Keeping busy during quarantine

What with curtailed travel plans, masks, and quarantining, Covid-19 has done a good job of messing up my shooting schedule. Not that I haven't done a truckload of relevant images to illustrate the virus and its effects, but it has cramped my ability to get out and gather up material for some of my favorite art material.

This past week I did arrange a brief shoot with one model where we were able to take a series of stock photo situations and a respectably safe 6' plus distance. One thing I did to guarantee this was to limit myself to shooting exclusively with the Fuji 90mm f'/2 lens on my new X-T4.  The focal length forced me to maintain a safe distance. 

We covered several situations in our brief shooting time, but this is one of my favorite shots to come out of it.

During my pandemic seclusion, I have been creating more and more images directly in Photoshop.  I did this one of the model holding a prism up in front of her face to refract an image of her eye. Later I combined the image with several scientific overlay charts, graphs, and symbols I've collected to create multiple exposure conceptual imagery.  

Funny thing is that I really had no idea that this would be the final outcome of the shot when I was taking the portait of the model.  I just made things up as I went along. 

Some crazy, unexpected things have come from the residue of what we have to do to stay safe during these difficult and lonely times. 

BTW, all the charts and symbols I used as overlays for this image, I had created in my downtime during the stay-at-home for the virus.  

Adding the element of time

The Cubist painters created works that illustrated space volumetrically by moving through it to reveal alternate views of the same scene. This splintering and rearranging of the elements of a scene add to it the element of time -- the time it takes for the artist to spend with a situation, explore it from various angles, break it into components, think about it, and reassemble it into a cogent compositional whole. The idea was that this presented a more comprehensive experience of the event. 

I have been working with that concept for the past year and creating photographic works with the same idea in mind.  Below are just a few of the images I created with this theme. More examples can be found here.  

Saguaro sunset - 60" x 34"

Lone tree in Bryce Canyon - 60" x 27"

Above and below the Everglades - 60" x 27"

Wind patterns, Death Valley - 60" x 30"

Six sunsets Walden Pond - 60" x 34"

Tropical leaf abstraction - 60" x 30"

The birthday photo

Every year on my birthday I try to go someplace in nature to photograph. This year the coronavirus had other plans for all of us and closed the Everglades, which was one of the places I had in mind. So, instead, not having any particular plan, I picked up a Fuji X-Pro3 with a single lens, the Fuji 35mm f/2, and went out walking to a nearby nature area with some interesting tropical areas to it.

I took a series of photos with the CC color profile and came back to edit them into a single image containing multiple viewpoints of the same scene. This image is a composite of four separate images from the morning walk combined with some graphic elements to tie it all together into a single composition. Working this way is the new theme I have been developing for a while now. You can see more from this stylistic series here.