Pictograph Alcove, Palatki Ruin

One of several really interesting pueblo ruins near Sedona, AZ. A rough and dusty drive to get out there, but well worth it.

The Mathematics of Nature

Bryce Canyon Sunrise - Utah

Something a little different for this post, inspired by a TV documentary that I saw a few months back, about mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

We tend to think of math and geometry as applying to man-made objects.. they have width, height, length and angles that can be expressed and measured in ways that we are familiar with. Nature on the other hand, may seem to be random and chaotic, totally free from the laws of math and geometry. Not so. Mandebrot discovered the formulas that can express most forms of nature in mathematical terms.. it's just a different kind of math, known as "fractals"... the term that he coined for it.
In reality, many of the the most amazing things in the natural world follow these fractal formulas: trees and plants, waves, mountain ranges, canyons, clouds, coastlines, even the capillaries within our bodies are all examples.
I'm strictly a visual person, certainly no math whiz... (one year of engineering in college and I realized that my calling was going to be elsewhere), but it's interesting to realize that everything really is tied together, art and science, if you look at it from the right perspective.  I leave it to you to read further if you're interested... I came across a really cool website that explains a lot of this in very visual and easy to understand terms here.. most artists, photographers and just plain nature lovers will think: "wow.. this makes total sense!", when they look at these pages.  It goes into other art-realated topics also, such as the "golden proportion", known by artists for centuries, and seems to be part of our innate, human sense of beauty. 

So, what is an artist's interest in all this? Well, computers have made the application of fractal formulas easy and practical.  The other images here (click for a larger view) are ones that I generated using a 3D terrain modeling software. The natural features... rocks, clouds, dunes and even the textures, are all created with fractal math.. there is no actual picture mapping utilized anywhere in the image.  I didn't go all out with the detail.. I could keep working for an even more photo-realistic effect, but this is good enough for a comparison to the real photo of Bryce Canyon at the top of this post.

It's basically "virtual photography"... the "camera" acts just like the real deal.. move it around as you wish, select the focal length, depth of field..everything.  Of course all the basic principles apply: composition, texture, color theory and lighting.  If only the real world was so easy though... you can literally carve and move mountains, then choose the time of day, along with a control of the elements limited only by your imagination. If you've watched a sci-fi, fantasy or animated movie in the last ten years or so, you've surely seen a much more sophisticated use of this technology, but this was done just sitting here at home on my everyday computer.  The tree was an afterthought as I was writing and took about 5 minutes to compose and render!

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles,

and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
—Mandelbrot, in his introduction to The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Feelin' Abstract

It's a rare day out that I don't spend at least part of my time focusing on abstract details.. sometimes just to kill time while waiting on the light, or sometimes because I find some genuinely interesting subjects. Much of it turns out to be junk of course, but every once in a while I snag one that looks just right somehow, at least to my eye. Very much a matter of personal taste; some people find the "picture" in this pure shape/color/texture and others don't react to it at all, but Mother Nature is an abstract expressionist, for sure.

Desert View Watchtower-Grand Canyon

"Desert View" - Grand Canyon, AZ

For this "SkyWatch", I was perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon, watching and waiting (and hoping) for the sky to develop as it does many summer days around these parts. I won't say a clear blue sky can NEVER work for you, because it can if handled properly, but everything is so much more interesting and dramatic when there is some activity in the sky. It got even better than this in a few minutes, but I'll cover that in a future post:)

This view from the south rim includes the Desert View Watchtower, designed by Mary Colter, architect for the Fred Harvey Company that developed many famous and still popular hotels and buildings around the southwest early last century. Colter's body of work is quite impressive and influential, especially considering that she was a successful female architect in a time when that was almost unheard of. A really interesting (but not too long) article about her history and work can be read here. Or, the super-short version on Wikipedia. As usual, check out all the great SkyWatch images of the week here.

On a side note, I know my posts and visits have been few and far between recently... I have been involved in relocating my entire office/studio, which as you might guess is a lot of work, but at last we're pretty much resettled and I hopefully won't have to devote quite so much of my time to that process anymore, allowing me to get back to some fun stuff.

Lair of the Spider Woman

"Spider Rock" - Canyon de Chelly, AZ

This photo, in itself, is probably not my very best - although not my worst either:) - but the process of taking it definitely epitomizes what I love about the art of photography. This location is exactly 750 miles from where I live; I drove the whole way in one day, almost non-stop... and don't regret a minute of the effort it took me to get here, because unlike my experience a few days later at Monument Valley, I was able to appreciate this scene in an ideal way. I scouted the location earlier in the day and by the time I arrived again in the early evening, all the casual visitors were returning to their camping spots or motels, leaving me to select a nice perch on the rim of the canyon from which to observe the shadows climbing these fantastic spires as the sun slowly sank in the west. Only the occasional raven would stop by and sit in a nearby tree to see what I was up to... and I could hear coyotes calling clear as a bell from the canyon floor 1000 feet below. In a place like this, all alone in the warm evening light watching the shadows grow, you can imagine yourself observing the scene 100 or even 1000 years ago, and wonder at how similar it would have been.
Known as Spider Rock in Navajo lore, this 800 ft. tall formation is believed to be the home of Spider Woman, one of the most important figures in their mythology; a main character in the creation of the world and the one who taught them their most revered craft of weaving, which they still practice with great artistry today.
Would I make the same effort to be here if I wasn't so determined to capture the scene... and would I have learned about the Navajo traditions surrounding it?.. probably not. That kind of unexpected benefit is what makes this work rewarding on so many different levels. Producing a successful photograph is really just icing on the cake.
A short but interesting history of Navajo weaving can be found here, with some good links that go deeper into the old tales and history should anyone be interested.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Water Study (Part 2), and a New Series on Influential Artists

As promised in my previous Water Study post, here is another, completely different interpretation of the same subject, this time in color. Since it was a "local" subject and I was in no hurry, it was possible to spend more time than I normally might working a very limited area, trying to construct as many variations as possible from this little area of falls. It's not just one grand fall, but a series of cascades wandering all around the rocks and trees below a mountain lake, so there are certainly many different possibilities to be had. This type of "intimate landscape" leads me into a new subject I've been mulling over for a while: I would like to give mention to some of the greats of photography (and art) that have shaped my vision, as well as a few of the contemporary people whose work I admire. So I'm going to occasionally steer you to some different sites that I feel are worth visiting if you are at all interested in the masters that have paved the road to where we are today, or some current artists that are very worthy of attention.

Some of the people I have in mind are very well documented and represented on the web; at least one that I want to refer to is surprisingly hard to find, so I'll start with an easy one because I found an excellent website covering his work: Eliot Porter. Probably the first great color landscape photographer, his show,"Intimate Landscapes" in 1980 was the first one-man show ever of color photography at New York's Metropolitan Museum and he was one of the first masters to catch my imagination during my younger days in art school. I won't repeat a lot of info about him here, because this website is concise and full of samples.
I'll mention others as they come to mind, or seem to tie in with my own examples; probably mostly photographers, but some other types of artists too... as well as some fellow bloggers that I have found since I started doing this blog. I know that with photography in particular, lots of people have been taken up in a sudden fascination on the subject and haven't necessarily looked into the history of what got us here, so I hope I can turn a few of you on to some great work that might inspire you even further. And I would certainly love to hear back from anyone who has their own favorite masters or contemporaries that they would like to share.