Sri Ganesha

I have no idea what I'm doing up at 2:23am and how this image created itself from a small Ganesh that's been on my desktop for the last few weeks.....have no idea where I found it, either.
But here he is, now, in this form....Ganesha, Ganapati...son of Shiva & Parvati. He who stands at the threshold of Time...the Lord of Beginnings....the Destroyer of Obstacles. Om Ganesha.

Om Eckadanthaya vidmahe
Vakrathundaya dheemahi
Thanno danthi prachodayath.

Om, Let me meditate on that one tused God,
Oh, God with broken tusk, give me highter intellect,
And let the elephant faced one illuminate my mind.


Perhaps this marks the beginning of something....we'll see.

Show at Durham Art Guild

REFLECTING ON REFLECTIONS

For the last few weeks my mind's been cluttered up with extraneous things, like the economic mess, watching network tv series at night, and being pissed about the small percentage of a sale that as a fine art photographer that isn't well known receives.After the gallery takes their 50% cut, and I've paid a quarter of the total for expenses, I'm less and less willing to sell work for my pitance when I continually realize that the reason for the sale in the piece in the first place, is that the buyer likes the image....and, that's the part I'm responsible for....the image, damn it. When that photograph is hanging on the wall in someone's house or office, it's because that person wants to live that particular image.

My rant has nothing to do with these photos, except to explain that I'm not shooting much these days. What's also going on is I'm taking a video production class, which is dragging my head away from stills and leaving me in the middle of nowhere, because I haven't started filming anything yet. Hence, tv shows are appealing... paying attention to the editing that goes on, particularly.

But, today, while drinking a cup of coffee out on the back porch, I noticed the reflections of the trees in the glass behind me, and so, fueled on joe, hauled out the camera. It came to mind that there was a connection to some reflection images I did over Xmas in NYC. These city window shots were done at Bergdorf''s on 5th Ave.

Double pane glass gives a bit of a stuttering to the image, which I like. The angle at which the camera was held to the glass decided how it would record the reflection.

I don't know about how other artists find their connections and similarities of the way they look at things, or come up with variations on a theme or subject, but for me, over the years of shooting, threads of ideas continue to show themselves, sometimes dormant over a period of months or years, only to surface again and again in a slightly different way, informed by a maturing or shift of consciousness on my part. Creating books seem like the best way to make myself pick through the archives of negatives, and slides, scour the boxes of prints, hit the hard drives of digital files, and get this lifetime of photography so far organized in some fashion. I do think that the process would reveal a great deal of insight into the heart of my passion and set a compass for the future.

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!