Marcia Schulman Martin

"I have always been fascinated with the qualities of water, and it has become the unifying theme for my body of work. My first water images, the Minnewaska series, were captured almost 35 years ago. When I returned to photography, after a hiatus of almost 30 years, I was again attracted to water. As I endeavored to do something different than before and something original, two ideas emerged. The first was to photograph leaves as the primary subject against a reflective background of water. The next, was to find beauty in ordinary subjects that would otherwise go unnoticed. I had usually captured those kinds of images in pristine mountain streams or ponds. Now, I was challenging myself to find beauty in the mundane. As I photographed floating autumn leaves in ordinary locations, I found that directional afternoon lighting produced the most desirable effect. To give the photographs a sense of mood and mystery, I processed them to have higher than normal contrast, similar in tonality to the Minnewaska Series. In this way, the original images were transformed, and the portfolio of "Floating Leaves" was created."