Wayne King Selected for Prestigious Conservation Artist Designation

Sale of Art Designates Percent for Conservation

Former Senator Wayne King has been selected as one of a small prestigious group of Conservation Artists by a selection board of acclaimed wildlife and conservation artists and the International League of Conservation Artists. His work will now be featured along with the works of other artists at the League’s website ArtforConservation.org.

“I’m honored to have been selected as a Conservation Artist” said King. “I have made a commitment to designating a nonprofit organization as a recipient for a portion of the proceeds on the sale of any of my art. The images at ArtforConservation.org benefit the World Wildlife Fund.”

Nonprofits interested in being designated as the recipient for an image can view Senator King’s images at a number of websites carrying his work including his site on internet giant RedBubble: waynedking.redbubble.com/ or contact Wayne King’s office by email: wdking@plymouth.edu

De-emphasizing a Busy Background

Sometimes an images background is just so distracting that it makes the image unusable. Of course there are the more extreme solutions to this such as cutting out the background altogether but in the case of this bittersweet pictured right, removing the background is for practical purposes impossible because the berries are so numerous that they can't be selected out.

Well here's one way to make the background less busy in order to emphasize the central focus of the image. Using almost any good image software you remove the color entirely and then using a history brush return only the central colors to the image - or create multiple layers of saturation that achieve similar results.

Since I often prefer a more "tonal" background, I will often take an extra step and add in a single tone to make a duotone background.

Below you will see two images representing the end result of this process. The first with no color added back into the background and the second with a very muted level of color added back in. I prefer the second, but you may find the first more appealing. In either case, you are likely to agree that it makes the image more enjoyable to view.

Bittersweet Vertical 1



Bittersweet Vertical 2


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Deep Woods Trove

On a recent visit to the Beech Hill Farm in Hopkinton, NH, I took the time to follow their nature walk. The walk itself, through the beautiful woods adjacent to the farm was quite peaceful, although those who might have been looking for self help signage would have been disappointed. I noticed a splash of color within the litter off the trail and left the trail to find this exquisite grouping of mushrooms.

The simple image itself was quite extraordinary but I am even more fond of it when certain aspects of the image are emphasized or de-emphasized. Interestingly, while this image has been manipulated to create a Mindscape. The color of the mushrooms themselves has not been altered in any way.

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Hidden Color in Muted Seasons

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Color is where you find it - or where you create it. Even in the more muted seasons on the shoulder of fall/winter or winter/spring it can be found in some pretty unexpected places and the results can be much more than you would expect at first blush.

The two images shown here, "Birch Tangle" and "Dogwood Dance" barely show the trees t

hemselves and focus instead on the tangle of branches and the few remaining leaves. The blue of the sky and the soft focus whites of other birches in the background give this image the effect of a painting whose power is derived not from the subject but from the interplay of color and form within the final composition. 

While both are "straight" photographs, with no manipulation at all, each, nevertheless, has a feel of something more than a photo to it. 

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Maple Ablaze Mindscape

This image is created from three different images taken in the same general area and lending themselves to an interesting blending.
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Tokyo Rain

The original image for this Mindscape was captured on a rainy day in Tokyo. It was printed through textured glass and hand painted to arrive at the final product.

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Goose Rocks Mindscape

Don't trust anything your eyes see in this image of a rock formation along the seacoast of NH and Maine.

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The Cornice

This image is taken high in the Rockies near the continental divide where we were snowboarding in the back country. The original image was treated with a watercolor filter in addition to changes in the brightness, contrast and saturation.

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Hand Coloring or Painting Images for Impact

Sometimes an image strikes you in an emotional place but looking at it in a more objective fashion you know that it just doesn't work as a piece of art from the perspective of another viewer. For me, this means that I need to bring my own emotional reaction to the image by stripping it to its bare essentials - the black and white image - and then adding the color back by hand to capture the emotion.

This is not an easy process and you can go about it in a lot of different ways. Some folks employ the "old" standby Marshall Oils which are specially made for painting on photographic surfaces. But you can also employ many other devices from a highlighter to colored pencils and watercolor paints. 

Because I do not often create a hand-painted piece where the colors are the central focus of the image (although one might argue that they become the central focus as a result of the painting or coloring process), I most often will print to a watercolor paper that allows me maximum flexibility in the coloring process. 

One caveat I would quickly add is that if the sharpness of the image is important to the final product, this is NOT the approach you will want to take. Watercolor paper, by virtue of the uneven nature of the paper will not yield a crisp reproduction. If you want that you will need a paper more specifically produced for photographic purposes. Watercolor paper yields a more ethereal image. 

The image to the right, above, entitled "Buffalo Road Horses #82" is the original image with which I started. The image went through several iterations on my desktop before I printed the black and white image from which the final Mindscape was created. In the case of this image, I used watercolors to achieve the final product - sometimes I will also combine colored pencils where very fine coloration is required but that was not the case in this image.

The final image "Buffalo Horses Mindscape" is a far more ethereal view of the scene from which it came.

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Amethyst Fire

Several images over the past few weeks have found their start at Gemstar Gemstones in Enfield NH. This is not only one of the best gem and bead stores I've ever seen, it is also an adventure from an aesthetics point of view - with all kinds of interesting elements from shelves filled with Amethyst geodes to wind chimes made of colored agate and the colorful birdhouses.

Amethyst Fire was born of a simple image of two large amethyst geodes amid a field of smaller colored agate bookends. The original image itself was colorful and fun but lacked that certain something that made it a conversation piece.

This piece was created using a smudging process in the areas surrounding the large geodes. In many ways this process is similar to the process once done using a polaroid image that was manually altered during the process of its 60 second development. In those days of course the outcome was a final print of standard polaroid size - which for most folks meant about 3" x 3".

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Birdhouse Beachfront

While visiting one of the best bead shops in America, Gemstar Gemstones in Enfield NH, I had the opportunity to photograph this group of birdhouses that resembled a bunch of colorful houses on a beachfront. Thus was born Birdhouse Beachfront!

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The Conversation

This image was photographed at the Sandwich Fair in Sandwich NH. Originally shot in color I first converted the image to black and white because I felt that the simple subject was most important and that color in the image added no value. 

After making the conversion, it was clear that I also needed to de-emphasize everything in the image except the two farmers and the ox. In this way it appears that there is a conversation taking place between the three.

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Knee Deep in Zebras

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The Mask #1

Image captured at the Lekki Market in Lagos Nigeria
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Wash Day in Accra

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At The Water's Edge

Photographed in Lagos Nigeria just before Terry Cromwell and I hired the owner of the boat to take us for a boat ride.


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Senegal Sunbrella #1

Photographed in Kayar, Senegal.


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Images from the Smithsonian National Pow Wow

Being of Iroquois stock, Alice and I felt strongly that we wanted our son Zach to participate in the National Pow Wow celebrating the opening the the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. We spent three glorious days in Washington DC and these images sprung from that experience.

Our Time Comes

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Native Pride

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American Icons

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Sandstone Against the Sky

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Combining Images to Tell a Story

They (whoever "they" are!) say a picture is worth a thousand words and this is true. But two images combined together may just create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and form one image that is worth ten thousand words.

It may also simply tell the story you intend to tell more effectively or simply capture the imagination of the viewer in a more powerful way.

The picture at the right begins to tell a story, but the people standing in the background . . . well they don't really capture the human side of the story very well.

I was in the city of Calibar, Nigeria with Kip Bates and in our exploration we came upon a beautiful grove of rubber trees through which stretched a dirt path traveled by children fetching water for their families in the village nearby.

I was intrigued by the rubber tree taps and the colorful nature of the tree where it is slashed to allow the sap to drip into the bucket. I was equally intrigued by the sight of the children walking through the grove on their way home. I took quite a few images of both but found myself unsatisfied with all of them as "stand alone" images that told a story.

So I set about to create a Mindscape tellling a story using a combination of images. Mindscape is my term for a manipulated image that captures a story or takes a step beyond the simple image.

The first step was to isolate the tapped rubber tree and to emphasize the colors of the tree where it had been slashed. This was done by first using the Extract function of Photoshop to remove the unwanted people from the image. Having done that, I then used the saturation filter to bring out the color a bit more, without changing it. The resulting image you see below.

Then, I chose about 6 different images to experiment with as my base image. Dropping the tapped tree over them and making a judgement about whether they worked aesthetically first and secondarily if they told a story in a more powerful way. In other words: was the "whole" (the combined image) greater than the sum of the parts?

With three of the images, my answer was almost immediately "No". Not because the combined images didn't work at all, but because the final result did not hold the promise of the other three images.

Once I had picked the three to use, I then worked on each image to improve the blending of the two images. This involved using the cloning tool, the paint tool and in the case of the final image below, I went so far as to mute the background using both gaussian blur and desaturation followed by full restoration of the colors central to the image but only partial restoration of the background colors.

The results can be seen below:

Rubber Tree Mindscape

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Walking Through Rubber Trees

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Children of the Rubber Forest

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The Mask #3

Taken at the Lekki Market in Lagos Nigeria.
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