Words on Pics

Before I started this business last year, I’d never really printed my photos. And even over the past 12 months, I’ve mostly printed small – 8-by-10s and 8-by-12s.

When I applied for the Rock Island Art Guild’s 2024 Fine Arts Exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, I figured my chances of getting in were slim. So I set the size of this piece at a ridiculous 3 feet by 2 feet.

To my annoyance, I actually had to print (and frame) it at that size.

But I’m really glad I did. Photographs exist when they’re just on a screen, but they become more when they’re permanently committed to paper, canvas, metal, or another physical medium.

And scale matters: This picture on your phone or computer monitor is very different from it as a small print, which is very different from the version covering 6 square feet on a wall.

My submitted artist statement for this photo:

“Western Rock Island’s bike path is flanked by commerce — the Mississippi and its barges on one side, and functional industrial buildings with their storage lots on the other. Beyond a stray flower or some decorative flourish on the Crescent Rail Bridge, it’s an ugly place.

“I’ve long loved it as a subject for photography, and not just because of the pleasure of highlighting an isolated bit of relative beauty. The real fun comes from imposing harmony or even elegance on such a coarse landscape.

“Taken on Easter 2023, this image has an uneasy equilibrium. The orderly beams dominating the top of the frame lack context and feel out of place yet are balanced by the entropy of the rubble below. The dark tree is opposite light weeds, and horizontal lines have vertical partners. The fence appears to have been placed without purpose but has been neglected into an artful pose.”

Related collection: Monochrome.

The best camera is the one you have with you.

In other words, you might not have the equipment you want when you see something you’d like to capture. So you use what you have.

I shot this photo in Anna Maria, Florida, four years ago with a cell phone that was released nine years ago. At core, it’s just a picture of the ocean and sky. But I like how they sort of bleed together toward the horizon, with the blue sky reflected in the water and hints of green low in the sky to the right.

I also like that while there are a few other elements – two birds and a buoy – they’re easy to miss. The result is a seascape image that’s almost entirely about color.

Saturday afternoon at Wildcat Den State Park (near Muscatine, Iowa), I said something about the grist mill and its truss bridge perhaps being good foreground subjects for some Milky Way photos — both because of their orientation and their distance from light pollution. My wife asked when I could try. “Next year,” I said.

But even though we’re at the tail end of Milky Way visibility for the year, my photo app said we’d have about half an hour of the galactic core that night. We gave it a shot.

Turned out okay. Plus, we caught a bit of the Taurid meteor showers.

Related collection: Astrophotography.

Looking back at this photo from a year ago, I was surprised at how short a hop it was from the original image to my current edit. A photograph that appears radically manipulated usually is, but this was a case when I took what I captured and subtly enhanced it. It’s still highly manipulated, but in small ways.

Because of the overcast skies near Juneau, Alaska, the pictures in this sequence were all low-contrast and nearly monochromatic –a dull gray.

The basic choice I made in editing was to push the image toward brightness while boosting the colors that were already in the image. My changes revealed detail in the whale’s tail, abstracted the water, painted the hills purple and blue with flecks of other colors, and shifted the overall tone to silver.

This photo looks fantastic printed on metallic paper with a white mat.

These photos were taken in a 10-minute span late in the afternoon of April 19, 2020. They’re all from the west/back side of Rock Island High School — about two blocks from my house.

It’s clear that on this day my eye was drawn to line, light, shadow, texture, and shape. The emphasis on geometry abstracts them, but against that is a physicality — the walls and sidewalks, the glove, the metal bell, the materials of the bird’s nest, and the inferred feel of the sunlight that’s different in each photo.

I’m very fond of these pictures while recognizing that their appeal will be (to quote This Is Spinal Tap) more selective.