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UltravioletPhotography

Natchez, in Infrared


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Some of my more recent photographic journeys to date, involves implementing infrared near-infrared wavelength photography of Natchez, Mississippi ... a charming, picturesque, historical town in the deep south, situated high atop a cliff-like bluff overlooking the mighty Mississippi river.

 

At one point in history (especially throughout the first half of the 1800's), the town of Natchez was resident to the wealthiest millionaires, per capita, than any other city in the United States! One of the primary dynamics which fueled these most elite wealthy classes had to do with the fact that this town sat at the very epicenter of the exploding cotton and sugar cane plantation industries of the late 1700's to early 1800's, powered by slave labor, and the tycoons who grew these empires. Given that this town was among the first in "New World" colonial history to set up a permanent mercantile outpost along the Mississippi river for the trading of many other goods, this also played a crucial role to having it become home to the richest in the country, on the heels of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, Natchez was once the "cotton capital of the world", as its cotton was exported and shipped across the Atlantic to European countries, as well as domestic business.

 

Many of its stately, antebellum-era mansions were a product of Greek revivalist architecture, introduced by Germanic and Celtic peoples who moved to the southern States after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. These types of architectures are characterized by bold columns, pronounced square geometric patterns, prominent roof arches made of hardened clay and slate tiles, tall Victorianeque ceilings and wrap-around porches, and many evenly-spaced, lavish rooms with very tall, elegantly-crafted windows.

 

Also of note, is the very old 'City Cemetery', retaining historically-significant remnants of a time when the richest would pay for towering memorials, prominent monuments, and imposing mausoleums which were intricately patterned, carved out, and painstakingly chiseled by hand from solid granite and marble. Also note that this very old, pre-Civil War cemetery was among the first to honor the lavish and well-decorated burials of prominent Jewish merchants, alongside Protestants and Catholics.

 

The ultimate irony of this town is that few places (at the time) exhibited a greater divide between its wealthiest class, and its poorest class, as the town grew its population into the early 1900's ... evident of the dilapidated and run-down, small wooden shacks interspersed amid the stately-columned homes that were well-cared for.

 

I feel that my choice to retain salmon to blood-red colored skies and pale-blue vegetation, via custom white-balancing (instead of doing a red-blue color channel swap) gives the Gothic cemetery scenes a perfectly haunting and ghostly look. This is why I refrained from swapping to blue skies, and pale-yellow vegetation. Not all IR photos should be color-channel swapped to blue skies, by default, in my opinion. I think that there is a special niche and place for implementing red-sky and pale-blue vegetation, as well.

 

- Camera: Full-spectrum-converted Panasonic Lumix GF3 (Micro-4/3 format, mirrorless interchangeable lens system).

- Lens: Panasonic G Vario 14-42mm F/3.5-5.6 (kit lens)

- Filter: Tiffen (Wratten) Red #29

- Minimal processing (aside from in-camera custom-white-balancing, contrast enhancement, and moderate highlight & shadow adjustments, post-photo processing)

 

 

Permanently "parked" along the banks of the Mississippi at the bottom of the bluff, a classic, stream-driven "paddlewheeler" boat sits alone ... converted to a "floating casino" ... yet restored to its full glory, to commemorate a time when the mighty river played host to the hustle and bustle of many cotton-industry fleets of steam boats. A sight that brings to mind an adventure or two, of author Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

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The gates to a private, central courtyard ... belonging to one of the several mansions in the downtown area.

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Mausoleum. One of the more prominent, within the "Jewish Hill" section of the Old Cemetery.

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"Learned" is the family name. Isaac Learned, Rebeccah Learned, etc., etc. Likely German-Jews, who immigrated to this town. However, it is a fascinating word to find, on a tomb. Definitely sparks the imagination. It should be mentioned: Curious family names such as "Learned", while likely of Germanic ancestry, are indicative of "Americanization" ... as the original family name may have been "Lerndt", "Leirnen", or something similar, before it was Anglicized. German, Swede, Dutch, and Austrian Jews, in particular, emigrating to these parts of the United States while also seeking to dodge any potential persecution / anti-semitism along their travels to finally settle down in Natchez, Mississippi.

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A scene from "Jewish Hill", a section of the Old Cemetery sectioned off for the wealthy Jewish families who emigrated to Natchez in the early 1800's, and played a central role in its early commerce market of various goods (clothing, shoes, baked goods, etc.). Note: a stone marking the unfortunate and sad burial of one of the Moses family's infant daughters.

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A VERY sad, lone grave; that of a baby girl, who perished right before she was just barely 6 months old.

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These are very old trees. Swirling, gnarled, winding, somewhat deformed, thick grumpy branches. "Old man, oak", indeed. :)

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Well seen, all of these. Natchez was partially destroyed by a large tornado on May 7, 1840. I wonder if any trace of that long-ago disaster still remains.
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Igor, I enjoyed this series. It is nicely put together as a series and the individual fotos also would stand on their own. The narrative is informative and interesting. It is really lovely to have such a series posted on UVP.

 

Photographically, your compositions are very good. I think you have a real strength compositionally. You have used different points of view, different angles and so forth.

 

Your IR style is non-typical. This is good. We should develop our own style, yes? I think the dark red sky look works well in most of the fotos and for the series. It is a fairly dramatic style, but I did not tire of it by the end of the series because it worked well for your subjects.

 

Here or there I might like to have seen a bit more brightening? For example in the last foto it would have been useful to the composition perhaps to lift the tones of the branches and maybe the leaves a bit so as to bring out more of the gnarly aspect to the viewer? Or perhaps a bit of midtone lift in the foto (#17 if I counted correctly?) just before the kneeling statue foto. IR tends to go soft so we typically use contrast to bring out detail. But unless you're going for an abstraction, perhaps don't let your contrasty dark areas block up entirely, let a bit of detail peep through?

 

[Those were my thoughts about your work. The latter bits are not meant to be commands or even suggestions because the artist always has the last word.]

 

I look forward to seeing another such series sometime.

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@ Col & Damon,

 

Thank you so much! I'm just trying to bring some more "diversity" to UVP, while also presenting it in a more inviting, story-form / narrative fashion for visitors (call it an "info-mentary", if you will. A cross between information and documentary). :)

 

I also believe that tying one's work to a specific town name / location, and associated history, will put UVP more "on the map", when people do web browser searches involving keywords for such geographic locations. It will definitely present such locales "in a new light" (pun intended), to anyone doing research on the web. :P

 

@ OlDoinyo,

 

Correct. According to public archives, this tornado is considered the second-most deadliest in American history! It resulted in COMPLETE devastation to all of the outposts, docks, encampments, and boats along the river. On both sides of the river! 317 people dead, in all.

 

Having a funnel base that was estimated to have been about 500 yards (457 meters) wide, this is also possibly among the LARGEST vortexes to have ever formed (to meteorological knowledge). We are not talking about the additional "clutter" that exists around the twister (outbound and inbound secondary eddies, cloud swirls, debris, rain bands), but the actual true diameter (wall-to-wall) of the tornado, itself. That is huge!

 

Being this large of a funnel, this is how it was possible for it to wreck havoc to both - the village of Vidalia (on the Louisiana side of the river) and the town of Natchez (on the Mississippi side of the river), at the same time! (The tornado's track actually followed along the river, itself). And the Mississippi river is quite a wide river! So, you'd have to imagine the sheer size of a tornado that is wide enough to partially engulf both towns, on opposites sides of such a wide river, within its diameter footprint! Truly a FREAK event. A "super-tornado", one should call it.

 

Toss in the fact that many of the more wealthier estates, at the time, were constructed of columns, facades, and solid slabs of granite and / or marble, and yet were still leveled to the ground or even fully ripped off of their foundations and carried aloft in some cases, and you start to only begin to understand the immense power of this particular event. This one would have most definitely been classified as an EF4+ (or possibly even EF5), in terms of the "Enhanced Fujita Scale" system, if this grading scale for tornadoes had existed at the time.

 

(http://en.wikipedia....ed_Fujita_scale)

 

And yet, for all this somber devastation, there was the fact that only the northern-western-most parts of Natchez were fully wiped off of the face of the earth (beyond repair). Other places, outside the diameter of the "cone" itself, showed varying levels of damage, from moderate to severe. Thus, many other dwellings and mercantiles were salvageable, and rebuilt.

 

But, had the tornado shifted its track away from the river, and actually come fully ashore to either town on opposite sides of the river - Vidalia or Natchez - than either one of those towns would probably had been erased from American geography.

 

See this image, below, for the then-surveyed tornado track (based on damage inspection of the surrounding woods).

 

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About any evident damage still remaining to the current day ... yes, I believe there are still some minor evidences, here and there, interspersed around town. You have to look (and more likely, ask the locals) for where they are found. I've run across some suspect locations, myself. I will have to see if I have snapped some of them, within my entire saved archive for this trip. That includes me noticing (while shooting my photos) many tombstones and monuments at the old cemetery, even those made of solid granite or marble, that had once been completely split / severed in half, and appeared as if they had been cemented together (but the "crack lines" are still evident). This is at least one such instance of being highly suspect of former (but repaired) tornado damage.

 

@ Andrea,

 

Very appreciative of your input, and kind compliments! I am grateful for your thorough response, and ongoing encouragement.

 

Yes, indeed, I plan on doing more such presentations in similar style. I think this would be a nice addition to UVP, especially passerby visitors. :D

 

About the highlight tweaking ... I agree, that I probably could have "squeezed" and "lifted" some more detail from some of the shadows of the trees. But, here's a funny thing: I've noticed that on some of my calibrated monitors (including calibrated brightness adjustment), the details are sufficiently there, already (hence, I didn't want to lift so much, as to eliminate the "dramatic" and "foreboding" feel of the tree / branch shadows, as compared to the cracks of light shooting through). But, then, I go to some different monitors (as well as at the homes of other people, to make tests from time to time), and the details within the shadows are not as well represented in some cases, and the monitor brightness needs to be increased a bit to make them apparent.

 

Thus, just know that I have to constantly walk this thin fine line and play this "balancing game", between various monitor (and even smartphone / portable device) renderings, across all platforms. All of this, of course, is due to the fact that IR photography does funny things to light-balancing, to begin with. And things, therefore, get tricky for post-photo editing, don't they?

 

(I've actually once tried to lift the shadows a bit more, on one or two of the photos at my own end, only to see that they suddenly appeared too bright on some of my friend's portable devices).

 

So, this is quite a "Catch 22", and so what I have put up is what I feel to be a "middle ground" across all of the extremes that I've had to reconcile with. Eeeek!

 

(Andrea, you're going to make me even MORE obsessive than I already am. Goodness gracious. Hahah! :P)

 

But, yes, I am glad you've brought that up, nonetheless. Maybe it's my contrast that shouldn't be throttled so hard. I'll try to play around some more, though. Thank you, greatly!

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I do love the photos... and the best part is you didn't do channel swapping! The dark red skies and pale blue vegetation makes the photos really "other worldly". Big Fan here! :D
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Thank you, Timber!

 

Appreciate the kind words and compliments.

 

Yes ... I actually like salmon-red skies and cyan vegetation much better (in most cases) than the now over-done and overly-common channel swap to blue skies and pale yellow vegetation.

 

I mean, if we want to retain blue skies so badly ... then why bother shooting IR photography at all, since you can get PLENTY of blue skies from "normal" photographs derived from a non-converted camera?

 

Something to think about. :-)

 

However, I also implement many other "unconventional" IR faux-color schemes. Dark-magenta skies and lavender-colored vegetation, for instance.

 

 

See the photo below, as an example of this (which I have actually sold prints of, titled "Tree of Life.")

 

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Or, a multi-spectral image (mixed IR and visible, often referred to as "dual band") ... in this case, producing purplish skies and tall pine trees that appear as if they are on fire. (A print that I've sold, under the name: "Blazing Aura.")

 

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So, yes, as you can see ... there are MANY more color schemes and combinations that one can explore, instead of yet another also-ran channel swap of blue skies and pale-yellow vegetation.

 

(Not that channel-swapping for blue skies and pale-yellow vegetation is any less valid, to be clear. I've got plenty of those, as well. But ... when it becomes the over-used "de facto" IR job, it starts getting stale after a while, I think. Because "variety is the spice of life", as they say.)

 

Ultimately, it comes down to taste, of course. However, tastes can start losing their appeal, if one sticks to the same scheme over and over again. At least, for me. (Given enough time with my current love affair with salmon-red skies and cyan vegetation, I'll probably eventually grow tired of that "lover", too, and have to play the "IR swinger" once more. Haha.)

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