Pursuing my two favorite motifs, water and the anatomy of movement, I started making composites, extracting from one image and pasting onto another.
Showing the first version of this composite to a mentor, he questioned me about shadows.
Archives for photography
In praise of shadows
Old musings on recent photography have led to the resurrection of a completely different series I thought I’d given up on. Just last week I deleted a draft from March that I had started in excitement, but never finished because I couldn’t make the pictures work.
The thoughts were on Japanese aesthetics, and the abandoned series was a rather minimalistic one, captured in all of 15 minutes near the start of a Yellowstone outing during which I later busted my aging ski gear, cutting the trip short (I managed to limp out with frequent falls, discovering in the process that it’s not easy getting up from soft, deep snow when your skis are higher than you are).
Sourdough Trail: a project blog
It appears I’ll be making good on my recent threat to re-activate my dormant Sourdough Trail project. But never fear, I do not intend to flood A&P with posts on that topic. In fact, because, through A&P, I’ve realized how blogs can be useful, I’ve decided to create a new one specifically focused on my project. I’m in no way attempting to create a popular or active site; I simply think the blog structure is appropriate to the nature of what I’m doing, namely a variation on the psychogeography project discussed here a few months ago (and which I still hope to carry out this year). This one has similar concerns, but will be in a familiar rather than a new setting, and will be over a longer time scale, months rather than days. In essence, I want to observe how my sense of that particular place evolves and how it relates to the photography I do there. But if you want to know more, visit Along Sourdough Trail.
Focus and philosophy
Leaves are beginning to come out here now, but branches were quite bare a week ago when I payed a visit to the strip of woods along Sourdough Trail. I’ve gone there occasionally through the winter, but much less frequently than I used to while actively engaged in that project (I never closed the books on it, but I’ve done very little in the last year). I’m thinking seriously of re-activating it. In any case, the new season seemed to call for a little experimentation.
Stone soup
When I started my Patina project on weathered auto paint and rock surfaces, I originally had in mind flat surfaces with intriguing designs and colors. But rocks aren’t smooth, so I soon began photographing rocks with some three-dimensionality, playing with the ambiguity between tone and color as surface properties or caused by orientation to the light.
Last week, just back from photographing a favorite rock face, a number of ideas relating to that work seemed to be coming together. Unfortunately, working with the images (just a little) since then, the ideas have muddled themselves rather than resolving. Despite some enticing ingredients, the fine soup is still mostly in my imagination. Here’s what’s stirring in the pot:
He colors me, he colors me not, …
Often our lives are made more difficult by greater choice. In photography, the choice of color vs. monochrome was not necessarily easier in the past, but at least it had to be made by the time film was in the camera. With digital capture, you can change your mind at any time. Some photographers, as far as I can tell, use only color; a far smaller number are all about black and white. Some, like myself, dither. Not to complain, but this is a constant issue in ways it wouldn’t have been before. Reminded of it by both the previous post and recent experience, I here present the latest dithers. Prepare yourself: I’ll be asking for opinions…
