Mini-Series
Portfolios

This page features several mini-series completed in 2015 and 2016.

A mini-series is a project that is designed and completed in a very short time. I also call these mini-projects. The two names, mini-series and mini-projects, are interchangeable.

Instead of taking months or years, a mini project takes minutes or hours. On average my mini-projects are completed in one to two hours maximum.

I complete mini-series regularly and this for several reasons.

First, because of its size, limited scope and non-ambitious goals, a mini-project is not stressful or frightening.

Second a mini-project does not offer a chance for procrastination. Because it is the result of immediate inspiration, and because it is thought of in the field, it is a spur of the moment thing that asks to be started and completed immediately. It is this immediacy that takes away the opportunity to procrastinate.

Fourth, because a mini-project has low ambitions, fear of failure is absent. There is no time to consider how the project will be used, if it will be difficult or not, or if it has been done already or not. Plus, since no one but you knows that you are working on this project, the option is there to keep the outcome private if you want.

Fifth, we take more and more photographs due to the ease with which digital photographs can be captured and processed and due to the omnipresent role that photography plays in our lives. The outcome is an ever-increasing number of photographs that we struggle to account for and use in a meaningful way. One solution to this problem is to show our work not as single images but as group of images. Creating mini-series is an attractive option because it offers a simple and creative way of presenting groups of photographs organized in a logical manner around a specific theme.

The size of a mini project depends on my inspiration (superficially or deeply inspired for example), on how much variations I am able to find in the subject (repetitive subjects versus subject with multiple aspects for example), on the subject itself (a single piece of farm equipment or a barn full of different machines for example) and on the time I have available (a few minutes or a couple of hours for example).

One thing that is constant is that I don't have a minimum or a maximum number of photographs in mind when I start. I haven't created a project that consists of a single image so far but that is certainly an option should a subject with such a possibility present itself.

Another constant is that each mini-project is given a unique title. On this page I used French titles to reflect my French heritage and because I like to use French titles for artistic projects.

I also don't have a set idea for how the project will be used. It may end up as an online portfolio like you see here, it may be printed and offered as a small folio, or it can be simply abandoned. Other options may be considered as well such as using the photographs in the context of a larger project, or in a book or an essay for example.




Mini-Series #1
Arbres sans Feuilles (Trees without Leaves)


I had photographed this location before in the fall (you can see these previous images at this link). At that time the trees had leaves that had just turned yellow and red and I focused on the color of the trees and on the luminescent quality of fall light.

For this second visit I was there later in the year and all the leaves were gone. At first I was disappointed because I was looking forward to creating more photographs similar to the ones I created on my first visit. I expected a repeat of the conditions I witnessed on my first visit but instead I found a totally different situation. All the leaves were gone, there was no direct light, and it was snowing lightly. The light was dim, the ambiance was wintery and the temperature quite cold. IN fact by the end of the shoot my feet were numb from standing on snow for an hour or more.

I considered not taking a single photograph of the trees. While I found them extremely inspiring on my previous visit, this time they came across as uninteresting. While on my previous visit I used a short telephoto lens to narrow the composition to the trees alone, this time I put a wide angle lens on my camera and tried to photograph the entire scene, including the sky and the mountain.

However the light did not lend itself to a wide view of the whole scene. It was getting dark already and the light was not interesting. Running out of options I remembered that on my first visit I used too wide of a lens to photograph the trees and I had to crop the photographs down to get the emotional content I was after, namely an immersive experience of the trees themselves, an effect I achieved by removing all the elements that gave an indication of context, leaving only the trees, using a tight framing, to achieve the effect I was after. the framing tight

This reflection made me realize that I could try mounting my longest lens this time and see what I could compose with it, zooming deep into the trees for a tight cropping, both horizontal and vertical, so I could create the final image in tech camera instead of having recourse to cropping later during conversion and optimization.


The result is the mini-project you see here. During processing I decided to do two color variations for this series, one with the white point slightly veered towards a slight blue tint and the other with the white point slightly veered towards a yellowish tint. These two color choices were arrived at because I could not decide which of the two colors I liked the most. Each expressed a different mood and together these two moods represented my feelings for this scene. One, the bluish images, expressed the coldness I felt on my second visit, while the other, the yellow tint images, expressed my memories of the warm light present on my first visit.

it took me about an hour to capture these images.

Arbres sans Feuilles #1


Arbres sans Feuilles #2



Arbres sans Feuilles #3



Arbres sans Feuilles #4




Arbres sans Feuilles #5



Arbres sans Feuilles #6



Arbres sans Feuilles #7



Arbres sans Feuilles #8



Arbres sans Feuilles #9



Arbres sans Feuilles #10




Mini-Series #2
Outil de Ferme (Farm Tool)


While the fist mini-project on this page is about a relatively large subject, namely a clump of trees featuring several hundred trees, this second mini-project is about a very small subject, namely a single piece of farm equipment.

What captured my attention with this subject was the repetitive geometrical shapes, the rust color and the mechanical quality of the machine despite its ancientness.

My goal was to express all these different concepts in this mini-series of images.

It took me no more than fifteen minutes to capture these images.

Outil de Ferme #1



Outil de Ferme #2



Outil de Ferme #3



Outil de Ferme #4



Outil de Ferme #5



Mini-Series #3
Dessins Rupestres (Rock Art Drawings)

These images were created at a single location in Northern Arizona.


I have photographed rock art extensively in the past, visiting hundred of different sites, and my motivation when I approached the site depicted here was to do things differently.

To achieve this goal I decided to photograph the rock art 'sideways,' meaning by tilting the camera instead of keeping it horizontal. The fact that the image is tilted is not necessarily visible in the photographs because of the lack of context and the absence of a visual horizon. In fact these images may appear to have been photographed 'level' even though they were not.

The goal of photographing this site with the camera tilted was to give me creative freedom. Instead of following the vertical orientation chosen by the ancient artists who carved these images in the sandstone, I was able to bring my own inspiration by choosing the direction I wanted to give them.

This freedom continued to be inspirational when I designed this web page. I realized that some of the tilted images were inverted versions of the same panel even though they were taken as separate photographs. My first impulse was to show only one of these pairs of images to avoid repetition. However, after reflection I realized that these pairs could be presented next to each other thereby emphasizing their mirror-image quality. As a result of this insight I am presenting three pairs of images that follow this inspiration.

It took me one hour maximum to capture these images.

Dessins Rupestres #1



Dessins Rupestres #2




Dessins Rupestres #3



Dessins Rupestres #4



Dessins Rupestres #5



Dessins Rupestres #6



Dessins Rupestres #7



Dessins Rupestres #8



Dessins Rupestres #9

 

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