Jay Ressler • Artist

Jay Ressler • Artist

Artistic Images and Sometimes Commentary

  • Vegetation drooping over curved window casings at one of the stone buildings near the Great Wall. False Color infrared Photo.
  • Black and white photo of the Great Wall Meandering through the Huangya Pass.
  • False Color infrared picture of buildings and vegetation at the Great Wall. Vegetation reflects infrared radiation, while the terracotta roofs absorb it.
  • Tourists walking a short portion of the Great Wall at Huangyaguan. It's estimated to take 18 months to hike the entire length of the wall, which is longer than Great Britain.
  • This Black and white infrared shows a tower along the Great Wall as it passes through the Huangya Pass
  • View of the pass through parapets on the Great Wall. The Great Wall is over 5,000 miles long and only slowed episodic attacks by marauding bands but ultimately did not stop invasions of China by foreign armies. The Wall is sometimes called the world's longest graveyard. Over a million workers are believed to have perished in constructing it.
  • Rugged mountains serve as the backdrop for a terracotta-roofed building surrounded by trees in this Black and white infrared photo. The building appears to be par t of the administrative and maintenance complex for the wall at Huangyaguan. Vegetation appears to floresce in infrared photography.
  • False Color picture of ripe persimmons growing close to the Great Wall. Despite the rugged mountains close at hand a great many of the trees are cultivars yielding fruit including apples and persimmons.
  • False color infrared picture of a terracotta roofed structure at a landing on the wall at Huangyaguan. Blue sky effect is achieve by swapping red and blue color channels in the original capture.
  • False Color Infrared Picture of geological upheaval that formed the mountains at the Huangya Pass.
  • Black and white infrared image of a pagoda style guard tower at an entrance to the Great Wall
  • This is a false color infrared picture of a willow tree adjacent to a building next to the Great Wall. The building is part of the complex for the park.
  • This is a black and white infrared picture of the Changcheng or Great Wall at Huangya Pass. This is one of the more remote portions of the Great Wall requiring a three and a half bus ride from the coast.
Black and White China False Color Great Wall Infrared 

No. 47. Changcheng Segments in Infrared

Jay M. Ressler 0 Comments , , , ,

“Changcheng” or “The Great Wall” as seen at Huangyaguan is rated as one of the best, least-crowded places to hike a portion this wonder of the world. In last week’s post, I featured color photos from here. A three-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Tianjin on the coast, the Great Wall even here is not for the faint-hearted, not even in small doses. Steps can be steep and are frighteningly irregular. Still, families with active children and elderly people in reasonably good shape come from all over China and all over the world to partake.

The Great Wall is said to be the world’s longest graveyard with a million workers estimated to have died during construction. Contrary to myth, it cannot be seen from the moon without advanced optics. Also worth consideration is that while it stopped small bands of marauders intruding, the wall did not stop invasions by large-scale armies from over-running the country.

 I’ve chosen a mix of black and white and false-color infrared photos derived from similar original captures. Here are infrared photos shot with a 720 nm filter on a full spectrum camera. The camera is a small specially-adapted point-and-shoot.

There is no color in the infrared spectrum.  Color is really a matter of perception made possible by the receptors in our eyes capable of interpreting a narrow band of visible electromagnetic-radiation we call “color.” For me, a big part of the appeal is the dreamy, otherworldly appearance of infrared photos resulting from the way vegetation fluoresces when photographed in infrared. Healthy vegetation reflects infrared radiation to prevent overheating, other materials absorb it. Color artifacts that pass through shorter wave-length IR filters (590nm, 665nm, and 720nm) can be manipulated to produce eerie false colors. In the raw state, these images have a magenta cast. By swapping the red and blue channels a more pleasing false-color scheme is produced.

Jay M. Ressler

Jay Ressler Composite Photography, Encaustic Art, and Oil Painting He is an outstanding location photographer and painter, with an eye that can capture the soul of a Havana back street as beautifully as the sip of a hungry hummingbird, often with compelling black and white images. Jay Ressler is best known for artistic expression that lives in layers between opposites. “I like to explore boundaries,” he explains. “Boundaries between consciousness and the unconscious, between reality and imagination, between certainty and skepticism.” He does this by compositing his own photography in multiple layers to produce stunningly original, interleaved images. Using Photoshop, other image manipulation software and a variety of digital effects, he paints one photographic layer on top of another. He takes advantage of textures he's captured along with an array of processes for manipulating light, contrast, and color to tell the story. “Distorting and reinterpreting the literal 'machine moments' captured by the camera is as old as the art of photography,” he insists. Jay occasionally extends his multi-layered approach to encaustic mixed media creations. Based on ancient techniques, the process begins with cooking his own recipes of beeswax and damar resin and applying this medium between the layers of photographic images, along with various pigmented compounds and materials to add color, texture and expression. Either way, the results are riveting. The viewer is drawn into an unfolding, dreamlike scene that might be heart-warming, haunting, gritty, poignant or magical. Sometimes, within the various layers, all of the above. The award-winning photographer/artist has many dimensions himself. He studied advanced digital photography at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and advanced encaustic techniques with leading instructors in the field. He worked as an underground coal miner, steelworker, machinist, labor and civil rights activist, copywriter and commercial printer. He has a BS in Psychology from Albright College.

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