Speaking of Art Blog

As I took a leisurely walk at Coffee Creek Watershed Preserve near my home in northern Indiana last fall, I was looking for picture taking opportunities. I saw this:

Now this may not be the kind of image that knocks you off your feet, but what intrigued me was just part of the picture, a small slice across the upper middle. This part: 

What caught my attention in this slice were the uneven intervals between the various reeds. In nature, there are no perfectly spaced intervals between shapes as there are in man-made objects, such as windows evenly spaced along a building wall or lampposts spaced along a city street. In nature, things grow at different rates, they are subject to what is lying on the surface of the ground where they grow, and they get varying amounts of sunshine and water. All of these factors, and many more, affect where a bunch of identical reeds might sprout and grow, and how far apart they are spaced. So when creating a zoomed in look at a slice of nature such as this, rendering a pattern with unequally spaced intervals will feel more natural to the viewer.

A few other features about this slice of the photo that attracted my attention were the suggestions of fall colors in the background, and the prickly balls with their sharp, dark edges that punctuated the scene with just the right amount of light/dark drama. But the real icing on the cake was the fact that all the reeds were bending in the wind, creating wonderful diagonal line movement in the cropped image. This slice shouted autumn to me.

I did have to do some refining of the photo slice using Adobe Photoshop. With the cloning tool I “moved” some reeds that were blocking my view of one large prickly ball so that it looked like they were wrapped behind the ball instead of in front of it. 

I also needed to keep in mind that when I started working on the out-of-focus background, I wanted to really jazz up the fall colors back there. As I worked I used that same principle of uneven intervals by placing unique, oddly shaped, blurry suggestions of fall leaves in balanced, but not predictable places. Let me tell you, that part proved challenging!

Here is my finished piece: 

I did one more thing after I finished. Using Photoshop, I removed the color from my image to see if the intervals between the diagonal reeds were indeed uneven. Yes! Uneven autumn intervals, a very lovely vignette to behold.