Sand Beach Texture Abstracts
"Sand Beach Texture #1"
Hello friendies, figured I'd take the time to show and tell you about going out shooting yesterday morning where the point was to shoot for fun but I wanted to spend some time on the sand patterns found at Sand Beach in Acadia- the patterns come from (1.) fresh water drains out from a wetland behind the beach and carves these neat little rivulets and shapes in the beach which is made of (2.) more crushed sea shells then sand apparently (making the name Sand Beach something of a misnomer) either way I've always thought of these ripples as being really interesting- creating a kind of a vertigo as looking at them I can lose my sense of scale and imagine that I'm in a jet 4 miles over head looking down onto an alluvial plain. To add to the effect I shot them on my 24mm f/3.5 Ts-e cranking the tilt way over to add a sense of depth of field that feels like you are looking over miles of distance more than looking down on a topographical map, the last thing I wanted it to feel like was being 12 inches off the beach on a tripod. I first shot these ripples here a year ago when I first got that new used Tilt-shift but this time wanted to make a group of them that would compliment one another as well as provide a sense of variation, so this Sunday morning I went back and tried to see them for the first time.
"Sand Beach Textures #2"
So the impetus or inspiration for this kind of thing is (aside from shooting cool patterns in the sand), stemming from a desire to make more visual extracts of a sort- where I'm usually a landscape shooter and do the whole -go shoot weather and big scenes that have some inherent drama or whatever, but after a while of creating imagery that is in a wide view I'm looking for more details- not necessarily macro which always has something of a sense of "what is it", that reminds me of the visual riddles of "Ranger Rick" when I was a kid, I'm trying to look for scenes that have a distilled sense of the space that excludes a wide angle perspective. Guy Tal does this really well: http://guytal.com/wordpress/ I imagine him working off mostly a 70-200 and excluding anything extra and making scenes that are from a few inches wide to maybe 10-15 feet wide to the widest of 10-15 meters or so.
"Sand Beach Textures #3"
The problem with making those kind of pictures (not these kind of pictures which are simpler then that and are only of sand ripples), is that nature is full of chaos and the forests around here and most of the coast is all a hectic jumble of everything at once and to find an "extract" in all of that is a challenge of vision and patience to say the least. My only recent successes in this are here: http://nateparkerphotography.com/blog/2012/8/teaching-photography-for-canon-in-the-parks-and-the-american-parks-network-debrief and I've got some others on-deck in the editing suite for the day when I'm feeling particularly inspired to deal with them, but that may take a while-
"Sand Beach Textures #4"
The bottom line is I guess that I think it's important to challenge yourself sometimes and make something that you ordinarily wouldn't- in the words of Monty Python: "Now for something completely different"! Not to say that from this point forward I'll be changing my style or my sensibilities, just trying to keep my horizons open: which reminds me of the rule "when you're making a great picture, always look behind you for an even better one". Right then frienderinos, keep your batteries charged and keep your eyes and minds' open and show me the pictures that you made recently! -Nate.
"Sand Beach Textures #5"
