negativespace Archives - Bliss Photographics

Posted on July 12, 2020July 5, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Everything Gets in a Rut

Sunday Night I get a little philosophical… Forgive my editorial excesses… Please apply this to the appropriate world sit rep….

Just when it seems that there is no way out. Stuck in the hole. The road ahead looks impassible. I point out that nearly every problem is a matter of viewpoint. Here the situation only looks bad. My example is: Sol is in a deep hole here… Since he is about the heaviest object in the solar system, this could take a winch larger than I have here on ranch. Living on a remote ranch in the middle of nowhere has it’s preparedness aspects. I try to be prepared for most situations but this one was a bit beyond my anticipatory imaginings. Unknowable endings brings anxiety beginnings.

It’s a good thing that most problems are a result of our perspective. They are not made of insurmountable mountains in my experience. In my hideously disguised metaphor it seems the land behind our celestial neighbor dropped away smooth allowing his clean “get away” from my perception of his predicament. I just couldn’t see from my angle…. My thoughts of his delay caused a whole list of celestial consequences that had cosmic ramifications. Talk about anxiety…. Boy are we lucky. (from my perspective) 👀

My point is, get others opinions about problems that seem unavoidable and insurmountable . Others may see a way out of the “problem” that we can’t because of each of our limited perspective(s). … We have to get our minds together or we will be torn apart where we are forced by our “problems”.

Now from strictly back to my normal programming basis, Simple Photographs like this are a favorite. I think from somewhere back in the “70’s” I picked up a liking for lots of negative space with smooth gradients about. Position and timing were everything in this capture. 😜 📷

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana).

Title: Everything Gets in a Rut

Posted on February 6, 2020January 30, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Shadows Divergent Snowy Sunrise

Everything was covered by ice. During this winter cold morning with little or no cloud cover, the glare was excessive. The Shadows are Long with a slight down hill angle to the hill. This makes the shadows a bit shorter. However this is a VERY high contrast environment of white and black is way outside the normal photographic envelope.. Human eyes just can’t look into a scene as this without blinding ourselves. The Mirrorless Cameras I use that feed to a video screen. It actually lets me see this image BEFORE I click the camera. I can adjust the settings live real time on the screen. Love those Snow Diamonds…

Photographic Musings:

There would be a star around the sun if it weren’t filtered by the branches. I way prefer cellulose filters to glass ones in front of my lens. Turning up your f-stop which is necessary in this high light environmnet has an added benefit. in this case by reducing the amount of light coming into your camera. It also gives you a very thick depth of focus.

In this high light environment, your also going to have adjust shutter speed really fast. Set your ISO really low (camera sensitivity) or both to compensate for the high light. Basically you have to shut down your camera to light. Many cameras will take a neutral density filter to accomplish this. . Your always balancing 3 different settings in Manual Mode on your camera. I use NO/zip/zero automatic settings anywhere. Not in my cameras or lenses. No auto focus, no stabilization etc. Manual photography strictly on a very modern platform. I get a pretty good battery life that way😄. Manual Mode is best.

Location: Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Shadows Divergent Snowy Sunrise

Posted on January 31, 2020January 24, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Perspective In the Shadow

The winter wears on up in the highlands of the Wyotana borderlands. This year has been a low snow year so far. It has also been winter since Oct 1st. Most of the snow is now either granular or ice at this point. We’ve had sort of a January Thaw around mid month. That period of warm weather took a foot of snow turning it into 3 inches of dense hard bumpy ice. It’s durn uncomfortable to drive in the backcountry at the moment. During the day I have mud problems out there as well. Vehicles leave marks in mud so I tend not to go out.

Bright scenes and over exposure….:

High Contrast snow/shadow divergent light is an interesting perspective to work. It’s really hard to get the bark detail in the silhouette with most cameras. I find these Sony Alphas are low light monsters with a very high dynamic range. The ability to bring out shadow detail is a big deal in my world. I always expose the highlights correctly as my third rule of photography. If you overexpose the highlights, you loose detail and get a washout. No details exist in washouts. However there is usually a boat load of photo hidden within the shadows of virtually every photo we take. Almost every photo I take you would consider underexposed and dark in the camera. It’s hard for me to preview them raw sometimes as a result. I have to work on them a little bit to see what I actually got. There are advantages to having a quality editing program.

Location: Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Perspective In the Shadow

Posted on October 18, 2019November 16, 2019 by Bliss

Sunslit Twilight With a Cellulose Filter

I certainly used a “cellulose” filter on this Sun-slit Twilight. Yup that tree is all cellulose and it filtered the light that made it through to my photon capture box. Hundreds of miles of atmosphere for light to travel through to make it into this twilight image before the sunrises above the horizon and illuminate the cloud deck. This is a night sky technically. The sun has not risen here and won’t for about 9 minutes in this timeline. It’s still 3 sun diameters below the horizon or so. Dead calm, 2 second exposure, f22, ISO 200.

This image is all about the use of negative space. 36×24.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands.