
I have been going to work early and swimming in the ocean quite a bit lately. I bring my water-tight action camera with me sometimes… Here are three self-portraits taken while swimming in the ocean and holding the camera under the water.
I really wanted a wide angle lens to play around with but wasn’t sure how wide I wanted. I enjoy capturing vast landscapes, so I grabbed a 18mm. It was nice, but not as drastic as I had hoped. I then got a 12mm, and fell in love.
Sure, you can shoot straight and get very little distortion, but I try to embrace the weird. I love how I can fit so much into my frame, and then add a level of surrealism without any need for Photoshop.
I made this image to sum up what a majority of my life is these days… I’ll get into the details another time, but I have basically been spending hours and hours, days and days, rolling around the beach on a golf cart… If someone 5 years ago told me this is where I would be and this is what I would be doing – I would laugh them out the door.
I have always been so fascinated by fractal imagery because you can zoom in and in and in – and there is still more to explore. Fractals are self-similar mathematical patterns that shift slightly at different scales, and so they are infinite and can be viewed at different points. Though photography cannot do this, I realized that some of my pattern work has multiple levels of viewing as well.
This is a pattern created in photoshop by cutting a photograph of a sunset into an equilateral triangle, then repeating it around itself as a tessellation… Imagine seeing this printed HUGE on the side of a wall. As you walk in the room, you first see a bright and complex geometrical pattern. As you walk towards it you begin to notice a sky, the sun, and a few boats in the water. It may not be a fractal, but it does have more than one view point like a fractal.