FULL MOON SHOOT IN OCTOBER

My friend Jean who lives out in the boonies told me how cool his pasture looks when the moon light is spilling everywhere, and I should come out to shoot during some full moon time. So I went this month. On the way out there, I had to stop when I noticed the clouds were swooping so dramatically around in the sky. As usually happens, I couldn't quickly find a road or driveway to pull over into that gave me a full view of the sky and wouldn't get me killed by passing cars. The twilight faded more than I hoped when I finally found a spot, but it still was worth the hassle, I think.

My friend was right about the moonlight on the pasture, and said the view from the barn was good; he and his friends sit up there, have a few beers and watch the moon rise sometimes. (The other side of the barn was set up to watch the sun set, by the way.) Anyway, after noticing the scene in front of me while he got absorbed in the moonlight, I asked him to just stay there and stop breathing when I said,"Now." I'll be damned, his torso is still a little soft focus. I still haven't figured out how to pull this off, but I like how it turned out having a figure in the composition.

While stumbling around the barn with only a small flashlight on the way to the doors, I noticed, well, more like almost fell into, a hand made boat that the owner of the property was storing there....I love when you find stuff you never in your life would think to bring to a shoot. It's that serendipity that the universe loves to toss into the mix and you can decide whether or not to go with it. Of course, sometimes what crosses your path is just something to step over and walk on by, but I loved the idea of a boat coming into the composition to add a bit of mystery.

"A few days after that night, Jean emailed me:

About half an hour after you left, the nightly barred owl chorus began with an intensity befitting the full moon. As if on cue the coyotes (apparently the teenagers from the spring litter)joined in for one of the most delightful and bizarre choruses I've ever had the hair on my neck stand up to."

Home is Where the Art Is

The first night I saw the reflection of the Japanese maple tree down below on the bedroom wall I knew it had to be used in a photo. This night image is the first of now three photographs done here, with a few more in mind. This house I live in now a year and some inspires me so much that a photographer friend informed me he thinks I should move because I enjoy being here too much and hardly ever want to go anywhere. It's also been said by sages that one doesn't have to travel half the way around the world to find one's Self. I've been in both situations...Staying home doesn't cost as much. I do notice though, that as a visual artist, I tend to go into a heightened state of awareness when places aren't familiar. That's why traveling is so seductive, such a high. A shift takes place, newness glows, visual epiphanes abound!!! Click.Click.Clickclickclickclick....So, anyway, I'm staying home a lot getting high behind the lens just looking around where I live, getting especially fixated on the Japanese maple during autumn when every day you think it couldn't possibly get any more red, and then the next day it is pulsatingly red...red red. For some reason this environment keeps me in that altered state (no drugs, I swear) much of the time. I really sound like a bliss bunny, I suppose, but visual stimulation is my obsession. Luckily, it doesn't take much to "click" in, so to speak. Just staying present in the moment as I look around, absorbing the simplicity of the light, the shadows, the reflections play between objects, all the manifestation of this world we live in...what a play! What a joy. I'm so glad cameras were invented. Someday maybe photographers will just implant a flash card into our eye and all we' ll have to do is wink to make an image .... downloading is another story.

Showing at Horace Williams House

Fine Art Photography and Political Involvement

Last week I posted a comic style photograph "Be Afraid." It kept crossing my mind all week, how never before had I spent any creative time and film/pixels making images or combining them to create a political statement. I'm using the term "political" here in the narrow term, as in national and world politics, such as we are immersed in these days with the economy and presidential elections....I tend toward making images that have more to do with my personal life and interests; political involvement is not on my usual radar, in fact I usually avoid cluttering up my mind and emotions by not watching or listening to the news on a daily basis..I know I'll hear about anything going on that's important. For me, the a constant diet of "news" is like watching the weather reports....so what....look out the window...keep an umbrella in the car...most of the time they just make you worry about weather that doesn't even happen...(don't get me started on this...I can rant.)
Anyway, the other night I was testing how to best work with people in long exposure night scenes. The last 3 years I've mostly shot tableaus without people, so it's easy to just open the shutter to "bulb" setting and hope the wind doesn't pick up too much when trees are involved. A photo I did a few weeks ago showed me I need to learn more exposure tricks to keep people sharp. Using the self-timer and myself as the subject, I set up the shot you see above, and did a number of variations to work out other visual issues.
Late into the night, my newly spawned political junkie mind led me into the comic software once again, and I concocted a variation of what is shown above...basically it was the same, but the box with the words was much more about just the crappy condition of the world, and the blue bubble suggesting the meditator with the freaked out mind "go deeper" wasn't in what I thought was the piece before I fell into bed around 3am.
Something didn't feel right...I had the sense from the previous comic that what I put out into the world played right into the same fears that have put us here in the first place....fear begets fear. As an artist, I had my irony going on, but at bottom, (or as the new worn out phrase goes.."at the end of the day..." ) I was using my creative energy in a way that was, to me, not too karmically cool. So as I drifted fitfully off to sleep that night, I thought about how to keep the truth of "ommmm my gawd" that I/we are dealing with, but take it to a higher/deeper level, to
express a way to raise our consciousness out of the morass, bring light into the darkness rather than let it continue to drag us into the abyss. Maybe this photographic comic solution is too "airy-fairy," but so be it...I lived in LA for a long time. Om Shanti Om. Namaste.

Be Afraid

The outside world is too weird at this moment to spend my time talking about photography. As many are doing, we listen/watch the news, rant to our friends, beat our chests or tear our hair. One of my outlets is to work out layers of frustration and existential angst into something I call "Late Night Comix" on a little software program called Comic Lite...