Subtle Transformation

August 12, 2015

My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat – or in film’s case ‘run on’ – manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing. —Andy Warhol

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]The Warhol quote is appropriate for this morning. Today’s video experiment is one you may need to watch more than once before you actually observe the subtle transformation that takes place over the 30-second duration of the project. I’m not going to tell you right away exactly what it is. Sure, you’ll see the video move; that part’s rather obvious. But there is a subtle transformation that occurs slowly, one that changes the emotion of the image, but avoids being dramatic in its presentation. Don’t be embarrassed if you need to hit the replay button more than once before you realize what’s happening.

I’m going to have to watch this post today. I’ve been uploading the videos to my YouTube channel because not only is that the easiest and most dominant method of video presentation, it also integrates well with our web design. I don’t have to go through a number of steps for it to work as I do with some sources. I could upload the video directly, but I tried that with the first one and was less than pleased with the result. However, YouTube, like many other forms of social media, sometimes goes apoplectic over artistic material. Unlike Facebook, where I can set some images to be seen only by specific, appreciative friends, YouTube videos not set for public viewing don’t embed in other websites. There’s a chance the video won’t survive the day. Or it might. One never knows.

As a backup, I’ve uploaded the video to Vimeo, which has a more tolerant policy toward artistic material. I have to take a couple of extra steps to embed it, should that become necessary, but if it happens that, too, should be a subtle transformation that is less than obvious to the average viewer. There are so very many considerations when working with video.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]I will also be watching to see if today’s video is more popular than yesterday’s. Once again, I was disappointed in the lack of attention yesterday’s image received and have to assume that it was largely because there were no humans in the picture. This is why I post so very few landscape and other non-model oriented artistic images. When we post a photograph to the website, we need for that image to draw people in, to make them curious and interested at what we are doing, what there is to see here. Ultimately, we want people to click on the booking link and set an appointment with us, or contact us if they have questions. That doesn’t happen when I post pictures of barns, even though I think the effect in yesterday’s video was very cool.

I get it; subtle transformation is something that happens in our head the moment we see an image. We glance at a picture and instantly decide whether we want to give it any more of our attention. People, especially faces, are easier for us to engage on an emotional level. We look to see if the subject is someone we know, what they might hold in common with us or someone else with whom we are acquainted. Our instinctive response is to try and personalize a photograph on some level and having a model in the picture makes that easier because, if nothing else, we’re all human. Allegedly.

Subtle transformation is, I think, I good approach to today’s image. One needs to not just look, but observe carefully or they’ll miss the entire point and purpose of the video. I’ll be watching to see how many times the video is viewed. I’ll explain the transformation below the original image. [/one_half_last]

A Quiet Moment (2012)

If you’ll watch today’s video very closely, you’ll see it slowly moves from black and white to color. That’s the subtle transformation!

Advertising / PotD / video

Moved By The Music

August 11, 2015

Music really becomes the soundtrack to the major events to your life. —Sheryl Crow

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]We all know that music plays a fundamental role in film and our lives. As I sit here writing in the morning (the clock just flash 4:30 AM), I have my headphones on listening to the soft, lovely voice of Sarah Brightman singing Time to Say Goodbye. Like many people, I have different soundtracks saved for different moods and different times of the day. An hour from now, I’ll switch to the “Morning” playlist just before waking the little ones for school. Later this morning, it’s likely to be classic rock blaring through the speakers as I’m editing photographs. For a vast majority of the world’s population, music is what keeps us going through the day and even, in some cases, keeps us from giving up and walking out.

Advertising creatives know all too well that music, or any sound at all, can make or break a commercial, especially when one only has 30 seconds or less. The first sound one hears does more to set the mood and viewer expectation than does the first image. Pictures can be interpreted any number of ways when left sitting out on their own, especially when the photo is rather innocuous and void of copy. The soundtrack guides the viewer toward a specific interpretation, whether that be serious, emotional, or humorous. When the match-up between music and imagery is done especially well, no voice over or copy is even necessary. A good commercial can be like a mini music video in its effectiveness.

When one only has a limited bit of time, though, finding music that fits a concept can be challenging. Advertising creatives like pop songs because they provide an instant level of recognition and even an implied endorsement on the part of the artist. The problem with that approach is that, A) it’s incredibly expensive to gain the rights to use a genuinely popular song from a popular artist; the whole budget can be blown right here. B) They don’t write 30-second pop songs, so someone’s going to have to do some creative cutting and mixing; a task that sounds so much easier than it actually is. A bad mix of a good song can have the exact opposite effect from what one was wanting. This is not easy territory.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Knowing all this, and knowing that I’m less than proficient at mixing and mashing soundtracks, selecting music for this week has not been easy. Our filtering process went something like this:

Is it free? We have no budget for this experiment (as usual). Our only choice was to use clips that are either public domain or have an attribution only Creative Commons license.
Is it too long? It’s more likely that we can work with a clip that is under 90 seconds than one that is over two minutes. Limiting the length of the clip immediately cut our choice by two-thirds.
Is it cheesy? A significant number of the clips available are pieces some budding composer authored sitting at their midi keyboard, and the sound betrays the cheapness of their base instrument. Eliminating anything that had a cheesy synthesizer sound again cut the options dramatically.
How does it make me feel? Music affects emotion and certain emotions match with different kinds of photographs. I needed clips that matched what certain photographs make me feel.
How does it make Kat feel? Because we never trust our own opinion to be valid outside ourselves. She has different tastes and immediately vetoed some I would have considered.

Today’s soundtrack immediately caught our attention because it seems to have been specifically created for the type of effect used on today’s image. There is a major chord precisely every two seconds throughout the track, with well-measured changes at points where we would want to alter the effect. Listening to the track, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the image, I just had to figure out how to do it.

Again, I’m more pleased with today’s video than I am the previous two. I hope that trend continues. By Saturday, we might have something truly special. The music and visual effect take a very plain subject and give it an all new level of interest. Can we ask more from a 30-second video? Well, maybe. The original photo is below.[/one_half_last]

What’s Left of the Farm (2015)

Advertising / PotD / video

Moving Portraits

August 10, 2015

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. ― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]For all the many facets of photography there may be, portraits probably account, anecdotally, for 60-70% of all commercial business. Weddings, high school seniors, family, babies, and headshots dominate the commercial side of the business and can be financially rewarding for those who dedicate their efforts to doing them well. In fact, I don’t know too many photographers who don’t engage in some form of portraiture. Just yesterday, I sat in the floor of the studio with bubbles dripping on my head while trying to convince a tiny one to smile. Portraits may well be the heart and soul of photography as a business.

So, if we’re going to talk this week about the use of moving pictures as a marketing tool, and that is exactly what we’re doing, then it only makes sense that we look at portraits and how we might turn a simple, beautiful photograph into something more without sacrificing the integrity of the image. Right away, we are faced with a problem. Portraits are typically oriented with the vertical side being longer. Video, however, is oriented so that the horizontal side is longer. Try putting a vertically-oriented portrait into a video setting and two severe problems occur: the picture size has to be reduced to fit the frame, and large black borders dominate the screen.

Solving those problems means not only choosing a landscape-oriented photo, but cropping it to meet the dimensions necessary for final output. This information is not obvious when working with Adobe® PremierPro™. If there is a way to manually set the dimensions of the stage, or what photographers might think of as the canvas, I’ve not found it yet. Instead, PremierePro sizes the visual area according to the dimensions of the first visual media placed on the timeline. I assume this isn’t a huge problem when working with video, since the orientation there should match camera output, but with still photographs it means knowing to what output format you will export, and cropping the image to the dimensions of that format. We chose YouTube’s 1080p HD format as our final destination, so we needed to crop the image to 1920×1080 pixels before importing it into the project.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Video interpolates images differently than do printers, so we have to consider the qualities of our image very carefully before importing it into the project. Specifically, one needs to make sure the color setting is RGB, not CMYK, even if the image is black and white, which we will explore later this week. Clarity is always an issue, but here we have to be careful about using any sharpening tricks or filters because they can create lines that look jagged and pixelated when rendered for video. Our test is to zoom in on the image to 400% and look for, and eliminate, any flaws at that level.

For a portrait as delightfully wonder as this one, I didn’t feel that moving around all over the place served the image well, especially since we only have 30 seconds. So, for the majority of the time we see the full image. When we do zoom in, it’s to the places one’s eyes are naturally drawn: the flowers and the faces. We end with focus on the faces because, in any portrait, that is what is most important.

Music was a critical issue here as well and trying to find 30-second clips in the public domain is almost impossible. The soundtrack one chooses to go with an image is probably the most important decision one makes here after selecting an image. Music guides not only the emotion of the video but also plays a defining role in determining when movement takes place. The music and the animation need to match or the video format doesn’t work at all. Some minor DJ skills were necessary in clipping and overlapping the audio track so that the final guitar chord would occur at just the right place in the video. No one ever said this was going to be easy.

I like this one slightly better than I did yesterday’s video. It still took a tremendous amount of time to produce, though, and the learning curve here is extremely steep, even with already having some (limited) knowledge of video processing. I have little doubt my perspective on the whole issue of video is going to be different by the end of the week than it is at this particular moment. For the moment, I still prefer my portraits to be still, thank you. The original photo is below.[/one_half_last]

Flowers For Raven (2014). Models: Jenn & Raven King

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]

Fashion / PotD

Too Fast Fashion

August 6, 2015

War of the Roses

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. —Oscar Wilde

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I have spent more of my time as an adult paying attention to fashion than I ever would have anticipated. Part of that is admittedly due to growing up with an inappropriate gender bias that said fashion was for girls. There’s also the fact that I grew up in a rural state where fashion had more to do with whether one was wearing denim or church clothes, and one’s jeans were boot cut or straight legged. Sure, there were stores in Tulsa and Oklahoma City that carried clothes with designer labels, but we were pretty sure that no one ever actually purchased anything with a four-digit price tag; those clothes were just there so that the markup on the cheaper clothes didn’t seem so bad by comparison.

One of the challenges fashion has always had is convincing people that they needed to buy more clothes. Historically, people have bought new clothes for one primary reason: their existing wardrobe had either worn out or they had outgrown it. Prior to the end of World War II, many women, and some men, either made their own clothes or at least knew enough to make minor alterations. One didn’t just run to the nearest store and pick up a new shirt or a new skirt without considerable thought. Clothes were, for the average consumer, too expensive to be treated with frivolity.

Fast fashion has its roots in the early automation that took place in the 1950s. Prices fell as manufacturing made it possible to produce more pieces per day and it wasn’t long before department stores began seeing the benefit of placing these cheaper-priced goods on the floor along with name brand labels. Making clothes more affordable was a strong part of the growth of the middle class. People were no longer waiting until their clothes were threadbare before replacing them and the world’s elite weren’t the only ones paying attention to fashion and style. Dressing well was a sign of being upwardly mobile, a status most everyone desired to achieve.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]While more affordable clothing seemed like a good thing, greed, selfishness, and vanity soon took over. Profits had to be bigger. New clothes had to come out more often. Having the latest style, as in what hit the shelves last week, became a monitor of one’s social standing. Fast fashion stepped up to facilitate all those shortcomings, and more. Designers were suddenly asked to not create two collections a year, but four, then six, and now eight in many cases. Special partnerships between designers and discount retailers drive sales during those two weeks between collections. Fast fashion has become a monster which we are not inclined to control.

Fast fashion has a severe price, though. As more emphasis is put on lower prices, quality has taken a back seat. Conditions for garment workers have gone beyond sweatshop all the way to outright slavery in too many situations. For every shop that is “cleaned up,” five more “dirty” shops open to meet the price demands of retailers such as Wal-Mart, H&M, and Zara. Domestic manufacturing is non-existent because just meeting building codes in the US prices us out of the subpar competition of third-world countries. We spend billions of dollars on cheaply-produced, low-quality clothing to secure a facade of a social standing, while simultaneously ruining the lives of thousands of garment workers and destroying the environment.

If there is a hope for the end of fast fashion, it may lie in the development of 3D printing that would allow people to print their own clothes at home. I’m sure designers would still be paid well for producing the patterns, but the low-price demands of retail could potentially be eliminated. Of course, so could millions of jobs. There are no quick and easy answers to a bad system on which we’ve become dependent. But change we must. Fast fashion is not sustainable and the end is not likely to be pleasant.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

Slipping In The Mud

August 5, 2015

Slipping In The Mud

Politicians must set their aims for the high ground and according to our various leanings, Democratic, Republican, Independent, we will follow. Politicians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone. —Maya Angelou

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]”If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I’m sure I’m not the only one whose parents offered those words of instruction. They’re hardly new, and seldom heeded even by the people who are encouraging such behavior. We all know that we shouldn’t be saying mean and hurtful things, that we shouldn’t be throwing verbal mud at each other, but we can hardly resist doing so, especially when the media of communication we’re using encourage and even thrives on our misdeeds. Can you imagine Facebook without all the ranting and raving? Can you imagine Twitter without #MeanTweets? If anything, we have attempted to turn mud slinging into an art form.

Actually, I understand what late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is trying to do with the #MeanTweets hashtag. The theory is that by making fun of the most severe forms of rudeness and impoliteness that one takes away any power they might have had and turns the meanness back onto the person who said such things in the first place by subjecting them to ridicule. When read by the person to whom they’re directed, the original insult becomes powerless and the person who authored the tweet is, in theory, humiliated. The problem with the Internet and modern society, though, is that once the trolls find out they can get their name mentioned on television, they begin creating even more severe insults in hopes of even a fleeting second’s worth of notoriety.

Slinging mud is not new, of course. Societies have been spewing all manner of rottenness, sometimes in a very physical sense, at those they don’t like for as long as we have existed. While the term “mud slinging” only goes back to the late 19th century, I would not be the least bit surprised to find that our earliest non-verbal ancestors actually threw mud at each other before they discovered that rocks had a much more permanent effect. People say or do something that we don’t like and we feel compelled to respond in kind. One might argue that this is human nature.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]If being mean and perhaps even slanderous is somehow instinctive, it remains something which we have the ability to overcome. One does not speak by accident and one certainly doesn’t post such trash on social media without engaging in a deliberate multi-step process. One cannot feign ignorance nor claim any level of innocence when there is sufficient opportunity to choose a different course of action that is less hurtful. We don’t have to be mean. We don’t have to teach our children to be mean. We don’t have to follow or support pretend leaders who engage in meanness as a form of political grandstanding.

I’m not opposed to mud in its natural form. Today’s picture merges two of my favorite forms of mud. I’ve even offered to shoot weddings for free if they would perform the ceremony nude in the mud. Certain forms of mud can also be used as an industrial lubricant, which I’ve always found interesting. There are plenty of pleasant and acceptable uses for mud that are not only not mean, but artistic and beautiful and maybe even somewhat desirable. These are the forms and uses of mud which we should more readily and universally embrace. A Miss Mud Universe pageant, anyone?

The thing about throwing mud at other people is that to do so we have to get muddy ourselves. The more we toss mud at others the more likely we are to find ourselves slipping in that mud and ultimately we become more covered in mud than does our target. We know better. We know we’re losing more ground than we’re gaining when we engage in less-than-honorable activities. Is the definition of a fool not one who knows to do better and refuses to do so? I would much rather work with people who roll naked in the mud for fun than those who are constantly slinging it at others. Let’s be more careful what we do with mud. Think art, not harm.[/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]

Nature / Photography / PotD / Social Commentary

Cool Water

August 3, 2015

Cool Water

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. ― Susan Sontag

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Water. For a lot of people across the Midwest United States, it’s something we’ve had a bit much of this summer. There’s been no short amount of rain and with it has come a significant amount of flooding, sometimes in areas that had never seen such a problem before. For all those people who are still cleaning up from the devastating effects of those floods, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of cool water.

Wet conditions don’t prevail everywhere, though, and Western states have continued a drought that started in 2012 and is well beyond critical levels. The National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) reports that for the month of June approximately 14 percent of the US was plagued with severe to extreme drought, an increase of five percent over May. July numbers aren’t ready yet, but don’t expect them to be any better. Good luck finding cool water around here.

If you want cool water that is actually clean and drinkable, there aren’t that many sources. The entire planet is experiencing a shortage of the stuff and the situation is getting worse. Numbers from aid organizations and charities vary a little bit, but the United Nations reports that 783 million people, that’s over one-tenth of the world’s population, does not have access to clean water. 2.5 billion people do not have adequate sanitation. What’s the resulting impact? 6 to 8 million people die annually from the consequences of disasters and water-related diseases. And if you think throwing money at the problem is the answer, you’re wrong. The UN estimates it would take 3.5 planets Earth to provide enough water to sustain the existing population at the current lifestyles common to Western Europe and the US. The UN also reports that, “By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could live under water stress conditions.”

We’re not exactly doing well with this cool water thing, are we? I’m pretty sure the majority of people in the US take for granted how fortunate we are to have the easy access to clean, cool water that we do. We don’t have to walk for miles. We simply turn on a tap and it’s there. We don’t even have to worry too often about it being clean.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Aid organizations have been trying for years to draw our attention to the global water issue without too much luck. In California early this year, Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order requiring, among other things, a 25% reduction in water usage across the board, no exceptions. Just this past week, the Internet nearly choked as pictures of Melinda Gates, wife of world’s richest man Bill Gates, was photographed carrying drinking water on her head in solidarity with women in Malawi. Still, at the end of the day, most Americans and Western Europeans ignore the looming disaster.

Today’s picture is a tempting one as we’ve created a double exposure by merging an image of a babbling brook with that of a young woman bathing in a stream. The cool water looks comfortable, refreshing, and alluring. This is a fairly complicated image that not only blends two separate photographs but changes from color to black and white as one moves from left to right across the picture. The result is a blend of emotions as our perspective of the image changes.

Back in 1963, on his album Cattle Call, which produced his signature song, singer/actor Eddie Arnold also included the song Cool Water, about a cowboy crossing the desert with his horse, Dan.

All day I’ve faced a barren waste
Without the taste of water, cool water
Old Dan and I with throats burnt dry
And souls that cry for water, cool clear water.

Dan’s feet are sore he’s yearning for
Just one thing more than water, cool water
Like me I guess he’d like to rest
Where there’s no quest for water, cool clear water

If something doesn’t change, and quickly, those are sentiments we may all soon share.[/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]

Editorial

A Sexy Bohemian Summer

July 31, 2015

This is the summer of casual bohemian chic and Kat wears it very well

I’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian. —Brigitte Bardot

This is officially the wettest summer Indiana has seen since someone started keeping records. We have surpassed the record amount of rainfall set all the way back in 1875 and I’m finding it difficult to complain about that too terribly much. Of course, we’re not the ones with trees uprooted by high winds or basements flooding on a weekly basis making the battle against mold never-ending. For us, the summer has been delightfully mild and, on those rare days when it’s not raining, we’ve had a delightful time being out in nature.

Our biggest challenge to the summer is not knowing exactly when rain might hit. Scheduling photoshoots gets difficult when the weather forecast changes multiple times an hour. We might start the day with only a 20% chance of rain, then it changes to 80%, then back down to 40%, up to 70% and all over the place. I’m not inclined to take up someone’s time getting makeup and hair done only to be rained out. Fortunately, we have an in-house model and when we do get a break in the weather Kat is ready to jump in front of the camera for a few quick shots.

Bohemia is the dominant look this summer and that fits in quite nicely with Kat’s personal sense of style that makes comfort and practicality a priority. The loose-fitting, flowing dress is perfect for days when the humidity is high, especially if there’s a little bit of a breeze flowing. The thin cotton breathes well, looks good, and holds up to repeated washings. Other days, especially when we’re out traipsing through the woods as we’re prone to do, jeans and a crop top are more appropriate. The biggest challenge on those days is keeping Kat in shoes. When we come across a chance for her to go barefoot, Kat quickly takes advantage of it, especially if there’s water involved.

We haven’t been able to do many shoots this summer, which makes me rather sad, but it’s nice to know that when we do get a chance to go out the results are going to be fun and exciting.

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

Candy Corn

July 28, 2015

Candy Corn

The worst thing about Halloween is, of course, candy corn. It’s unbelievable to me. Candy corn is the only candy in the history of America that’s never been advertised. And there’s a reason. All of the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911. And so, since nobody eats that stuff, every year there’s a ton of it left over. —Lewis Black

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I have a very horrible confession to make; one that may well cause you to change your opinion of me. I realize this may cause me to lose some friends and if so I certainly understand why. I do not say this with pride, but in acknowledging a life-long weakness against which I am powerless. I love candy corn.

There, I said it. Whew. I am so very relieved to have that off my chest. Well, in this case it’s on the model’s chest, the candy corn is, and I personally think it looks quite attractive there, certainly better than it does encased in cellophane packaging on the store shelf. Have you ever noticed how poor and pathetic candy corn looks when it’s at the store? Candy corn is the Eeyore of the candy aisle. “Thank you for noticing me,” it says, never really expecting to actually leave the store.

How one actually eats candy corn is another matter. Personally, I nibble off the yellow end first and then the tiny white end, leaving the orange colored center for last. No, there is no difference in how the different colors taste; it’s all just a mix of sugar and gelatin. I just like prolonging the great as long add possible without giving myself a sugar buzz. I’ve seen people just grab a handful and drop the whole thing in their mouth. That seems wasteful and unappreciative. All that sugar at once overrides the delicate texture of the candy corn.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10 px”]Despite the fact no one admits to liking candy corn, recent years have seen several variation hitting site shelves. Mind you, for the most part the sugary bland taste is still the same no matter what the colors are, but there’s an autumn version where the bottom is brown and the top is yellow, and a Halloween version where the bottom is black and there’s no white tips. There is even a holiday version where the bottom is green and the middle is red. Last fall we tried a candy apple version that was brown on the bottom and a dark red in the middle; it had a vague artificial apple flavor to it but was otherwise unimpressive.

I’m glad we used the traditional version for this photo. The colors work well with the model’s skin tone and there’s no question what it is covering her. Although, for some reason, people still ask, “Is that candy corn?” as though they can’t quite believe their eyes. That is often quickly followed by the declaration that they don’t like candy corn, but I tend to think those people are lying. No one wants to admit to such a strange indulgence.

This may be the only time in history that candy corn has been used in quite this way. I won’t go so far as to think that is never been used in art projects because people can be very creative. Still, this is likely one of the most unique photos in our archives and gives everyone a chance to like candy corn without actually having to eat it.[/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]

Art / PotD

More Than Candy

July 26, 2015

More Than Candy

Welcome, let’s all prepare to be whisked to the magical land of candy. Be warned, candy is very addicting and at Jubilee’s the candy is the tastiest in the world. ― Derek Ailes, Zombie Command: A Horror Anthology

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Wow, here we are already at the last week of July and it feels as though I don’t have nearly enough done to show for it. Sure, the garden has been a moderate success and we’ve traveled a bit to see family, but we’ve not taken many pictures. At times, the weather hasn’t been cooperative; this has been the wettest summer on record in Indiana, and there’s a decent chance of more rain today and tomorrow. My nature is to push myself to keep up with a schedule that, perhaps, isn’t as realistic today as it was fifteen years ago when there was something new to shoot every day, often multiple times a day. That absence of new pictures bothers me.

Then, I look at the collection of pictures we’ve chosen for this week, part of a series called Texture, shot throughout the year in 2010. We didn’t shoot them all in one day. We didn’t even shoot them all in one month. The earliest shoot was done in March, and we strung it out all year with the last shoot taking place mid-December. As a result, we have a full set of images, almost enough to have run two weeks, with a wide array of diversity across the group. We had time to experiment, which was good because only a couple of the shoots came out the way I anticipated. A couple of the concepts were absolutely disastrous. Had we been on a tight production schedule, those two could have killed the whole project.

By spreading the concept out over a year, we were able to figure out what worked best. Lying down produced better results than standing. A popular powdered children’s drink burns when the powder comes into contact with sensitive areas of skin. Taco seasoning doesn’t wash off for almost three weeks. Having a ticklish model doesn’t help. Recruiting models wasn’t as challenging as it is for some projects, though, because they were able to see what we were doing along the way. We posted images soon after they were shot and that made the project more interesting. While some of the first images were full-length, we eventually decided that it was closer, more macro shots that look best, so we didn’t need to cover as much of the body to get the desired effect. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Texture is a series that finds its roots in some very basic, childish, perhaps even primal need to get dirty. Prior to embarking on the series, we played around with mud and paint and sand and even coffee grounds on a few occasions because it photographs similarly to sand. There’s something about dirt on skin that feels natural, that connects us back to the planet in some psychological way I’m not able to explain. Getting dirty, connecting with our environment, is what generates some of our happiest memories as children. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but getting dirty is definitely a lot more fun.

Expanding on that concept, candy seemed like a natural fit for the project. Sure, it meant having to crush it in some cases, but with today’s photo all we had to do was looking in the baking aisle of the local grocery for chips and pieces. Putting a variety of candies in cookies and milkshakes has been a popular enough activity that finding crumbles wasn’t difficult at all. The one question was a matter of which ones would actually look good against the skin. Some worked better than others because even small pieces of chocolate melt against the 98.6° warmth of the human body. And no, one really doesn’t want to eat them afterward. We used a thin layer of petroleum jelly in most cases to help the candy (or whatever other substance) to actually stay in place. This mix of toffee and chocolate managed to look good without smearing all over. The flower was a nice finishing touch.

We grow up with our parents constantly admonishing us to not play with our food, and when it comes to candy there was the added warning to not get it all over the place. Candy can be very messy, and at times very difficult to clean. Chocolate does stain, after all. Yet, what we found across this project is that the texture created by getting personal with food is interesting, surprising, and at times quite alluring. What those candy crumbles do to the landscape of the human form is rather exciting. Be warned, this could be addicting.[/one_half_last]

Behind The Scenes / Photography / PotD

Not Dead Yet

July 25, 2015

Polaroid PX 600 Silver Shade Impossible UV+ Monochrome

I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid. —Lady Gaga

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]For those whose lives are incredibly boring and/or severely disadvantaged, let me explain why I chose the title for this today’s photo. In the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there is a scene invoking images of the black plague. A man is walking through the streets of London yelling, “Bring out your dead,” as he pushes a cart carrying the bodies of the deceased.

As one body is tossed onto the cart, the presumably deceased man objects: “I’m not dead yet!” At which he is told he soon will be and that he should just lie down and die already.

Then, in true Monty Python fashion, they break into song.

Polaroid is the photographic equivalent of that old man; it just refuses to die, even though there is no longer any logical use for the once-popular technology. When Edwin Land introduced his first instant camera in 1947, he wowed the photography world with his amazing film that processed on its own. The impact was every bit as significant as digital photography would be some fifty years later. There wasn’t a serious photographer on the planet who didn’t snap a series of Polaroids to make sure the light and camera settings were correct before committing to film. Polaroids quickly became an indispensable part of the profession for anyone working in a studio. I shudder to think of the millions of Polaroid images scattered across studio floors that were eventually swept up and thrown away. If those Polaroids could talk …

Then came digital cameras and with them the ability to “preview” an image right on the camera. One knew instantly whether they had the shot or not. No waiting. No shaking. No suddenly discovering one had a bad packet of film (which happened too frequently). As the new millennium dawned, Polaroid’s days seemed numbered. Sales of both its cameras and films plummeted. Bankruptcy was inevitable and talk of the company’s demise just assumed that doors had already been shuttered and no one was left. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Folks at Polaroid weren’t so quick to just give up, though, and as though crying, “I’m not dead yet!” they came back in 2008 with an instant mobile printer and followed that with the Z340 instant digital camera in 2011. The company has recommitted itself to finding ways to bring their instant prints to a digital-centric society that has very little patience. While the Polaroid may no longer be a studio necessity, the new cameras as still a lot of fun and give a person that instant gratification of being able to hold a picture in their hands.

To some extent, creating a digital conversion to a Polaroid-type look seems, well, very anti-Polaroid. After all, having a Polaroid is all about the print, being able to hold something in one’s hands. Yet, for articles about the technology or perhaps just the uniqueness of the look, there are ways of re-creating most of the Polaroid film looks. You don’t want to try this on your own, though, unless you have more patience than I. Fortunately, you don’t have to be the brave explorer here. There are Photoshop™ actions all over the place that make it process much easier and, in this particular case, I suggest using one. I used one from rawimage which is available by clicking here. Be aware the link takes you to their page on DeviantArt. After running the action, we did a little burning around the edges to further “age” the image a bit and bring out the streaks that were inevitable with older Polaroids.

Keep in mind a couple of things. First, the actions require original images with strong lines and good contrast. I ran the action on a picture of a white wedding cake with a white topper and when it finished the topper had completely disappeared! Second, Polaroid images were not meant to be permanent. Don’t try to give them too polished a look or you’re missing the whole point. Polaroid was never a perfect film and the majority were inevitably thrown away. Don’t think the days of Polaroid are completely gone, though. They’re not dead yet.[/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

Mind The Shadows

July 23, 2015

LAB Processing

In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated. —August Sander

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]One of the challenges of working with natural light is the depth of shadows, even in well-diffused situations. Natural light shadows tend to have a bit more gradient to them, which is nice, but they can also run extremely dark and be impossible to lighten without introducing significant amounts of noise to the image. This is one of those situations where it is more appropriate to find a black and white conversion method that can work with the shadows rather than trying to fight it, which makes the conversion more labor-intensive than just moving black and white adjustment sliders. This can get scary.

Our image today is again from 2007. The setting is an executive office in an abandoned facility originally built in 1930-31. Obviously, a few more modern enhancements were made at some point, such as the grounded electrical outlet and fireplace screen, but marble fireplace and wood paneling are likely original. Light was wonderfully diffused through smoked glass windows that were largely opaque but still managed to let enough light in to shoot at 200 ISO. This gave us a beautiful shadow gradient across the model’s skin, and a very gradual light-to-shadow gradient across the entire room. However, where it did go to complete shadow it was extremely dark. The room had a bit of a spooky feeling to it.

What was important in making this conversion was being able to adequately capture not just a specific tone, but the overall feeling of the room. If I had shot this on film, I would have instructed the lab to let it sit in the developer a little longer, maybe +2 or +3, or perhaps use a T-Max developer rather than D76 if I had used a T-Max film. This would give me a little more detail in the shadows while maintaining the overall feel. However, this would also seriously affect the tone and one would have to be extremely careful to not introduce grain.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]From a digital perspective, the options can be even more challenging. We don’t want the shadow around the door to go all the way black. We want to see the door. Please note, this process does not work well for every image. Proceed at your own risk. You’ll need some sharp Photoshop knowledge here.

Convert the image to LAB color, then select the lightness channel.
With the lightness channel selected, convert to greyscale mode. This flattens the image a bit, so be careful. Don’t stop here.
Now it gets tricky. You want to create a selection of the lighter parts of the image then invert the selection. There are numerous ways of doing this, choose your favorite and save the selection.
Convert the image back to RGB. Make a new layer and with that layer selected create a new masked channel using the saved selection. Make sure the channel is visible.
Select the new layer and change its blending mode to “multiply” then select the RGB channel. Make sure the selection is still active.
Create a new fill layer using hue 40.9°, saturation 63, brightness 58. The masked channel should automatically be applied to this layer as a mask.
Adjust the saturation where you like it. I’ve used -45 for this image.

There are other tweaks one can use, such as adding a light blue layer at 10% opacity for a more silver tone, or very carefully playing with the curves just a bit. Each image is going to be so very different that it’s impossible to impose one specific setting. Play around and see if it works for you.[/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]

Behind The Scenes / Photography / PotD

One Grumpy Cat

July 21, 2015

Ilford Delta

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. —Henri Cartier-Bresson

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Remember that warning about not working with animals or children? This cat is a good example of why animal photography is difficult. The shot was taken in March, 2007, long before that whole grumpy cat meme took over the Internet, but he easily could have served as the inspiration. The model, whom we had shot before, was on her way home from college for Spring Break and was, naturally enough, taking her cat with her. She stopped by just long enough for a few shots and, given that she had a hat whose coloring matched that of the feline, she wanted pictures with her dear feline. Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it?

The cat wasn’t nearly as enthused as was it’s human. Actually, dear cat hated being stuck in a carrier and absolutely loathed riding in the car. By the time they had made the hour trip to us, dear cat was nothing short of royally pissed. He expressed his displeasure by yowling and hissing from inside the carrier as she brought him in. Thinking it might help him settle down a bit, the model decided to let the cat out so he could roam and get acquainted with his surroundings. The problem with that thought? We were shooting from Nick Tucker’s place on the South side of Indianapolis. Nick had a dog. A very large, friendly, and slobbery Saint Bernard.

You can probably guess what happened next. Even though the poor dog was sequestered to a separate room, the cat took one whiff of dog and ran for cover. Finding and retrieving him took so long that we had to drop one of the sets planned. By the time we actually got the extremely miffed cat in the pictures, the model was exhausted, which shows. The cat scowled the entire time, I think. It can be difficult to tell with cats like this; they have a resting grumpy face that never really changes.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Our challenge in choosing a processing method for this shot lies in the fact that everything from the wall to the chair to the cat is pretty much within the same general tonal range, with the exception of the model’s jeans. Nick did a great job with the lighting, but there was still a danger of losing detail. So, I chose a method duplicating what was typically my second-favorite film: Ilford Delta 100. Ilford is an old British film company that has been around since the 1870s, started in the basement of Alfred Harman’s house in Northeast London.

What makes Ilford Delta the best choice for this image is its sharpness and such fine grain that it is nearly grain-free, even under the most severe of conditions. Given the tonal range of our image, even Kodak professional films would have difficulty matching what Ilford Delta could do with this shot. The challenge, of course, is finding a digital conversion that meets that standard. This one took a while, but what we finally came up with is this: reds- 34, yellows- 76, greens- 40, cyans- 66, blues- 25, magentas- 61. That back-and-forth approach hits just the perfect tonal balance for pulling out detail without introducing unnecessary noise. Once we had that conversion setting, we made only the slightest adjustments to contrast before closing the file.

Shots like this are difficult to convert to a good digital black and white. It’s too easy to go too low on the contrast, which leaves the photo looking flat. Take the contrast just a tweak too far, and the highlights are lost. I’ve used this conversion method on several different challenging images, though, and it has yet to fail. It even manages to make a grumpy cat look almost friendly. Don’t be fooled, though. He wasn’t. [/one_half_last]

Behind The Scenes / Photography / PotD

Surprise!

July 20, 2015

Fomapan

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. —Edward Weston

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Surprise in photography is rarely a good thing. One of the most significant differences between shooting film and shooting digital is ease of traveling. When traveling with film, one has to take great pains going through security to make sure the film canisters are removed and not exposed to any x-ray or other devices that might damage the product. Sometimes security personnel were cooperative and understanding, sometimes they weren’t, especially in countries with a history of rebellious violence. Digital cameras sail through security much more easily, though it still makes me quite nervous.

Imagine being in a former Soviet-bloc country, such as the Czech Republic, and your film not surviving the airport. Suddenly, and frustratingly, the success of a high-budget project depends on finding a replacement film with high enough quality to do the job. After asking around, you find a local photographer who hands you a roll of a locally-made film he promises is professional quality. At least, you think that’s what he’s saying; the interpreter was having problems with the vocabulary. You drop the film in the camera and pray, hard. To make matters more challenging, lighting conditions for the shoot are far from perfect and you keep having to adjust exposure by a stop or two. Warning the art director that you can’t guarantee results seems like a good idea.

Next, you bring the film home and hand it off at a lab to be processed. After a couple of hours, the phone rings and you get the strange message that the film has turned both the developer and the negatives a bright blue! After sharing some strong words with the lab manager, he agrees to go ahead and finish processing the first roll. You wait patiently for the results and when they arrive you are pleasantly surprised to discover some of the sharpest photographs you’ve seen. Even when the exposure had to be adjusted, the film compensated more than adequately. Much to everyone’s delight, the project has been saved. Surprise![/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]As the former Soviet Union crumbled and both nation states and businesses struggled to retain some identity in this new existence, we discovered a host of smaller film companies who, to great surprise, created products that excelled in different ways. The Czech company now known as FOMA Bohemia is one of those companies. Founded in the early 1920s, the film products were rarely seen outside Eastern Europe until the mid-90s, after the Czech Republic was formed. They had the bad luck of hitting the global market just before the whole digital craze took hold and never had much of a chance to prove what they could do. The film is still available in limited quantities, but more for hobbyist than professional use.

Fomapan is an interesting film that likes to surprise photographers with slightly different results on every roll. These are good results, mind you, but how the film is scanned and any variation in how long they’re left in developer, which will still turn bright blue, shift the tonal base even for black and white film. This makes the film quite fun from an artistic perspective and totally frustrating when one needs consistency. Recreating the look digitally is easy enough, and one has plenty of latitude. For today’s photo, we used the following black and white adjustment settings: reds- 31, yellows- 89, greens- 105, cyans- 77, blues- 46, magentas- 44. Where the fun, and surprise, comes in is applying various color filters on top of the black and white layer. We used an orange filter to bring out the model’s freckles, but blue and red filters can be very dramatic.

Fomapan does play a little dark on blues and reds, so one has to be careful with shadows and shading. For added effect, mix this setting with a Holga filter if you have one. Fomapan in a Holga is truly a work of art, but is better for landscapes than portraits. Fomapan is a black and white with a lot of tonal flexibility. Try it and share the surprise.[/one_half_last]

photographer

My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat – or in film’s case ‘run on’ – manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing. —Andy Warhol

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Music really becomes the soundtrack to the major events to your life. —Sheryl Crow

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The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. ― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

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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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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. —Oscar Wilde

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Politicians must set their aims for the high ground and according to our various leanings, Democratic, Republican, Independent, we will follow. Politicians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone. —Maya Angelou

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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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All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. ― Susan Sontag

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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’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian. —Brigitte Bardot

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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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Welcome, let’s all prepare to be whisked to the magical land of candy. Be warned, candy is very addicting and at Jubilee’s the candy is the tastiest in the world. ― Derek Ailes, Zombie Command: A Horror Anthology

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I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid. —Lady Gaga

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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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In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated. —August Sander

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

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In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. —Henri Cartier-Bresson

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The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. —Edward Weston

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