Painting During my Rehab

 These paintings, with the exception of the second, were done over the last three months while I was convalescing from my hip fracture and surgery. (The second was done earlier in the year but I combined it with the others to compare how my painting style and ability has changed or matured over the last year or so). The first three were done from photographs I took while in Stockholm, Sweden last March. The fourth painting was done from a photo I took in London, at Trafalgar Square in London where we visited in June. I don't notice a huge difference between the earlier painting and the last three, which I painted this last January and February. I believe that I have modified my technique of painting with the water colour medium so that now I paint in a freer manner. I feel more in control of the medium and much more confident. That takes a long time to achieve with this medium, and I feel that I will continue to do that as time goes on. I don't have a problem with the composition of the image, which really was optimized during the taking of the photograph itself. So far I am happy with the outcome of these four.

The Blue Boat (as per Winslow Homer)

I started painting again once I was able to move around a bit in my sunroom/studio, (recovering from a broken hip and surgery), and continuing on with my art classes at the U of A extension department. I'm in my second watercolour class, and the assignment was to do a copy of a famous watercolour artist's painting. I chose Winslow Homer, a well known American artist at the turn of the century. This is my copy of  "The Blue Boat", which Winslow Homer painted in 1892. Here is a copy of his actual painting:

So I generally don't like to copy other painter's works, but it was an assignment for the class. I was fairly happy with the outcome, though, and feel that I did capture the essence of his painting. I like this style of painting, which is quite impressionistic, yet it does retain a feeling of realism.
I think that the watercolour is quite suited to this style of painting, and I am growing in appreciation of this medium.

San Juan River Overlook, Utah

I finally got back to posting an image from my trip to Arizona and Utah this fall. I've experienced a bit of a setback recently, having suffered from a broken hip due to a fall. But no matter, I will be back to getting out as soon as I can to do some more photography, as well as some painting.
This photo was taken the last day of my trip, on the San Juan River near Butte Utah. It was taken early in the morning at sunrise, with the sun at our backs. This shot I decided to process as a black and white image. The colour image was nice but it lacked something. I think I have a tendency to favour black and white images anyway, harkening back to my film shooting days with the Monochrome Guild guys.
The downside to this image was the cloudless sky, which is always a problem for me. The sky is just a blank area in the image which does nothing for the composition, so I cropped it quite a bit.
It is a nice composition with the S - shaped river in the centre of the shot, which is always a good compositional element. I also like the variation of tonality of the trees in the centre of the image.

Coal Mine Mesa, Arizona

I recently went on a trip to Navajo land in northern Arizona. My companions were also photography enthusiasts who shared a similar interest, not just in photography in technical terms, but in photography as art. Our teacher is Alain Briot who lives in Arizona and conducts photography workshops that are a bit different than the average photography workshops that focus mostly on equipment and location. Alain teaches us to approach photography as an art form, helping us to develop our personal vision of the art we produce.
This trip took us to little know Navajo locations in Arizona and Utah, that few photographers visit. Several of these locations are also considered sacred by the Navajos that live on the reservations, so they are not always enthused to see photographers encroach on their traditional lands. This was one reason that our group consisted of a limited number of people, so as not to draw attention to ourselves.
Coal Mine Mesa is a beautiful place where coal seams are evident in the strata of the canyon. The colours we see here are created by the soft morning light just before the sun rose over the horizon.  The colours change dramatically as the sun rises, from a rosy colour to a golden yellow colour. The window for taking these types of photos lasts for maybe an hour and a half. After that the terrain is bleached by the hot Arizona sun.  

Cathedral in Bourges France

I liked this image because it has an abstract quality to it, that I didn't notice until I processed it in Lightroom. I like the tonality of the image very much, which I intentionally created by reducing the saturation of the image, greying it down somewhat. The abstract quality of the image is that it looks very much like a face looking down at us. Almost alien in nature. You can see the head, the eyes, and mouth of the alien face.  Shots like this are hard to take without distortion due to the extreme height of the interior of the cathedral inside, and having to take the shot from the floor level. So extreme curvature is created as a result. Problems like this can be overcome with a large format camera which allow movements of the front lens and the back of the camera, a sometimes complex operation, that can eliminate or correct curvature. In this digital image, I resorted to using a "distortion" filter to correct the curvature as much as I could.

Montmartre and Sacre Coeur Paris

One of my favourite areas to visit in Paris was the district of Montmartre, near the Sacre-Coeur. Here you will see, among many other attractions: side walk cafes,  galleries,  and artists selling their paintings on the sidewalk, and also willing to do a portrait of you, for a price of course. The atmosphere here is unique,  a few minutes away is the Sacre-Coeur (Sacred Heart Basilica), which is the second highest viewpoint in Paris after the Eiffel tower.

It's a bit of a climb to the top of the stairs to the Basilica, but the view is worth it. 

The French government commissioned the building of the Basilica in 1873 to symbolize the return of self confidence after the devastating years of the Commune and Franco-Prussian war. The architect was Paul Abadie, and he employed Romanesque and Byzantine styles of architecture. Construction continued through world war I, and was consecrated in 1919. 

Eiffel Tower

I took this shot from the roof of a tour bus in Paris. The conditions to take a shot from a moving vehicle is not always ideal, since you are moving while taking pictures. I did have to make a few adjustments in Lightroom and Photoshop to correct some lens distortion that did result from taking the shot under these conditions. Pictures like this are always challenging to take since there are often people in front of the desired image that you would prefer not to include in the shot, and it is hard to hold the camera still while moving. However I was fortunate that this was not a major problem in this instance. The light for this shot was quite nice, and I always prefer to have a cloudy sky similar to this case, whereas a clear blue sky can often be uninteresting and dull. The people in the middle distance created an interesting feeling to the overall image.

Le Mont Saint- Michel France

Recently my wife and I took a trip to Paris and central France. Our tour included Paris itself, and central France. The Paris part of the trip was mostly done on foot and by the metro, while central France was seen by bus. Much of the trip included seeing much of the cultural aspects of France, such as the Louvre, several cathedrals in Paris, museums, and several well known tourist attractions. The central France tour was an education in French culture and history.
I brought my Leica M9 with me to document the trip, and take as many scenic photographs as possible, not only for the photography itself, but also as future reference for my watercolour painting. The Leica is the perfect camera for a trip like this. It  is light weight and not too noticeable by people you want to photograph. I brought only one lens, my 28 mm Summicron, and it worked very well as an all purpose lens. It is a wide angle lens, but I tend to take more wide angle shots anyway.
This is a shot of the cathedral at Le Mont Saint-Michel, which is on the coast of France, on a sort of Peninsula. This is a close up of the cathedral at the top of the rock outcrop, in evening light.

Vasabron Bridge Stockholm, Sweden

This is a painting of the Norstedts Publishers building on the Vasabron bridge in Stockholm. I was fortunate to be able to visit Stockholm on a business trip in March. The day was a bit overcast but relatively warm, during a walk that my fellow traveller and I took the last day of our trip to Sweden. I took a photo and had it in my mind that I would like to paint this scene at a later date. My choice of paints was watercolour, and the paper I chose was a 300 lb Arches. A 300 lb watercolour paper does not really need to be stretched beforehand, and so no preparation was required. I used a muted palette by using complementary colours of Quinacridine rose and Viridian, with a little of orange mixed in. The yellow I chose was naples yellow, which is a bit muted to begin with. The cooler tones were a mixture of Ultramarine blue and Ultramarine violet, muted a bit with their complements as well. I'm settling in with a more earth tone range of colours that I mix myself, using Steven Quiller's palette, which includes about 26 colours. I like how the bridge stands out from the background. I think I achieved this by leaving white highlights on the lamp supports on the bridge, as well as the higher contrast that is created between the white and the darker portions of the bridge. I also like how the water seems to sparkle below the bridge. Starting to feel better about my paintings.

Watercolour Painting - Utah landscape

This was an image I photographed a few years ago during a trip to Page Arizona. Page is located very close to the Utah border, and this location was just across the Colorado river. I was on a photographic workshop with Alain Briot, and his workshops never fail to please. This was an amazing location to photograph, and the terrain is very much as you can see in the painting. Unfortunately there is no human figure in the image I took, so the scale is hard to evaluate, but the boulders in the centre of the image are about 6  to 10 feet in diameter. The hoodoo to the right is at least 15 feet high.
I am becoming more familiar with the water colour medium, and I do not have to mentally focus on how to do so as much as I did a year ago. It becomes more natural and instinctive as I spend more time painting. I did use strong colours on this painting, but the actual colour scheme of the real thing is also very bright and colourful.
With watercolour painting it is important to leave some of the white of the paper to create that sparkle that a good watercolour painting should have. I think I could have left more white than I did, but once the paint is down, you can't go back. However, I am relatively pleased  with the effort.

Bighorn Country

This is a recent painting I did of the Bighorn River just as it approaches Crescent Falls. I often go here to take photographs, and the timing was perfect. The sun was just setting in the north. The aspen trees had already turned yellow, and winter was not far off. I am striving to improve my watercolour painting skills, and finally I have a fairly decent painting, after having trashed at least 4 or 5 in a row. It definitely takes time to master the skills required to do watercolour. I hope to improve that as I take a watercolour course with the U of A as part of my Visual Arts program, starting this week. I used a tertiary colour scheme, employing orange, green and violet. The picture plain consists of three layers, the foreground which includes the boulders, the river in the middle distance and the trees and sky in the distance. Most artists use this technique to create a sense of distance in the painting. I don't think that the actual colour translate very well to this upload, but it's close. I think if you look elsewhere on this blog you might find the original photograph.

Summer Day

I find that this image carries a certain peacefulness and calm. I was immediately attracted to it as I was driving down the highway last summer on the way to Drumheller in Alberta. Horizontal lines in an image usually give the sense of calm, and this artistic tool is used by artists to create a quiet mood. I toned down the colour somewhat, something I have been doing with my photos recently. A more saturated colour image would create an uncomfortable feeling that would take away from the mood I wanted to project. Two horizontal lines dominate the image, those being the horizon, and the lower edge at the water. The horizontals are not quite horizontal, with the bottom line curving up, while the horizon curves down. If both lines curved upward, the mood created would be perhaps a bit more joyful, like a big smile. The downward curvature of the horizon sort of opposes the feeling projected by the lower line. A downward sloping line in art can convey a feeling of sadness, but having them both present in the same image creates a contradictory feeling.

Battle River Valley

The Battle River valley is a very picturesque area just west of Wainwright Alberta. This image was taken with my Hasselblad H3D, using a 50 mm lens. The 35 mm equivalent to the medium format 50 mm is about a 35 mm lens. Presently I own 2 lenses that are compatible with the H3D: the 50 mm and the 24 mm lens. I like both lenses for the wide angle perspective that these lenses provide. The majority of my photos are taken with wide angle lenses. I also own a Leica M9 rangefinder which is also a great camera, and I have begun to use the two cameras for different purposes. The Leica is a great camera for photojournalism. The Hasselblad is well known for professional photography in fashion, commercial, and architectural photography. Both cameras have a beautiful colour pallette, and I find the Hasselblad  gives a warmer tone than the Leica. This scene has a painterly feel to it which I like very much. The H3D is a heavy camera, and usually requires a tripod. It weighs as much as a large format camera. It is a sophisticated digital camera with a 31 megapixel back, but quite often I will shoot in manual mode, after having taken a light reading with a hand held light meter. This way I rarely have to repeat the shot at a different setting.

Cloud Study

This was one of the first shots that I took with my new Hasselblad H3DII, with the 24 mm wide angle lens. It may not be readily apparent in the small jpeg uploaded for this blog, but it's quite amazing how three dimensional this image appears. The camera is 31 megapixels, which is not really that high a resolution compared to the higher end H5D for instance, which can go as high as 50 to 120 megapixels. But the detail is quite apparent, which is not always a goal of mine anyway. The H3D has a much wider tonal range than other cameras I have owned, although my Leica still competes very well. The strong element of the Leica is always the lens. They simply cannot be beat. The Hasselblad HCD lenses are very good as well. But the digital back on the H3D has sophisticated software that does a lot of correction for the lenses. I like the Hasselblad for landscapes and my Leica more for people shots. I will be doing more portrait shots in the near future with the Hasselblad.

First Hasselblad Image

This is my first post in few months, and I have some new images to present. I recently bought a new camera, well, actually used, but like new. My new camera is a Hasselblad H3DII with a 31 megapixel digital back. With the camera I also picked up 2 lenses, a new 28 mm HC and a used 50 mm HC lens. Both are wide angle lenses, the camera being a medium format. The 28 mm is equivalent to a 18 mm and the 50 mm is equivalent to about a 35 mm in the 35 mm camera lines. The camera produces beautiful images with very nice colour. It definitely is a different colour than what my Leica produces. I'm not sure which I prefer, but I love them both.

This image was taken with the 28 mm, inside an old run down garage a few miles from my home. I was a bit surprised at the colour that I was able to extract from the raw image. It was quite dark inside the building with a bright sky coming through the roof. At first I thought I would try HDR to get the full tonal range in the image, and I did try to use Photomatrix Pro HDR software to produce an image, but I was not very successful at getting a nice image. So I simply used Photoshop to work  up the image. The detail in the images that this camera produces is amazing. A jpeg cannot do it justice.

Grand Canyon Misty Mountains

I recently was studying how to paint the typical misty mountain painting, as done by many masterful Chinese artists of the past and present. I have to give credit to Henri Li who teaches chinese painting on line, for the inspiration of this painting. He himself, has spent a lot of time painting the southwest of the US, and I share his passion for that part of the country. Henri has created many beautiful paintings of the Grand Canyon, and the desert of Arizona. That area of the world is my favourite place to visit for photography and painting because of the beautiful colour palette that is found there.

Chinese painting is not easy to master, and I am slowly developing my skills. The stages of making a painting involve several steps. Initially, the darks are introduced with black ink, until the brush is exhausted of ink. Then successive layers of gray are laid down by adding water to the brush, each successive layer being lighter than the previous. Colour is introduced in the same manner, from heavier washes down to light washes. One aspect that is hard to master is to be able to visualize the intensity of the colour that results after the paper has dried. The water washes of colour always fade to a lighter tone. The nice thing about that is that successive washes of transparent colour can always be added after the initial washes have dried.

The goal of this painting is to create the effect of a mist in the lower area of the canyon as well as in the far distance. I think I have succeeded in doing that.

Death Valley

This is an image that I took while entering Death Valley from the west entrance, driving back from Lone Pine California. The photo was given a sepia tone colouring, which helps to  portray the feeling I had as I drove down the mountain side into the valley. The temperature was 109 degrees, and I could imagine how the old miners and fortune seekers felt when they were exposed to the searing heat of the sun at 100 feet below sea level, on the salt flats. Death Valley can be a scary place to be in, especially when you are alone, far from any gas station.

I like this image as it draws you in visually from the lower left corner, into the mid distance, where interest is maintained. The flat plateau continues to draw the eye in further, creating a bit of mystery about what's around the bend.

Silver Efex Pro 2

Today I decided to try a demo version of Silver Efex Pro2. I haven't really studied yet how to use it in detail, but a trial image editing of a black and white photo I took in the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, California has me very interested in this software. First the original image, that I edited in Lightroom:

Then the  image I edited in Silver Efex Pro:

I like this image very much. It's a bit hard to see the image as it looks in Photoshop or Lightroom, since it has to be uploaded as a jpeg, but its quite nice. There are many options as to how one would like the final image to look, and it can be adjusted manually as well. In Lightroom it looks fantastic. I plan to use this software more often in the future.

Zabriski Point, Death Valley

Zabriski Point is a well known viewpoint at the eastern entrance to Death Valley. It is a part of the Amargosa Range in Death Valley, and is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 million years ago. This part of DeathValley is noted for its erosional landscape, composed of sediments that were collected at the bottom of the lake in the form of saline muds, gravels from nearby mountains, and ash falls from the then active Black Mountain volcanic field. (Wikipedia: Zabriski Pont) What is striking about Zabriski Point is the colour of the landscape. This image was post processed in Photoshop to create the effect that I was looking for when I actually took the photograph. I de-saturated the blue background and the reddish foreground, which enables the viewer to focus on the yellow band in the middle distance. It becomes the central focus of the image.

Morning at Lipan Point, Grand Canyon

This shot is a good example of waiting for the right moment. I had had arrived at Lipan Point at the Grand Canyon early in the morning, just before sunrise. It was very windy, and some hikers nearby were just preparing to go down into the Canyon on a hike, but they were hesitating due to  possible inclement weather. A dark cloud was behind me, blocking the sun and it looked pretty well like it might be time to pack up. Just as I started walking back to the car, the sky cleared, and bright sunlight broke through. I took a few shots and ended up with a few keepers, one of which I posted here. I always keep in mind some advice I received from a friend of mine, that bad weather can result in good photography. This is especially true at the Grand Canyon, where the weather can change dramatically, and very rapidly.