News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Sisters photographer H. Tom Davis has received prestigious second-place honors in the category Fine Art in the Prix de la Photographie Paris (Px3) for his entry entitled "Ice Abstracts." The jury selected PX3 2014's winners from thousands of photography entries from more than 85 countries.
Davis notes that the prize was for a series of photographs taken in Tollgate "during freezing periods that resulted in many interesting patches of ice from frozen puddles. Our area has a lot of red and orange volcanic rock that underlies the patches and complements the blue and cyan colors of the ice during various natural light conditions."
Davis has been a serious photographer since the 1960s, an interest that is enmeshed in his love of the streams and fish of the West. He started shooting on rivers as a young man, and has continued to shoot landscapes, wildflowers, and rivers ever since.
His landscape submissions to Px3 never got any traction. He started submitting eight years ago, and in four years he never won anything - so he stopped. But with his ice images, he thought he might have something the judges would like. He was right.
"It's obvious that if you're abstract enough, it'll turn 'em on," he said.
Davis believes that entering shots in competitions is a way to push yourself as an artist, and he says that winning silver honors "has invigorated me in a way that I thought it might."
For the abstract shots, he says, "the main thing is to have a good macro lens."
Davis tries to frame his shots with everything he wants in it and no more, avoiding cropping.
"I always shoot in RAW," he said, "which means I have to process them because these are pretty neutral in their tones."
He primarily uses Adobe's Lightroom, with a little bit of Photoshop for saturation and highlights. The photographer notes that laypersons have a misconception about what it means to process photos, thinking that digital photographs are sometimes created with the software.
"What I do is probably less than a good chemical lab processor (working with film) would do," he said.
Davis thinks he got his first digital camera in the late '90s or maybe the early 2000s. The speed, quality and convenience of processing digital photographs makes a huge difference in a photographer's art.
"It would have taken you 10 hours (in a darkroom) to do what you can do in an hour," he said.
Davis is continuing to shoot in his beloved backcountry. Combining backpacking and fishing and photography has always been his driving force. He's got some projects in the hopper.
"I've got about 100 good shots of probably about 40 wildflowers," he said.
And he's thinking about shooting some stumps - and he knows that if he goes abstract with them, he's got a good chance of catching somebody's eye in France.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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