Patagonia 2: Impressions of Santiago, Chile 1/16/19

Santiago's Cooly Wealthy & Sparkly

Here's where we began our trek in January of 2018.

Chilé's capital marks the Pacific-top of Patagonia, which forms the bottom 20% tip of South America that Chilé shares with Argentina. Starkly modern: crystal fingers erupt from Santiago's earth like glittery blue nails of a haughty latin diva. She's home to about two thirds of her country's population and fueled by Latin America's hottest economy. The city reflects its searing summer sun glaringly as a mirrored radio telescope faceted with glass and precious latin passions. Neither New York, London, nor Brussels wears a richer cloak of ambitious success.

Geek Stuff: Santiago demands a wide angle lens... It's almost impossible to step back far enough to frame any of her parts. So I screwed my EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5) onto its Canon 7D Mark II to make sense of her pieces. Then, pulling out a digital pen I sketched out the Square, a multi-tiered neighborhood restaurant, and poked between the shoulders of twin heaven-scrapers to scribble in another tower popping from the ground behind. Everywhere the throb of contractors, taxis, and people-throngs cranked up Santiago's latin pulse.

If you can make it there... you can make it anywhere.

Thinkin' About This Stuff. 1

Okay... There's this thing called "Color Management". And it's all about sliding what you see on the screen into a different-sized envelope.  Only the dimensions of the original are defined in color numbers, and a unique set of metrics Like pushing a hot dog into a cube.

Gamma is a term that defines the dimensions of different spaces. So gamma defines different work spaces like sRGB, or RGB, CMYK, or my favorite RGB (Adobe). There are others. My Canon 7D is set to create RGB images. But net images are usually contained inside of an sRGB box. And each printer/paper combination has its own unique envelope that shapes colors that will be reproduced.

So... Color Management has to do with a series of moves from Camera envelope to monitor envelope to printer/paper envelope. I think of each of those envelopes as gammas. And they just don't overlap. No matter what, it's almost impossible to match a monitor image to final print. 

The cheaper the monitor, the less likely that the process will be predictable. And even with the best monitors, if their screens aren't identically calibrated, both with themselves and standards for other gammas, then what you see you really won't get into a printer and onto its paper.

Three are so many variables here. It's terrifically complex and discouraging if you're printing test prints while changing values of the transmitting gamma. 

Oh... and then there's viewing light. I replaced all of the lights in my studio so that they'd mimic daylight. Tungsten lights darken the dynamic range while shifting the perceived printed image toward red/magenta. I can now hold my print next to my monitor and actually compare the range of colors.  

I'm using the image above as my first level test. The palette is vivid but they fall within a narrow color range. I'm tweaking my computer/monitor combo and working to get the monitor's gamma as close to the Epson P-800/chosen paper gamma. I'm about 90% there.

Sometimes my mind changes. Yours?

I like alleyways. They're where time leaves the most dust. Y'know?

Don't Drink And Thrive

Wall • W. Chestnut & N. Queen St. • Lancaster, Pa

This board is gone now. I don't mean the ad, I mean the board, the installation... The whatever-you-call-it that holds the message. Which doesn't surprise me since this is like an alley and the traffic on the street to the left up there is one way... Toward the camera! Meaning that city traffic would see it only in rear view mirrors... So... Backward. And there are no lights on the thing. 

Why would anyone have spent the money to erect it? Why would anyone purchase its space? What goes through the minds of people who make decisions to spend money? Since this is a marketing decision, perhaps they advertisers were merely told that they were getting space on a board in the very heart of Lancaster's downtown? Maybe that's the way the owners promoted this thing? 

But if you'd rented its space, then later tried to find it from your car, well, do 'de expression, PizzedOff spring to mind? A friend of mine recently bought that building and he's turning it into a posh series of down-town condos. I wonder if he has plans to paint this wall? But then again, like that billboard, I'm not sure anyone will care. You?

34 Main St. • Killarney, Ireland

How to mute Killarney?

It's a tourist town of about 12,000 permanent Irish residents, yet it seems to have more hotels than people. The city streets evoke Disneyland - or Disneyland evokes them. Their colors make for squinting.

And then there's the smooshing together of decoration, both around, on, and inside the store fronts. Killarney shops are shameless as showgirls in their efforts to grab attention. Blocks are eye-exhausting as Vegas in their palettes. Of course Vegas boasts performance architecture that's imploded, what? Weekly? Daily? Vegas won't tolerate history, or even nostalgia, much less antique.

Killarney, OTH, has a patina-of-shabby that seems as carefully adhered to its surfaces as the layers of paint which are probably  inches thick. And see how at first this image seems as if the camera was canted? but look closely, the lens was straight as a nun in a gay bar, but it's the shops themselves that are bent by age.

Now see this late afternoon sidewalk? While the blinds in the upstairs window boast mid-last-century dust, the sidewalks are surgery-table clean. Killarney's kept like a retro set for WWII soldiers, back when the photographs were black and white, but the memories were full-on chrome.

Killarney works at being a memory. But one that's hard to mute.

Geek Stuff: Shot with my Canon 7D, worked with PS the processed with Alien Skin Exposure's Kodachrome II to tease out the rich antique late-afternoon reds and memories that my grandparents and my mother brought to America.

Invisible Stuff

This is invisible. Neuroscientists proved that our mind's a lazy piece of meat. It does what it must, the rest... fuggedabouddit.... The brain doesn't put itself out. For example, on your way to work, or to visit a relative, you only tend to see what's out of place. The ordinary, the usual, the banal... The brain says, "Ho-hum" and never sends that information to the processor. Which is why we see... really see... through fresh eyes when we travel down new roads. 

Oh, and even then we tend to filter away the commonplace. "ZAP!" I've transported you to say, Istanbul, and out of your hotel window there's a distant view of the Great Blue Mosque. "Magic," you mutter as it shimmers under a morning sun. And you never see the dumpsters or even the parking lot where they're sitting below. 

Nor will you see, really see, a turret atop a tiled roof in the next block that's accessorized with trash, sat-dishes, pipes, and wires snarling patternlessly. Actually the brain not only filters out the common, but also the pointlessly ugly. 

Ugly rarely gets gallery wall space, or storage room in those lazy pieces of meat between our ears. Why use up the energy to record then retain this sort of thing? And yet the common and the ugly fill the majority of every space between pockets of beauty.  It makes me wonder what else our efficiency-censors delete. What ideas we won't consider because the facts are... invisible. 

Pieced-Impressions

Dunno where in Ireland I captured this. We watched thousands of these homes drive past our windows. They filled my memory with their colors, boxed shapes, and tidy; lines, walks and alleys. 

They weren't like American memories... not exactly. They weren't like European memories... not exactly. But they weren't foreign. Weren't exotic. They fit onto my story arc comfortably: Abstract pieces of box-color with plenty of fireplaced-space inside.. Each with doorways that open, uninterrupted by porches or stoops, directly onto the world's-rush. The world that bussed us past their un-barred windows to leave a sense of color-brushed security.


Canon 7D, EF-S17-85mm, ISO 1000,   AlienSkin: Snap Art 3: various layers of mixed media, Exposure 5, Kodachrome 20 ASA. Custom textures/brushes.Hand drawn sky and features to reveal pieced impressions.

Sunset On Middle Street

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“Just once,” the old worker muttered,

“Just once in anyone’s lifetime I’d like to see…”

(Was that a tear? Or did the sun make him squint?)

“Just once I’d like to see…

a recession start in Washington. Or at least…”

(Yeah, it was a tear…)

“Finally hit the hundreds of thousands of bastards down there gettin’ fat…”

He shrugged toward his mailbox hung on crumbling bricks

“Off the bills they cram into that!
Winter’s comin’,” He whispered. 

“We gotta’ make ’em STOP!”

Late August’s sun lowered over Middle Street.

Sunday evening. Canon G10, Topaz custom enhancements, spot masked dynamic range adjustments, OnOne Hollywood Glow.

NYC: 5th Ave. At Central Park

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Consensus disciplines perception

Perception focuses judgment

Judgment triggers conviction

Conviction colors streets nasty.

Found on July 12th 2012 as I walked along 5th Avenue.

Canon 7D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), PS4: Topaz Adjustment, Custom texture, AlienSkinExposure 4: Color Films – Polaroid/faded-darkened, Snap Art Blow Up 3 (300% enlargement). Custom spot-applied color shift adjustment layers, original created to be printed at 27" X 36".

Crayon New York City °1

In high July color

Bubbles and melts.

Like flamed-plastic toys.

Like feeling-seared film.

I walked through New York’s mid-day tropics… Storing stuff in my memory-bin that’s marked Summer In The City. I found new image puddles – left out in the noon-day sun – that melted right over those I’d stored in that bin before. These new ones were like casings to harden around stacked feelings that burble and glow when I poke around for memories of city summer.

Crayoned Impressionism: Canon 7D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), PS4: Two square details carved from a 3 panel vertical pano, Topaz Adjustment, AlienSkinExposure 4: Color Films - Polaroid/faded-darkened, Snap Art3: Crayon. Custom spot-applied color shift adjustment layers, original created to be printed at 30" X 60".

Water Street Bindery

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Here's a house and a half... Circa. 1730 along Water Street in downtown Lancaster, Pa. a couple of blocks from my house on Sunday morning May 27, 2012. That's my bike there by the bindery. It was one of those days when scattered thunderstorms lead to summer sunlight shining through sudden rain..

Canon G10, 4 vertical image pano, PS4: Alien Skin: employing Snap Art 3: Watercolor as spot filtering.

Good Morning Florence

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An oarsman snaps
His way along the
Mirrored Arno.

The light enwraps
Its coat over the
Ancient feeling.

Canon 40D, PS4: custom brushes, Topaz, AlienSkin: Exposure4: Color Slide: Agfa RSXII 100 <- My favorite film ever!

Bosporus Bustle

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Gilt party boats
Crazy sway
In waves and wind.

A two arm gap
Over an
Ancient alley.

Istanbul, behind the Blue Mosque
Mixed Media, Canon 7D, PS4: custom brushes and textures, Topaz, Alien Skin: SnapArt: pastels.

In Konya There's An Emerald

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The sky was lit by the splendor of the moon
So powerful I fell to the ground
Your love has made me sure
I am ready to forsake this worldly life
and surrender to the magnificence of your Being.
– Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi

In Konya there’s a museum
Its emerald glow
Remembers its poet.
Its poet remembers
The moon…

Open the love window.
The moon won’t use the door,
only the window.

– Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Here’s The Rumi Museum
Looking over Konya, Turkey




Canon 7D: PS4: Custom filters & brushes, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt – Impasto: Custom texture.

Antalya, Turkey

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The old town’s
Ancient port
Bobs atop the
Mediterranean.

Antalya, Turkey
Canon 7D, PS4: 8 image pano stitch, Topaz

Turkey Notes - Istanbul Morning

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The morning call
Echoes from
Mosque to mosque.
A soprano melody
Along the city bustle
Melody line.

I took notes – with my Canon. Jotting onto FlashCards: my feelings. And of course in Istanbul, you feel the morning pull you awake. Is the city always sunny? dunno... but we never saw rainy clouds in July anywhere in the country. Of course it was mid summer and it was hot. Surprisingly there were palm trees in Istanbul. Since it sits at about the same latitude as Lancaster, we were told that the weather was comparable. But a palm tree would freeze its coconuts off here in the Red Rose city. Maybe it's because Istanbul pokes into both the Black Sea and the Med that it's warmer in winter? Anyone know?

Notice the buses in this scene. Istanbul has a spectacular public transit grid of mixed buses trolleys and light rail together with a bustling taxi and limo industry. The things are crowded at all hours. SRO... But with maybe 19 million people living in the city, a tad of crowding is expected, huh?

Last point... I tried to make this, at least in part, about the neighborhood mosque where the Imam chants/sings the morning call to prayer. And that is an interesting point. It was explained that while Turkey is a secular nation without a state church, the government does erect mosques and hires the imams who I suppose are sensitive to the um... sensitivities... of the interests of the place from which their checks come? Dunno, but it's an interesting arrangement.Actually the prayer call coming from the loud speakers on most minarets is a peaceful background sound, much like the peeling of church bells.

Istanbul, Turkey – Monday morning
Canon 7D, PS4: pano stitch, custom brushes, filters, Topaz, Alien Skin: SnapArt: Impasto, Custom textures.

Mada Caress

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Panic sweats
Come at night
Like fingers
Eerily
Squirming at
The story arc
Of your grim
Dank fearings.

NY, NY

Canon 7D: PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: Snap Art, colored pencils, Custom filters & brushes

Searing Mid Day Dixie

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Nightmare Daylight

Searing light bleaches
Colors and inks
Black shadows
Except when
It doesn’t.

Tybee Island, Ga.
Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm: PS4, AlienSkin, Bokeh2: Custom textures & brushes. Thanks to Distressed Jewel.

Steel City

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It rides upon
Three river ways
And like a
Boat at night
It rocks!

Pittsburg, PA
Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm @12mm, PS4: Topaz, AlienSkin, SnapArt, Oil Paint, Custom brushes and textures

Cave Painting

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There is an urge
To deface space.
Like a dog’s need
To mark his place
With primal dung.

To boldly claim,
"This is my thing
See I’ve been here."
To scream aloud
“It’s about ME!”

The spray can is
Mightier than:
Maturity, or
Historical
Adhesive.

The spray can is
What happened when
The stone age child
Ran out of stone..

Via Dei Bonizzi
Florence, Italy
Cannon 20D; PP: PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin:SnapArt:Colored Pencil, Custom textures and brushes.