“Suwanee Dawn – Bodice Ripper”

Recently I had a great photo session with my friend “Suwanee Dawn.” Going over the photos later, I realized that some of them would look great as cover illustration on Romance novels. So, I went to the library and got several well thumbed copies, and just started on transforming them, using images from the photo session. So, here is my first go at my new “Suwanee Dawn – Bodice Ripper” portfolio.

Portraits with MB

Usually I never post this many images from a single session. I am making an exception here because they are all interesting, and I would love to get everybody’s feed-back.

You will probably notice that there is quite a repetition of photos here – I am after figuring out which looks work with which images.

Neither MB nor I were much interested in coming away from the session with ‘regular’ portraits.

We are both interested in images that speak more to the mood and different ‘atmosphere’ than those that are formal portraits. So, some of them are a bit ‘over-the top’ and don’t look like MB, nevertheless, they are still here – just a side of her that perhaps we don’t often see.

Ovation TV | Sally Mann: What Remains

Here is a wonderful video about Sally Mann working with Collodion.

“WaterWomen Oyster Planting” – Silver Leaf

{click on image to see the sharper version}

This is another inkjet on silver leaf print. The original is a 35mm negative scanned and printed on silver leaf on acrylic paint and watercolor paper. The paper is 13×20 inches. Too big to scan, so this is a digital photo of the finished print. It fairly well approximates the look of the print. However, since it is on silver leaf it has a lot of reflection, depending on where and how it is viewed.

I am learning to appreciate the irregularity of the print, and its marks from the process.

One for Silver Leaf

I reworked this “Tarnished Mirror” image [see previous post] to be printed on silver leaf.  What I would really like to do is print on silver leaf or silver acrylic ground on Arches cover, black.  Will have to give that a try. I think this one is actually a bit better than the original.

Printing on Gold & Silver Leaf

Here are three more digital prints on gold and silver leaf.  Photographing these so they truly reproduce the way the prints look, is something I have not been able to pull off.  These are fairly close, but I feel they still look much better and interesting  in ‘real life.’
They are all on 13×20 inch watercolor paper, with the metal leaf adhered to a ground of acrylic paint.

The top one is from a Holga panorama, the bottom left one from a 35 mm black and white negative, and the gold leaf one from three merged digital layers.

‘Pizza wheels’ be darn

I just finished printing this image on a 13×20 inch sheet of watercolor paper on which the image area was gold leafed – perhaps I should have waited for thing to dry just a bit more before I started printing, hmmm…

Anyhow, as anybody who has done this kind of thing before knows, the ‘pizza wheels’ on the printer can drag through the wet ink surface of the print, and make these notifiable straight lines you see on the left hand side of this print.

I do think I can probably spot it a little to make the marks less noticeable – I am not willing to ‘disable’ the ‘pizza wheels ‘ on my Epson R2400.  Actually I don’t mind them all that much, they simply show the ‘process.’

Photographing or scanning my gold leaf prints is pretty tricky.  In this case, I think I have come pretty close to what the actual print looks like.  I am very satisfied with it.

The original image is a recent one, titled “Screen Door.”

More “Live Bait”

Back in August I posted a color image of this area.  It is just one of those places in Cedar Key that totally fascinates me every time I walk by.  Yet I have never been able to get a perfect picture.  Here is another Holga image from the roll of expired XP-2 I just got back.

Cedar Key claming boats

A three frame Holga panorama from a roll of outdated Ilford XP2 that I took earlier this year and just had developed.

“The Vortex”

Metamorphosis

Here are a couple of panormas showing the  current exhibits that went up in the 621 Gallery last Friday.

Metamorphosis

In the Main Gallery
Opening First Friday, April 3rd, 6-9pm
April 3rd- 27th, 2009

In April, The 621 Gallery presents Metamorphosis, an exhibition revealing the metaphorical context of images and objects through psychological reactions and association. Brandon C. Smith captures emotional, intellectual and psychological moments in a visual context that relates the gross, comical, and kitsch aspects of contemporary culture to frailty and power of the human condition. Carole Loeffler pushes the boundaries of ordinary materials in order to create experiences, personalities, and environments imbued with themes of passion and sensuality. Daisy Winfrey explores themes of emotional trauma, fear, and memory through nostalgic materials intended to captivate the viewer with visual connections to the past. Julie Guyot creates ceramic objects that comment on concept of branding, labeling, and tagging.

Also, in the Nan Boynton Memorial Gallery will be the FSU Art Students’ League.

More ‘oysterplanting’ pages

It is slow going.  Here are a couple of pages I did today.  The question comes up, why show the images that are go0ing to be in the book?  Doesn’t that take away the suprise and joy when the book is finally published.  Well, I don’t think so, and I don’t think anything is going to be as nice as holding the book in your hands and looking at the actual work.

[remember, because of the compression, the images look a bit blury here, just click to see the larger version]

Pinhole Portraits

There are many things I don’t do often enough, one of them is do pinhole portraits. Whenever I do them, I invariable come away with a print I like.  So, while going through my negative files scanning and pulling together images for my Cedar Key/WaterWomen book, I am more than occasionally  sidetracked scanning negatives that are from another portfolio.  So, today I became sidetracked by a couple of 35mm pinhole negatives, and I thought I would post them now, and at the same time be on the lookout for the rest of my pinhole portraits so that I can collect them physically in a portfolio.

Another Zero and Holga image

I just finished scanning another couple of ’setting the mood/scene’ images for the book.  On was made with my Zero 2000, the other with my Holga.

Using the Holga and the Zero 2000 pinhole cameras

Putting together the layout for my Cedar Key WaterWomen book, I started looking for images that would ‘flesh out’ the visual story, and help set the mood for the documentary.
I am finding out that the images that seem to work best for my purpose are those done with one of my Holga or pinhole cameras. Many of the pinhole photos were made with my Zero 2000.

Garage Darkroom

Thanks to Alexandria’s hard work, the darkroom is finally taking shape in the back of the garage. It won’t have running water or a sink, but then I have never had one that had those luxuries.
What amazes me is how long it takes me to get all the odds and ends together that go with having a functioning darkroom.
I packed up a functioning one, but somehow, somewhere things got misplaced and perhaps even thrown out.
Little things like having a wire stretched on which to hang negatives and prints to dry. Where is the hypo check? Did that lid go with that film developing canister, and the search and ordering of stuff seems to go on and on.
I am sure anybody a bit more organized than me would have not trouble with this. One thing that seems to be slowing me down with getting the darkroom up and runnning faster is that I really do enjoy working with the scanner, computer and printer. How the times are changing! :)

Annie’s Cafe

Another screen shot from my ‘book-in- progress’ layout.

[compression makes this awfully blurry - click for better image]

These photos are from Annie’s Cafe, which is my favorite local [Cedar Key] breakfast and lunch place. It has no A/C but a great big screened in porch, and is owned and run by Glenda Richburg.

That’s Kathy who used to waitress there.

Sex, Lies and Photoshop

There is an interesting op-ed video on the New York Times web site about body image and the ‘retouching’ of advertising and magazine photos.

My personal opinion is that there is less and less a chance of doing anything about this as digital dominates, and ‘retouching’ no longer is even the correct term.  I guess ‘post production’ would be a better term, but I think it is really assumed nowedays that there is ‘post procuction’ and acknowleding would do nothing to change this .

Well, take a look and see what you think.

Film and digital thoughts and results…

[click to see larger image which looks clearer]

I continue scanning older negatives, and every now and then I am totally surprised by the results.  Although I try to follow a pretty standardized workflow when I do this, every now and then, I try something different, or I forget what I am doing, and end up with a surprising result.  This is one of them.  Working’outside’ of my, more or less, normal workflow routine feels a little bit like doing lith prints in the darkroom.  I never quite know what I am going to get, I am often rewarded with a surprisingly interesting image from a negative I previously neglected.

First trip to the beach this season…..

Sunday we headed for St. George Island State Park for our first beach outing this year.  It was a glorious day!

“Miss Jonya”

Thank You For Your Business

Morning Walk

Does the World Really Need an 8MP Camera Phone?

I am usually amused when I run into photo equipment discussions that take themselves too seriously.  So I thoroughly enjoyed  “The Imperfectionist” article [see my 20 December 2008 entry below] about super model/photographer Helena Christensen’s use of  archaic camera phones, and other ‘krappy cameras’ in some of her commercial photography work.

Now for a  ‘follow up’ this appeared in the PDN blog:

“We recently finished writing a story about a pro photographer “obsessed” with taking pictures with the 2MP camera in his iPhone for the April issue of PDN’s Photo Source — sorry, no spoilers; you’ll have to read it when it comes out in PDN — when we saw an interesting piece of news from Samsung. The company announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain yesterday that it has released an 8MP camera phone, called the Samsung Memoir.

According to the announcement, Helena Christensen (yes, the Danish supermodel) is the the “first photographer to gain hands-on experience with the device, using it as her official phone and camera to shoot images during her travels in New York and Barcelona.”

You can see some of Helena’s images, including many which seem to be of her using the camera phone (WTH?), here.

Our interest isn’t so much with the phone or with the still fetching model/”photographer” Helena Christensen herself. We’re more curious about whether pros are actually using camera phones for anything other than taking quickie, idiotic snapshots.

Clearly pumping more megapixels into a camera phone is going to increase the noise-factor at least 8-fold, but what if some manufacturer actually does produce a tiny camera phone chip that can capture halfway decent pictures? Would you use it for more serious work? We’ve already seen how at least one iPhone photo by a citizen journalist ended up on the cover of several newspapers.

The photographer we interviewed for Photo Source — okay, his name rhymes with “Race Parvis” — told us he uses the iPhone’s digital camera as sort of a photographic “sketchbook” to gain ideas for his higher-resolution professional work.

Anyone else out there, aside from Chase, er, Race, and Helena Christensen doing anything similar?”

Cedar Key/WaterWomen Layout 66/67

I am working pretty hard scanning and making a layout for my WaterWomen/Cedar Key book. All the work in it will be from black&white negatives. Here April and Diana are pulling clam bags in the waters off Cedar Key [the Gulf of Mexico]. When wet, these bags weight well over one hundred pounds each.