"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: winter

New Year’s Day 2026 (White Mums, Manipulated)

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From “A Way to a Happy New Year” by Robert Brewster Beattie in Poems for Special Days and Occasions, compiled by Thomas Curtis Clark:

To leave the old with a burst of song,
To recall the right and forgive the wrong;
To forget the thing that binds you fast
To the vain regrets of the year that’s past;
To have the strength to let go your hold
Of the not worth while of the days grown old,
To dare go forth with a purpose true,
To the unknown task of the year that’s new;
To help your brother along the road
To do his work and lift his load;
To add your gift to the world’s good cheer,
Is to have and to give a Happy New Year.

From “The Snowman’s Resolution” by Aileen Fisher in More Poetry for the Holidays, selected by Nancy Larrick:

The snowman’s hat was crooked
and his nose was out of place
and several of his whiskers
had fallen from his face,

But the snowman didn’t notice
for he was trying to think
of a New Year’s resolution
that wouldn’t melt or shrink.

He thought and planned and pondered
with his little snowball head
till his eyes began to glisten
and his toes began to spread;

At last he said, “I’ve got it!
I’ll make a firm resolve
that no matter WHAT the weather
my smile will not dissolve.”

Now the snowman acted wisely
and his resolution won,
for his splinter smile was WOODEN
and it didn’t mind the sun.

Hello!

While I’ve been taking photographs regularly at Oakland Cemetery for about six years now, it wasn’t until 2022 that I discovered the large volume of late-blooming asters and mums that are featured throughout the property. Most of them initially flower from late October through late November, include a wide variety of species and colors, and persist into early December if we don’t have too much cold weather. They tend to fill the gap between the emergence of fall color among trees and shrubs in autumn, and those plants — mostly flowering shrubs and trees like quince and plums — that are capable of producing blooms as early as January or February. As these asters and mums put on their best shows just before the holidays — and just before I start my annual Christmas project posts, I tend to accumulate several hundred photos that I don’t work on until after the holiday project, and the holidays themselves, are in the rearview mirror.

So this is the first post (of a presently unknown number) of some of those asters and mums, and I picked the white ones to share today since I’ve gotten in the habit of associating white flowers with New Year’s Day. Subsequent posts will bring in rainbows of hues, including some rather amazing mums where the single stems of individual plants produce three to five flowers, each one a different color.

While members of these plant families are highly resistant to cold weather — which is of course what makes them so suitable for late autumn and early winter growth spurts — we’d had several days below freezing right around the time many of the plants were starting to bloom. You’ll see the effects of those freezing temperatures in three ways: some of the flowers formed non-traditional shapes that reminded me of what coastline trees look like when blown by wind off the water for decades or centuries; some of the blossoms (especially at the tips of their petals) had their colors shift from white to light pink or light red; and many of the stems and leaves froze to the point where they produced swatches of yellow or turned completely brown. The leaf color change is similar to what happens to many plants as autumn approaches, where a plant’s ability to produce chlorophyll (and stay green) is reduced by the cold and its leaves eventually desiccate, detach, and fall to the ground. The shape-shifting is a chemical reaction to reduction in water fluidity that contracts cells and collapses the flower structure; and the color-shift is a reminder that few flowers are actually pure white but instead are suppressing the appearance of alternate colors when they’re at optimal blooming stages.

All this means that this year I accumulated hundreds of aster and mum photos that are not entirely photogenic. Naturally, I was aware of that when I took the photos (how could I not be?), but took lots of them anyway, in part because I wanted to see what I could create from them once I had time to spend editing in Lightroom. While I’ve long been accustomed to using Lightroom’s healing tools to remove spots, pollen, bits of debris, or unfocused photobombing bugs from my images, the kind of repair and reconstruction needed for heavily damaged plants is beyond the capabilities of those tools.

Such reconstruction is not, however, beyond the capabilities of Lightroom’s Generative AI Remove tool, which was added to the software in mid-2024 and I’ve been experimenting with it since. Simply put, this tool lets you select parts of an image that you want to replace, and it fetches three potential replacements you can pick from to let you properly match colors and textures. It lets me think of an image’s creative reconstruction like this: what might have been in the photo if the damaged flower, broken leaf, or dead stem wasn’t there?

Here are some examples to help illustrate that thinking, three photos showing how the image looked before I selected elements to remove and replace (sometimes dozens of individual selections), and after. Select the first image and page through all six if you’d like to see how the changes worked out. Note, especially, how the tool generated new leaves for the plants that are botanically accurate: they not only match the colors and textures present in other parts of the photo I didn’t change, but are correctly rendered not as some generic leaf shape, but with the distinct appearance of chrysanthemum leaves.

Of course, the end result departs significantly from what I photographed, which generates all sorts of interesting questions at the intersections of photography, creativity, image manipulation, and even artificial intelligence. A photography theorist bound to originalist or documentary conceptions might think this distance between what I photographed and what I chose as an end result violates some picture-taking laws, but I’m not one of those theorists. I do, however, try to approach these changes intentionally, with the idea in mind that we — as humans who observe plants and flowers in real life — tend to focus on parts of a scene we consider the subject and worth contemplating, while disregarding those parts of that scene that we consider irrelevant. To the camera, everything it captures is equally significant or insignificant, though it may help us with subject isolation when we vary focal lengths, apertures, and other settings — so it’s up to us and our discretion, not the technology, to decide what matters.

If you’ve been following me here for a while, you’ll likely recall that I have in the past often produced galleries of images where I’ve removed the backgrounds behind the subject I wanted you to see by converting them to black. This was a different kind of image manipulation serving the same goal: presenting a photo based on what mattered to me when I viewed the subject, while discarding distracting or irrelevant items. Given the Generative Remove tool’s capabilities, I look back on that now as a transitional period in my own development, one that I’d probably still be using had this new tool not been invented, and one that permits me to take wider shots than I did in the past while knowing I can remove aberrations while still preserving the botanical accuracy and garden context of the original scene.

Because its operation is quite opaque — like a black box in technological terms — using it is heavily experimental, but with a lot of ambiguity since you can never get the same results twice even if you try to make an identical second selection. And while you can’t tell it what to do with words that represent your thoughts or your vision, eventually it sinks in through that experimentation that you can influence how it acts. I’ll explore that more fully in a later post, but here are two things I discovered that have turned out to be consistently true: if I want to repair damage to a particular leaf, I should first remove any small spots or blemishes on adjacent leaves, or the tool will incorporate nearly identical spots into its replacement; and, if I want the tool to construct something like a new leaf in an otherwise nearly blank location, it will do that accurately if I include a sliver of a leaf nearby in my selection. These two techniques tell me that the tool is contextual: in determining potential replacements, it’s looking at what else is in the photo in conjunction with what I’ve selected before providing replacement options.

Here’s another way to understand that. For this image, I selected everything in the sixth photo above for replacement — therefore asking Generative Remove to recreate the entire photo. What does this result tell us about how it works?

I’m glad you asked! We can see that — even though I’ve told the tool to replace all the image’s content — it still recognizes that the primary subject was a white flower of a particular shape, the background leaves were unimportant, and that the most prevalent colors in the image were white and shades of green. It probably knows nothing specific about objects we would identify as chrysanthemums, but takes the pattern it found in my photo’s subject and repeats it while varying the pattern to simulate randomness. It applies this same approach to the grass in the background: note how each swatch of grass is very similar though not precisely identical.

This arrangement of recurrent but slightly varying patterns is one of the reasons we would recognize this implausible field of flowers as likely created by an image generator: the patterns are too uniform, and any given section of the image looks nearly identical to any other. That has two implications: first, that when editing photos and using this Generative Remove tool, I have to keep an eye out for unnatural patterns or patterns that aren’t a logical fit; and second, when you see an image with patterns like this, your conclusion that it’s AI-generated is most likely correct.

Thanks for reading and taking a look…

And Happy New Year!

Climbing Around a Climbing Fern

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From Introduction to Botany by Murray W. Nabors:

“During his botanical studies near Concord, Massachusetts, in 1851, Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, discovered a rare, native climbing fern, Lygodium palmatum. ‘It is a most beautiful slender and delicate fern,’ he wrote, ‘twining like [a] vine about the meadow-sweet, panicled andromeda, golden-rods, etc., to the height of three feet or more and difficult to detach…. Our most beautiful fern, and most suitable for wreaths or garlands. It is rare.’

“In recent years, two exotic relatives of Thoreau’s fern have posed a serious ecological challenge in regions of the southern United States, particularly Florida. The climbing fern Lygodium microphyllum, native to parts of Southeast Asia and Australia, and the Japanese climbing fern Lygodium japonicum both entered the United States as horticultural plants for hanging baskets. They then escaped cultivation and became exotic pests. Like many introduced species, these Asian ferns thrive because they encounter few growth restrictions in their new geographical range. They grow rapidly and spread by wind-borne spores that may be carried 40 miles or more. These hardy ferns currently cover 40,000 acres in south Florida and have increased their range 100-fold over six years, surviving floods and droughts.

“Although beautiful, the ferns can be deadly to other plants, covering other vegetation in masses up to 0.6 meters (2 feet) thick. They kill other plants by cutting off the light or by sheer mass, even causing some trees to collapse under their weight. The vines, actually climbing leaves, may be up to 30.5 meters (100 feet) long, sometimes acting as fire ladders that rapidly carry flames into dry, dead trees. Masses of ferns readily break off during fires, carrying flames to new locations and resulting in the destruction of valuable forests.”

From “Fern Frond for John Wain” by Anthony Conran in Poetry Wales, edited by Meic Stephens:

Why don’t I send you
A fern really old —
Osmunda, with its massive
Stump-like bole?

Marattia or Angiopteris —
Squat little trees
That through the millennia
Inched down by degrees —

Dowagers of the rain forests
Left to their plight
In the hundred yard high
Struggle for light —

Or Lygodium, the last
Climbing fern —
Queens that hark back to a realm
Of no return?….

Evolved, sophisticated,
Able to hold
Its own where it chooses to be,
Withstanding the cold

Of our British winters
Like any birch or oak.
Red leaf burns on the hill.
Red dreams turn to smoke.

This fern has no royal blood —
Or if it has,
Only as much as is green
In a blade of grass.

Hello!

Here we have a series of photos of a fern called Lygodium japonicum — the Japanese Climbing Fern. When I took the photos, this fern — one of the members of the Lygodium genus, all of which love to climb and do so with energy and enthusiasm — had crept its way over a section of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens that was about thirty feet square. The amount of fern covering nearly everything in sight was stunning, and its abundance in very early spring surprised me. I had probably encountered the fern before, but it wasn’t until I saw this exuberant spread that I paid any attention to it, and I still wonder if it was intentionally planted there or it conquered the space on its own.

Plants in the Lygodium genus (especially Lygodium japonicum) are considered invasive in the U.S. Southeast — especially in Georgia and Florida — though I feel like there should be a separate category of such plants designated as “invasive but adorable.” Each leaf is no bigger than a dime or nickel, and as the plants unfurl and coil around whatever they encounter, they look like a soft green blanket. Before opening, the individual fronds produce a tiny version of the typical fern fiddlehead — appearing as points of yellow-green light in my photos — which take on the common triangular shape of a fern leaf as the plant matures. The vines have plenty of tensile strength; some of those I saw stood several feet high on their own accord, while waiting for the wind to toss them toward something they could latch onto.

In my imagination, all of this fern-ness was from one endless plant; though that was impossible to determine, which is the reason I’m just imagining it. In the plant’s name — Lygodium japonicum — “lygodium” is derived from a Greek word meaning “willowy” or “flexible” and “japonicum” reflects the plant’s native history in Japan. The excerpt from the poem “Fern Frond for John Wain” contrasts the Japanese Climbing Fern with several others that exhibit more common fern-style (click the links in the poem if you’d like to read more about them), and interprets the evolution of this viney fern within the context of British imperial explorations that brought plants from countries like Japan to Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In addition to giving me a new plant to learn about, these photos ended up being a fun study in differences between what we perceive with our eyes and what a camera sees. Here, for example, are three of the photos from this series as they came out of the camera:

Just to the left of center in these photos, you can see what I considered the subject of the image: the vines entwined on the black fencepost, where they had climbed about six feet above ground level, supported by the post. I took photos at several different zoom levels to get separation between the vine on the post and the rest of the scene. A challenge, of course, was to get the vine adequately focused so that I could make it the subject of the photo with some clever editing in Lightroom, since even the slightest breeze led the fern to try to wiggle out of focus.

As you can also see from the photos, it was an especially brighteous morning when I took them — which accounts for large swaths of intense highlighting throughout the background. When we look at a scene like this, we selectively exclude extraneous information (like all the bright light in the background) in favor of what we’ve chosen (if “chosen” is the right word) to focus on. This can be confusing to explain: while we use “focus” to describe both how our eyes work and how a camera works — it’s only our eyes (or brain) that selectively disregard elements of a scene based on what we think we want to see. The camera simply records the scene; our vision makes choices about what parts of the scene matter to us.

Memory and emotion come into play here also. I remember the scene as one about a vine climbing up a post — not as a vine climbing up a post amid overpowering backlighting — and as a feeling about the vine’s behavior and ability to enwrap itself so high above the ground around something without obvious points of attachment. So a lot of what goes on in post-processing is about narrowing the gap between what the camera has recorded and my memory of and reaction to a scene. One might say that’s the whole point of post-processing, to bring our images closer to how we attached significance to parts of them when the photographs were taken. It’s about what I saw, not necessarily what I photographed.

To describe what should happen to these photos in Lightroom goes something like this: the background brightness needs to be decreased (a lot!) and the presence of the vine on the post needs to be increased. For that there are no shortcuts or automation: the vine needs to be carefully masked as the subject in Lightroom (with a combination of object selection and brushing), then that mask gets duplicated and inverted so that the image is split into two parts: the vine (in the foreground) and everything else (in the background). Once that’s (easier said than) done, the two segments can be treated separately: the brightness, color saturation, and sharpness of the background can all be reduced; the brightness, color saturation, and sharpness of the foreground can all be amplified. A semi-infinite amount of time and several cups of coffee later, we end up with photos that look like this…

… where (hopefully, The Photographer thinks) your eyes first alight on the vine while the background registers simply as location context for the photo, with three-dimensionality or depth improved over the camera’s flatter interpretation.

Here are side-by-side pairs, where you can compare what the camera saw to what the human saw by selecting the first image and paging through all six as before-and-after versions:

And here are three other examples — which got similar treatment — showing the difference between each scene as the camera interpreted it, and how I saw them at the time.

We have come to the end of the words…. Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (3 of 3)

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From “Subject and Master: Figurative Art” in The Joy of Art: How to Look At, Appreciate, and Talk about Art by Carolyn Schlam:

“Pictures tell a story in their own inimitable way. If a thought or idea was totally understandable in words, we would not need pictures, but the truth is that we depend on our eyes to gather much information and to appreciate the world we live in and that artists imagine for us.

“We now greatly depend on still photographs and moving images (i.e. film) to fill us in on visual matters. As a result, we do not have the dependency on drawings and paintings to describe what we actually see, a function it performed for centuries. Portraiture, in particular, provided a record of what people actually looked like, and was not only prized, but was an almost essential service….

“A Dutch figurative artist, [Johannes] Vermeer’s world is a small and very meticulous one. His scenes are set in two of the rooms in his Delft house, and much has been speculated about optical devices he may have utilized in the creation of his amazingly masterful work.

“In addition to his careful drawing, he is known for his beautiful application of paint. He used an extensive and expensive palette of pigments including ultramarine blue, not common in the seventeenth century. He built the color with reflected tones from adjacent hues.

“[The] very well-known Girl with a Pearl Earring is an example of his extraordinary sensitivity, soft color, and expressive quality. No Impressionist would give you that black background, but it is so beautiful here as it sets off the sweet light on her face and costume.

“Only a small sampling of Vermeer’s exquisite paintings are known, but his attention to detail is esteemed worldwide. He was a unique voice in portrait painting, never imitated and probably never surpassed.”

From “Head of a Young Girl: Vermeer” in The Eye that Desires to Look Upward: Poems by Steven Cramer:

How long it must have taken to arrange
her knotted turban, the exact slope of her shoulder,
her face adrift in a vacuum of black space;
and that startled look, as if I’d just touched her
lightly, teasingly, on the nape of her neck,
and then, too late, realized my mistake.
Her eyes round out like the red mound
of her lower lip; her face circles toward me
and away…

This morning I write to you
about a face I’ve loved from afar too long,
when all the time it’s the black background
I care for and stare at, while she stares back,
as if to bid me walk with her, into the dark,
into whatever she grows out of and returns to;
and isn’t this the way I look at you —
no more than a yard of air between us,
across the inevitable space between people
learning to face what they want?

Hello!

This is the third of three posts where I took some of my recent photographs of chrysanthemums and daisies, and “painted” their backgrounds black. The first post — with a description of my workflow for creating images like this and some chatter about Paint-by-Number and Velvet Painting — is Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (1 of 3) and the second post is Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (2 of 3).

The poem “Head of a Young Girl: Vermeer” above is about the famous Johannes Vermeer painting Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). This type of poem, I have learned, is called an ekphrastic poem — after ekphrasis, an act of engaging with one art form using another. This engagement is usually a vibrant, rhetorical dialogue between two art forms, a distinction made to differentiate ekphrasis from an ordinary text description of, say, a painting or a photograph.

The two stanzas I excerpted above are part of a much longer poem — seven stanzas about the same length as those above — and the poet, Steven Cramer, alternates seamlessly between describing the Vermeer painting and writing about the girl in the pearl earring as if she exists in his version of the real world. At one point, he “encounters” her in a bookstore, as an image on a card, staring at him — so he buys the card. I thought all this was an interesting way to observe a piece of art, about which we can create a complex description but can’t quite possess, even in its commercialized form as a copy of a famous painting on a postcard.

The Wikipedia page for ekphrasis includes other examples of ekphrastic poetry, along with examples of music intended to reflect painted scenes. A slight twist on this might be paintings of musical rehearsals or performances — such as those of Vermeer and his contemporaries — that you can see here: Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure.

Vermeer’s painting The Music Lesson is among those featured on that page, and that painting is often included in analyses of Vermeer’s probable use of a camera obscura and mirrors to project scenes he was going to paint on a canvas. The Music Lesson shows several characteristics of the potential use of a camera, even an early one, such as the double shadows behind the painting hanging on the wall above the performer and those beneath the harpsichord, as well as how the ceiling and walls aren’t precisely perpendicular, exhibiting the barrel distortion (or slight bowing) that is common even with modern wide-angle lenses.

If these subjects interest you, Traces of Vermeer by Jane Jelley is a very fine book that explains the use of camera technology by Vermeer and other artists at the time, and includes images of nearly all of Vermeer’s paintings.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (2 of 3)

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From “Why Photograph Flowers” in Photographing Flowers by Harold Davis:

“[Flowers] are a subject that photographers at all skill levels want to shoot…. Where else can you find such a riotous display of colors and shapes contained in such a small package? Every flower is different. I like to photograph flowers for:

– The grace they bring the world;

– The wildness that is contained in the heart of every flower no matter how showy or domesticated it is;

– The realism, clarity, and bravery with which flowers confront the mystery of their brief lives.

“And, okay, flowers are simply beautiful. In fact, flowers live for beauty. As a species, they make their living by seeming attractive — to their pollinators, and to us humans because symbiotically we help them spread far and wide.

“Mostly, flowers aren’t practical. We help them grow for their beauty and poetry. How can we not want to capture this ephemeral and bold stand against entropy and the chaos of the universe?”

From “Golden Thoughts Against a Black Background” in New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz:

since awakening
I’ve been having black thoughts

black thoughts?

try perhaps to describe
their form their substance

how do you know they’re black

maybe they’re square
or red
or golden

that’s it!

golden thoughts….

Hello!

This is the second of three posts where I took some of my recent photographs of chrysanthemums and daisies, and “painted” their backgrounds black. The first post — with a description of my workflow for creating images like this — is Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (1 of 3).

Thanks for taking a look!

Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (1 of 3)

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From “Pitch Black” in The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair:

“Pitch black is the most fearsome kind of darkness. For humans, fear of it, perhaps lingering from the days before we could reliably make fire, is universal and ancient. In the dark we become acutely aware of our limitations as a species: our senses of smell and hearing are too blunt to be of much use in navigating the world, our bodies are soft, and we cannot outpace predators. Without sight, we are vulnerable. Our terror is so visceral we are wont to see nighttime as pitch black, even when it isn’t. Thanks to the moon, the stars, and, more recently, fire and electricity, nights so dark that we cannot see anything are rare, and we know that, sooner or later, the sun will rise again…. Perhaps this is why we experience night, figuratively at least, as more than just an absence of light….

“The most eloquent expression of humanity’s fear of pitch black is also one of the oldest. It comes from the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian funerary text used for about 1,500 years until around 50 B.C. Finding himself in the underworld, Osiris, the scribe Ani, describes it thus:

“‘What manner [of land] is this into which I have come? It hath not water, it hath not air; it is deep, unfathomable, it is black as the blackest night, and men wander helplessly therein.'”

From “Portrait of the Artist” in Eleven Days Before Spring: Poems by JoEllen Kwiatek:

The blonde moon grows whiter
as it rises in the spring sky
which is delicate as a watercolor.
Spring is late this year.
I notice the first leaves growing
in curly on the shorn branches poised
as sprigs. For a while, they garnish
the moon. For a while, the difference
between foreground and background is
most obvious as that between the dark
loaded hills and faint sky. I love
the moment of contrast —
though it’s hard to achieve….

Hello!

I haven’t done a photos-on-black-background series in a while, so I decided to pick a few of the chrysanthemum and daisy photos I’ve been posting since late 2024 and do just that. It had been long enough since I’d done this work that it took me a minute to remember how to get results that I like. Once “muscle-memory” took over, however, I got a little carried away (as one does!) and ended up picking 68 photos (to split among three posts) for black-background treatment. Given that February was a lousy winter-weather month here in the Southeast — many million raindrops, much wind, and extremely small temperatures — staying warm and dry at my desk with my canine assistant snoozing at my feet seemed like a good way to spend my time.

I originally took all these mum and daisy photos during several trips to Oakland Cemetery on cloudy days that were bright enough to enhance the colors and textures of these flowers without creating any harsh shadows — making them ideal for black-backgrounding. On black, the original colors — which I didn’t enhance for these variations — appear to be more luminous or phosphorescent, like, you know, things that glow in the dark. In some cases, I kept stems and leaves in the final image, something that worked when they were as well-focused as the flowers and their colors were as luminous as those of the flowers.

Here’s the full-color version of one of the photos I previously posted, whose black-background rendering is one of my favorites in this series:

To convert this to a photo with a black background, Lightroom has several tools I can pick from to select the subject, background, or individual objects in the image. Sounds great; and you might think that using the background selection tool here would recognize that all the stones are behind the plants, and the rest is in the foreground (or is the subject). But the application doesn’t think like you do, and has its own magical mystery for deciding which parts constitute the background, probably based on slight differences in focus or contrast at the pixel level that our eyes may not register. So when I ask Lightroom to select the background, here’s what it chooses…

… as indicated by the fluorescent green overlay that covers the stones but also covers some of the flower petals and leaves. If I simply convert that to black, I end up with something that, shall we say, doesn’t meet my artistic needs:

One of the steps in this workflow, then — the one that takes the most time — is to carefully mouse-erase any part of the mask that covers something I want to show in the photo. I’m not complaining, mind you — there’s something both relaxing and immersive about “un-painting” parts of these photographs to gradually reveal what I want — but having done so many of these over the years, I find it interesting that the human and the computer can’t get a little closer to each other in identifying the subject (or background) of an image.

Here you can follow the transition from background selection, to converting the background to black, then to the final image after I expose additional flower petals and the stems and leaves leading to the upper right corner. To get that result means erasing black from nearly every flower petal, leaf, and stem in the photo. Patience is a virtue here, but the final result is usually worth the effort.

It’s been about five years since the first time I tried to create these images on black backgrounds — which isn’t to suggest it’s some discovery of mine, just that I had to discover it for myself. I also had to learn how I wanted the images to end out, given that it’s easy to use several Lightroom or Photoshop tools to create blended dark backgrounds that aren’t necessarily pure black. I aim for consistently pure black for the backgrounds — a result that isn’t possible to achieve naturally. While you might be able to simulate a black background with clever placement of studio lighting or with flash photography, those techniques are likely to produce gradations of black or include reflected color from the subject onto the black sections of the photographs.

While working on this batch of photos, I suddenly remembered “Paint by Number” kits I had as a kid. I don’t know if anyone does these today, but Paint by Number was popular during the 1960s and 1970s. Each kit consisted of oil paints, brushes, and a canvas or thick cardboard printed with a numbered outline of the subject you were painting. The oil paints in the kit were numbered to match the outline — so you could pick the right color and create your own (alleged) masterpiece.

There was a variation of Paint by Number — called “Velvet Painting” — where the canvas or cardboard was covered with a stretched black velvet cloth… so you could create, for example, a painting of flowers on a black background. You had to be very patient with your brushwork, however, because the textured surface of the velvet could cause colors to bleed into each other or leave your subject with rough edges. Maybe that’s where I learned to be patient with my Lightroom work, but it was also an early visual experience that showed me what happens to our color perception when we isolate the subject of an image on a black background.

The more things change….

Thanks for reading and taking a look!