Greetings, Earthlings...

Welcome to Beyond the Limits of Reason, the meeting point for all things Michael Doubrava.

Michael Doubrava profile

I was born on Earth during the second half of the twentieth century.

Untitled (San Lorenzo, New Mexico)

Untitled (San Lorenzo, New Mexico)
A metaphor for the conflict between rationality and emotion; betweeen Apollo and Dionysus; between the empirical and the supernatural; between stasis and revolution...

our motto and mission is to

tickle the idiot
rapture the faithful
pity all the ignorant and hateful

illuminate the enlightened
confound the intellectual
with life distilled flood memory's temple

January 30, 2024

Skyland; Eye in the Sky (January 2024)





In-camera double-exposures using 85mm p.c. lens on full-frame digital 35mm camera.

December 30, 2023

Sleepwalkers (January 2024)



This is an image of somnambulists, sleepwalkers, engaging in an act of wish-fulfillment. This is simultaneously an image of two spiritual adepts engaging in the practice of "hidden knowledge" based rituals.
 

December 25, 2022

Kansas Landscape with Electrical Utility Pole (summer 2022)


 A three-exposure panorama.  This landscape photo is composed of three individual, (though overlapping) landscape photographs; each of which was made with a full-frame 35mm DSLR and attached 35mm lens. This strange combination of the wooden vertical obelisk and wild vines suggested an element of eros at work (or play?) within the fertile fields of Northeast Kansas.  

November 26, 2022

November 2022: Paranormal Flower



 Another image of things that do not exist. No flowers were harmed in the creation of this image; in fact, there were no flowers. 

(The lower image is a detail from the finished image above)

November 22, 2022

October 2022: Kansas Landscape


 This image of a landscape in Northeast Kansas was created on location, using the multiple-exposure function on a Nikon D810 with a 35mm lens. Two exposures were made in succession, with a 180 degree camera rotation between them. 

This is a Kansas landscape in miniature; this is an Imaginary Kansas.

October 8, 2022

October 2022



Top frame: In-camera double exposure, using 35mm lens on full-frame 35mm DSLR

Bottom frame: In-camera double exposure, combined with another in-camera double exposure of same subject made minutes earlier, using same equipment as top frame

March 28, 2022

November 29, 2021

February 23, 2021

Three Different Visual Strategies/Responses to the Same Subject: Orchid

These three photographs were made using the same camera, in the same room, utilizing the same subject: my very patient and always willing subject, the plant I lovingly have named Lazarus, after the biblical figure who rose from the dead. Lazarus the Orchid came into my life  three or four years ago. This orchid has returned from what I believed was death, to bloom and flower again, over and over. This re-flowering, this rebirth, always inspires me to observe and celebrate and create a new round of photographs.

The top image is the most visually conventional, on the surface, yet even it is a couple of steps away from a traditional photograph: looking closely, the viewer detects ghostly double images within the frame.

The second image was made with a pinhole "lens", rather than an actual glass lens. The long exposure time, thirty seconds (due to the tiny f162 aperture through which light strikes the sensor), resulted in a bit of softening of the floral detail.

The third and final image is also a pinhole photograph; it varies from the second image due to a sense of overall Dionysian energy and fecundity, almost from a bug's-eye perspective.

 



 

January 27, 2021

January 2021




 My thought when I first viewed this in-camera, triple-exposure photograph, as it appeared on the viewing screen on the back of my DSLR, was that extremely weird, uncanny sensation that I was gazing at a figure simultaneously orchid and human.

January 21, 2021

January 2021: Channeling Francis Bacon, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson


 This photograph, a triptych of  multiple exposure images, was initially created in-camera: a series of long exposures lit by a hand-held LED flashlight and a 500 watt tungsten spotlight. The three individual images were then combined on a single canvas in Photoshop. I feel as though this is an image made by Francis Bacon, who ditched painting and picked up a camera after reading Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray  or Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde.

January 7, 2021

Nocturnal Eyeball Orchid, January 2021



 
This image began as an eight-shot, in-camera multiple-exposure photograph, Using a DSLR with multiple-exposure capability I photographed my eyeball, pointing the camera at my eyeball as I held the camera with one hand. Additionally, in order to make things more difficult, the only light source was a tiny pinhole-like light beam which was travelling into the room through the security peephole in the door. This multiple-exposure process was repeated and then images were selected and combined to create a new composite. This composite was then duplicated and the duplicate was reversed. The new reversed composite was dragged on top of the initial one. The images were then selectively modified via layer erasing/layer density in Photoshop, and then the layers were flattened, creating this new, final, 'master-composite'. This is as yet still a preliminary version of the as yet unfinished image.
  The process is so simple a monkey could do it!
 

December 1, 2020

Process

This first image is a double-exposure, and has been fully processed from a single, in-camera RAW file into a final TIFF after editing. I then made the reduced size JPEG you are looking at for internet purposes.


 I've included two photographs here: The smaller photo is more-or-less a straight out of camera image with minimal processing. The larger photograph is edited using, post-digital-processing and what I can only call "handwork" in Lightroom and Photoshop. The camera I use, a full-frame DSLR, allows for the production of multiple exposures on the same file, producing a RAW original.This image was a double exposure. I've done a bit of work increasing contrast, applying both minus clarity AND plus dehaze, and slight variations to a magenta, blue, and yellow color channels. I also tried split toning with color to add a color cast to the shadows and highlights. I still consider the final, processed image to be the truer expression of my internal, pre-conceived ideal. The expressive power of the image is finalized and made manifest in the 'digital darkroom', just as in days past the true vision of the analog photographer was made "real" in the analog darkroom. My photographs are not ABOUT the process, but they can't exist without it. That is why I occasionally share these details, since I normally prefer to speak only of the 'content', however one defines that slippery term. For me content refers more to intentions than objects.

Looking for more?

You can access more imagery by clicking on the phrase above which says"older posts". Many additional works can be viewed dating back to the earliest posts which initiated this blog.