Emil Nolde and Photography?

Disclaimer: This is NOT about emulating Emil Nolde but about being inspired by his ideas!

When you look at Emil Nolde's work it's pretty hard to make the connection between his ideas/paintings and their relevance for photography. But what inspired me most are his brilliant expressive colors and his dissolution of lines and surfaces with his brush strokes - and how he gave life to the pretty flat landscape of northern Germany. But that'll be the topic of another post...
So there I was at Heinz Teufel's workshop thinking about what to extract from the great painter's "vision" and how to put it at work in my photography. As the first day of the workshop was dedicated to shooting flowers it was easy to get the expressive colors that Nolde is so famous for. And the dissolution of reality ("abstractification" ;-) comes with the shallow depth of field that is so typical for macro photography.
So here goes:



Or this one with the colorful petals reminding me of broad strokes on a canvas:



Click through the image to get to the large original.

Hope you like it!

The Stroke of a Genius

Kit White proclaimed in his "101 Things to Learn in Art School": "A painting should be satisfying at a distance of both twelve inches and twelve feet". Now look at Noldes image reproduced pretty small here due to the limited width of 500 pixel, so somewhat akin to "12 feet" away:




Beautiful portrait of a lady sitting on a chair or couch in the warm afternoon light - until you recognize the second young lady sitting opposite to her. I really had my moment of slow reveal here as I did not immediately realize there was a second face in the image. Perhaps I was too close to the painting admiring the brush strokes of the genius Emil Nolde.
Here is a close-up of the face on the right and I really urge you to click through the image and have a good look on the large version of that crop to get an almost life-like impression of being "12 inches" away:




Simply marvelous!

Visit Emil Nolde Museum!

Coming back from a visit to the Emil Nolde Museum in Seebüll (www.nolde-stiftung.de) I can only say "Wow!" It is not a large museum and can only show a small part of all the work Emil Nolde did (1100 oil paintings alone) but they do a very good job in picking interesting pieces like the following portrait:



See a selection of the paintings currently on display in the museum: My flickr album
These are NOT faithful reproductions but I processed them to capture the images as best as I remember.
Hope you like them!

Preparing for Emil Nolde

With a photography workshop at Nolde's garden coming up, I've been reviving my idea of painterly effects. I was experimenting with layering sharp shots onto unsharp shots of the same subject in Photoshop when I ended up with the following result of a Geranium flower (best viewed large!):



I pretty much like the combination.
This is without any "post-merge" processing, but you can still bring more detail of the flower to the fore, if you wish.

Back to orchids

I finally decided to make the following image my favorite when i was playing with Adobes new profiles. This led me to dissolve the contours of the flower even more radically leaving the color blotches like the mask of a Kabuki actor.



Hope you like it.

Zooming

This can be a pretty effective way to abstractify an image - although it is a well-used technique. As with other techniques that involve movement (of the camera) it tends to come with a penalty of reducing the contrast considerably. So be prepared to enhance contrast and/or colors in post-processing. I captured the following shot by looking into an abandoned building through its glass front. Using a tripod an ND filter, f22 and a 4 second exposure I managed to produce a relatively smooth and even zoom from 24mm to 70mm - or was this the other way around? I honestly don't know. But I suspect that the results in this setup would not have been much different. Using the tripod was essential in creating straight lines when zooming. If you move the camera while zooming (which will be inevitable when hand-held) the results look pretty wild. This is what I got - after turning the results to black&white + some contrast-enhancing. I also produced a "negative" by inverting the curve which interestingly now makes the image as if I'm looking (from the darker) inside out. It has something of a ghostlike appearance.

Amarylis

Preparing for an internal competition in my photo-club I was playing around with an Amaryllis. At first nothing came out of it because it all looked like the pretty typical Amaryllis photo. Finally I tried shooting through the petals against a strong light-source capturing the inner structure and fine details of it.
That was more to my liking: