“It’s more about emphasis and accen-
tuation,” Gore explains of his process.
“Sometimes exaggeration to, again,
breathe a certain life into the image so
that it speaks more than the raw image
otherwise could. When I create my
images, it’s never my goal to be disin-
genuous about the location. My personal
‘line in the sand’ is to not alter anything
to the point that it no longer resembles
the location in reality. You can go to any
location of an image I’ve created, and
every rock, mountain, body of water or
other semi-permanent object in the scene
will be exactly as it was portrayed in the
image. I would never do something like
put a lake in front of a mountain where it
didn’t exist. But I am fairly liberal with
altering, nudging, shifting, accentuating
the ephemeral components of nature. I
wouldn’t go as far as saying that I’m
doing any kind of illustration if we
are talking about straight up ‘drawing’
something into the image, but paint in a
little extra light or mist here and there
to help shape a composition or enhance
the atmosphere—I have no problem with
that. I also don’t always limit myself to
what I can fit into a single frame as seen
through a viewfinder. If things are hap-
pening in the moment at the place I am
shooting, I do often take supplementaryimages to then pull into the final image.
“For example,” he continues, “if a
really awesome-looking cloud is hanging
around just outside what I have framed
up, I will take a quick snap of that cloud
and pull it into frame in processing.
Because for me, at the moment, it was
part of the experience of being there. In
theory, this is nothing more than doing
something like a focal length blend,
where you combine two images taken
at two different focal lengths, to include
more from a scene in certain areas but
less in others where it isn’t necessarily
needed. It’s just a little bit more detailed
and free of specific ‘rules.’ For me, a lot
of it is trying to recreate an experience
versus just the challenge of what can I fit
into this rectangle frame with one click. I
have nothing against that approach, and I
certainly sometimes do that myself, and
I understand the appeal of that. There is
art in restriction. There is also art in no
restriction, and in the end I’m all about
how I can make the most beautiful image
of the place I’m in, utilizing whatever
techniques I have at my disposal. For
me, 100 percent accuracy to reality is
not important. That isn’t what speaks
to me when I am trying to make art out
of nature.”
In the stunning image Gore calls
“Naupaka’s Journey,” he used focus
blending to make a photograph that would
otherwise be all but impossible owing to
the massive depth of field required for
sharpness from the foreground flowers
to the peaks in back.
“The technique I use is one of man-
ually rack focusing from the closest
point to infinity,” he explains, “taking
an exposure at small increments through
the focus range and then using software
like Helicon Focus to blend the exposures
together. I mentioned a technique I some-
times use of pulling in dynamic elements
of the scene that aren’t necessarily in
frame in order to better capture the per-
sonal experience I had at the location,
and this is an example of doing some-
thing like that, where the slight rainbow
that showed up was actually more to the
left. I chose to capture that separately
and pull it into frame to better serve the
composition and the overall collection of
events that took place while I was there.”