Obama As Muse

I'm so jealous of the photographers, and his daughter with the camera, who get to be around that iconic form, and rock star presence that is Obama. As the media has shown, and we all know, he's bigger than life...and damn it, I want to have my camera in there too! I want him as my muse, too.
Over my years of shooting, there are a few people in my life that I never tire of looking at, both in reality and through a lens....that spark a dance of spirit and creative possibilities. The images come forth, sometimes through perseverence of waiting and looking, sometimes in a flash of recognition, sometimes as a collaboration as both of us leap into the "zone" creating something combined. The experience of working with a muse is exquisite.

So how can I work with him...satisfy this longing?...... TV screens!

I'm not too sure about copyright laws on this, but it seems to me that pulling a 1/60th of a second from a video feed is more about appropriation than copying....I hope to hell that's the truth of it, anyway.

I need my fix.

THE SHMOOTZ* FACTOR

*"Shmootz." Those of you who haven't spent time in NY or aren't Jewish, might not be familiar with this wonderful sounding Yiddish word that translates as "dirt" in a wider context. It isn't dirt, like ground from the earth (unless it's all over your face or clothing, as in "What's that shmootz all over your clothes?" kind of way...it's messy or dirty stuff that shouldn't be where it doesn't belong.

Like the greasy fingerprint a small child got on my lens when I wasn't looking!

I was in LA last week for a family event which is where the shmootz got applied. Later, driving through the West Hollywood area, I did a few "drive-by shootings" ...shooting while in the car, sometimes at a stop; sometimes while still moving along. Generally in LA that means not moving too fast because the traffic is abominable, which is how this series began when I lived there. It was so frustrating to be sitting in traffic so much of my life that I took to photographing out of my windows or windshield to feel more productive or at least to keep myself from traditional road rage. Also, street life and real estate is visually interesting there. As an aside, I have to say the series came to a halt when I moved to North Carolina. Anyway, I didn't notice the fogging in the photos until later that night when I was having supper with a friend and looked at a magnification of a shot I did of him across the table; his nose and mouth were blurry. A quick look at the lens told the whole story.



Examining earlier pictures, including a bowl of fruit I shot before leaving to drive around, struck me with a sense of wonderful serendipity...how cool it was that the shmootz added an element of soft focus shifting for the eye to enjoy as it wandered around the image.

I love when life offers little surprises and shifts to encounter and make us slow down for an instant......May they all be enjoyable and uplifting.

Last Photo of the Year

It's New Year's Eve and I was hanging out in my digital "dark room" as usual, but thinking about what movie to watch a bit later with some vodka concoction...yum, when my friend Eric called to tell me I had to go look at the moon, how beautiful it was with the whatever planet below to the side, and if he had a tripod, he'd photograph it probably surrounded by trees, and would I pleeeeeze go out and shoot it. He's a good friend, and I have a heavy coat, so here is what turned out to be my last photograph of 2008.
I'm glad he called.

Happy New Year. Let's make it wonderful!

Silent Night

For years, I've made it a tradition to create my own holiday cards. Occasionally, however, the muse of good ideas skips out on me and I trawl through the racks of commercial offerings hoping to be drawn to an image I like with a message I also can live with. Or vice versa. Sometimes it comes together, other times, my Virgo nature kicks in and I skip sending out cards all together rather than settle for something less than "perfect." It almost came to that this year. No inspiration was bubbling up, nor were there any cards on the rack that called to me. One was close, until I saw it was drowning in sparkle. Not a love match. So looking at my bulletin board in my studio the other night, I was drawn to a photo I did long ago during a candle ceremony at my meditation center in LA where I then lived. It became my card that year. For this variation, I added words with Photoshop. My procrastination precluded getting them printed in time and I couldn't deal with my printer to make them myself (don't ask) so I had them made up as 4x6 prints at the local Wolf's Camera, and hunted down those cards with the frame to slip in the picture of your kids or dog/cat and send off to all the aunts and uncles. Five stores later, I found some that looked ok. Horray. Done. Out the door into the mailbox....whew.

Then, two nights ago, I fell in love with a scene I'd been looking at for a few weeks as I drove from my drive-way up to the road. A neighbor with a forested front yard had strung colored lights on a scrawny little pine tree. It was endearing, but I didn't find it special enough to bother dragging the camera out into the night. I've also been rather lethargic during these early darkness times; wanting rather to be in the house, much warmer and cozy. But....wow....it was so appealing as I passed it this time, heading home. The night silent and still, the air soaked with a fine mist created a scene embued with a life of it's own........a mysterious space surrounded by large old trees, this ungraceful little tree wrapped and glowing with light.



I shot it as a sequence of frames set at different shutter times, counting up to over a minute on bulb setting to get the darker areas to show some detail in the shadows, then did some short exposures to get the lights not blown out. Later, layering two of the raw digital frames after doing some fiddling with Photoshop, I carefully brushed in the less exposed string of lights from the second layer which I hid behind the main image. It took some time and small brush sizes to get the darker lit tree exposure to blend in realistically with the original level of light surrounding it.

Now I was faced with having an image I wanted to share, but I mailed outthe other one....what's a girl to do?....At 2am this morning, an e-card design was born in Photoshop....today I was able to share my new night photo with all the rest of my friends online. Yaaaay technology.

Happy Holidays to everyone....Let hope ring out in 2009!

NEW STUFF

It’s been a bit of rollercoaster ride between coming down from the election frenzy , the economic slip-slide, and starting out the holiday gear up, beginning with Thanksgiving, in recession 2008 style. For me, this all is layered on top of attempting to keep a clear enough head to continue working on photos; both shooting and working with them.








A family trip down to Miami for Thanksgiving gave opportunities for a few hours of camera glee, aside from the “happy snaps” of the moments along the arc of the 3 days. My brother-in law took me along on his pilgrimage for cigars to Little Havana for a few hours one afternoon, opening the space for wandering around a new neighborhood with my camera in tow.




These are what I came up with to play with when I got back home. A beautiful sunset on Thanksgiving evening bled through the sheer curtains in my mother’s dining room as we offered our gratitude and began downing much too much food. Luckily, everyone in my life is used to my visual obsessiveness, so no one paid any notice to me slipping away to photograph the progression of the day fading into evening.



This past week the Moon, Jupiter and Venus provided as all with the excitement of staring at the sky. A friend sent me a photo taken in Australia, where the moon was below the 2 planets, causing folks to describe the configuration as a “smiley face.” Here someone I know said ours was an “upside down smiley face.” Luckily a poet friend came to my rescue by replacing the cutsy cultural iconisms with his version: “Poetically, this celestial event is heaven's menage a trois for the masses.”

Much better, for sure.

ALL THOSE CLICHES COME TO MIND...

"All That Glitters Isn't Gold," "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (thanks to St. Mick), " Ya Shoulda Seen The Fish That Got Away."

Well, it was like that the other afternoon....
Driving down a street near town a delivery truck turned a corner and suddenly my windshield view was taken up with this huge square shape filled with a beer glass and bottle looking so perfectly scaled and color coordinated with the red, yellow, orange autumn follage surrounding it. And the sky's blue was the perfect complimentary color.... I reached across the seat into my handbag for my ever present camera only to not find it. I continued on searching for it, and my mind, wondering how I left it at home. The image began to taunt me....beginning to glow like a gem just out of reach. Blocks later, I had to turn off onto the freeway, and would lose my opportunity; the image began to be more and more important in the face of having no way to possess it.....We got to the freeway entrance, and omfg, he turned onto it also....and the tree lined expanse became more lush and perfect with the uncluttered road way, not messing up the perfect composition. The Photo Gods were laughing at me now, I thought, they're amused at my frustration. And then came the moment of "aha...the cell phone!!!" I have to say, I never use the camera function and barely know how to work it. So there I am, tailgating this truck at 65 miles an hour, clicking furiously, barely able to see what was on the tiny viewer without my glasses on,
plus not knowing how to save the little suckers....click, click, click. The truck finally got to his exit and away he went, probably grateful to get this crazy woman off his ass...I had no idea what I got, except feeling it was a futile attempt for the crumbs of a glorious cake that got away. When I finally looked at the file in the phone, most didn't get saved for not knowing how to work the damn thing. There were 3 frames of my dashboard only and this one with the truck somewhere out there in the distance, above the dashboard which I cropped out. It sure ain't art.

So the magic of the moment was the only prize of the day; the lesson for me is that's all there really is.

ART OF MANIPULATION

Converted with the antique plate filter

No one sees things exactly the same as another. If you put 10 reasonably creative people with cameras in the same situation I suspect you'll get 10 different photographs. Not only that, but someone else looking at those photographs then interprets what we have seen in their unique way. Pretty cool on one hand, because all we can do is what we do, then put it out there for others to see in it what they will. However, as an artist, we have many options to create a portal or path for an observer to follow into our own special world of visual delights. I find there are times I have a specific intention for a photo, and want to make a particular statement. Sometimes it's more illusive.....an image seems to make it's self intuitively, the outside beckoning me from within; a feeling sparking pure consciousness into being, connecting perfectly into a form in the confines of the camera's window frame. Those are magic times; I think that's what keeps many of us clinging to our cameras as one would a love interest. (that sounds weird, huh?) Anyway, with new technology adding more possibilities to extend our photographic vocabularies and flights of fancy, visual impact becomes more and more available and sometimes overwhelming. If money were no object, I'd probably overdose on lens and software, like a diabetic run amok in a candy store. I should probably be grateful I'm being protected from myself. That said, I found an interesting program that I'm using on a 15 day trial download (thank you photo-god.) It's Silver Efex Pro by NIK Software. It's a filtering program that goes into Photoshop and lets you create very interesting black and white conversions. Since downloading it yesterday, I've been experimenting with how one image can be altered to create an entirely different emotional feel.

This is the original photo of Central Park in NYC

Converted with yellow filter and some contrast fiddling