Outer Banks Trip Coming To End

I will have one more day here in North Carolina before heading home. I went back to Jockey’s Ridge this morning and spent a few hours there before heat and light were no longer pleasing. I did have some great sky to work with and the dunes were pretty quiet for the first hour. Then as more and more vacationers appeared, my compositions incorporated a human element.

I have had to deal with more rain here than I expected. I used this down time to read (I’m working on getting through Focus magazine), and hit some more stores for interesting natural subject material. I have purchased more shell, geode, and fossil material for future photographic exploration.

I’m looking forward to getting home, but I will try to make my last day productive. When I do, I’ll process some work from this trip and add it to my blog here. In previous years, I have spent considerable time up in the Corolla area. It used to be that the northern Outer Banks was known for it’s wild horses. Traffic deaths of horses and people not respecting distance needs resulted in the need to place them in a controlled environment with barriers. In the image below, the barriers are sillohetted against a morning rising sun.

Gull on Horse Barrier

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OBX Time of Year

I’m back on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This is where I come to do seascapes and work with plant and animal life that lives in the dunes, marshes and other maritime environments here. I arrived on Sunday, got situated and based on weather reports, began to plan outings to areas I want to work. First stop was Jockey’s Ridge which is the tallest dune on the east coast. A popular spot for hang-gliding and kite flying, this place is also interesting visually, and fun to explore. It was very hot and I did something I don’t often do, worked the location during mid-afternoon with the sun high in the sky and very harsh.

I have begun collecting artifacts of the beach that I find in some of the shops here and plan on doing some images of these subjects. I also checked out a couple of the local galleries to see what is being sold and the quality of the photography here. The photography offered is mostly by local artists. I always find it interesting how locals see things differently than visitors. The truth is though that there is not a lot of photography offered here and much of what is offered is by the same few artists.

I haven’t processed any images from this current trip, here though is one from last year using an 8mm circular fisheye lens.

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Good Behavior

I’ve always been fascinated by animals, especially the things they do. I took that interest into my college career, majoring in Psycho-Biology. At my school (Acadia University – previously Beaver College), this major was really animal behavior studies. My coursework and studies included both lab-rat behavior and field work. Why animals behaved as they did was as important as what behaviors they exhibited. To determine why an animal behaves a certain way, it helps to understand their life cycle, ecology and evolution. So, I studied all of these things as well.

My interest in animal behavior didn’t end after college (including 2 years of graduate study). As a nature photographer, I look for behaviors exhibited by animals ranging from butterflies to black bears. Every move, posture, or look that an animal exhibits is really a behavior that says something about what that animal is feeling, thinking, or responding to. I try to bring those behavioral elements into my wildlife imagery, even if the behavior is subtle. Understanding that any little body move or position says something about the way an animal responds to its environment, helps me anticipate a behavior which may have visual interest as well. I don’t activity think through this visualization process, it is more of a subconscious response that I think helps me add something special to an image.

Even a small postural move can add a lot of visual interest to an image. A stretched neck, wing, or foot, an alertness in the eyes, position of the ears, a raised leg, or simple things like a lowered head, nose lifted to take in a scent, all make an image more engaging for a viewer. Everyday behaviors like feeding, sleeping, resting, running, flying, all lend themselves to interpretation and a bit of anthropomorphizing. This I believe helps us relate to the animal and adds a degree of understanding and even empathy for the subject. That in turn, adds to the attractiveness of the image. 

I greatly enjoy a beautful portrait image, especially if done with a strong environmental backdrop. But, by including a behavioral element to an image, I gain a sense of who an animal is, a feeling of connection with the subject, and a greater visual interest in the image.

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Turtle Play II

I have read nothing that makes me think that turtles beg for food or that the parent provides any kind of care for her young. As far as I can tell, she lays the eggs and is off. So what is happening between these two turtles that appear to both be the same species, but obviously different ages? There is some kind of interaction going on with a great deal of persistence on the part of the smaller one.

In this image, the smaller turtle has positioned itself face-to-face with the larger one. At this point it would began waving its front legs wildly in the larger turtle’s face until the larger turtle could face away or push the smaller one aside. It does appear from my total set of images that the smaller turtle was doing this to more than one larger turtle. Whatever was going on, it was great fun to watch and rewarding to photograph. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this kind of behavior again and an opportunity to put some explanation to it.

Face-to-Face (c) Paul Grecian 2008

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Turtle Play

I spent about 6 hours at my favorite spot in Bucks County, PA yesterday, photographing from around 6:00am til noon. It was a great morning, and definitely something I needed to do. Toward the end of the morning, I overheard a woman telling her husband that the turtle she was watching in the lake  was pestering another turtle. I couldn’t understand what this could mean so I went over to see. Surely enough, there was this little turtle seemingly pestering this larger turtle as if it was begging for food or something.

Both turtles appear to be Painted Turtles, which are pretty common around here. The smaller turtle would swim around so that it was face-to-face with the bigger turtle and then it would wave its hands quickly. The larger turtle only seemed to want to get away from the smaller one, sometimes pushing the smaller one away. Turned out, this was a fun sequence of images.

The scary part for me was holding $5500. worth of camera gear 10 ft over deep lake waters. But this behavior was so engaging, I just held on and made images. The water was drab, but being that these are Painted Turtles, there is still nice color in the image. It was also just overcast enough to not have bright reflections in the water.

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Chasing Rainbows – and missing

We’ve been getting some great rain storms here in SE Pennsylvania lately. The last two have resulted in perfect rainbow conditions – well almost. The other night we had a beautiful double rainbow right behind our house. Not the best place for it to be. When I finally realized where I should be, it was too late. But the sky was still interesting and I stayed till it got darker.

This area used to be much more rural than it is now. I have had some success in past years working a rainbow into a scene with a great red barn. In fact that image hangs in our township building and was used for a coffee-table book on Bucks County, PA. With development as strong as it is around here, that red barn image wouldn’t be possible today. However, there is a field behind a church where the view is still mostly what it was when I moved here 13 years ago.

Since I missed the rainbow, I was still able to make a few images that have a stormy feeling about them. Lots of atmosphere if you will. The perspective here is fairly wide, about 28mm, which dwarfs the homes reflecting last light of the day.

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Size Matters

No, I mean matters pertaining to size. When I consider printing a particular image, I must decide what size I will print it to. Often the subject matter weights heavily in that decision. For example, I like landscape pieces to be larger. If a subject is small (e.g., a frog) I tend not to print so that the subject is larger than life-size in the image (there are exceptions). Sometimes I consider whether an image will be more popular larger or smaller.

Occasionally I will have a request to make a particular image in a size other than I offer. Whether I can accommodate such a request depends on a variety of factors including if that image is limited in edition size. At my last show I had a request for an image of a Red Fox in a larger size than I had printed. I thought that the image would work well in that larger size and I was not constrained by a limited edition issue. I sometimes rely on customer requests to determine what size(s) I will print other than what I have already done. The image here (The Gaze) was one I offered as a 5×7 and per request, will now be available as an 8×10.

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What Must The Neighbors Think

My schedule, when I’m not at a show, is something that I can control. I am usually awake before most people in my neighborhood. I take a magazine and coffee out front (during warm months) and read for about an hour before starting my To-Do List. This means that many of my neighbors see me sitting comfortably (often in slippers), sipping coffee and reading some mag. It’s kind of fun actually, but it makes me wonder what they make of it. Having had a regular-hour position and a long commute at one time, switching to a career that gave me the flexibility to work as I wanted/needed, was quite an adjustment.

I spend at least 8 hrs a day in my studio, but that usually includes working well into the evening/night. My neighbors see me getting the mail during the day, sitting out back for the afternoon coffee break and doing the lawn during regular work hours. Once they find out I am a self-employed artist, then they know for sure - I must be a bit crazy.

Funny thing is, that even without my three hours a day of commuting to my previous work, I still have trouble squeezing everything into my day that needs doing. That’s the problem with being all the departments rolled into one I guess. I like what I do though and have no plans to change a thing – unless I can add a couple hours to the clock.

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