Advertising / PotD

Totally Unrelated To Anything

September 27, 2015

Oops, it slipped (2010)

Providing meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures – it is the designer’s job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.—Paul Rand

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Welcome to our grand experiment, one which is far from being scientific and authoritative in nature, but still slightly more than anecdotal. You see, for websites like this one to be profitable, one of two things has to happen: either it drives enough traffic to make advertising ratios work, or it drives enough traffic to actually impact business. Neither of those has happened yet. There are a number of factors involved, of course, but one of my frustrations is that the content of the articles seems irrelevant to their popularity. What matters is how provocative are the pictures. Last week proved that premise quite handily. The pictures were totally unrelated to anything. We knew we were pandering, and it worked; our weekly hit count was higher than it’s been in months.

So, this week we continue in the same vein, but going a step further. The articles this week will not only be unrelated to the pictures, but they’ll be unrelated to anything. They may be funny, they may be nonsense, they may occasionally be serious, but you won’t catch us talking about technical things like how the mirror reflected light awkwardly back in the model’s face in this picture. Nor will I tell related stories like how it snowed nearly nine inches while we were shooting this set, or how the place where we shot no longer looks anything like this now, which makes me sad. Instead, I’ll talk about something totally different, like trees.

Except that, for the moment, I’m not really interested in trees. I’ve not done any research on trees. I have noticed that our lack of rain is ruining the fall foliage. Rather than turning colors, leaves are simply dying, turning brown, and falling. How depressing that is. No pretty colors. Rather sucks when you think about it. We had all that rain back in the spring and now we get nothing. I suppose this is making it easier to get in the fall harvest; fields aren’t muddy so farm implements can roll across the crops with optimum efficiency. I have cousins whose business involves leasing combines and such for the harvest. I would imagine their business is doing rather well at the moment.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]For the two or three people who actually attempt to read the articles, this week could be either entertaining or frustrating, depending on what happens. What I’m expecting is that I’ll get up each morning and just go with a stream of consciousness based on how I’m feeling at the moment. Milan Fashion Week wraps up on Tuesday, Paris Fashion Week starts Wednesday. Both require me getting up earlier than usual some days, but at least Paris is only a five-hour time difference versus Milan’s six. That extra hour can be brutal when there’s a critical show at 3:30 AM our time. I’m not sure I’m capable of anything resembling consciousness at that point.

Early morning writing requires help. I have a browser plugin that not only checks my spelling, which can be atrocious early in the morning, but also checks my grammar. Sometimes its grammar checks are a little too strict for this style of writing. I am, after all, being rather conversant. This isn’t the New York Times by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, it pains me to see any writing where the grammar is totally ignored, and when the plugin corrects things it usually does so with good reason. I miss things when I’m tired. I also have difficulty caring when I’m tired. I’ve been tired a lot, lately. The plugin has been working overtime.

Totally unrelated, I’m wondering what would be too explicit; at what point would a photo be so audacious as to actually turn traffic away? Is that even possible? At the same time, I more frequently wonder what it would take for people to actually start sharing these posts; that’s what it’s going to take to really bump the hit counts. I can only reach a limited number of people at any given time. For us to get the big numbers, where the website begins to pay off, people have to share what they see here and that’s not happening. But then, how many people are doing anything more than looking at the pictures, anyway?

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Totally unrelated to anything.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

A Poverty Of Life

September 24, 2015

Leave A Simple Photo Alone (2015)

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.—Frederick Douglass

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]What did you have for breakfast this morning, anything at all? As adults, the meal is perhaps the easiest to skip. A cup of coffee and we’re out the door. We don’t have time, we’re not in the mood to prepare anything, and many people just don’t have breakfast food in the house. Maybe we could make toast, but that’s about it. I’ve heard mothers complain that they just can’t get their children to eat breakfast. My mother would be appalled. Breakfast wasn’t an option, it was a mandate.

Life really wasn’t all that different when I was growing up, but there was one thing about which my mother was adamant: you’re eating breakfast. It didn’t matter how early it meant we had to get up, we weren’t leaving the house without having food. Where we lived in rural Oklahoma, there was no catching something on the way, or stopping at the convenience store down the street because there was nothing there! I think school breakfast might have been an option, but I never knew anyone who actually ate it. There were some Saturday mornings in high school where the band bus left for a trip at some ungodly hour that required us to leave home at something like 5:00 AM. Guess what, we sat down and had breakfast first. Every morning. Not just something slapped together, either. Eggs. Bacon or sausage. Hot cereal during the winter. Toast. Fruit in season, when we could afford it. Breakfast was a big deal.

Today, there are more options. It actually makes sense for Kat’s kids to eat their breakfast at school; it’s built into their schedule along with lunch. We know they’re getting nutritionally appropriate meals and we don’t have the added fuss at home of trying to convince them to finish their food before the bus comes at 6:30. People who have to commute to work also have more options now than were available forty years ago. There’s a fast food option on every other corner. Seated service restaurants are in greater abundance. Grocery stores are open earlier. We’ve got it made, right?[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]No, we don’t have it made. Having it “made” means that everything is balanced and healthy and that we’re making the right choices. None of those things are accurate. Our lives and our diets are anything but balanced or healthy and we’re notorious for making bad choices. We create poverty within our own lives by eliminating the things we need most while being excessive in the things we need the least. Children get the worst of it, too. We place them in food poverty by failing to make sure they’re actually eating fruit. Globally, a lack of food in the diet kills 3.4 million people a year, and the great majority of those are children. They don’t only have impoverished diets, they have impoverished lives.

More than a financial state, poverty is a life condition. Even people whose incomes are well above what is considered the poverty line can still have impoverished lives because of the choices they make in how they spend what they have. One of the biggest areas of poverty, strangely enough, comes in having too few fruits and we replace that with an excess of sodium, which in turn kills yet another 3.5 million people. And no, grabbing a bottle of juice isn’t the same, especially for children. Juice doesn’t contain the fiber and other nutrients available in whole fruit. What’s sad is grocery stores and markets dump tons of wasted fruit every day. Global economies keep prices out of reach for people who need fruit the most, and those who can afford fruit look at it more as a dessert item, not a dietary necessity.

We like to think we’re rich, and comparatively we are, but look in your shopping cart the next time you buy food. If you have three different kinds of chips, packaged foods, and/or soda, and less than three different kinds of fresh fruit, you are creating a poverty of life for you and your family. We should all be appalled. [/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Education

September 18, 2015

Think A Minute (2013)

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.—James A. Baldwin

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]My mother was a teacher in more ways than one. Yes, there are a few people out there who endured, and survived, the trials and tribulations of being in her classroom. She didn’t stop teaching when she walked out of the classroom, though. Education, she believed, was something that began the moment one woke up of the morning and didn’t end until one was unconscious at night. She saw the potential for making every moment a teaching moment, and she wasn’t going to let one’s education be incomplete.

Mom always said she was 5′ 2″ tall. I’m sure she was at one young point in her life. Most of my life she was about an inch shorter than that, and she continued shrinking. That never stopped her, though. She couldn’t be bullied, by administration, student, or parent. To cross her as an adult meant being on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing that damn-near drew blood. To cross her as a child meant bending over, grabbing your ankles, and being thankful her arthritis prevented her from swinging that paddle as strongly as she might. In her mind, the first thing one needed in an education was discipline and respect. One didn’t begin learning until those two things were present.

At the same time, though, Mother could be incredibly compassionate. Being the preacher’s wife in a small town meant she usually knew when a student’s family was struggling. School policy prevented her from helping a child directly, but she would find a way to make sure a child had food at home, or clean clothes, or in at least one case light by which to read. Hugs were something she handed out readily, even long after one left her classroom. After school tutoring wasn’t’ part of a program; it was just something she did as student’s had need.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Mom would not have done well in today’s schools. She understood that an education isn’t just information one learns to regurgitate on command, but how we learn to take that information and improve our lives and the lives of others. She hated standardized tests because she knew that people can’t, and shouldn’t, be standardized and neither can the education system that teaches us. She taught more by living than by lecturing. She set an example for her students that was worth following.

I look now at how schools have changed and want to cry. We have so woefully underfunded our schools that teachers show up to find absolutely no resources in their classrooms, not even textbooks or dry erase markers. We totally misunderstand the point of education when we think test scores are a sufficient or accurate measure of learning and/or teacher adequacy. Library shelves sit empty because there’s no money for books. We wonder why there’s a teacher shortage in almost every state, not realizing that by the time teachers pay for all their supplies, books for their classrooms, and materials for students, they’re not longer making a living wage!

I’m glad that the little ones can now come home and watch re-runs of Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood on Netflix. They are thoroughly enthralled as they pick up the values education that are no longer part of the school curriculum. Education for them is a very different experience than it was for my sons, and almost unrecognizable compared to my experience. That we have allowed the situation to deteriorate is inexcusable and everyone is at fault. We have no education system when we refuse to learn. Even Mother couldn’t solve that problem. [/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Self

September 15, 2015

The Beauty In Nature (2009)

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.—Golda Meir

[one_half padding=”4px 0 px 0 4px”]Over the years, I think more has been written about the self than any other topic. Self-worth, self-esteem, self-identity, self-loathing, self-love, and self-help are all topics that have lined bookshelves and stores as long as humans have put ink on parchment. We are very concerned about ourselves and have little difficulty discussing ourselves endlessly, especially now that we have social media so that we can broadcast every ridiculous and trivial detail about ourselves to the entire world. With the advent of phones with cameras, we’ve even started taking voluminous pictures of ourselves, and call them selfies. We are, and always have been, quite full of ourselves.

What has been born out by countless research, however, is that for all our bravado, we really don’t like ourselves all that much. How one sees one’s self determines to a large degree how one sees others. Where we are unsure of our own qualities we find fault in others in an effort to compensate for and distract from our insecurities. We don’t like our bodies, so we shame the bodies of others. We are embarrassed by our own sexual proclivities, so we express outrage at the sexual identities of others. We feel inadequate in our own understanding of a subject, so we refer to those who are experts on that subject in as unflattering a way as possible.Every negative we see or imagine in ourselves we reflect back in some way negatively on others. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]For several years, self-help and self-improvement books and audio tapes have been one of the world’s best-selling genres. We understand that our view of ourselves is inferior and misguided, but we are unsure how to best address the issue. Then, studies have shown, once we purchase the book and begin to see what is required to change, we give up and stop reading. We want to improve ourselves without having to make any significant changes or sacrifice to our current lives. If possible, we would happily take a pill to make it all better, but to have to actually work toward improvement is something very few of us are disciplined enough to actually do.

So, we continue, from one generation to the next, parent to child, handing down the same foibles and shortcomings that have limited us since the dawn of our existence. We fight the same wars, often with the same group of people, we have the same arguments, we battle the same ghosts as everyone who has gone before us. We blame others for refusing to change, to grow, or evolve, not wanting to realize that the problem is more with us than with them.

We talk a lot about improving the world, but we must first start by improving ourselves.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Pain

September 14, 2015

Attic Fashion (2011). Model: Sarah Harris. Hair & Makeup: Christopher Thompson. Styling: Tiffany Gilstrap Scott.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.—Angelina Jolie

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Humans are designed with a built-in warning device called pain. We feel it soon after we are detached from our mother’s umbilical cord. Hunger is our first experience with pain. We cry and someone feeds us. The pain is our body’s way of telling us that something isn’t working correctly, that a part of us needs attention. Yet, as a society we are intolerant of pain and just as we remove the batteries from smoke detectors so that we don’t have to put up with the screeching sound going off at unexpected moments, we try to mask or cover or ignore the pain we feel. We shove the pain into our emotional attic and try to forget that it exists.

As young children, we are taught that expressing our feelings of pain is not acceptable. “Walk it off.” “Suck it up.” “No pain, no gain.” Our intent is to dissuade children from complaining about every little insignificant boo-boo they encounter. “If it’s not bleeding, you don’t need a bandage.” The longer-term effect, though, is that from those very early moments we teach children that feeling and expressing pain is a bad thing. No one wants to hear about your pain. Ignore it and it will go away. Be tough and play through the pain.

Often, however, that strategy backfires on us. My father’s youngest sister succumbed to cancer perhaps sooner than was necessary because she chose to treat the pain, not the cause. Rather than being consistent with the chemotherapy, she chose alternative treatments that only covered up the pain. Only when the pain became intolerable did she return to her doctor, and by then the cancer had spread too for treatment to be effective. She didn’t even communicate to her family that anything was wrong until the pain became debilitating. She didn’t want them to worry. She had seven children and wanted to put pain aside to care for them. While her attitude might seem noble, in the end it took her from them sooner than might have been necessary.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Part of our problem in dealing with pain is that we look at it as an inconvenience and a bother rather than the warning system it is. When, as a child, we first encounter something hot and we pull back from it, learn to treat it with some respect and don’t touch it again without taking appropriate precaution to not burn ourselves. That is an appropriate response to pain. Consider what causes the problem. Fix it, if possible. Respect what caused the pain and then take steps to not repeat the pain again. Yet, we don’t apply that formula too often once we pass the age of five. We prefer to ignore the pain and keep going.

Philosopher/poet Kahlil Gibran penned these wise words:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.

As we get older, pain becomes a more constant part of our reality. There are some pains, both physical and emotional, that will never go away no matter what we do. Our challenge is to not look at our pain as an inconvenience, but rather an opportunity to learn.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Humanity

September 13, 2015

Held Together (2010)

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.—Mahatma Gandhi

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Humanity is baffling. How can the same species that produces individuals of great caring and compassion also produce those of great hate, deceit, and cruelty? How can some countries with practically no economic standing offer to take in more refugees than they can hold while another with every economic advantage in the world prefers to build a wall? How can one claim there is sanctity in life and still desire to put people to death?

The multiple paradoxes of humanity, though, are part of what defines us. One doesn’t see other species wake in the morning pondering whether to participate in the genocide of millions. In being given the choice to choose between right and wrong, we create an everlasting and inherent struggle between doing that which preserves ourselves and acting toward the greater good. While this struggle has always been within us, we seem blind to the lessons that would be taught by the actions of others and still look for ways to justify our own selfishness and greed while doing our best to minimize the good of others.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]What makes the difference in whether make choices for the good of all or the good of ourselves is a matter of focus. When we only look in, we do not see the needs of those around us, no matter how blatantly obvious they may be. When we only look outward, we see those needs and feel compelled to respond to them, perhaps neglecting the necessity of our own care and well-being. Trying to look both directions, though, only sets up more conflict and confusion as to what we should do.

Humanity has no easy answers. To be human is to struggle, continually, with right and wrong, good and bad, selfish or selfless. Humanity has had great successes and colossal failures based on the decisions of a few individuals. When kindness is answered with greed we become monsters. When cruelty is answered with compassion we become angels. Humanity has the ability to be either, and we each decide in which camp we will reside with the dawn of every morning.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

Quiet, Please

September 8, 2015

Quiet, Please

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.—Blaise Pascal

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]There’s something to be said for good, intelligent conversation. Almost everyone has at least one friend with whom they can sit and talk for hours and the conversation never become boring or argumentative or difficult. Those are people we respect, love, and enjoy having in our lives.

Then, there’s everyone else, the people who never shut the fuck up, who always must be speaking (usually about themselves), who never listen to anyone’s opinion other than their own, never let anyone else get a word in edge-wise, and never end a conversation on another’s statement. Those are the people whom we most often desire to meet an untimely but just demise, or at least wish they’d move to the other side of the planet. They don’t know how to be quiet.

Perhaps it was growing up in small, rural churches that taught me how to be quiet. When there are only 20-30 people in attendance, every little sound draws attention. Unlike churches today, where children are only seen in the main worship service for Baptisms and holiday pageants, we didn’t always have a nursery worker. I would have to sit in the congregation with my mother, which wasn’t easy on either one of us. The threat was always that if I wasn’t quiet and behaved during the service my butt was getting spanked when we got home. Damn, if I didn’t learn to be quiet![/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Ours was ever an especially rambunctious household, though. The four of us could easily go a couple of hours with no one saying anything. Momma would be reading or grading papers, Poppa would be immersed in the evening paper, I would be either practicing the piano or doing homework, while Squirt played quietly with his toys or sat watching television. Our house could be surprisingly quiet. Conversation occurred at the dinner table for the most part, and beyond that any talking we did was born largely out of necessity, giving instruction, asking/answering a question, and occasionally playing a game. Quiet was valued.

Today, though, we are surrounded by noise, even when it’s not audible. The Internet, and especially social media, provide too many people with absolutely nothing worthwhile to say, the opportunity to speak at volumes they would never actually consider were one to meet them in public. They post endless memes, share inflammatory rhetoric in a constant stream, and never seem to shut up even to go to work or sleep. Quiet is practically non-existent.

Quiet stimulates creative thought and the more one talks the less creative that speech becomes. We need the break from the cacophony our planet serves up. There is a time to speak, but without quiet we have no time to consider what’s been said. So please, do everyone a favor: shut the fuck up. Now.[/one_half_last]

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this week’s photographs are strictly those of the author: charles i. letbetter, and do not necessarily reflect the attitudes or opinions of the models involved in the pictures. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the model. Thank you.

Art / PotD

Flip Phone

August 28, 2015

Communicate Everywhere (2005)

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets ― Andy Warhol

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Here is the proof that 2005 was eons ago: that flip phone design was brand new. I’d chosen that particular phone primarily because it reminded me, a lot, of the communicators used in the original 1968 Star Trek series. Of course, they didn’t quite work like that. One still had to push buttons and wait for someone to pick up on the other end of the phone and half the time coverage sucked so you couldn’t hear what the other person was saying. Still, the look was cool, in my opinion, and there’s just enough geek in me for that to matter. I would happily flip my phone, communicator style, and use the voice function to place a call. The future had arrived.

Until I visited New York, where the images for this photo were taken. We were out shooting in Central Park on a horribly cold and windy day in February and, for some reason I don’t remember, pulled out my phone. The model giggled. I thought she was laughing at my geekiness. She then explained that, at the time, flip phones were a favorite of local pimps and drug dealers. While there were probably hundreds of thousands of people running around Manhattan with similar phones, the stereotype was prevalent enough that pulling one out while standing on a street corner was likely to get the unwanted attention of NYPD.

I was careful about where and how I used my phone after that conversation. Placing it in these photos, with the same model, was our inside joke. Nothing said pimp quite like a flip phone on a woman’s naked chest. We convinced ourselves that it was the duty of art to make fun of such social idiosyncracies and that even if we were the only ones who understood the meaning behind what we were doing that the message was still valid. One thinks such things in New York when the snow is falling. Realities of the world are somehow altered and art was as good a justification as any for being naked and playing with phones.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Ten years later, flip phones are making a comeback, largely in frustrated response to the increasingly large smartphones that everyone else seems to be carrying. My phone is so large that people often ask if it’s a tablet. While I like the benefits of my phone, such as being able to see it in the dark without having to squint or hold it at arm’s length, there are times when the shirt-pocket convenience of a flip phone would be nice, at least on a temporary basis. Of course, there would be no facebook on that phone, and trying to send text messages was an absolute pain in the backside. Still, carrying something that is the size of a thin brick isn’t exactly fun and games all the time, either.

The evolution of phones over the past fifteen years has been nothing short of amazing. They have completely transformed our lives and our expectations for communication. It really wasn’t that long ago that we were all tied to land lines. If someone wasn’t home or at their place of employment, they couldn’t be reached. Now, if someone doesn’t respond to their phone, either voice, text, or social media, in a matter of minutes, we are immediately concerned about their health and safety, or upset that they might be ignoring us. There is no escape. Phones have now made us available to everyone all the time. Even in bed.

With the exposure of the recent Ashley Madison hack, I have to wonder how often people used their phones, rather than a computer, to make that connection. Rather than being an object that identifies a pimp, the phone has become the pimp, selling out our information, our lives, our souls, and maybe even our bodies to the highest bidder. They track everything we do, report back to the NSA when we connect with certain people or go to certain places or use a certain vocabulary. Thinking along those terms, I look at today’s image and laugh even harder. Phone. Pimp. Damn straight. [/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

Swimming At Night

August 26, 2015

Kick Harder (2004)

If something’s going to happen for you, it will, you can’t make it happen. And it never does happen until you’re past the point where you care whether it happens or not. ― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]This is not underwater photography. I’ve watched with interest over the past few years as that particular genre has gained popularity, but it’s not something I’m likely to actually do. First, an ear condition prevents me from being able to enjoy swimming; there’s no photograph worth spending the next two weeks trying to get rid of a painful infection. Second, the cost of even renting underwater equipment is excessive. Unless one is planning on making underwater photography a significant part of their services, it’s not worth the price. So, we won’t likely be doing any underwater shots any time soon.

Instead, this is an above-the-water, long exposure image. The shutter speed isn’t too terribly dramatic, three seconds being short compared to some I’ve taken. Yet, that was enough to capture this unique image. Of all the photos in this week’s series, this is one for which I wish I still had the original RAW file. The state of technology, and my understanding of it, at the time, prevented me from being able to do any more detailed processing. But then, the simpleness of the shot is part of what I like about it. There were others in the set, of course, but this is the one that stood out.

The situation around this image wasn’t exactly normal, either. I hadn’t planned on anyone doing any swimming that evening. I hadn’t planned on doing anything at all. Two models traveling from North Carolina contacted me when one of their scheduled shoots fell through. In one of those made-for-late-night-cable moments, they invited me to join them at their motel to take some pictures. Being human, I accepted, grabbed materials for a project I was shooting, and drove to their hotel. When I arrived, the girls informed me they wanted to shoot down by the pool. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Most hotel outdoor swimming pools aren’t open in mid-October, but this particular hotel sported a warm indoor/outdoor pool. A large glass window was the retractable barrier between inside and out, but it only came down to the top of the water. Swimming under the window was rather easy. Since the outdoor part of the pool was technically not open, the security cameras were conveniently off. So the models showed no hesitation in removing their swimwear once they were outside. Sitting along the edge of the pool, I was the only one who was feeling a bit cold.

The only light was the one inside the wall of the pool. Look in the bottom right corner of the image and you can see it. The amount of illumination wasn’t much and if the girls moved too terribly far away from the light they were completely in the dark. Since I hadn’t known I was going to be shooting outdoors I hadn’t brought a tripod. There was a limit to how long I could hold the shutter open without the result being a complete blur. I tried several other shots while they were swimming, but none were turning out well. I was feeling woefully unprepared.

What eventually worked was to have one girl hold the other in place, near the light but not directly above it. I was pleased enough with this shot and soon convinced them to return to the indoor portion of the pool. As the air grew colder, I was shivering too much to take a decent photograph of any kind. For someone else, this might have been one of those “Dear Penthouse” moments, but not for me. From there, the evening went downhill, with one of the models having a severe allergic reaction to some food they had brought up to the room. I have my picture, though. Life goes on.[/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

This Sh*t Is Bananas

August 24, 2015

charles i. letbetter - this shit is bananas

Matching Curves (2004)

I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do. ― Andy Warhol

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Bananas. Not only is there a giant one in this picture, in case you hadn’t noticed, but it’s also perhaps the kindest way to describe the model. She was from one of the barrier islands off Georgia’s coast, near Savannah. A trust fund baby, Daddy’s only little girl, who had grown up with every privilege possible. She saw one of my pictures in a magazine and decided that she simply had to come shoot with me for a whole weekend. I needed the money, so I took the job not knowing the girl’s reputation, nor the trouble into which she had a habit of getting.

My first warning came moments after meeting her at her motel, one in the higher-end of the Hilton chain. She carried a number of credit cards that Daddy had provided, but despite each one having an excessively high limit, she had already maxed them all out for the month, and it was only the 12th (strange how I can remember that date). So, checking into the hotel was a bit of a challenge. Hotels don’t like to accept cash anymore. She stood at the desk and argued with the night manager for the better part of an hour, calling him every dirty name in the book, before finally calling Daddy, who gave them yet another credit card number. She then called a sorority sister, at 1 AM, who was a regional manager for the chain, and complained. The manager’s phone rang immediately afterward.

After checking in, she changed clothes, and then wanted to go out to the clubs. I knew several club managers and owners personally, so that wasn’t going to be a challenge. What bothered me, though, was that we were supposed to start shooting at 8:00 the next morning. It was already almost 2:00. She promised she’d have no problem waking up and being fresh, so off we went. First place we went was doing jello wrestling. She volunteered to participate. Second place was doing wet t-shirt contests. She needed to do that as well. I almost lost track of her at the dance club. I had already nicknamed her bananas, to her face, by the time I tucked her into her bed at 4:30.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]I left messages for all the places we were scheduled to shoot, postponing everything until afternoon. Even if Miss Bananas managed to wake up, which didn’t happen, I knew it would take a couple of hours’ worth of makeup and water consumption before she’d be in any condition to take pictures of any kind. We had talked through several concepts before she arrived, most of which involved nudity in some form. I was hoping to tone down the ideas a bit toward something a bit less pornographic and more editorial. When she finally woke up, a little after 10 AM, we ate brunch then headed out. This was going to be an interesting day.

After she bought half the clothes at one boutique (Daddy had wired her cash), we started taking pictures. Convincing her that a public park in the middle of a Saturday afternoon was not a good place to be flashing her ample breasts was not easy. After more than one close call with police, I insisted we move inside, to a rented studio where I wouldn’t have to worry about being arrested for her actions. Along the way, she wanted some fruit. The banana shot was one of the first we took in the studio, and arguably one of the best. You would need a very dirty mind to imagine what she did with the banana afterward.

Over the course of the weekend, we managed to drop over 2000 frames. Only three photos remain, none of which records her face or her name. Interestingly enough, she was arrested for cocaine possession the moment she stepped off the plane back in Savannah. Apparently, she thought her tray table was a good place to set out lines. One of the flight attendants called ahead to local police. I never heard from her again. I sent pictures to the address she had given me on her release, but received no confirmation that she ever saw them. Gwen Stefani was right, this shit really is bananas. So, how’s your Monday? [/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

Casually Naked

August 18, 2015

Life Upside Down (2009)

I always say: To be well dressed you must be well naked. —Oscar de la Renta

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Being casually naked is wonderful, but rare. One of the reasons I enjoy getting up so atrociously early is that it affords me the ability to sit here and work without having to put on pants. I’m not naked, mind you. There are still small children in the house and one never knows when one of the little buggers will wake up and need some encouragement to return to bed. Still, just the simple condition of not having to be fully dressed the instant I wake up each morning is pleasant, and a luxury I’ve not always had. In fact, for many people, being casually naked is not so much about comfort as it is opportunity. Our lives don’t give us much of a chance to even sit naked in our own home.

For most of us, we get up in the morning, get dressed, perhaps dress children, down some coffee, maybe some food, and try to make it to work on time. After work, there’s some combination of dinner, child care, social events and obligations, and by the time it is all over we’re more likely to pass out fully clothed on the couch than spending any time in our bare form. Casually naked? Sorry, I just don’t have the time.

I would like to suggest, though, that the best friends, not just intimate relationships but the kind of always-reliable friends who would either bail you out or be in the jail cell with you, are those around whom one can be casually naked. Granted, those friendships are rare, especially if one is male. For some, male nudity is seen as being inherently aggressive, so finding someone with whom one can just “hang out,” so-to-speak, can be challenging. When those relationships happen they are priceless.

To the degree we’ve created a society where we fear being naked around each other, we’ve done both ourselves and our friends a disservice because we’re afraid to let our friends see us as we truly are. Yet, that is exactly what we’ve done. Being honest, letting our real selves show, is considered bad form, even taboo. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Socially, I’ve known a lot of people who talk about enjoying being casually naked, but one would never actually catch them in that state. For all the tales of pizza delivery people being greeted at the door by someone naked, modesty tends to overtake most of us. Actually, I’m no so sure whether it’s modesty or a fear of being judged that forces us to put on that robe. The late comedian Rodney Dangerfield famously joked:

My wife was afraid of the dark… then she saw me naked and now she’s afraid of the light.

We worry so much about what other people think of our bodies that we tend to want to hide them rather than enjoying the natural state into which we were born. Fashion and popular culture doesn’t help, either. There’s a double standard between men and women that perpetuates old habits and stereotypes. Designer Christian Louboutin has said:

A naked woman in heels is a beautiful thing. A naked man in shoes looks like a fool.

What amazes me is that some people find being casually naked threatening, as though it might bring about the end of civilization as we know it. One of the most laughable objections I’ve heard is that to allow casual nudity in public would be to encourage an increase in crime. Think about that. You’re naked. Dude, you have no pockets and you’re barefoot. The only thing close to a crime one might commit while naked would be a random walk-by mooning.

Being casually naked is elusive, especially this morning. I hear children rustling around in their room. That means it’s time to put on pants. Perhaps we’ll find time to be naked later.[/one_half_last]

Advertising / PotD / video

One Voice

August 14, 2015

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There’s an objective and a subjective camera, like there’s a third- and a first-person narrator in literature. —Manuel Puig

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Oops, sorry, but if you were looking for the Barry Manilow song One Voice, this isn’t it. You can find that song here, if you’re really insistent. And old. Like me. Actually, it’s the only song from the 1979 album of the same name that I like at all, and it’s actually the 2010 version he did with acapella group Straight No Chaser that I prefer. You can find that one here, but again, the song has absolutely nothing to do with today’s picture. They just happen to share a name. That’s it. Hope you’re not too disappointed. If you’re younger than 50 you’re probably wondering what I’m even talking about.

What we did with today’s picture, which was completely reprocessed from the original to fit the video format, was experiment with adding a voice over, one voice, specifically my voice, to the video. Narration of this kind is a fairly common thing for short videos such as this, so I figured it couldn’t be too terribly difficult, especially given the challenges we’ve already had this week. My assumption was that this might not be easy, but would be reasonably doable without having to purchase new equipment of any kind.

Let me just say that equipment certainly does matter and the absence of a high-quality recording contributed to the challenges of laying a voice track over everything else. In an ideal world, the voice over would be recorded separately where it could be appropriately equalized and its levels adjusted professionally. Instead, what we ended up with was a recording that caught every possible background sound and left my voice sounding as though I was shouting into an empty room. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]To its credit, Adobe® Premiere Pro™ has a number of filters built into its effects selection that did a great job of removing most the background noise. You probably won’t hear the air conditioner running. You definitely won’t hear the cat jumping into my lap in the middle of recording. You won’t even hear my hand bumping my coffee cup right toward the end. The tools in the software are not sloppy by any stretch of the imagination. Any deficiency here is mine. To be able to properly utilize those tools, though, would take much more time than what I have to offer the project this week.

Adding the voice over to this picture was made somewhat easier by the fact we didn’t have to follow complicated motion or animation that would have required precise synchronization between the audio and video tracks. Yes, that capability is there, but again, we would be looking at a severely steep learning curve that doesn’t fit well with the remainder of my schedule this week. There are other things to do. Such as laundry. Lots and lots of laundry. As much fun as synching a voice to animation might be, that’s just a luxury we don’t currently have.

What we have, though, is one voice over what is actually two images. This allowed us to reveal the photograph slowly so that one actually listens to the narration. I like the overall effect, but, perhaps like most people, I’m less than thrilled with the sound of my own voice. We never sound how we think we’re supposed to sound. There’s a scientific reason for that but it would take a lot of time to explain. Barry Manilow is more interesting.

The original image and appropriate credits are below.[/one_half_last]

A Second Thought (2012). Model: Kat Gulling; Makeup: Danelle French; Hair: Kelly Walsh; Styling: Jantina Anderson; Studo assistance: Brian Logan

Advertising / PotD / video

Title This

August 13, 2015

You make a film to distract people, to interest them, perhaps to make them think, perhaps to help them be a little less naive, a little better than they were. —Claude Chabrol

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]What is a title? We hear the word and most people think of a book title, or the name of a song, perhaps. So, to tell someone that I’ve been playing with titles all day, or that a title has been causing me trouble, or that I can’t get a title to fit, is confusing to the average person without taking the time to give the word some additional context. Let me do that now: A title is to film what copy is to printed material; words that explain or emphasize or instruct or give credit.

Titles are everywhere in almost every form of video. The opening segment of one of my favorite cartoons, Phineas and Ferb, ends with DeeDee shouting, “Mom! Phineas and Ferb are making a title sequence!” Instantly, you’ve learned something about video production you didn’t already know. Any time you see words on a screen in any form or fashion it is a title. So, the opening of a show that list actors, producers, and the name of a show is a title sequence. The credits at the end of a movie are another title sequence. The product name and tagline at the end of a commercial is another. The video world is full of title sequences.

Titling is one of the advantages video has over still imagery or print. With print copy, there is limited space and text can easily get in the way or even overpower an image. While ads from a century ago tended to try and cram every bit of information they could into small print on a page, we’ve since learned that less is more and often we see ads with only one word and the product logo. A title sequence gives us a little more space and a number of different options so we can say more without it being overwhelming.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]I have to admit that, at least to some extent, I’m not using the best tool for the job here. Video editing is a complex monster, as we’ve learned this week, and requires multiple tools to handle the various pieces that go into the average video. Of course, those tools cost additional money and the cost can grow large rather quickly. Our goal at the beginning of the week was to stay within the boundaries of what comes by default with Adobe® Premiere Pro™, so we held today’s experiment to that confinement, though most professionals would shudder at doing so.

I also avoided the use of any special effects for the title sequences, beyond those that cause them to appear and disappear from the screen. Animating titles seems to be a big thing, especially giving it the appearance that someone is writing on the screen. I actually looked into that one. Again, wrong tools and way too much effort for something not going into full-fledged broadcast. I also question whether such gimmicks actually help the message or distract from it. These are merely experiments and I do have other things to do with my day.

Titles do help drive the point we’re trying to make with today’s image. I could just post the picture with copy that says, “Experience counts,” and you would likely get the message. The title sequences in the video explain why that experience counts and also embeds a concept that photography isn’t something one just “picks up.” Are the titles effective? You tell me. 30 seconds isn’t all that long for those who can’t read well. The original photo is below.[/one_half_last]

The Pain of Beauty (2012)

Advertising / PotD / video

Experiments In Moving Pictures

August 9, 2015

Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god… I loved his idea of what filmmaking was. —Martin Scorsese

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I have no idea what I’m doing. This week will either be delightfully interesting or a catastrophic disappointment. We are delving into an area about which I admit knowing very little but one which, it would seem, is necessary if one is to stay up to date with how best to present oneself as a photographer. Okay, up to date may not be the best term. Jumping the gun is probably more appropriate. Most people are still just fine posting still pictures. No one has told me that I need to change. No photographers of note have started doing anything differently than they always have. I’m responding to what I see as some “handwriting on the wall,” as it were, warning that we need to up our game if we are going to stay relevant.

What I’m responding to are changes in how material is viewed, and how often it is viewed, in social media. Whether one likes social media or not, and there are plenty of reasons to hate it, we cannot escape the fact that it is a dominant part of society, taking over the space that was once exclusive to newspapers and television. The good news is that, unlike newspapers and television, we can participate without it costing an arm and a leg. The challenge is that we cannot be successful with the same techniques we’ve been using since we first discovered the Internet.

We’ve known for quite some time that actually getting your pictures in front of the people on your friends list, or the people who have liked your professional page, is difficult. Facebook is continually revising their algorithms and other resources such as Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr change what gets preference in being seen. Where once that preference leaned strongly toward photographs, it now tilts even more strongly toward video. In some instances, video is three to four times more likely be seen than a photograph without paying for additional promotion, something most of us are reticent to do. So, we need to find a way to create video without succumbing to actually changing the photographs we take.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Creating moving pictures from still photographs is nothing new. We’ve been able to stitch strings of still images together with simple video effects for several years. Videos in that format are extremely popular at weddings and family reunions. They have their place. But, when a photographer places a photograph on the Internet, it is primarily for promotional purposes and ten-minute-long videos of someone else’s family don’t quite make the cut for that purpose. We need something short, something distinct, and something eye-catching that convinces people to take some kind of action, such as visiting our web site’s booking page. Something that acts more like a commercial.

So, all this week we’re taking still images, just one picture per day, and turning it into a video of approximately 30 seconds (today’s is actually 32 seconds). We’re using Adobe® PremierePro™ for editing, and Media Encoder for rendering. We’re at least starting with the basic materials that come with each product, though I can’t promise we won’t look for other sources by midweek. We’re pulling music from Free Music Archive, and yes, music is important for projects like this. We kept titles minimal today, but that may change through the week as well.

Everything I just mentioned in that paragraph involved learning something new. This 32-second video took all day to produce. I’m really hoping I get better quickly. One of the first things I’ve learned is that planning is more necessary than ever. But then, sometimes one can’t plan if one doesn’t know first how to do something. Ultimately, the matter comes down to whether any of this is actually effective. Will more people see the video in social media? Will we see more traffic to our website? Do moving pictures actually help? That’s the purpose of the experiment. We will see.

The original photo is below because we still like images that don’t move.[/one_half_last]

Back to 55 (2012). Model: Allison Hublar

Art / PotD

Keeping It Simple

August 8, 2015

Reality & Desire (2015)

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. —Ansel Adams

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Keeping it simple this morning means not digging too terribly far back in the archives. We first published this picture as part of a set in the art section back in May. Click here to see the full set. As I was arguing with myself about what to do this morning, it just seemed to make sense to use this shot, partly because I saw the model earlier this week and was reminded of how much I like this set, and partly because I didn’t need to do any additional work for it to be ready for this morning’s post. I really can be quite lazy at times.

Keeping it simple is a necessity on a Saturday morning. As much as I would like to start my day a little later than the 4:00 AM that is the weekday norm, the children have little body clocks that don’t yet possess the ability to recognize the difference between a school day and the weekend. I know the day will eventually come when convincing either of them to get up before noon will be practically impossible. We’re not to that point yet, though, and as a result Saturday mornings inevitably start much earlier than I want.

Trying to type while wiping sleep from my eyes is a bit dangerous. For starters, I’m usually alternating between wiping sleep and drinking coffee. Sometimes my hands get confused as to which we’re doing. Spilled coffee is the number one reason why I wear black. There’s also the danger that, if the coffee doesn’t wake me up soon enough, I might forget this little thing called tact and start writing something genuinely offensive. I’m really not as nice as I try to appear in public.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Keeping it simple is also an effective method of communication; one that is too often under employed. We sometimes mistake intelligence with the ability to string countless multi-syllabic words together as we prattle on about how much we like our number 2 pencil or some other really simple concept. Real intelligence is knowing how to be brief, and more importantly, knowing when to shut up. Saying too much about a simple concept everyone already understands makes one sound rather like a politician.

Unfortunately, there are these things called minimum word counts. Mine is 600 words. Below that, the two-column layout doesn’t work. That means that I have to sit here every morning and find ways to fill up the space. Most days that’s not a problem. In fact, most days I have to do some heavy editing to keep the whole thing from being too long. Most days I have no problem being extremely verbose. I’m really struggling here, especially knowing that everything important that needed to be said was in the first paragraph.

Keeping it simple is a pretty good rule in life as well. I’ve been in the position, several years ago now, of looking around me and realizing that we had too much stuff. Granted, a lot of the stuff was nice, but we were spending money on things we really didn’t need; things that actually made our lives more complicated rather than helping out in any significant way. Shortly thereafter, life came along and corrected that situation. I’ve learned how to make simple work at the most basic level. Simple is good. Simple is healthy. And now, I am simply done. See you tomorrow with something different.[/one_half_last]

Art / Photography / PotD

Flexible Friday

August 7, 2015

Flexible Friday

And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you’ll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not up to this Friday. —Alfred Doblin

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]As I sit down to write this morning, and it’s a rather unusual thing that I wake up on a Friday not already having at least half this thing done, I’m tempted to just set the picture here and walk away, leaving you to look at it and wonder for yourself what manner of meaning, if any, it might hold. For me, there’s a sadness to this image, but that’s a personal matter not really fit for public consumption. There are also the technical aspects of how this particular multiple exposure was achieved; a different technique used due to the fact that the background on each image was bright white. I’m not terribly motivated to recount the steps for that process, either.

As you look at the picture, you might be impressed with the model’s flexibility, and appropriately so. Lord knows I’m no longer in any condition to be contorting myself into such positions. Sure, I have friends who are yoga instructors and they all assure me that there are things I could do to increase my physical mobility without aggravating the pain issues. What no one has been able to do yet, however, is find a way to increase my mental flexibility that seems to be increasingly rigid as I get older. I’m sadly reaching that point in life when rather than being excited about the prospects for fun-filled Friday night activities, I’m wondering how early I might be able to get to bed.

I once met a lovely little lady in Paradise, California, back in 1981, who was 101 years old. She was the first person of such age I’d ever met and her spryness caught me off guard. “The secret,” she said, “is to never let anyone convince you that you’re old.” She was amazingly flexible, a former dancer, who put her stockings on while standing up to help maintain both her balance and her flexibility. She read constantly to maintain her mental acuity and every Friday walked the mile and a half each way to the senior center for lunch just to prove to “those old people” that it was still possible. She was quite inspirational.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]There was a time, and it seems like it was not long ago, when I considered myself reasonably flexible. I could scale a climbing wall as fast as any of my boys. I could straddle two canoes and manage to not fall into the river. I could leap across rocks to the middle of a stream so as to have the best perspective for a picture and not worry too much about dunking my equipment. I was also socially flexible. Last-minute schedule changes didn’t bother me. Long lines were something I could marginally tolerate. Differences of opinion were interesting and often worth considering. Fridays were busy and fun, even when we stayed home.

Not so much anymore. When my alarm went off this morning, the first thing I had to do was pop a dozen different joints that had gone stiff during the night. Walking across the floor to my desk was arduous, slow, with carefully measured steps. Getting up and down from my chair is challenging enough that I’ll sit here arguing with myself as to whether I really need that second cup of coffee before I lose consciousness and fall asleep on the keyboard. Again. Changes to my schedule? Don’t you dare! Once I have an appointment set it might as well be carved in stone. Death is the only excuse I’ll accept for changes and even then I might gripe about how inconsiderate it is for someone to die on a Friday and ruin the whole weekend. Cross opinions with me and you’re just being stupid.

Oh look, I’ve actually made it past my minimum 600-word count. I just got up and put on water for the second pot of coffee (French press). Perhaps I’m more flexible than I thought. I even have plans to go see a friend’s photography exhibition tonight, children in tow and everything. Just don’t talk to me about last night’s presidential debate; that was an exercise in who can pander in the most disgusting manner. I’m still not flexible enough to handle stupid. Don’t expect that to change.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Dust On The Trail

August 4, 2015

Dust On The Trail. Model: Lisa Petrini

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. ― George Bernard Shaw

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Death can be a difficult issue to discuss with children, especially when it comes to family members. One moment, you think they have a grasp of it, then later, seemingly out of the blue, the topic comes up again with new questions that need to be answered. With a five- and a six-year-old around the house, the subject comes up surprisingly often, sometimes in ways we weren’t expecting. Trying to figure out how best to respond to those questions and situations is a mixture of wiping tears and trying to not laugh at the wrong time.

We were driving past a mortuary and its large cemetery one afternoon when Baby Girl pipes up and informs us that this was where her pre-K teacher, Miss ‘Nay, works. When questioned as to why her teacher would work at a cemetery, the little darling responded without hesitation, “That’s where she puts the people she doesn’t like.”

Miss “Nay was horrified to hear of the exchange. She’s a jolly, pleasant woman who does a great job with children, but might be a bit superstitious. “I can’t stand dead people,” she told us. “I don’t even go to funerals.”

More frequently, and certainly with less humor, it is Little Man who raises the subject, frequently in tears over the loss of his great-grandmother a couple of years ago. Trying to explain to him that people don’t live forever and that his great-grandmother had lived a long life does little to appease him. She’s not here now, and that’s what counts. At other times, though, he can look out across a cemetery and explain that once one has expired that, rather than becoming dust, our bodies become tree seeds that grow new forests. While perhaps missing a biological step or four, that perspective of a renewable life is certainly less traumatic and easier to discuss.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Growing up in rural Oklahoma, and especially the son of a minister, death was such a normal part of life for us that we were almost callous about it. After all, we played and ran in large fields where it wasn’t unusual to come across whole sun-bleached skeletons of cows. The general opinion of ranchers at the time was to only remove a cow carcass if it was diseased and posed a health risk to the herd. Coming across skulls in the dust just wasn’t that uncommon.

Western philosophies have evolved over the past couple of generations where we no longer see death’s natural role in the life cycle. Instead, we see that passing from life to dust as the ultimate unfairness, the unjust removal of someone important to our lives. We expect explanations where there are none to be had and look to blame people who are not genuinely at fault. In matters of violence that should never have happened, our sense of outrage stems from our own sense of privilege that the deceased should never have been taken from us; a warped sense that it is we, more than the dead person, who have been short-changed.

Today is the thirteenth anniversary of my mother’s sudden and very unexpected death, a mere six months and four days after my father’s passing. I was living in Atlanta and one of the challenging decisions we had to make was whether the boys should go to their Mema’s funeral. To do so would mean them missing the first two days of school, but to not take them would deny them the emotional closure we thought they might need. We left the decision up to them. They opted to not go. As one of them put it, “We’ve been to enough funerals this year.”

Life is a wonderful thing, but sooner or later we all become dust on the trail. Love now. Live now. Find peace. Embrace the full cycle of life, even when it seems unfair.[/one_half_last]

Photography / PotD

Double Exposure: Did You Mean To Do That?

August 2, 2015

Natural Beauty. Model: Destany Harte

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ― Ansel Adams

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I like quiet Sunday mornings; the kind where I can sit here at the computer and read, drink my coffee, and listen to music in the headphones without being interrupted. I’m only mildly annoyed that we’re not out shooting in this perfect light because I was up way too late last night to have been thinking lucidly early enough to actually take advantage of the situation. I’ve been behind a camera long enough now that I don’t have to have one in my hands every waking second, I don’t have to shoot every day to feel complete, and when I do shoot I’m much more likely to be concerned about the emotion of the image rather than the technical aspects. If I’m not feeling a concept, there’s little use in pushing through and shooting it; there’s little point in taking more bad pictures. We’ve had our fair share of those plus a few.

Not every Sunday morning is quiet, though, and not every bad shot is a waste. I remember, early in my career, getting a phone call at some ungodly hour of a Sunday morning telling me that yet another tornado had ripped through yet another small town in Oklahoma. I pulled on clothes in the dark (the advantage of a monochrome wardrobe), grabbed my camera and a half-dozen packs of film and headed out. One of the dangers of early-morning shooting, especially when the matter’s urgent, is that one tends to not check their camera bag as thoroughly as they should, and I didn’t. I knew I had film and my lenses with a selection of filters for effect. I didn’t bother checking for backup batteries for the film advance.

It seems almost silly now, and is one of those problems that new shooters will never experience, having to manually advance film. The batteries that powered that function were often specialized, expensive, and impossible to find outside a camera store. Finding one on a Sunday would be impossible. So, I kept a couple of spares. On a shelf. And they were still sitting there when I drove off bleary-eyed into the night rain. This was one of those moments when I was second-guessing my profession and spent most the drive thinking about going back to college and working on my masters degree. Being a photographer just seemed like a ridiculous way to try and learning a living. No one ever asked a symphony conductor to be up before dawn.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Arriving in the small town forced me to focus on my job. The tornado had skipped through town obliterating the two-block commercial area before taking out a church building, a handful of homes, and the school gym. There were trees and power lines down everywhere, making the situation a bit dangerous. Highway patrol and electric company officials were already there keeping people away from live electric lines. Miraculously, no one had been seriously hurt this time. I pulled my camera from my bag, slapped in the first roll of film and started shooting. I was about a dozen shots in when I noticed I was hearing the click of the shutter, but not the whir of the film advance. I took the battery out, wiped it on my shirt, and stuck it back in the camera, and it gave me a few more shots before dying completely. That’s when I discovered I’d left the backup batteries at home, some 70 miles away.

I did the best I could,trying to remember to manually advance the film after every shot, but I knew I had missed a few and warned the lab that there would be a few double exposure shots out of the batch. I apologized for the wasted film. Monday morning, the lab called to let me know that there were a couple of those “wasted” shots might be worth keeping. Specifically, the double exposure had placed the rising sun coming up right behind the destroyed church building. The effect was rather striking and totally unique, one of those things one can never reproduce.

Double exposure doesn’t naturally occur with digital cameras, but we can re-create the effect with some careful layer work. There are several different ways of achieving the effect, layering one image over the other, then adjusting the layer blend mode and opacity, then tweaking the levels and curves. One can easily get bogged down in the details, but double exposure really has to do with emotion. If the image doesn’t create an emotional response then it’s a waste of time. So, this week we’re going to look at some specially created double exposure images that we’ve produced along a number of themes for the end of summer. This is different from what we normally share. I hope you’re ready to feel something. [/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

Playing With Your Food

August 1, 2015

Playing With Food

All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt. ― Charles M. Schulz

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]There is something about growing up and being able to do the things that your parents wouldn’t let you do. Jumping on the bed. Watching scary movies at night. Having desert before the main course. One of those things that continues to bring great joy to me is playing with my food. I think that’s why I spend so much time in the kitchen preparing meals. There is no small pleasure in taking a stack of raw ingredients and creating something that, usually, ends up being delicious. For me, eating the concoction is secondary to the creating, and should I happen to get covered in something delicious in the process, well, I’m probably not going to mind too terribly much.

Having seen three boys through their toddlerhood, I’m rather convinced that playing with our food is inherent and instinctive. From the moment they stopped nursing, all three boys found interest in seeing what all they might do with their food before it went into their mouths. Can it be stacked? Will it fit up my nose? How does it look in my ear? Hey, this makes my hair look cool! You know, this feels very cool on my toes. Wow, look how much of this fits in my diaper! No matter how many times it happened, it wasn’t until they were school age that they reluctantly stopped playing with their food at every meal. I won’t say they don’t still play around on occasion; I’ve seen what a certain Marine tries putting between a couple of crackers.

I am of the opinion that playing with our food is one of our earliest forms of creative expression. Before we’re allowed to play with craft dough or color with crayons, there’s food—food that is soft and often comes with sauce. Baby food spreads quite well, especially across a white highchair tray, or mom’s linen table cloth that’s been handed down for five generations. Daddy’s clean, starched shirt is the perfect canvas for a mixture of strained peas and smashed carrots. Here is where we first begin to express ourselves, to experiment with blending colors and textures, and seeing just exactly what all we can do with these things called hands and toes. As incredibly frustrating as it is for the parent who has to clean up both the baby and the artwork, the lessons being learned are crucial to our early development.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]I won’t say that any of the works we’ve shown you this week are critical to anyone’s artistic or motor skill development. I will say that they were each interesting as we shot them. Rarely did the food behave exactly the way we anticipated. Sometimes body heat caused things to melt; other times it caused things to sweat and bead up. We discovered that small pieces were easier than larger ones, especially when it comes to chocolate. We anticipated chocolate being a little messy, but an eight-ounce bar liquefied almost the instant it touched skin. Orange peel curled up, dried out, and changed color within a fifteen-minute period. I learned something new about food with every new concept and in some cases decided to never use said products again, even for their intended purposes. Something that hurts you on the outside can’t be doing anything helpful for your insides.

What this episode of playing with food taught me, though, is that the possibilities for expressing one’s creativity by merging food with the human form. The seven examples you’ve seen this week are only half of what we’ve shot, and I’ve developed plenty of ideas over the past five years should I decide to ever expand on the concept. I’ve not even started playing with pasta or vegetables. Wet sauces are so numerable they could probably host their own exhibition. I did give momentary thought to trying something with ice cream, but given our experience with chocolate I don’t see that working out quite so well. Anything that spoils, melts, or sours quickly isn’t a good choice.

Of course, we could always just work with baby food. We already know its artistic potential, and for all I know it might just help someone get back in touch with their inner child. Although, if that inner child is a brat then perhaps it’s better that it just stays put away. The world doesn’t need more politicians. What the world needs is the freedom to take what is in front of them and use that to express themselves, whether it’s through food, or cloth, or digital electronics, or even tree bark. Art doesn’t start with the exotic, but creates exotic from the ordinary. I can’t think of a better place to start than with food. [/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

Your Crackers

July 31, 2015

Your Crackers

I know people that could serve me canned tuna and saltine crackers and have me feel more at home at their table than some people who can cook circles around me. The more you try to impress people, generally the less you do. —Alton Brown

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I am obligated to address the grammarians among my friends and readers who are at this moment questioning whether I have made a mistake in the title of this entry. No, I have not. The intention here is to reflect the possessive in that it is my intention to discuss the crackers that you own. Therefore, they are your crackers. Now, notwithstanding, you may very well be somewhat daft and/or loopy also, in which case I might tell your nurse that you’re crackers and I’ve no doubt she would readily agree with me since she has to put up with your cantankerous old ass on a daily basis. Behave yourself and take your medicine; I almost know what I’m doing.

Crackers may well be one of the oldest forms of prepared food known to humanity. After all, it doesn’t really take much to make them. A little flour, a little water, at minimum; maybe a little salt, possibly a little baking powder if that’s not against one’s religious convictions, is all one needs to make crackers. Those ingredients have been around for thousands of years, and to a large extent the recipes haven’t changed all that much, though one might argue that the base ingredients have evolved along with us. One might argue whether humans or the grains have survived that evolution well, but both of us are still here and crackers are still just as much a staple of the modern diet as they were for our ancestors. Some things just can’t really be improved upon all that much.

Among all the various types of crackers available in the universe, saltines may be the most prevalent. Not only are they simple, they are inexpensive which puts them in high demand among the 98 percent of us who actually have to pay attention to the price of food. They provide accompaniment to everything from simple soups to fancy hors d’Oeuvres without risking upsetting anyone’s stomach. One can even purchase low-sodium saltines, which seems rather counter-intuitive at first, but since I’ve become one of the millions who has to watch their blood pressure I understand the concern over what a little salt can do to a body. My personal preference is for those round butter-flavored crackers, again the low-sodium kind. I can devour a sleeve of those and still eat a full meal. Children love fish-shaped crackers with artificial cheese flavoring. Multi-grain crackers are nice, but seem almost too fancy for everyday use. There’s a different cracker for everyone. What’s important is your crackers and making sure they’re always available.[/one_half]

[one_half padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]My most vivid memory of saltines comes courtesy my maternal grandfather, for whom I’m named. Grandpa was on disability by the time I was born, having hurt his back working for the Rock Island railroad. As a result, he took a lot of medicines to manage his pain and associated ailments. Some of those medicines required eating something before taking the pill in order to prevent nausea. One dose came at bedtime and since it just didn’t make any sense to eat anything heavy, Grandpa would typically slice off a chunk of longhorn cheddar and put it between two saltines. That was just enough for the pill to do its work. There were other times, often around lunch, when he would open a can of Spam® (yes, people actually do that), cut off a slice and put that between crackers. If he was feeling patient he might fry the Spam, but more often than not he just ate it as it was, straight from the can. Saltines were grandpa’s crackers and I think of him every time I see on.

For this project, we crumbled a single sleeve of saltines, going for that fine consistency one gets when the little cracker package one gets with the salad at a truck stop is handed to a two-year-old. While crackers don’t weigh a great deal, they are still subject to the laws of gravity and this is one of the sets we shot with the model standing rather than lying down. Of all the different substances we tried, crackers spread the most evenly. We tried a couple of different kinds of crackers, but saltines provided the most contrast and recognizable texture.

Look around your kitchen; chances are you have a sleeve or a box of crackers sitting somewhere on a shelf. If you are one of my sons, you have a sleeve sitting next to your computer. Your crackers are what gives life to other boring foods, such as simple cheeses or processed meats. Your crackers leave a trail of crumbs to help us find you should you become misplaced (or hiding because you’re two and have pooped your pants). Your crackers fill the culinary cracks where one needs texture without noticeable taste. Most importantly, though, your crackers are your crackers. No one else can eat your crackers without permission. Should you choose to share your crackers, you are a nice person, but we understand if you don’t. It’s probably nap time, anyway. Brush the crumbs off your shirt and lie down. Your crackers will be right here when you wake up. Have a good nap.[/one_half]

Art / PotD

Snap, Crackle, Hold the Pop

July 30, 2015

Snap, Crackle, Hold The Pop

Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rooting around for a free gift. —Craig Brown

[one_half padding=”4px 10 px 0 4px”]My generation, those of us commonly referred to as Baby Boomers, should probably be more accurately named the cereal generation. We are, after all, the ones who made the folks at Kellogg’s and Post and General Mills billionaires. We were consumed with our breakfast cereals, those sugary-sweet morsels of sugar infused grain with a sweet sugary coating and all the natural goodness of sugar that made us snap and crackle. No wonder we were hyperactive as hell! And reading the back of the cereal box was the child’s equivalent of the adult sitting at the same table reading the morning newspaper. The information on the back of the cereal box was vital to life because it told us everything we could do with the toy inside the box! Reading it once was simply not enough. We had to go over it again and again and again.

Actually, we were a gullible bunch of youngsters who believed in things like x-ray glasses and super secret agent decoder rings. In fact, I distinctly remember fighting my younger brother on more than one occasion for the right to wear that decoder ring we pulled from the cereal box. After all, there was a message to decode on the back of the box and he wasn’t old enough to read it yet, much less understand it’s super secret agent spy message. We believed the cartoon characters who told us to follow our nose, that sugar was great, and that the snap and pop of milk poured over cracked rice was actually the cereal talking to us. Good god, we were a stupid bunch of kids. And we’re running the country now, so maybe that explains a few things.

Rice Krispies® held an extra special place on the shelf lined with almost-empty-but-not-quite boxes of breakfast cereal. Not only could we enjoy the snap and such of the cereal in the morning, but at least a few times a year Mother would mix the cereal with marshmallows for one of the best treats to ever grace the refreshment table at a school or church party. I’ve no idea whose mom originally came up with this concoction, but she most certainly deserves sainthood in the eyes of children everywhere. What would a party be without those treats? Sure, the same thing could be done with just about any cereal, but no one ever did that because it would have just been a blatant, un-cool knock off of the original. Kellogg’s now packages the things themselves because modern moms are too “busy” to be bothered with the fifteen minutes it takes to make a batch. Trust me, kids, if you’re being fed the packaged goods you’re being cheated. Big time.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4 px 0 10 px”]Cereal is still very big business, of course, but attitudes have changed. Sugar is no longer in the name of anything because everyone pretends to be health conscious. Mind you, the cereal itself doesn’t actually have any less sugar, but they’ve removed the word from the name so that moms wouldn’t be so blatantly reminded that they’re feeding their children empty calories that will establish bad eating habits for the rest of their lives. They’ve also played down the advertising and all but eliminated the prize inside the box. Again, the cereal hasn’t changed. Kids just don’t have the joy of finding true meaning in the bottom of a box like their parents found in the bottom of a bottle. We have deprived our children of one of the basic sources of hope. No wonder they’re committing violent crime before they’re old enough to drive. They never got to figure out the message from the super secret agent decoder ring.

You’ll note we sliced strawberries to put on our Rice Krispies®. Putting fruit on cereal has anyways been a big thing. Parents like it because the fruit is a natural sweetner. Kids like it because MORE SUGAR! In our case, we added the fruit to give the picture some color. Up until this point in my life, I had never really noticed how just incredibly bland looking a lot of cereal is. Those made of a single grain such as corn, rice, or wheat address all monochromatic as they sit there in a bowl of white milk. There’s no visual excitement, nothing that separates one bite from another other than degrees of sogginess. The bright red of strawberries makes a tremendous difference in the visual impact.

I rarely eat breakfast cereal any more. I rarely eat breakfast any more. I’m up early, downing coffee; the kids eat at school and by the time they’re on the bus I’m too deeply involved in work to bother. When I do eat, it tends to be something marginally healthy with granola and dried fruit. No more sugar bombs. No more decoder rings. Being an adult would really suck except for the fact I can now play with my cereal and call it art. Pouring cereal all over someone who’s not my brother? I can get into that.

Our kids deserve to experience breakfast like we did, with all the family drama and hope and encouragement that came from the back of a cereal box. Kids deserve decoder rings. Otherwise, life is like cereal that has sat in milk to too long: still some snap and crackle here, but no pop. [/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

Doing It Wrong

July 29, 2015

You’re Doing It Wrong

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

[one_half padding=”4px 10 px 0 4px”]”We all make mistakes.” How many times does a parent or teacher say that to a child who is distraught over what the adult sees as an insignificant error? I know I heard the phrase countless times as I was growing up and I’m pretty sure I’ve said it to my boys and several other children, and maybe some other adults, over the years. Some mistakes are significant and deserve attention and correction and perhaps even punishment. But the majority of mistakes we make aren’t really that big a deal, even though they may feel like it at the time. We’re good at blowing things way out of proportion. Hell, political pundits wouldn’t have anything to talk about if they gave mistakes a fair shake. None of us are perfect, but we too often expect such of ourselves and, most notoriously, of others.

“You should have known better.” Wow, have I used that one far too often. I’m rather ashamed now that I’m sitting here giving it some though. Should we always know better? Sure, we may have covered the topic under similar circumstances multiple times before, but when we consider the nuances that surround each and every second of our lives that keep up from actually duplicating anything, could it be possible someone innocently, unwittingly, taking the moment for the unique thing that it is, doesn’t know better? What we see as an error born of failure to pay attention may very well be one simply caused by living in the moment.

“You’re doing it wrong.” Ouch, that one always hurts but it has taken on a new life of its own thanks to a “song,” by some guy named Drake. I have to admit to some ignorance here. I’m not a hip-hop/rap fan and if I’ve ever actually heard a song by this Drake fellow no one bothered to tell me. I know he’s no Frank Sinatra but it’s not exactly fair to hold that against Drake, is it? Just because someone doesn’t sing in the style to which we accustomed doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong, does it? So this Drake fellow is being creative, as are millions of other people who choose to do things in their own special way, color their life outside the line. Does that mean they’re doing it wrong?[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Powder-like substances were the first thing we tried, but after five attempts with only two that could be considered successful and two that were outright disasters, we opted for thicker, more sturdy substances that provided a greater amount of texture. I don’t like having a concept go wrong, but moving on to other substances was probably the best for the project. Being versatile and flexible is a necessity even when working on one’s own. That doesn’t make admitting that you’re doing it wrong any easier.

At least the only m negative aspect of using flour was the mess quotient, which was considerable. Anyone who has spent any time in a kitchen knows the propensity floor has for getting all over the place, no matter how careful one tries to be. One little whiff of air and there is flour all over the place. Now imagine, we weren’t trying to be all that careful and the air conditioning was on. Every time the model changed poses, more floor became airborne. By the time we finished, flour dusted everything in the room. Clean up took weeks.

I still like this image, though I probably wouldn’t do it again. There’s a phantom-like feeling to it that is a little dark and mysterious if one chooses to let one’s mind wander in that direction. Also like the natural lines that formed as the model moved. The texture and design turned out far more interesting than I had anticipated. While this portion of the project wasn’t quite what I wanted, at least it doesn’t carry that sense that we were doing it wrong. Nothing in life has to be perfect to be correct. After all, we all make mistakes, even when we should have known better.

Forgiveness is often very necessary. [/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

A Cool Thrill

July 27, 2015

A Cool Thrill

After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy. ― Denis Johnson, Nobody Move

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I don’t see them around much anymore, that cool thrill that enlivens a mouth and freshens breath. They used to be everywhere: doctor’s offices, bank teller windows, on the reception desk of every office in the United States, and scattered in little dishes around funeral homes. I spent way too much time in funeral homes as a child, so I know these things. They were the one candy my parents rarely minded me sneaking though they were careful to make sure I didn’t walk out with a pocket full. They were gentle, soothing, just sweet enough to satisfy that sugar craving but mellow enough to not overwhelm one’s mouth. Take a swig of soda while you had one in your mouth, though, and things just might get a little crazy in there.

I’m talking, of course, about the little individually wrapped peppermint candies that are, probably even now gracing a dish in the viewing room of some funeral home. We wouldn’t want our bad breath to bother the deceased, you know. They went by different names. Spangler Candies called theirs Starlight Mints while Brach’s called theirs Star Brite Mints. What relationship a peppermint-flavored piece of hardened sugar has to do with anything related to astronomy I’m not sure, but everyone called them star-something. White candies with stripes of red, they didn’t have an expiration date and the only way for them to go bad was if they somehow managed to get wet. One never knew if the candy had been in the bowl a day, a month, or a year; it didn’t really seem to matter.

What we don’t like to talk about, and quite likely the reason we don’t see as many of them anymore, is that every place of business set out mints because everyone smoked cigarettes, but no one liked smoker’s breath. I grew up in a day when it wasn’t unusual to walk into a business, especially one dominated by male employees, and the air be thick with cigarette smoke. The more people smoked, the more one could be sure there was a dish full of mints sitting nearby. While no one really cared about the effects of second-hand smoke, they did care about how their breath smelled. Having bad smoker’s breath was a far worse social offense than was the actual act of smoking, especially when attempting to comfort the family of the deceased.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]If we’re totally honest, peppermint candies were far from being my favorite because, while they did provide a cool thrill that made listening to adult conversations slightly less intolerable, they took too long to dissolve in my mouth. I never have been the most patient person on the planet. I like my sugar rush to come quickly, strong, and preferably coated in milk chocolate. If I was sucking on a peppermint, it almost always meant I was somewhere I didn’t really want to be, waiting on my parents, trying really hard to not get in trouble despite the overwhelming level of boredom that came with visiting people who were sick, or dying, or already dead. Poppa was the compassionate one. Me? I wanted to get home so I could ride my bike.

Unlike yesterday’s photo where I was able to find pre-packaged bits and pieces of candy, I had to buy a couple of bags worth of peppermints and crush them each myself. The task was not easy and thank god the little things are individually wrapped or there would still be pieces of peppermint scattered across the studio floor. Once sugar reaches the crackle stage, breaking it damn near requires a sledgehammer. Creating enough crushed candy to cover not one but two bodies sounded as though we were undertaking a major construction project. Lord knows I’ve not spent that much time with a hammer in my hand since doing string art back in the fourth grade. Preparation for this shoot was one of the most time consuming ever.

I love how the peppermint just scatters loosely across the skin. I cannot help but look at this picture and think of the holidays, and winter, and Santa Clause, and peppermint faeries. Then, because I’m a child, I have to giggle at the use of the word faeries.

Using peppermint for an art project like this was doing the candy a favor, I think. I saved them from sitting endlessly in a cut glass dish next to a dead person and gave them a brief but exciting life covering a naked person. What a cool thrill that had to be for the peppermint. Actually, the models didn’t seem to mind, either. Cool thrills all around.[/one_half_last]

Behind The Scenes / Photography / PotD

A Good Touch

July 24, 2015

Tintype

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. —Walker Evans

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Photography isn’t all that old of a medium and it has been one of constant change pretty much from the moment it first started. Fortunately, it is a well-documented history and we have done a decent job of preserving not only the images from the past but the manner in which they were taken. We can, though sometimes with a level of great difficulty, with a good touch duplicate almost any type of photography with either the original equipment or exact copies. Photographers tend to be a nostalgic bunch and no matter what advancements are made to the industry, there has always been those who prefer the way it used to be.

Photography inevitably invokes looks at the past because it is the past we have captured. Sure, sometimes it’s the recent past, but even if we share photographs “in real time” there is a lapse there that only grows longer. Today’s photo was taken in 2006, which is practically forever by digital standards. Given the temporary nature of anything digital, it is a bit surprising that nine-year-old photos still exist. The camera on which this shot was taken is just as much a relic now as would be a tintype. In fact, that is exactly the reason I chose to process this image using a tintype tonality. Both cameras are obsolete, but at least the tintype gives us a distinctive look into the past.

A good touch is necessary when doing any kind of “antique” look. There have been multiple methods of recreating this old look over the years, depending on what was available in a particular version of Photoshop™ and with all of them the challenge has been to not go overboard with the effect, making the image too dark or too light. All we can do is approximate the look, after all. Remember that original tintypes were printed on thin sheets of metal, not paper, which gave it a reflective tone not possible in a digital format. We’re also accustomed to seeing streaks and burning around the edges, but that is due to decay, not originally part of the image.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]I don’t use this conversion method often because to do so just ends up looking cheap and gimmicky. It works best on older digital images that are less than ten megapixels in depth and more likely to have a natural noise level similar to the grain of a tintype. Also remember that there are two different types of tintype, dry and wet, and each has its own tonal range. Try this on an image:

Duplicate the background layer. Desaturate and equalize the new layer and reduce its opacity to 25%.
Duplicate that new layer. Auto-adjust the levels and contrast on the new layer, then apply a smart blur with a radius of 3 and threshold of 25, quality: low.
Here’s the tricky part. Add a curves adjustment layer and make an adjustment in the red channel only. Make one adjustment point with input 128 and output 157, which curves upward, giving the image a light pink tone.
Create a second curves adjustment layer, this time doing an auto adjustment in each channel, red, green, and blue.
Create a levels adjustment layer and set the output to 50, 208.
Add a fill layer with the blending mode set to color. Use these settings: Red-255, Green-229, Blue-191.
Add a second fill layer. Set the blending mode to color and reduce the opacity to 40%. The settings are easy: Red-223, Green-223, Blue-223.

What you do beyond this point is totally up to you. We added a frame to our image for effect, but it really isn’t necessary. If an image is too clean, you might add some noise and if you want an aged look you could dodge and burn around the edges to create the streaking. Again, you’ll need a good touch, a delicate and reserved use of the tools, to not overdo the effect. This isn’t an everyday conversion, but for special images it can really stand out.[/one_half_last]

Behind The Scenes / Photography / PotD

Subtle Touches

July 22, 2015

Kodak T-Max 100

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. —Duane Michals

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Do you remember the first picture you ever took? Chances are it wasn’t 35mm, but rather a popular consumer-grade fixed-lens camera. Poppa wouldn’t let me touch his Brownie, but we did own a series of little 110 Instamatics that were passed around to whichever family member wasn’t actually in the photo. I remember dumping that film cartridge in the back and looking through the small viewfinder, trying to not cut off everyone’s heads as Mother tended to do. If we were inside, there was a requirement for flash, which most often came in the form of a cube that sat on top of the camera. Getting four flashes without having to change cubes seemed so much more modern than the single-use bulbs required for the Brownie. Never mind that they tended to over-light, casts horrible shadows, and were anything but subtle. We were just having fun with friends and family. No one took seriously anything shot with a 110.

Using a 35mm film was different and something I didn’t experience until I was in college. It was the summer of 1981, if I remember correctly, and we were going to a family reunion of sorts, back to Arkansas and the little farming community where Poppa grew up. A friend loaned me his 35mm, loaded a roll of color 36-exposure color film, and showed me quickly how to focus the lens. I put the camera in the trunk of the car, largely afraid to use it for fear of causing damage. When I did try to take a few pictures with it, I was frustrated by the fact that a subtle movement could throw the entire picture out of focus. I didn’t even use the full 36 frames. I was sure, at that point, that photography at any advanced level wasn’t for me.

So much of photography seems to center around the big, highly-produced, carefully manipulated, high-processed images that appear in fashion magazines that we tend to lose sight of the subtle, more nuanced images where careful attention is given to the detail. Finer points of an image are easily lost as we mismanage light or fail to pay attention to precise settings on the camera. Sure, maybe no one notices, and perhaps no one cares, but when I look back at archived images, which is where we find most of our #POTD subjects, detail, or the lack of it, is the first thing my eyes catch. Subtle touches can make a tremendous amount of difference.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]No black and white film I’ve used handles those subtle touches better than Kodak Professional T-Max 100. When I first started taking pictures, this was the film I wasn’t allowed to touch; it was more expensive, required a photographer that knew what they were doing, and was reserved for those special occasions when someone of national prominence was visiting. There is no finer grain, no better resolving power, no sharper lines than is possible with this film. T-Max enlarges well, it is consistent in tone from batch to batch, and it handles the most subtle of details with finesse. Art photographers have long loved this film, but I always liked it for portraits as well because I feel like it does a better job of capturing everything one wants to see in a face.

Okay, so there are times T-Max can be fussy, especially in development. There is dramatic difference between the 100 speed and 400 speed versions of the film. 100 speed prefers longer exposure times, which may be great for portraits and still life, but is totally inappropriate for almost any kind of motion at all. The shorter the exposure time, the more the film struggles. Variances in any portion of the development environment affect the contrast and tone of the final image. Even subtle changes in temperature can have strong results. Similarly, one has to be careful with the conversion to digital. I used these settings for black and white adjustment: reds-37, yellows-70, greens-33, cyans-64, blues-28, magentas-68.

Whether there is, or can be, a good digital equivalent of T-Max 100 is open for debate. With digital images, grain, or more correctly, noise is introduced by the camera sensor and is not something easily removed in processing. T-Max 100 has such a fine grain that any noise in the image discounts the accuracy of the conversion. One needs to be extremely careful with any contrast adjustment as well. Still, when one is starting with a good image, this is a good method to use and the subtle handling of detail makes a world of difference.[/one_half_last]

experience

Providing meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures – it is the designer’s job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.—Paul Rand

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Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.—Frederick Douglass

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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.—James A. Baldwin

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Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.—Golda Meir

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Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.—Angelina Jolie

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You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.—Mahatma Gandhi

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All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.—Blaise Pascal

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this week’s photographs are strictly those of the author: charles i. letbetter, and do not necessarily reflect the attitudes or opinions of the models involved in the pictures. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the model. Thank you.

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Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets ― Andy Warhol

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If something’s going to happen for you, it will, you can’t make it happen. And it never does happen until you’re past the point where you care whether it happens or not. ― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

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I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do. ― Andy Warhol

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I always say: To be well dressed you must be well naked. —Oscar de la Renta

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Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There’s an objective and a subjective camera, like there’s a third- and a first-person narrator in literature. —Manuel Puig

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You make a film to distract people, to interest them, perhaps to make them think, perhaps to help them be a little less naive, a little better than they were. —Claude Chabrol

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Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god… I loved his idea of what filmmaking was. —Martin Scorsese

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Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. —Ansel Adams

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And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you’ll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not up to this Friday. —Alfred Doblin

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A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. ― George Bernard Shaw

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When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ― Ansel Adams

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All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt. ― Charles M. Schulz

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I know people that could serve me canned tuna and saltine crackers and have me feel more at home at their table than some people who can cook circles around me. The more you try to impress people, generally the less you do. —Alton Brown

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Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rooting around for a free gift. —Craig Brown

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It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

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After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy. ― Denis Johnson, Nobody Move

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Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. —Walker Evans

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Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. —Duane Michals

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