Slow Photography

Click the play button to see a preview of my unique book Ruins and Rust. Jim Ruins and Rust by Jim Austin Jimages

    REACHING OUT WITH AWE   " Wow ! " exclaimed the girl.  Her mother whispered to me: "I've never seen her speechless."  We were watching Maximo, looking through the aquarium glass from the shelter of a dim, underground room. Maximo is a salt water crocodile. On the other side of the glass, at Saint Augustine's Alligator farm, Maximo was motionless. As she stared at Maximo with awe, the girl reached out to touch his fingernails.* Seeing at 15 foot long salt water crocodile filled me with awe. Maximo weighs 1250 pounds. When you see his underbelly through the glass, he seems enormous.  Maximo's home is Saint Augustine Florida's Alligator Farm. It's a good setting for high dynamic range methods. Why? Many of the animals there, like Maximo, do not move around much. This makes them good HDR subjects. For my HDR work, I took a slow photograph approach. A sense of awe is at the heart of slow photography. When we pause to stare a

A rose. Honeysuckle. Blackberries. The wind in the pines. Skunk. The smell of the ocean . . . What is your favorite natural smell ? Which smells makes you cringe? Do scents open up your vault of memories?  Nature wafts aromas that are rich and varied. Instead of just looking at the details of nature that catch our eyes, we might also slow down to savor her scents, using all of our senses before we touch the shutter.  Slow Down and Crawl  As we taste, we inhale, pausing to savor subtle flavors. What does this have to do with slow photography? When we rush our craft and speed our steps, we miss nature's subtler scents and textures. Photo walks in natural places are a good way to take our time. At times, I stop walking, and get down on the ground. I sit. I inhale. I listen and then crawl toward an aroma or a sound that is the photograph's subject. Soaking up the aromas of a sunny, summer field at the hottest part of the day, our amazing sense

by Jim Austin Jimages Having no alternative, the Florida sun was shining above us. As we sweated under it, in line for the art museum,  my neighbor in the queue asked “Do you have the time?”   BACK IN TIME The question seemed to hang in the air like a basketball player making a shot. I answered"  Yes,I do" just as the front doors of the Bass Museum opened into blissful air conditioning. Quickly glancing at my ancient Time piece, I told her the Time. It was 11:58 am, in Miami Beach or so it seemed. We looked inside the doors, to where a museum security guard was glancing at his watch. He started to unlock the museum. A sense of déjà vu came over me. Perhaps it was just a glitch, as in The Matrix, but I wondered: Have I stood here before and told this woman the Time of day, just like this, at some Time in the past? What year was it, anyway?  It did not matter. Once inside, we traveled back to 1887, looking at a black and white photo series by Muybridge.