Capturing the ‘mystical’ power of the Okefenokee Swamp

To David Walter Banks, there’s one thing particular in regards to the Okefenokee Swamp, the most important blackwater swamp in North America.

There’s a mystical high quality, the photographer says, that’s arduous to elucidate to somebody who’s by no means been there earlier than.

“It’s this spiritual, metaphysical presence,” he stated. “Time and time again, people that go there explain that’s it’s just magical. It touches people’s lives when they enter the space and spend time there.”

Over the previous three years, Banks has spent practically 70 nights alone within the swamp, which stretches greater than 400,000 acres from southern Georgia to northern Florida. He would keep there a number of days at a time, tenting on the islands or simply elevated picket platforms.

His days would include paddling on a ship and “doing the best I could to be completely present in the moment,” he stated. “What I would photograph was whatever I saw, whatever I was drawn to.”

But there was one thing lacking at first. His pictures, by themselves, weren’t totally capturing the best way it felt on the market to him.

So he acquired artistic, experimenting with completely different in-camera methods to inject extra coloration and fantastical parts to all of the wildlife he’d encounter on his journeys.

“I always had a love and a fascination for the way that photography can capture a moment that is more or different than what our eyes see, especially when that picture sort of hints at the surreal or magical realism,” Banks stated. “It’s something that I nurtured personally, even if it wasn’t for my professional work.”

Banks’ attractive, nearly psychedelic photographs make up his new e-book “Trembling Earth: A Transcendental Trip Through the Okefenokee.” Okefenokee has been translated as “land of trembling earth” within the the Muskogee language.

“I wanted to hint at this more spiritual, mystical feeling that people have talked about this place since (naturalist and writer) William Bartram’s travels in the 18th century,” Banks stated. “It was like suddenly, all these little tricks that I had come up with, for creating an image that feels a little more surreal, I had an outlet for them.”

The results are primarily the results of strobe lights and coloured gels or filters, Banks defined.

“When I go out on these trips, I have normally two lights: one goes on my camera, or can also be used off camera, and the other is a little bit of a stronger battery-powered strobe light like you would use in a studio,” he stated. “I’m often using one, if not both of those. Sometimes they’ll have different colors, like a tinted piece of plastic more or less that goes in front of the light, and then the light shoots through that and casts that color.”

Some of the extra complicated-looking photographs are created with an extended publicity, the place the digital camera shutter is open for a number of minutes at a time. This is very used earlier than dawn and after sundown, when gentle is restricted.

“Say I have a landscape that I like, I like how it looks. I’ll set up the camera, I’ll have it on a tripod, and I’ll have a long exposure,” Banks stated. “Now, throughout that lengthy publicity, I’ll be taking these two strobes, and I’ll be operating round and simply popping them off, simply lighting various things, typically with completely different colours.

“My strobes can only reach so far, so I’ll also bring these high-powered, tiny flashlights. I’ll take those same gels that I put over my strobes, and I’ll use my hand and cover these flashlights. I’ll use those to sort of paint in things are that are off in the distance.”

These methods assist the photographs really feel extra emotive to Banks. But there’s additionally one other profit: They seize your consideration.

“I think people are just bombarded with visual stimuli these days. … Part of this is also kind of jerking people out of that scroll malaise and making them stop and look at the photo and question it,” he stated.

Banks needs to make use of his e-book to lift consciousness in regards to the swamp and a few of the threats it has confronted prior to now and probably sooner or later. Environmental advocates lately helped put a cease to a proposed titanium dioxide mine on the Trail Ridge, which borders the swamp on its japanese boundary. There have been considerations that the mining might have lowered the water ranges of the swamp and made it extra inclined to wildfire.

The Conservation Fund stepped in to purchase an 8,000-acre tract of land from the mining firm that was making use of for permits, however Banks says the swamp gained’t be totally protected till safeguards are placed on all of the waterways and land that encompass it.

“This place is a National Wildlife Refuge, so the actual space is protected — but the boundaries are not,” Banks identified.

He is obsessed with defending the swamp, which has been nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in order that future generations can take pleasure in it. It’s one of many largest intact freshwater ecosystems on the planet, he stated, with unbelievable biodiversity that features uncommon and endangered species such because the gopher tortoise.

“Wetlands, they’re like our redwood forests of the South,” he stated. “These are where our gigantic trees are. These are where our prehistoric trees are. And more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are already gone, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Since his first evening within the swamp, when he was serenaded by a symphony of frog songs, owl calls and alligator bellows, Banks has fallen in love with the Okefenokee and the best way it makes him really feel.

Sometimes there’s an amazing quiet, an vacancy the place he can middle himself and discover refuge from the hustle and bustle of every day life. At different instances, it may be chaotic and difficult, with intense storms that remind him of nature’s unrelenting power.

All of it offers him a larger appreciation for all times, which he explains extra in his e-book.

“This is no comprehensive record of facts between these covers, but it is one of truth — the truth of my experience,” he writes. “One of newfound awareness and revelation, and interconnectedness. I hope ‘Trembling Earth’ captures not only what can be seen, but what can be felt — the unmistakable yet ineffably mystical quality of this primordial space.”

David Walter Banks’ e-book “Trembling Earth” was revealed by The Bitter Southerner and is now obtainable.