This has been an interesting project. 

Let’s begin with a digression down an irresistible rabbit hole.

The artist George Inness has long been a hero of mine. One interesting tidbit I found recently cited a tendency of his, that up until now I thought was a mental deficit uniquely my own. 

It comes in two parts.

First, that every piece of creative work I invest heart and soul in remains “mine” regardless of who may have paid for it and in legal terms owns it. I have often joked with landscape and water feature clients that although I was entrusting a landscape, pond or watergarden into their care, in my head and heart it would always remain mine.

And, strangely, I meant it.

A second odd notion I secretly harbor is that no piece of art is ever really finished. 

Inness suffered from this so severely that he is reported to have repeatedly been observed strolling through a rich patron’s hallways well-hung with art, only to pause before one of his own, that had been formerly commissioned and paid handsomely for even, and mutter to himself, “no, no, no!’ And without reservation unhang the masterpiece and cart it off back to his studio. Often, once returned they had been so reworked as to hardly be considered the same works at all!

Other times, these pieces were never returned only to be found later gathering dust along some wall of his studio amidst stacks of others.

I have reported this piece finished at least a half-dozen times over the last ten years only to revisit it months later with an entirely augmented vision of what parts are lacking and what others over-stepping. 

Let’s rewind. 

For years, I was obsessed with a few notions that eventually led to the development of styles all their own.  

One, were night skies. This was my second or third lunar eclipse and I felt particularly well-prepared. 

I came a couple of nights early and scouted three possible locations. Lunar eclipses happen in different locations in the sky, and I hadn’t really figured out the whys and wherefores yet. So, extra time in the field allowed me to test favorite locations and guestimate with a relatively high level of accuracy the collateral “accidents of light” I might expect on the big night. 

In this image, the rattlesnake’s eye is the exact size and location of the blood moon as it occurred. 

Another obsession is Native-American “spirits.” Hence the location and mystery legend implications, behind a rather pedestrian set of pictographs in a local National Park.

Let me clarify; there are nothing pedestrian about ancient artifacts, quite the opposite. I used the term “pedestrian” only to signify a set of pictographs so well known that the Park service has put up signs out front pleading for visitor discretion upon visiting. 

Next, this image backplate is a “Wide and Tight.” A style I developed for myself that allows hyper-wide field of views while maintaining tight perspective controls. I sub-title the style; “Beyond the panorama,” and it goes way, way beyond. But for the sake of brevity, we’ll just call this a panorama …on steroids.

The foreground was originally twenty-one frames wide. I only used probably 16 or 18 for this image. The sky is another twenty-ish and captured on a much darker night two weeks later from the same location compensating for the rotational difference a fortnight makes so the stars were in the exact same relation to the moon that they had been.

On the night of eclipse night the moon went full red just past midnight. I light painted, with huge studio strobes, the foreground, mid ground and inner cave and pictograph until the moon approached its eclipse. Then I shifted to my telephoto lens and equatorial mount to track the moon through its phases pulled-in tight for clarity. Once the eclipse ended, I continued shooting and light painting the foregrounds until sunrise a few hours later.

I went ahead and shot the sky and constellations even though I knew I would be replacing them just to better inform me of anything I might need to consider on my return trip and to record the moon’s precise location during its bloodletting. 

During the two weeks wait a worker on a landscape job spotted a nice rattler. I gently bagged it up and caged it comfortably until I could photograph it for this project. It took all of two weeks for it to come out from hiding under the leaves I lined its cage with. I started to worry she might get hungry, so I went to the reptile store and bought some feeder mice. Creepy, huh. 

Five minutes later my cats were acting crazy freaked, and I realized the rattler had already killed a mouse and become very territorial of her space. She was coiled up, buzzing and hissing. I grabbed my camera and lights and slid open the screened lid to the glass enclosure.  

They thermally sense by taste with their tongue, but she wouldn’t attempt it through the glass. I had to hold my camera in one hand and wave the other in front of her face inside the cage to get her to stick her tongue out allowing me to fire off a few rounds.  It sounded like a lot better idea at the time. She cooperated beautifully and after her meal she was released back into the wild and out of harm’s way. 

The next styles are, “mirroring,” “mask shifting,” “mode gymnastics,” and, “texas teas” or, textures and plates.

More later….