Mount DIablo

A friend of mine from DVC and I went out to Mount Diablo to play with each other, our cameras and the mountain. Here are a few of the images I took (there are more on Flickr):

100 Strangers

Jesse's class is over for me now, but learning (and shooting!) continues...

I'm currently engrossed in Flickr's "100 Strangers" challenge - Daryl found it and recommended I check it out. The challenge is to approach 100 strangers, one at a time, and ask permission to photograph them.

This has been powerful for me since I am acutely shy about asking strangers to do something like this for me, and as a consequence have focused on those photographic subjects that don't require speech to explore.



I'm on # 13 or so now, and getting a little more comfortable with the exercise.

Now I'm looking forward to the day when I am as focused on achieving my aesthetic and technical goals with the photograph as I am on mastering the inter-personal relations!

Final Project

This last project was the hardest one for me - I wonder if it's because I didn't want this class to end.

None of the earlier proposals I had in mind worked out, and to complicate matters in the middle of the project I went to Dresden to live blog an event one of the groups I'm working with produced. I met an amazing photographer there, Ulrich Soeder, but that's another story (I'll tell it here later, though - he really is amazing). I was so busy I barely left the hotel, so most of the photographs I took that week were from a train window, plus the one evening I spent with Ulrich and his wife Sabina, who is a light architect (I know! Doesn't that sound like the coolest job ever?).

So when I sat down to work, I had in mind to do an image with four images from the 'view from the train' series, but as I started to work with the options I began to experiment and came up with something entirely different; I call it a 'Fliptych'. :-)

This one, 'Staircase: Dresden, 2007', is made from two shots of the gorgeous circular staircase in the Soeder's apartment building:
I made two sets of images taken from the train window; the first is called 'Graffiti River', and the second is 'River Tracks':

And this last Fliptych is from the Soeder's apartment again; this one is called 'DeckChairs':

I printed them out, landscape, on 13"x19" watercolor paper, on my new Epson printer (Stylus Photo R1800) which made them look very muted and painterly. This actually worked pretty well for these particular subjects, but I'm not sure I would use that paper for anything I wanted to have more detail. I framed them too, just to get that 'finished' effect.

Here are some of the other photographs I've taken in the last few weeks, which I printed out to turn in as loose images. Most of them were printed on matte presentation paper, but a few seemed too fuzzy on that paper so I printed those on semi-gloss.

I call the collection 'Spring, 2007':

This class has been wonderful; I'm finally stepping into a mature understanding & acceptance of myself as an artist, and feel so blessed to have found this new form of expression to incorporate into my work.

Perhaps just as importantly, I've made some great friends through this class who I hope I will continue to know and grow with for a long long time.

Thanks so much, Jesse!

ReTouch

This picture was taken of me when I was 16 and lived on a 'hippie commune' in north-eastern Vermont.

I probably hadn't seen a mirror (or a bath) for several months, and all these years later the photograph too was a little worse for wear.

It was all schmutzy and cracked, and wasn't all that great of a photo in the first place; technically speaking, the highlights are all blown out. But it's one of the few images of me during that time and it WAS funky, so I chose it as my 're-touch' project.

There was some really strange 'banding' in it and Chris suggested a short-cut 'fix' (de-saturate it so that the bands flattened out) which seemed to work pretty well. I'd thought I would tint the resulting monoprint and started with some cheek color, but I wasn't sure the effect was worth the time, so I stopped before doing any more.

I wished I had a badly damaged old family portrait that I could have made my family happy by fixing, but I couldn't find anything like that. Ah well, c'est la vie.

Quality of Light2

This assignment was absolutely brilliant! (pun intended :-)

I had such fun chasing light everywhere I went this week... all over my house and neighborhood, and even to Honolulu for a quick trip to attend a family memorial. I'm really excited about the results, and can feel my photographic muscles developing.

There was one priceless image I missed, though... I think it was the best of them all. My step-son Lee & I were flying back on a red-eye from Honolulu to Oakland this morning and as we neared our destination the sun was rising and dawn light bathed his sleeping face and hood in a rich orange wash. It was a beautiful image, and would have been perfect for this assignment. Ah well, I guess that will teach me to keep my camera at the ready, no matter where I am!

So, here are some images where the camera WAS there.

This first one is the famous Albany Bowl, which I've only patronized once in all the years I've lived in the neighborhood (I often imagine I'll go again, especially with their special $1/game rate!):

This arty layout was in a friend's bathroom, and as soon as I noticed it I had to run out and grab my tripod so I could set it up to shoot. I love how it turned out, all swirls & reflected surfaces:

I go to this overpass walkway all the time to try and exorcise my fear of heights. Sometimes I image making a big banner with some profound & startling quote and hanging it up here to wake up the drivers as they pass under it:


This was just a quiet moment of beauty on one of my morning walks. I loved the shallow depth of field and the shimmery colors in the background:


This is from a string of orchid lights in my living room. I shot a whole series at different times of the day, with the lights on and off. This one felt fragile and delicate, lit just by early morning light coming in from the window.


This last one I think is the most interesting. Taken of the moon behind a ridge with some coconut palms this weekend, the green lens glare exactly reproduces the surface of the moon. I'd never seen anything like it before.

Quality of Light

This morning's 'beauty walk' had an interesting new dimension to it, as I was specifically aiming to photograph light...

I found myself looking with new eyes on my familiar neighborhood beauty ... seeing not only how things look in different light, but focusing on the light itself. It was the same, but subtly different. I can't wait to download my images and see what I got.

Another real difference was shooting in raw. This is the first time I've done it and they're still in the camera, so I don't yet know exactly how it will affect my work-flow (for instance, I'll have to see whether or not I can use iPhoto to download and store the images like I usually do), but they sure filled up my CF card quickly! I had to change cards in the middle of a walk, which has never happened to me before.

Lipkin Troll

I shot my misc. unedited Lipkin roll at the same time as I did my bracketing and metering assignments, trolling all around my house and neighborhood, experimenting with my new 60mm macro lens. I ended up with so many exposures that I HAD to edit some out, just to keep it down to one contact sheet with photos you could actually see.

And still there were discarded images that I really liked and wanted to include. So I chose three of them to post here. I couldn't really put them in the Lipkin Roll sheet with integrity, since they are each one from a series (I went a little crazy with the bracketing), but I had some kind of trouble with each group and couldn't include them in that assignment either.

This is my favorite: it's a blown glass vase my step-son made for me. I think it's beautiful and tried to use it for one of my metering subjects, but it was too tricky for me. Maybe my spot light wasn't focused enough... but I kept falling off the light spectrum and couldn't meter it in one end or the other of the final shadow & highlight frames, no matter what I did. I finally gave up, but there were several images in the spectrum I really liked & I think they stand on their own.

Here's another image I shot a whole series of - a blond wooden armchair in my front room in front of a big light-filled window with sheer curtains. I bracketed this baby all over the place, but it wasn't really white so I didn't think I could include it on the bracketing contact sheet.

This one was tricky too and I couldn't really get a proper series out of it, but I liked all the light and vertical lines, and this was one of my favorite exposures.

Finally, here's the stone Buddha that lives in the corner of our living room, next to the TV. He's wearing a feather lei I got a couple of years ago now when my love-monkey was away in Hawaii during my birthday. There is a bit of curtain behind him on the left that seems to work with the feathers, and make it seem like he's wearing a tam-o-shanter or something. I know, I'm weird.


This Lipkin Roll assignment was deceptively hard for me to do correctly. I tend to take a lot of shots of each image, and as I mentioned before I had tons of them and just couldn't stop myself from choosing the 32 I liked best for the final contact sheet. I didn't do any adjustments on them, so at least that part of the 'unedited' instruction was followed, but maybe I should have done some compositing or fancy PhotoShop work to emphasize Lipkin's Rule Digitalia bias ...

I'm glad I had the chance to include these extra shots in this blog post...

Me in Three Guises

Well, The Mystery Goddess of Shutter and Aperture finally revealed herself to me and I managed to capture enough time & light to photograph myself after all. At least the veil parted long enough to set up my tripod and shoot three separate sessions, and for that I am deeply grateful. Here are my favorites from each one, and what I like about them.


The 'theme' I was exploring in all these shots was what it's like to be a human in nature; who I am as a 'natural' being. This one came closest to expressing it for me. I'm in the foreground, a little fuzzy & out of focus, while the tree behind me is sharp, clear. I'm looking straight at the camera... just being there, like a deer looking up from eating, in her own part of the woods; only slightly curious, unafraid. Looking somehow both amused and accusing, registering the disturbance in the stillness of that moment. It's a very familiar expression and somehow intriguing for the complexity of the simplicity it reveals.


This image was from the first session. There was a massive redwood tree about 15 feet away from the small deck behind my room, so I set up the tripod to shoot myself against its broad expanse... I'd taken a number of shots and wasn't getting the connection with the tree that I wanted, so I took myself to a more internal place by hiding behind my hair, and trying to become part of the rough web and vine-trailed bark behind me.

I liked the hint of playfulness I see here, but there is also a kind of cowering in the way that the shoulders are hunched up that is also true and reveals the fear that also lurks in my secret heart.

This might be my favorite of the three. I felt the most 'in nature' and unconcerned with the way I look (which is frankly dreadful - I could not BELIEVE those three-tiered circles under my eyes!).

I love the textures - the rough bark and skin, dried leaves & velvet - and the contrasts - of color, the highlights and shadows, the direct stare/glare of the facial expression and the submissive quivering of the leaves in the foreground. I look at home and in control of myself & my world.

Nada

Well, my skill-building foray into this brave new world of digital photography didn't start off so well... Jessamyn told us we had to 'take the training wheels off' and shoot a roll of images in manual mode. Unfortunately I hit the pavement hard, trying without any success at all to photograph myself inside at night. In fact, I traumatized my camera, which was so pissed off at me it refused even to release the shutter and capture a blank grey screen. Nada.

I hope I have better luck this weekend.