High Dynamic Range – Jay Ressler

No. 32. Eastern State Penitentiary

Al Capone's Cell — Al Capone’s Cell, Re-Created

Door to Capone's Cell — Door to Capone’s Cell (HDR)

Cell with Iron Door, Bench and Dresser (HDR)

No. 18. Walk in the Woods, Part 2

No. 17. Walk in the Woods, Part I

Week No. 15. Guardians of the Planet

Crabgrass, Broken Glass, and a Rusted Hinge

In honor of Earth Day and of the show opening tonight at Studio B in Boyertown, PA, Local by Local, this gallery focuses on trees and other vegetation — including crabgrass — the stuff on which animal life depends. Included in several images are bits of trash left in forested areas.

I’ve included information with each picture about the camera used to capture the picture and the software used to develop it including the company that converted my Pentax K10D into an infrared camera — Kolari Vision. Most of the other outfits that convert cameras that I found, or were recommended to me, only deal with Canikon cameras.

For those interested in understanding better understanding Infrared photography, false colors, and the surreal effects it produces read my 2009 article here. The article, which includes a basic summary of the physics of light, should be read by all landscape artists whatever their medium. I hope readers won’t get lost in the science, but it’s what makes me appreciate the magic of it all.

Much of the content is based on my early experiments using an old point and shoot that I converted myself in addition to using IR filters on other cameras. The article has been slightly updated with a cursory look at processing IR files shot in camera RAW and channel swapping to produce the blue sky effect. I recommend Laurie Klein’s Infrared Photography: Artistic Techniques for Brilliant Images for a more in-depth (and less technical) look at the art form.

Week No. 1, Down an Road Less Traveled

A New Direction

For five years I’ve published a daily blog of my photography under the heading “Jay M. Ressler Imaging 365: A daily log of my artistic journey,” which was linked to my personal Facebook page. Beginning with this posting, I’m publishing the blog under a different moniker, “Jay M. Ressler 52 Weeks: Sights and Insights.”

During the first year of my 365 blog, 2011, I posted 663 pictures beginning in early April. Starting January 1, 2012, I organized it around one photograph a day.

In may respects the 365 project has been beneficial. It’s demanding and good discipline. On the downside, however, more than a fair number of pedestrian photographs ended up being published, while some real gems got overlooked. But isn’t that in the nature of the beast?

With this posting, marking the beginning of the second half of the second decade, I am changing direction with this blog. This will no longer be a daily blog, nor will it be strictly a venue for posting my own photographs. In addition, to my own photography, I hope with a more leisurely schedule to be able to examine the history of photography, the work of other photographers, questions of theory and practice in the medium.

This won’t be a “how to” blog (for my “how to” column refer to the bimonthly newsletter of the Berks Art Alliance, The Pallette). I hope to make this more project-centered—a halfway step between what appears on the blog and what I actually show in the real world. I also hope to include occasional video.

Part of the reason for making this change is to allocate more of my time to showing work on paper and to marketing.

This is new territory for me; we’ll see how it goes. My goal is to post once a week, on Thursday mornings.

In the process of preparing to make some needed changes on both my main we site and this blog, I introduced a fatal corruption to blog’s database. For that reason, I’ve had to start from scratch without the planned archives. A fresh start may prove to be a good thing, perhaps some archival pages can be partially reconstructed.