December 12, 2016. Point Reyes National Seashore. June 20, 2021. My Office.
I’ve been reworking some old favorites recently as I update my website. This was taken during a family getaway. I’ve made several versions but I was never quite in love.
Here are two stages of evolution of a whole new look. One is somewhere between literal and impressionist:
And one is further abstracted:
I’m on a journey to the land of minimalism. It’s difficult to know when I’m there because there isn’t much there — but still, I know when I arrive. For me it’s very often true that the less there is, the more the eye lingers.
I’ll be posting some more that pare things down even further. Stay tuned.
Let me know if you see anything.
(Nikon D500; Nikon 28-300 f/3.5-5.6G Zoom. RAW processing in DxO PhotoLab; Editing in Adobe Photoshop.)
More Fine-Art Photography at the ever-evolving www.amagaphoto.com
AMAGA Photography Blog 
“It’s difficult to know when I’m there because there isn’t much there” Haha, I love that! 😀 Found myself distracted by the abstracted. Lovely work.
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Beautiful images, Michael. Minimalist as I can be, here I prefer the slightly greater amounts of detail in the first image. 🙂
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Thank you, my friend. I actually like both, each for different reasons. I might try something between the two just to see what it looks like.
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So true…we get confused with too much information!! I LOVE your journey into all things minimal…not easy at all, the soul of things is often difficult to determine
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Thank you. And it is the soul of the thing that I’m looking for.
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Enjoying your wonderful compositions, my dear friend but even more so, your journey to the land of minimalism!
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Thank you very much my friend.
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Beautiful light in your minimal world.
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Thank you. The more minimal it gets, the more it seems to be about the light.
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So you passed through a getaway gateway into a minimalist world of cloud and sea.
If you’ve made prints of any of these, how well has the subtlety of the digital versions held up on paper?
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Thank you very much. Preparing these for print and printing them is an exercise in persistence. No print ever looks like the screen. Therefore you have to distance yourself from the screen and reimagine the photograph to be the best print it can possibly be. That said, it can work pretty damn well. Bruce Percy has said that if you can turn the file into something that makes a great print, it will also look good on the screen. So far this has proven to be true for me.
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I can find much to like in both versions, as well as your text, which is always so well-spoken. Keep cool!
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Thank you. I seem to believe in a brevity of words.
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For me, these seem to be a photographic version of the Cheshire Cat. It’s going to be interesting to see what’s left when only the smile remains.
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There’s a direction I could take!
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Realist me prefers the first with the more apparent detail, especially of that island on the distant horizon.
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Thank you very much. That seems to be the consensus. I’m actually working on something that’s a little bit in between.
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Hello! I like both, and…
Posting the two photos together creates a different context; meaning, I find myself looking for the extra detail from the first photo in the second one, because you showed me that something is out there. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t look at the horizon so closely since the horizon line is pretty consistent across the entire second photo. Funny how that works, eh?
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Thank you. And you point out the essential thing: even though both pictures are from exactly the same shot, they are two completely different pictures. Look at them completely without the context of the other and each stands on its own for different reasons.
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Very different images with different visual results. I like them both, hard to say which one I prefer.
Last year I drifted back to doing more representational images. Lately I’ve been doing abstractions again, and when I do, I take the approach you took in the first image.
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Thank you very much. I vary in approach according to my mood and according to what the picture tells me it wants me to do. In this particular case I had two different moods and apparently so did the picture.
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I love your photography and the imagery created with your words. It’s beautiful. The ocean is my “happy place” and I always find my center with her in full view. She is as complicated as I am which I appreciate! Thanks for sharing! ❤️
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Thank you very much. We are of like mind.
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I loved your photographs and the imagery in your words. ❤️
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Thank you. Thank you for visiting.
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