Slow Photography

In the winter, afternoon suj beams through the bow of a shipwreck on Cat Island, Bahamas. "A Work in Progress". A wrench on the bow exterior of the wreck.  Engine Room corrosion over several decades makes the steel turn to hues of white, brown and blue. SHIPWRECK on CAT ISLAND Slow photography is a daily practice. Part of the process is recognizing the oneness of all things, and letting go of perfection. Another aspect recognizes that increasing speed does not help us create quality. Quality arises from attention and being prepared. For example, I take a camera each time we go on a bike trip. I take only one lens. There is no need to hurry when out in the wilds. Biking along the banks of Cat Island, we saw an unexpected sight where Armbrister Creek meets the Bahama banks. Looking at the clear water, rays and baby sharks were visible, swimming in the shallows. In the mangroves, alongside the creek, calls rang out from nesting songbirds. Then, turning to th...

"Hey, ain't it good to know, you've got a friend"       ~ Carole King " Friends are the siblings God never gave us."  ~ Mencius A merlin flies over the Wakodahatchee Wetlands near Boca Raton, Florida, USA. One warm December day, three of us strolled the boardwalk of the South-Florida wetlands known for its diverse bird life. Dark grey gators, orange iguanas and pure white herons were at home in Wakodahatchee. Their bright hues drew our eyes and lenses. A banded raptor flew overhead and my friend looked it up in his bird book. It was a small, fierce raptor called a Merlin. Purple gallinule photograph Courtesy Glenn Kulbako www.kulbakophoto.com  Iguanas are arboreal, and a five foot long male iguana can climb trees as quickly and smoothly as it walks on the ground, photograph courtesy Glenn Kulbako http://www.kulbakophoto.com. Below the boardwalk, a pair of purple gallinules were feeding. They hacked away at the roots...

We can command a v ie wer to look, and make portraits more appealing by rethinking how we understand the square .  Example One: Bride with M other What is a s qu are? At left, the picture of the bride and her Mother has the proportion of a True square, 12 " by 12". Th ese 12 by 12 dimen s ions are what the camera recorded. For the photo a t right, I did not change the crop, but instead changed the proportions in post processing. This a dded a half inch of height while keeping the same w id th (12" by 12.5").  I call th is framing the Optical square.  From my experience with clients for wedding photography, I know that most brides , not all, prefer the Optical square presentation over the Tru e square. Why is this so ? True squares can appear wide and broad, due to the visual weight of th eir top and sides. Perceptually, our brains respond to verticals more than to horizontals.  L i ke trees, their shape ...

  "A photograph is only as good as the spirit of the person who took it.  Technique is merely a detail, a consideration, nothing more. "  ~Vincent Versace   Our portraits flow from our spirit and our being. Doing slow photography portraits is a  spiritual practice of  self-realization and other-realization. Our relationship with the other becomes the photograph. During the making of a portrait, the other becomes one's whole world. Portraits are other-centric, not selfies. The self realization is within, invisible.  Beginning with an informed empathy, an interesting portrait flows from the relationship between photographer and subject.  Good photographs are created by relationships with spirit , empathy and mutuality.    Thanks for your visit. Jim.  Jimages.com

FLOW "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" Flow is the pure absorption of a jazz musician playing 'in the groove or a rapper in freestyle. Time is forgotten. The psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi first popularizeds this process called "Flow." Musicians get in to flow quite often. But what about us photographers...we click, but can we Flow? Yes, we can. Takes practice. Flow came to me after a few years of photographing dolphins. After many failed attempts, I photographed a dolphin tossing a mullet in Florida. When I made the photograph, my body receded. My sens of 'I' disappeared. Time flowed as my thoughts became one with my actions. Flow is hard to describe, so with a little simplification, let's take a closer look at what "flow" feels like. 7 PARTS OF FLOW for PHOTOGRAPHERS: 1. You’re completely involved in what you’re doing: you’re completely focused and concentrated. The camera...

"Endurance trapped in pack ice" by Frank Hurley (1885–1962) - Public Domain,  Digital Collections of the National Library of Australia — nla.pic-an23478504.    First published on the page 156 of Hurley's Argonauts of the South (1925),  London and New York: Putnam & Sons.  ENDURANCE. .  The ship. A single frame. ERNEST SHACKLETON . Its captain. A single frame from a Kodak Vest Pocket camera. Ross Sea Party on Elephant Island, Frank Hurley photograph. The crew. A single frame? No. Although the image above was labeled as a single frame of the ship's crew on Elephant Island cheering Shackleton on his return , t h e clouds were added later from second image that Frank Hurley took. There is also no do ubt that the original image was not taken on Ernest Shackleton's return to the s tranded men, but on his departure from the Ross Sea Party.   But there is do ub t about whet...

" Gotta Go", Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 2015. Ektar 100 Film, Nikon n90s. " A good photograph is a happy accident— if you qualify the statement by saying that the greater the artist, the oftener the accident happens." ( after Charles Hawthorne) A fire hydrant and a dog. In the middle ground, a carriage rolls and hoofs its way to Lincoln street. People are sitting outside the Shop on The Corner , under a marine mural with its wide-eyes octopus, friendly skin diver and cavorting whale. Making the picture involved four kinds of luck. A LUCKY SHOT When we say "that's a lucky shot", we rarely mean to praise a photograph.   We really mean that blind luck made the picture happen. This underestimates the photographer. As photographers, we can create other kinds of luck than BLIND LUCK 1.These happen when we have removed the blinders, and have practiced and honed our craft.   Calling a photograph a lucky shot suggests it is only ...