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... my most recent purchase, by Robert Adams.
Once again a soft and reflective book, containing some quiet gems that have the potential to smooth anyone's photographic journey.
The inspiration behind photographing in these kinds of places, the way I do.
Rant warning here!
Been looking at a couple of sites that Joerg Colberg over on Conscientious has been pointing out, recently.
Flash player seems mandatory, why?
Apart from the usual usability issues, about flash, what do these photographers do when they want to make a small change to their sites, what of the people in the world not running high speed internet connections and high powered computers?
What if I want to dwell on an image for longer than the flash programmer has deemed suitable, what if I want to choose my own path through the images in their portfolio rather than one deemed a by the photographer, an advantage I guess
I gave up on the 3 sites that I clicked on from the Conscientious blog, and I'm on ADSL here at the moment, even though Spencer Murphy's seemed promising.
…elsewhere on the web, barb and myself have contributed to an online project called discarded object project
As part of my submission to the discarded object poster project, I went trawling through my archives for about a dozen or so images that it had been suggested would work.
A task, that ordinarily would have sunken to the bottom of the pool if it weren't for flickr and iView Media Pro.
After setting up a special set of the suggested images using tags, I then tracked down the dates that I had shot them, by year. Then I loaded up that year's catalogue in iView Media Pro, and based on the dates taken from my flickr stream, I quickly, easily and accurately found each image. Then after locating the physical disk, I archive my work to CD roms, it was a simple matter or control clicking and transferring the file to the appropriate location on my hard drive.iView Media Pro is even polite enough to ask me, how I want to handle this process.
All up a 45 minute job to track down about 13 images spanning 3 years of photography, not sure I can even do it that quick with proof sheets, as it is often a case of relying solely on memory of when an image was taken to find an image, my proofs are filed chronologically.
Currently my workflow involves, creating a catalogue of images every-time I download from the camera, then assigning keywords and any other meta-data that I see fit. Once that folder contains roughly 500 to 700 meg of data, I burn it to a CD, after creating a catalogue of the contents of the entire folder. Then each time a new catalogue is created I import the entire catalogue into an existing catalogue file organised by year. The advantage of importing catalogue files is that all keywords and meta-data is imported as well, so so long as I add the meta-data at the initial download that follows through to the final catalogue each year. Date of course are handled automatically and I assume are based on Camera meta-data and exif files.
All in all an elegant piece of software, which I am still learning the intricacies of, that is making my life and workflow much easier
...or, “ There's only one thing worse than being talked about and that's NOT being talked about.”
According to the Age, the public are getting on on the act of the Paparazzi by using their mobile phones to snap Celebrities in action on the streets.
"The paparazzi are now everywhere," declares The Sunday Times, reporting on a new British photo agency called Scoopt.com that deals in camera-phone snaps of celebrities picking their noses and otherwise trying to get on with their lives.I have mixed feelings about this. Do celebrities have the right to privacy or would they rather be ignored?
If they have hit the big time and are milking the gravy train then why shouldn't some humble Jane or Joe, cash in on it as well?
Fame, or is that infamy, in the 21st century is a complicated thing, something sought by many, look at Big Brother for example and Australian Idol, yet lasting fame is not easy to achieve, who were the others who didn't win the first BB in 2000 for example?
Personally I enjoy my mobile phone's camera for the creative potential it offers me, if I try and make a portrait with it for example, I'm usually upfront and people I point it at are aware of it's limitations and act accordingly. The whole reason I use it for portraiture. The ability to quickly and easily record fleeting moments is also a bonus for me, coupled with it's limitations in exposure and focus and D.O.F, I'm more than happy to admit that rarely a masterpiece will come from it. But there is still something intriguing about an image made this way.
Creative ideas aside, it has the potential to become a real cultural issue.
Donina is one of the few flickrnauts I know who had prior to signing up to flickr an existing online presence.
Her stream therefore serves a different function to mine and several other flickrnauts I've mentioned. She uses it as a testing ground for new projects and ideas, the final images then making it to her photo-blog.
What an intriguing, emotional and contemplative body of work it is that forms her experiments. Donina is a flickrnaut who has a true understanding of the emotional power of an image, who pours her heart and soul into each and every image she produces.
Her titles like, “ the hollowness of brevity” and, “ fury and tears for the philistines”, are poetic and poignant, and offer some clue as to her motivations, yet offer no real answer to the question or questions posed.
Donina's approach to her image making is rare for places like flickr and the internet, her output while not prolific as is often the case with digital photography, is deliberate, thoughtful and dramatic.
I'm proud to list her as a contact and to have socialised with her in person, gladly I've yet to play her at pool.
Joerg Colberg over at conscientious, is pondering the issue of imagery made of disasters which is then paraded as Art in Galleries.
Robert Adams has an answer or two here, in an essay about Frank Gohlke's photographs of the storm that swept Wichita Falls, on April 10 1979, that ranked 4 on the Fujita Scale, he talks about form and meaning, and of metaphor.
“ His composition implies a belief in the endurance of meaning within an apocalyspe.”1
In the same book he also writes a lengthy article on “ Photographing Evil”, which I'll quote here, in an effort to offer some explanation as to why Photographers need to do this kind of work.
“ The point of art has never been to make something synonymous with life, however, but to make something of reduced complexity that is nonetheless analogous to life and thereby clarify it.”2
Not being the articulate writer that Mr Adams is I am unable to argue at length about the ideas being discussed in his books or offer much but to offer these couple of small snippets of hope for Joerg. Not to mention that I am not one to have the balls or temerity to go to the kinds of places such as war zones or sites of disaster and make images.
1 pg 100 Beauty in Photography, Essays in Defence of Traditional Values,Things have begun to go into warp drive around here soon, keep an eye on my old blog to see what may pan out.
Things are being made worse by a lack of interwebs at work, thanks to technical problems from our ISP, what did we do before computers and the internet became so pervasive?
On a recent trip in a car as a passenger, over an extended period of time, I had another go at making images using my Sony Ericsson K610i 2 mega-pixel camera. The results reminded me of the now famous image by Lartigue, and I decided to try and produce a body of work while in the car.
I was happy with about 12 or so of the shots. They now form my first series based around the idea first popularised by Lartigue with his image entitled, ‘Car Trip, Papa at 80 kilometers an hour 1913’.
This of course gives rise to the idea that photography can still surprise and delight with the way it freezes and captures time.
Technically I think that the reason the poles and verticals look slanted in the images captured by a mobile phone camera pointed at 90 degrees to the direction that the vehicle is travelling is because it is a leaf shutter. The objects that are closest to the camera show the effect the most, with the speed of the vehicle is a determining factor also.
The real magic here is that the images themselves were a real surprise, and a little difficult to predict bringing back that real magical feeling that goes with the act of using a simple machine to freeze/capture/distort the world as it passes.
A week or so a ago I started writing about some of my fellow photographers on flickr, here again is another of Flickr's under-appreciated gems. Ziz's sharp eye is matched by his sharp wit. His imagery delights in the details and the mundane. His work suggests that Melbourne is either a cafe soaked metropolis or an apocalyptic desert, a relationship I'm sure many could relate to in this fair city of Melbourne Australia.
He also is not afraid to push the boundaries of how and why an image is made. Using Toy cameras to make charming yet edgy observations about his place and his time.
Ziz, not his real name, appreciates form line and light in a way that often only many seasoned professionals can, and this was all before he even acquired a DSLR, [considered wrongly by many serious amateurs to be the pinnacle of camera gear], now with his DSLR in hand, his witty and poetic body of works just goes from strength to strength.
I have been accepted in to a small artist run space for a solo show in 2007. The space is called Trocadero Artspace, and the show dates are, 21 Marchto 1 April 2007.
The question now remains, use which 12 images from 'Across the River Styx'.
Kent's photography is one of those rare, photographers who can firmly plant a foot in each camp. No genre or subject matter escapes his clever eye. His appreciation for and understanding of light is up with the best of them.
Of course I might need to make a small disclaimer here in that, I too have met this fellow flickrnaut, and we hit it off like a house on fire.
Despite this, his imagery reflects his enthusiasm for photography as a whole and his pedigree in the fashion world of the 80's has stood him well with his current work using digital cameras and flickr.
Kent's fashion work has a kind of honesty that seems rare in some ways these days, the models and their poses are somehow timeless, and his attention to detail just right, not to much not too little.
Fashion though isn't only where he excels, his appreciation of, and for light itself, as well as architecture, and the more cerebral aspects of art photography are truly humbling, a rarity in commercial photographers, or the ones I've met anyways.
Just bought Tom Waits' new album.
Not much else needs to be said really.
Except go buy it!
Oh and the photography artwork on the last few albums has been awesome. Self-portaits anyone?
With the social season beginning to amp up, and with a State Election looming, the sad yet inevitable pending departure of this years crop of students, at PIC is somewhat pushed out of my mind. A welcome relief really. Despite the pressures of teaching in a creative field that I also practice, it's always a sad time to see students move on. What perhaps is the most burdensome though is the workload of administrative tasks that predominate my day of late. In fact really it is a constant juggling act that is shared by many in the arts.
Take Tod Papageorge for example an Artist I'd been exposed to in Art School, but had forgotten about. It turns out that he has been teaching for some time at the Yale School of Art.
I am pleasantly surprised by his re-emergence.
One of the reasons his re-surfacing is surprising is that he was a 35mm street photographer in the 70's and the current mood these days is far removed from the idea, that you can follow intuition and wander around and stumble upon photographic gems and 'moments' and then produce a meaningful body of work.
To quote Tod Papageorge:-
...there's a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination.
This idea has turned into a quest for me, using film and the meditative process of reflection after wandering around camera in hand simply 'looking', then allowing a certain amount of time to pass before really examining my proofs and 'thinking' about what is going on.
After all who was it that said… “ seeing comes before thinking”
I really appreciate and am conscious of the sense of community provided by sites like flickr, and jpgmag, but in a noise to signal ratio world [where the signal is low] it's often difficult to get noticed, and noticed for the right reasons.
Sites like jpgmag, seem to have come from that need of recognition that so many folks hanker for. I wish I could say that I don't really suffer this, but hey I'm human and being ignored is something many humans don't shine to very well. So in the spirit of the online community that has developed over the last couple of years around photography, I ask both my readers to vote for my images on jpg mag.
While we're at it, please vote for barb, charlie, donina, gil hamish, mike.
Thanks to Alec Soth and Joerg Colberg, I've spent some quality time with some interesting links today, A.D. Coleman a photography writer who I respect, has an old school site thatis homely yet a bit out of touch with contemporary web design and content delivery. It could be a blog, but I'm not sure it is? Worth revisiting though.
Another gem, by Bill Jay, is a site that allows you to download his writings as .pdf files, again kinda quaint and worthy of further exploration.
![pay dirt [the effects of the drought are far reaching II]](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/306395168_8c2c7735fd_z.jpg)
28th November 2005
A small note however.
Last night saw Yann Tiersen at the Corner Hotel in Richmond. A music writer and critic I ain't, but it was an interesting gig, the mixture of tunes I can only describe as eclectic.
But what really piqued my interest was the number of mobile phones held up at several times during the night, at one stage I could see 5, and wondered what the hell do they hope to record?
I mean, video of the act? Stills, of the band? Sound? How can a mobile phone do any of these mediums justice?
I enjoyed myself though and what a relief the bandroom is smoke free and well ventilated, it was a real treat NOT having to shower off the smell of cigarettes, or put my clothes straight into the washing machine after a gig.
Well I missed this Letterman Show, never watch it actually, I personally know of nobody who normally watches it, otherwise I would asked them to have taped it.
Also a YouTube Video of the interview between Tom Waits and David Letterman.
Born in 1969, Isabelle Hayeur lives and works in Montreal. She completed a BFA in 1996 and a MFA in 2002 at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Since the late 1990s, she has been known for her large-format digital montages and her site-specific installations while she also produced public art works, videos and net art projects
Also, here is a bad interview by some one who doesn't REALLY appreciate Tom Wait's music. Either that or they just edited it poorly. I have to confess, I've talked about music and art in the past, if I WAS to align myself with a musician Tom Waits would probably come in first, followed by TISM.
Not sure if listing TISM is a good thing though?
This page contains all entries posted to musings from the photographic memepool [the shallow end] in November 2006. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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