Old Rag Photography

Every year throughout spring and summer, I find myself fascinated by the structure and purity of color in flower blossoms where ever I may be.. I am not a gardener (my wife does that). And I photograph the same plants in our gardens year after year. Thus I have created several thousands of floral images which reside on hard drives. These are a mere sample.

With infrared photography I can look beyond what I can actually see, into the world of the unseen. As I grow older the memories I cannot see are important to me. I want to preserve them. When I take an infrared photo, I develop an image in my mind of what I want to convey about a timeless, important and historical subject. What we see with our eyes is light reflected by the scene before us. Infrared is light (a form of energy and heat) beyond the visible spectrum that our eyes cannot see. The infrared camera sees only reflected infrared light, particularly coming off green vegetation and lightly colored subjects. These subjects will appear very bright in the image. Infrared light also penetrates atmospheric haze resulting in a surreal clarity in images of landscapes. An infrared photo in itself is a fairly flat image. I work with presets, specialized tools, add beige tones, sharpen details and amplify clarity to achieve the effect I want to make, revealing new insights into each scene. When I look at the olive tree, possibly 2000 years old, I can only begin to imagine how many people have walked by that tree. Rooted in the Italian soil, still growing and producing in Scolacium Archeological Park, it makes me feel how little we are in the passage of time. We can't see with our eyes what infrared photography reveals. I took that photograph of the olive tree during a summer trip to Calabria and, ironically, when I look at that photo, I reexperience the heat of the day when the photo was taken. The photo of the Lom-Bar-Dy restaurant evokes images of the people who cooked and ate there. Now just a shell, the actual building looks like junk, but the infrared process restores a sense of specialness, its importance to the community, a history, and the innate curiosity we have in a fallen down building or a structure worn down by time. The image of Main Street Sperryville is paradoxically historical and yet very much alive. While the voluminous cloud adds mystery and majesty to the historic village, the use of shade and tone captures both the sense of history and contemporary energy Built in the Doric order around 460-450 BC, the Temple of Hera is in the ancient city of Paestum, Italy, a major ancient Greek city on the coast of the Tyrrhenien Sea in Magna Grecia (southern Italy). Hera, Queen of the Gods; Hera, Protector of Women and Goddess of Marriage and Birth; Hera, wife and sister of Zeus. Power and Passion. The Temple’s grandeur is prominent in this infrared photo. The “brightly white” leaf trees focus one’s eye on the majestic temple while simultaneously softening the photo in its entirety. The clarity in the image and allows us to experience history in a different way.

I could not resist stepping out of my sheltering-at-home to get some photos after the rain shower on April 7. The glorious collection of many greens of the several tree & shrub varieties were amplified by the wetted sprouting leaves and late afternoon sunlight. You can see the green leaves gradually moving up the gradient microclimate of the Blue Ridge mountainsides. This … in the middle of a pandemic. I have seen and studied many photographs of the Spanish Flu Pandemic and the many images of Great Depression by the great photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). They are monochrome or “black and white.” That lack of color conveys the unhappiness and stress of those times. Thus, I never imagined or thought of color being present. Yet here we are a hundred years or so later. Spring has arrived in all its splendor during this stressful time of a pandemic … in color. That is a paradox that I, as a photographer, find very disorienting.

Sunsets and clouds provide a colorful landscape that often leaves us in awe of nature. Visit our Sunrise Sunset Virtual Exhibit for more photos in this genre.