Professional photography presentation at (USA) National Bonsai & Penjing Museum

Sunday (day-before-yesterday), professional photographer Michael Colella spoke to Potomac Viewing Stone Group about photographing viewing stones/suiseki in the (USA) National Collection. For a professional photographer there are so many bells & whistles for improvement.

In one example, Mike illustrated taking 5 distinct photos of Luciana Queirolo's La Bella using an adjusted polarizing filter & light sources to highlight distinctions with neither the stone nor camera moving. His composite photo created from selected areas of the 5 images revealed minute details throughout the final image. This is a far cry from a snapshot... and would require lengthy physical adjustments to prepare a studio photo for film capture.

On a large screen, projected images clarified details of stones with which I am very familiar. Re-experiencing them in enlarged detail with careful lighting & glare controlled was extraordinary... though nothing is as satisfying as viewing each stone, itself.

Photography, whether professional or amateur is inherently a distortion of the object, as you present a 3 dimensional object in 2 dimensions-something always gets lost-even when you use 3D-naturally with today's incredible photographic tools, we can get more accurate results, but I consider every photograph as a tool to remind me of the original-if I have actually seen the object at a show. I have learned the hard way, that judging a stone a bonsai or any object merely from a photograph, can lead you down a dangerous path-now even more so than in the past, as we can manipulate the photograph even more vigorously than in the past.

Hi Kora... Thanks. I largely feel as you do that the truth is in the real object rather than a photograph.

This past week, I attended a walk-through with staff at my local fine arts museum. Standing in front of an early Paul Cezanne portrait, the lecturer/facilitator spoke of the objects place in art and asked her audience for comment. Then, two facilitators passed-around enlargements of the painting's details on tablet computers. Standing at less than two meters from the modestly-sized painting, I wasn't picking out the incredible brushwork so obvious in the photos. Between eye & brain, there must be selective reduction in viewing the world. Photography sometimes astonishes with the brilliance of perspective that is true but often overlooked.