Nature Photography.......imposing order upon a disordered world?

"Am I, by imposing order in this way and perhaps not depicting nature as it really is, succeeding or failing as a nature photographer?"

Neither. Nature is three dimensional, and ever changing. Anytime you point a camera and click the button, you have transformed it into something flat and unchanging, so you never "depict nature as it really is". But, hopefully, you depict nature as you perceive it. And if you enjoy nature, hopefully that enjoyment is passed on to viewers of your pictures, and if that is done, you have succeeded as a nature photographer.

Keep in mind also that there IS a tremendous amount of order in nature that is not brought out in photos. That tree is not just a random pile of atoms, but a very ordered structure on the microscopic level; otherwise, it could not function. Rearrange it ever so slightly (as with a chainsaw) and it will die. The blob-shaped rock you see is a collection of crystals, each with millions of atoms in perfect alignment.

Well, we all look at things differently. I have never thought of nature as chaotic, but rather orderly. The tree that gets blown over in a storm, is used up eventually as humus to build up the soil. Seeds are blown, or carried down to the earth and grow. The squirrel that is taken by the redtailed hawk, ends up nourishing the hawk, which is doing its part to weed out the weak, slow, and sickly, therefore ultimately strengthening the squirrel population. All happening as part of the order of nature, the birth, the living, and the dying, some parts being violent, some peaceful, but all a part of the order. Your beautiful image of the tree, with its fall colors blazing against the blue of the fall sky, nourishes those of us who see it, and builds our love of the outdoors, and grows our appreciation of nature and its many parts. And another part of the order completed. Whoa, didn't mean to go nuts, but just my take on it. Joe

Maybe the intention of his comment was to say that you have a talent for composing aesthetic images within the relatively bewildering type of landscapes you prefer to shoot. This is a common skill of many veteran landscape photographers though that skill varies among those photographers and would vary depending on the type of landscape. Finding the aesthetic within a tangle of branches is certainly not one of the more easy places to be successful. I have shot trees for many years and particularly like roaming within aspen groves during the fall. One may look for preferred geometries and structure when wandering about looking looking, but just letting your visual system slowly absorb the scenery until something jumps out and grabs you as aesthetic is a talent. And it is difficult to develop by anything more than having spent the time through a great many experiences in which one seeks what is beautiful therein. -David

". . . just letting your visual system slowly absorb the scenery until something jumpsout and grabs you as aesthetic is a talent."

David is right, of course, but how many times, regardless of our skills, have we failed to capture an image that evokes the same emotions as that which we encountered? The talent to be able to consistently convey it the way you envision it is a special talent indeed! I know my percentages are low, even if my enthusiasm is high!

I like your website!

Art, it is sometimes said, teaches us how to see. If that be true, then it's the duty of the nature photographer to impose order on the natural world.

Bob Keefer
Keefer Photography
www.bkpix.com

Having thought about the question a little more, I suppose it comes down to the intended purpose of a photograph. If the intention is to record the environment, then it would be important to record the world as it is, disorder included. If the intention is to show the beauty of the natural world, then imposing order on the disordered world is acceptable.

Does this make sense and what is *your* approach.

www.keithlaban.co.uk

Emile Zola: "Art is nature as seen through a temperament"

You could get very Taoist about all this but the answer is fairly simple if you want it to be. Nature is a paradox, both order within chaos and chaos within disorder. All the universe depends on this relationship of duality. Night, day, male, female, wet, dry, hot, cold etc. This is the quantum reality which is beautifully illustrated by Shroedingers Cat. It is our intereaction with an event or subject/object which changes that event or affects the outcome.

Prior to our arriving everything is possible and impossible, both order and chaos reside together in complete harmony but it is only our perception of these things which alters them; the thing itself remains outside of us both something and nothing, both beautiful and ugly, both ordered and chaotic. You make your photography whatever you make it and nothing more than that. After all it will be both what you think it is and what you think it isn't regardless of what you think both before you arrived and after you left.

Enjoy, Si

Hi Keith: You already know that I regard your work very highly. To an ecologist" nature is a series of compensating catastrophies("Hugh Raup Harvard 1965"). Nature creates extremes which inevitably are reduced by catastrophic events. The spruce budworm,scourge of north eastern america survives for decades in refugia only to become the epicentre of a new population explosion which eventually so consumes its food supply that it is infected by virus and the population crashes.Similar extravagences occur daily within nature.While one can learn to understand the processes at work it is virtually impossible to bring pictorial order to these phenomena. But order or not nature is beautiful and we seek to display this beauty. You have succeeded.

Hi Keith,

Several thoughts come to mind.

Your image yields symmetrical balance within a static composition; complementariness in palette, and unified structure (reflecting order) given through the very symbol of the tree itself. The foundation (earth) is recessed in the foreground, and the symmetry of the arterialisation of the branches opens towards the blue heavens, sealed within the perfect balance of a square. (A prefiguration in this image can be grasped through allegory, however I'll not digress onto reality.)

Even on the right, where dark branches from another tree intrude into the abstracted space of this tree which you have singled out, the offset from the yellow background foliage balances the image.

Such characteristics in an image are classical structures in man's striving at art. Had I not known better, I'd infer the photographer's subconscious is structured with the intuitions of a painter's: the aleatory (disorder) is filtered out - not by how the photographer sees, but by the the nature of the photographer himself.

Yet it does strike me that nature (here) is abstracted by focalisation; the way you see. It is the visual abstraction which offers the control (and thus order), rather than the imposition of a set of technicalities (I would not steep low enough to say the latter criteria are fitting for this image). The abstraction might reflect a classical technique which when applied, has helped the soul-less majority shake off the bland habit of indifference, and thus revel in nature: 'ahh - this is beautiful....[speechless thereafter]'. Thus each individual revels in the rapt layers of beauty which foregrounding and abstraction achieve.

Yet, reading all of what I have written, leaves me feeling aware of the fact: perhaps I am mistaken not to foreground on - the 'order' which this image reveals - mirrored from the spirit of the author (photographer).

Yet, to depict nature as-it-(really)-is; which lens shall the photographer apply to grasp totality as a structure? Phenomenologically, is this possible? The lens of depiction is the scientist' fallacy. The fantasy is pregnant, yet the image of nature-as-it-is, remains unborn. When nature is grasped as-it-really is, it is experienced in vivo, in the fleeting pleasure of stepping into a relationship with the woodland, before such a moment is annexed as deftly as it dawned, by the very desire to photograph it: then the image is rendered back into its place as mere image, in relation to its object.

Nature as-it-is unifies oppositions (life and death, spring and fall) and thus order's relationship to chaos. Yet, this is still not what matters to the photographer (without disrepect to the planet either); nature as-it-is reveals its insurmountable facets. To abstract a personal facet (usually subconsciously, or more precisely, procedurally) from your image is that art-ifice; the art of depicting.

Perhaps allegory is the lens in which nature is really known, as-it-is. I'm inclined to believe that alienation in the modern man leads the viewer to see nature as disordered and higglety-pigglety. Is implied 'disorder' then a function of individual estrangement from the essence of nature? The ecologist; the biochemist; biologist and park ranger see order; the tree surgeon; the shopping mall addict the converse.

Kind regards,

Very interesting. I would like to add that in view of these considerations, the pure employment of the transcendental aesthetic depends on the Categories, as we have already seen. The Categories, for these reasons, occupy part of the sphere of metaphysics concerning the existence of our analytic judgements in general. What we have alone been able to show is that the transcendental aesthetic, in view of these considerations, is by its very nature contradictory. (On the other hand, the thing in itself, when thus treated as our sense perceptions, is by its very nature contradictory, since knowledge of the things in themselves is a posteriori.) Because of the relation between our knowledge and the things in themselves, the Ideal of human reason excludes the possibility of the Antinomies. Still, I assert, however, that reason abstracts from all content of a priori knowledge, as we have already seen.

In our current Western culture we are seemingly very selfish and self-absorbed, addicted to ever increasing amounts of sensory stimulation and excess, but when we inevitably crash into the limits of such excess, an existential crisis tends to ensue. Rather than, for example, sensing that our minds and emotions may need cleansing and recalibration, we may tend to see the world around us through a depressing filter of ennui, in which some things may seem hollow and devoid of meaning. Those destined to recalibrate may do so by realizing that a return to meaningful, satisfying "vision" might involve an inward-directed and highly personal search to re-discover the utterly honest and healing "Whitman-like" world of simplicity; or, child-like playfulness and naivete; or, the beauty of understated elegance. If we successfully negotiate this often productive return to the real pleasures of art, it is up to the individual whether or not he chooses to remember or forget the lessons taught by excess or self-inflicted boredom, and whether or not he will use his re-orientation to explore new directions or get lost again.