Author photo

By Brianna Wray
THE TIMES 

WAITSBURG FROM A VISUAL ARTISTS' PERSPECTIVE

 

Brianna Wray

Top: Kokejo No Rogu Lower Left: The Ma- chineShopLowerRight:StormOverStonecipher

WAITSBURG-The Touchet River is a 55-mile tributary of the Walla Walla River and in its valley sprawls endless hills and fields of wheat end-capped by barns and mills.

Our local landscape boasts breath- taking views that draw tourists and gasps, but is also seemingly difficult to capture in photograph. Especially when taking pictures as passengers from the highway at speed rendering every shot at least a little blurry.

Without specialist equipment such as a drone, one might think it is impossible to reproduce the scale and essence of our landscape, but visual artist Bill Rodgers makes it his business to find and capture that very image.

On display through the month of June at Ten Ton Art & Coffee, are a col- lection of Bill Rodgers favorite images he's captured and printed. These are the cream of the crop.

The collection ranges from the muted toned mossy deep forest feel of Kokejo No Rogu, to the warm wheat fields and cloudy chiaroscuro skies in Storm Over Stonecipher. Wallowa Scene brings a distant mountain closer while Frost on the KD Ranch chills.

"It's interesting a lot of them are winter scenes; six of the seven," shares Rodgers, "I love the landscape here in the winter, it is so dramatic. The snow really sets things aside and isolates. A bunch of these are in the fog which is neat too."

What distinguishes fine art from photo documentation is attention to detail and adaptation. An image that is too blurry is confusing or disorienting, but an image that is too vividly detailed is tiring for the eye and disharmonious to the photo. It is the job of the artist to balance what is seen and what is not by whatever means necessary.

Use Your Tools

Rodgers shoots with a Canon EOS 5DSR camera. It has every bell and whistle one could ring or blow. It has a 50.6 megapixel sensor that captures fine edge sharpness on a professional level. "It's a landscape photographer's camera," says Rodgers. "It's got a big sensor in it which means that I can blow things up really big without the image degrading.

"Also, when you have that many pixels in an image you can push a lot of things...without getting funny little artifacts, halos, and noise. It's a great camera. I wish I had it fifty years ago," he added.

But it's not all just the camera and the lens that are important.

[Storm Over Stonecipher]: "That was a really boring photograph," shares Rodgers, "it needed a little help and I have no problem doing that. Some photographers are purists and I'm not. In fact, I don't consider myself a pho- tographer anymore, I consider myself to be an artist. I will work with an image until it looks the way I want it to."

That includes digital manipulation with programs such as Photoshop.

"My friend Leslie Cain once told me 'you're not a photographer, you're a painter.' I like to think that I start with the camera, but sometimes I'll do things that make it better," he said.

"When I first started doing photog- raphy if I saw I barn I liked I'd take a picture of the barn," continues Rodg- ers, "but that's photo documentation, that's boring. It took me a while to re- alize what really works is finding a barn but using it as an element in, and not the subject of, the photograph, think- ing more like a painter.

"So now and what I teach at the Waitsburg School of Landscape Pho- tography is when you're driving around looking for stuff, look for compositions, not pictures of barns."

What are the key elements in a good composition? According to Rodgers, "you need to have a foreground or you won't have depth. That's basic stuff, but a lot of people don't do it."

According to Rodgers, it's the luck of the draw, "You go out, you drive around, some days you don't take any photographs, sometimes the light is

perfect and you shoot hundreds."

However luck favors the bold.

[Frost on the KD Ranch] "is my

friend Kristin's farm. I photographed the barns from the road for many years before she bought the place and gave me permission to wander around. The density of the trees and the teasel brush lends a comforting texture to the win- try scene," he said.

Get the up-close views without all the muddy hiking now through June at Ten Ton Art on Waitsburg's Main Street.

 

Reader Comments(0)

 
 

Powered by ROAR Online Publication Software from Lions Light Corporation
© Copyright 2024