One of the Petrified Wood Abstracts seriesOne of my favorite bodies of work, and yet one that's fairly different than my usual style, is the series of Petrified Wood Abstracts that I shot during my Petrified Forst artist residency a few years back and completed as artworks last year. Several folks have asked me about the making of those images, and it's a fairly long story, so I figured I'd do a separate post on them.
First, while it wasn't entirely conscious, I'm sure that a major inspiration for the work was Bill Atkinson's stone macro work, including his book, Within the Stone. I'd had the opportunity to learn digital printing from Bill in the 1990s, and so I'd had the opportunity to hear him talk about how he came to do his stone work, which was inpsired by his own visit to Petrified Forest National Park. When I was accepted to recieve an artist residency at the same park, I have no doubt that that information was churning in the back ofmy mind.
Still, I was unprepared for the beauty of polished slices through Petrified Wood. Even a single cut displayed in the southernmost visitor center at the park contained, within a couple square feet, dizzying amounts of detail and opportunity for macro work. And my residency gave me enormous access not only to the visitor center but also to the park's archives of such pieces.
The shooting itself was simple enough, my Canon 1Ds3, a tripod, the 100mm macro, stopped down to a tiny aperture. Lighting wasa bit trickier.
One of the key issues in making images like this is getting rid of reflections off the surface of the piece. Polarization can be effective at this, and I used it everywhere, but for the pieces in the archives I was able t set up a light and a polarizing gel to do cross-polarization. If you polarize the light coming onto a piece like this (with a polarizing gel) and then also use a polarization filter at the camera, you can get even better reductions in surface reflection than you'd get otherwise. I use cross-polarization a fair bit in my sideline of photographing paintings, so I had the tools and knowledge to do it easily, it's really not difficult.
Another issue was the state of the pieces--the samples I had did have some dust and scratches, and I'll totally cop to having done a fair bit of clean-up work in post-production.
I think the most interesting challenge, at least for me, was that my initial standard prints of these images really didn't pop for me. It wasn't a matter of contrast or saturation, the problem was the loss of the gentle sense of translucency the rocks give in real life, it's a glow not unlike the look of old Cibachrome prints. I switched from my usual matte surface to a glossy surface and that helped, but the prints still weren't everything I wanted to be, until....
I started thinking about what transluency was, and what effects it had on percieving an image (when we're not moving), and realized that in many ways, it was very similar to a mild, well, not so much blurring as the sort of glow that we sometimes add to photos with what Lightroom calls "negative clarity." I tried a very gentle nudge of the clarity slider on my test images, and all of a sudden the images came to life. It's astonishing how much of a difference a mild adjustment there made, it's not something that most people are conscious of when they see the prints, but it does really affect how people see the prints.
I completed the prints by havin them printed onto metal (thanks, Bay Photo) and showing them on stands, rather thna through glass, to help preserve that sense of a present physical object.
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 6:15PM 
Copyright Mike Spinak Join me (Joe Decker) and acclaimed wildlife and nature photographer Mike Spinak in this two-day expedition to the elephant seals at the south end of California's Big Sur. This incredible location allows close access to the seals often allowing the animals to be worked with focal lengths as short as 200mm. This workshop will be limited to a maximum of twelve students, and with two instructors you'll be assured of having constant access to advice on working these amazing creatures as well as post-processing, long lens technique and general phtoographic questions.;)
Copyright Mike SpinakInternationally acclaimed, award winning photographer Mike Spinak began photography in 1998. Lifelong passions for travel, nature, and creative expression developed into a lifestyle and career in photography and writing.;)
;)