Photo Gear Frustration Leads to Tripped-Out Seascapes That Go On Forever

Jeff Friesen’s project Beyond Here is a collection of serene, exaggerated ocean landscapes that border on graphic art. Each image is actually a composite of many imperfect shots Friesen took as an experiment.

“I just started going crazy,” says Friesen, who lives in Halifax. “I was purposely over- and under-exposing frames, panning, etc.”

It was 2006 and Friesen was shooting landscapes with a tripod that he couldn’t get to stay still on a rocky, windy beach in Nova Scotia. Out of frustration he took his camera off the tripod and started randomly taking unconventional shots of the sea.

He let the film sit undeveloped until he eventually scanned the negatives and decided to layer the photos into a composite. With Photoshop he erased parts of each layer, creating a collage that highlighted bits and pieces of each frame. After a day of tinkering on the computer, he came out with a surreal but beautiful scene unlike anything he’d ever made before.

“What happened was I took a bunch of bad pictures and turned them into one good picture,” he says.

The title for the project is something Friesen thought up while looking at the horizons he shot. “Looking out there you don’t really know what comes next, so that’s why its called Beyond Here,” he says.

Since his original experiment he’s made several more composites, mostly around Nova Scotia, but also in Oregon and Mexico. Each composite usually uses about 12 frames that were all taken within five minutes of each other. He started on film, but has since moved to a Canon 5D Mark III.

Friesen says there’s no particular time of day or location that’s preferential. He just needs an open horizon and good light.

“When it feels right I go out and shoot,” he says.