Wonder Woman

So not really, but still, is a female hummingbird not a superhero? Faster than a speeding…..well lots of things; able to to fly backwards, strong enough to migrate thousands of miles, fiercer than a barn cat.

I’ve been following the afternoon antics of a couple hummers that frequent our bee balm flowers. Since I’ve had time to observe these magnificent birds, I am also able to preset the exposure parameters, pre-visualize compositions, and set focusing to maximize success.

There’s something very magical about hummingbirds. They seem unreal. Working to create images of them and then doing so successfully, doesn’t change that feeling.

In this image I wanted to convey a strong sense of the magic of the hummingbird; her speed, her beauty, her agility.

Fulfill Your Dreams

Animals have always had symbolic meaning for people. Many cultures and individuals still consider the sighting of certain animals as highly significant events. One of the most cherished of sightings is of a bird that is thought to represent many of life’s best experiences – joy, love, peace, overcoming adversity, the fulfilling of dreams. What bird can signify so much all by itself? Well, its the amazing little hummingbird!

And no wonder, right? It’s incredible flight ability, it’s diminutive size, it’s great power and resilience to migrate enormous distances, all make for the things of myth and legend. It’s both magnificently delicate and fierce at the same time.

We have always had a few plants which attract hummingbirds to our farm. This year my wife Lin made sure we had Bee Balm as well. Beautiful red flowers are hard to resist, especially for the hummers doing their tour around the farm.

I read during afternoon coffee time on our front porch which puts me in view of the Bee Balm. I had established that the hummers visit the plant around that time. In addition to my coffee mug and Kindle, I’ll have my camera with a long telephoto lens attached. I prefocus, preset the exposure, and previsualize compositions. Hummingbirds are fast and don’t typically hang around for long. My last quick decisions have to happen on the fly (sorry), but the result was marvelous. I hope you like it too.

For a print of this image, go to my website HERE.

Start to the Day

I am very much a morning person. In fact, I love the beginnings of things in general — the periods where the potential is the most exciting. Dewy mornings are my favorite. With sunlight refracting through the water drops and blasting in all directions, it can actually be a bit visually overwhelming. It really is exciting work. The water drops can be clinging to a leaf, a flower petal, or a spider web. In each case the form of the drop will be different, but equally gorgeous.

Getting in close to nature like this, exploring these very small landscapes, is an endless journey of esthetic pleasure. I make images that express the fulfillment I get from these unique experiences.

exploring these very small landscapes, is an endless journey of esthetic pleasure

Paul Grecian

To make this type of image I prefer an Olympus Micro-Four-thirds camera with an Olympus 60mm F2.8 macro lens. Its small, light, and importantly, easy to maneuver without hitting parts of the plant or web I’m working with. I composed this image in order to have the large round light refractions behind the web create a visual harmony with the water drops.

Spider Jedi

When I first started exploring my vision through the medium of photography, it was the genre of macro-photography that drew me in. I really enjoyed the fact that I could explore the natural world an inch-and-a-half at a time. This ability was especially meaningful as I lived in the city without much natural area around me.

My interest in macro imagery continued through my college years where my photography coursework included two semesters of independent study. In both of these semesters my projects revolved around using close-up techniques. In graduate school, I was able to take a class on macro-photography specializing in flash usage. This gave me a unique skill to balance daylight and artificial light for very small subjects, an ability that can be crucial to the success of an image.

My preference with most macro images however is to use natural light. Reflected, direct, or refracted, I find natural light the most interesting and most esthetically pleasing.

In this image of a backlit grass with crab-spider, I was vey conscious of the way the light outlined everything, creating rim light. What I found especially exciting was the light refractions associated with the silk strand that the spider was producing. The light made the very thin strand visible and created a rainbow of colors. To achieve the angle and perspective necessary to make this image, I had to work hand-held – quite the challenge. Looks to me like a spider wielding a lightsaber, maybe this is a Jedi spider?

Sensations of Spring

When making any image, I am consciously and also subconsciously aware of my surroundings and how they make me feel. This means that there are many forces at work which impact the way I make an image. All of the sensations I experience in the moment play a roll in how I represent my world visually. Spring is a rather overwhelming time of year. There is so much life bursting forward! There is so much color and song and new found warmth. It all becomes part of a highly sensual, highly emotive, and highly stimulating event.

This image was made in a garden in Colonial Williamsburg, a location where my wife and I exhibit our art during the spring. We use the trip as a way to connect with our fans in Virginia and to create new works about the joyfulness of the season of regeneration.

All of the sensations I experience in the moment play a roll in how I represent my world visually.

Paul Grecian

For this image I was using a very odd lens not made for photography. It is actually a movie projector lens which I purchased from a Russian metalsmith in the Bronx who makes adapters for these types of “alternative” lenses. I incorporate the effect this lens allows me to create with my personal esthetic in order to create differently expressive images. I can see, and therefore control, the effect through the viewfinder which allows me to have a new experience while creating. That really is a main point to the art for me – new experiences.

Red Wing

I recently asked friends of mine to list questions they had about the artistic process. One of the questions asked was why do I work in my chosen medium and not another. What is it about the medium of photography that has kept me so engaged for over 40 years? The image that I have titled Red Wing is very much pertinent to the answer. For me, being able to create in the moment when my emotions are running highest is very important. I appreciate the rush I get when I observe something extraordinary. To most fully experience something remarkable, I need to engage with it in real time. I can achieve that engagement uniquely through the medium of Photography.

This image was made recently in a wooded section on our farm.  It was a cloudy afternoon. I saw the flock through my studio window and almost just chose to observe. Then a rather desperate urge came upon me to engage. I’ve been working in a rather impulsive way recently, just grabbing gear and going. I knew which lens I wanted to use, which camera body to attach it to, and that time was fleeting. I also knew these birds would not like me approaching them. I began adjusting settings as I worked my way closer and when in position, my gut instinct took over.

This is a very significant image for me. It is an image that defines the kind of work I have come to make over the last five years, and especially within the last couple.

This image is part of my “100 Series” and will be limited to 100 prints in all sizes. Prints are already available at my gallery online – HERE.

Landscape Mood

One of the things I like about living in north-central Pennsylvania is our four distinct seasons. And while I don’t particularly like the coldest weather we get here, I do like the visuals of leafless trees and the landscape covered in snow. This type of scene elicits a mood within me that tends to be rather sentimental, nostalgic, or cozy. The cold air outdoors can be countered by a fresh cup of Pike Place coffee or hot chocolate (a bit of peppermint Schnapps helps too). Maybe a favorite blanket, a fireplace, a comfortable chair come to mind as well.

So it’s not really the landscape itself which has a mood, it’s our response to a scene which is projected onto the landscape that elicits our feelings. When I am creating images outside in the winter I am working mostly by gut instinct. A combination of conscious and subconscious responses to the visual environment effected by the feeling of cold, the sounds around me, maybe the smell of a distant fire. I cannot, of course, put all of these sensations into my image, but they impact the creative process.

When the images are brought into my studio and viewed on a computer screen away from the conditions in which they were made, I can evaluate them at a different level. Without all of the sensory stimuli which were associated with the making of the images in the field, I can look at them with fresh eyes. Elements like contrast, tonality, texture, composition, visual impact, and even just how much I like the image, can be evaluated more consciously. My goal in this part of the process is to be authentic to my visual experience in the field and my aesthetic response to that image in the studio.

The image below was made a short walk from my studio. I was drawn to the texture of the trees and to the way they surrounded the small red building. The evergreen trees provide a visual color balance to the red and a color harmony with the blues in the shadowy parts of the woods. Strong diagonal lines throughout the image lead from the the upper left to the lower right and so to the red building as well. Most of this analysis takes place in the studio and not in the field, at least not consciously. But I am sure that the studio analysis of the image impacts my subconscious responses going forward when I am working in the moment.

Be Yourself

As an indie artist I feel it is important to maintain an authenticity in my work that speaks honestly to who I am. In the art world in which I exist, there are many players. It is both a smart business move and my absolute desire to distinguish myself as an artist. When I’m comfortable and confident in the work I am doing I have also been more successful in the art I create.

For me, this image only ever had one interpretation. An independent, self assured, non-conformist who would do it’s own thing regardless of the social pressures put upon it. The title “Be Yourself” came to me quickly. Notice the bird doesn’t completely isolate itself from it’s social system, but neither does it feel compelled to always be a part of the group. It is still close enough to be a part of the picture, but also able to be it’s own…….well, bird.

Like many images I have been making recently, this one was made on our farm. Tall electrical poles and long wires run along the creek at the back of our property. I often watch how various birds use this seating area and how they interact with each other. My university background in Psycho-biology (Animal Behavior) still informs my work. I was initially absorbed with pondering this individualist soul. Rock Doves are very social animals as can be seen by the tight group behavior on the top wire. So what was up with this rebel bird?

After a short while I began to see the scene for its simple geometry. I began composing in my head……….then ran to the studio to grab some gear. I’d need a long lens but one that would give me compositional freedom…..a zoom lens then! Since the sky was overcast, I knew I’d need to over expose the image. I wanted a stark, blank sky anyway so that worked out. Ultimately I printed the image as a black and white on a matte finish paper which gives the piece the character of a pencil drawing.

Its a fun piece, one that I have been offering at shows only since the beginning of June. The response has been interesting eliciting a variety of feelings about it. Some see the individual bird as I do, others as an outcast. Some just feel sorry for the poor thing. It may be a bit of a Rorschach Test type of image. We relate to the bird on the lower wire in our own unique personal-history, life-experience kinda way.

Archival pigment giclee prints are available matted and framed on my website HERE.

The Making of “Opus 1”

My approach to the medium of photography is as an artist. Because of this, I try not to have preconceived notions about how photography “should” be done and think instead only of the imagery I want to create. I do however work within the medium to create images that are best rendered as a photograph, not in a contrived way in order to make it look falsely like another medium.

My approach means that the images I create are conceived to be made primarily in the

Film Projector Lens

field through the use of traditional photographic methods, i.e., camera and lens. For an impressionistic image like the one above (titled Opus 1), I used an old 120mm f1.9 Carl Zeiss Jena film projector lens which had been fitted with an adapter giving it an M42 mount. With that mount, I was able to then add an additional adapter to allow it’s use on a Fuji digital interchangeable lens camera.

As a film projector lens, it has no focusing mechanism, no aperture control, and no way to communicate with the camera. The M42 adapter on the lens has a built in helicoid which allows me to “focus” it buy turning the lens and causing it to be closer to or further away from the camera sensor. With no aperture, the lens is only usable at it’s f1.9 rating. This large aperture means lots of light gets in and  depth of field is very thin. But for me that’s the whole point of using this big, hazy, scratched, and fungus growing, chunk of glass.

The lens is a beast and unruly on a camera, but I feel the rendering matches my aesthetic very well. As I continue to develop a view of the world which is more impressionistic, I find myself wanting to use this lens more and more. For the image above, I had been struggling with modern traditional lenses to isolate flowers in this meadow and simplify the background. The fall off of focus with this projector lens is very sudden and creates a unique type of bokeh that I have not achieved with any other lens.

Many people think that Opus 1 is a painting. I inform viewers that it is in fact a photograph, but one done in a painterly style. By painterly I do not mean the use of artificial brush strokes, but rather an emphasis on color and form instead of linear definition.

 

Black Bird – “The 100”

Black Bird

I am excited to introduce a new image and a new series. This new series is really a new category of art prints which will represent the majority of work I offer going forward. In this series which I have named “The 100”, prints will be limited to 100 total across all edition sizes. If I print in 1, 2 or 3 edition sizes, the total across all of them will be 100. For this new image, Black Bird, I am introducing it as a 9.75 x 13.75 print matted to 16×20 in an edition of 50. Therefore, all other edition sizes will number a total of 50 prints to reach 100.

Black Bird is an image I made early morning during a snow storm this month (it’s been that kind of spring!). Waking up to the snow, I immediately grabbed my preferred gear for tough weather and started driving the back roads around where I live in north-central Pennsylvania.

For this image I was drawn to the line of the trees and the way the snow was covering the branches almost as if the trees were “leafed-out” with white foliage. To me this piece has the feeling of an infra-red image, it is almost surreal. I keyed in on the small figure of a black bird on the top of the central tree and decided to make it the “center” of interest. The bird animates the image, providing a point of empathy, a vantage point that we can relate to. All wildlife allows this type of connection with a landscape, regardless of how small in the frame they are. It was also because of the small size of the bird in the image that I placed it centrally. The arrangement of trees is best in this configuration as well however. I work by gut instinct, intuitively, so I can react authentically and emotionally to a scene.

I used an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II with an Olympus 12-100mm lens. This weatherproof gear gives me great confidence to work in extreme conditions. It is small and light weight and feels very comfortable in my hands. The Olympus 12-100mm gives me a great range of compositional options especially when needing to work from a confined range.