Burst Of Swagger

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Escape? Lemme tell ya’…
That’s what you paid for…

Trample the detonator to throttle
A screeching stench of tearing rubber…
Neck-snapping…
Fantasy rush.

Each one of these babies came
With a full charge of swagger.

Say every girl didn’t swoon
At this rocketing past…

Hell…
You believed it…
And perception… that’s a
Big-assed part of truth.
Right?

Were you mistaken?
Like, you gotta’ know,
If you don’t make mistakes…
You ain’t making nothin’.

After that reckless feeling that came with each of these cars… The guy-fantasy of pulling on a super-hero costume that made little-pimply you invisible inside it’s sleek exoskeleton. Every fourteen year old boy’s cloak of seduction. Within this beast you were the rocker who became a movie star with an explosive ball of light beneath your foot. Or at least you figured you’d be all of that if somehow.. you could only grow up to buy one.

Canon 40D, Table top art, PS4: custom filters, AlienSkin: SnapArt3: Water Color, Alien Skin Bokeh2: Custom settings, Exposure4 – custom effects.

Love-Worned and Abandoned

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Sad how it seems
When your past forms your dreams
Of that time when
Wishes came true.

Then no one was lonely
Back when love was there only
For you.

What is more poignant than a lonesome little thing dreaming – of finding one more hug? She stood there tagged in life’s shadows… Eyes closed… dreaming of what? New love? Old love? Any…. love?

Canon 40D, PS4: AlienSkin Exposure 4, Custom textures

Pepper Fears Children

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It’s seventy years since
A nasty kid
Broke off her Salt’s head
And left him dying
In a puddle of powder.

Now she peers wildly
Maddened by the nearest giggle
Hoping to hide from
Hands unable to tell
Play from cruelty.

Canon 7D, PS4: Topaz Adjust5, Alien Skin: Bokeh 2, Exposure 4: Kodachrome II (1962-1974), Custom pop-spot texturing.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot...

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Soon the bells will start
But the wonder-filled sight that will spring
Is the glow that will quietly ring
Deep within your heart.

Sometimes they cloy… but we can’t help it because… Darn… we clutch at hooks to which we can hang an order, a map, an understanding…. a life. Here’s my moose-ical hook.

I found this little orphaned-guy on the shelf at a Goodwill shop years ago. He was tattered... stained here and there... but his grin was so optimistic. Look at him, and like a switch, you smile, right? Someone had breathed that into this ball of wrapped stuffing. I wonder where he is today. Wherever, his aura's here... and there with you, right? Okay, it's corny but still... still... Magical, don't you think?

Canon 7D, PS4: AlienSkin: Bokeh 2, SnapArt3: Watercolor, Custom textures & brushes.

FWOOOOM...

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Chris loaned me his 2007 Corvette.
It's very ... very ... quick.


Especially atop a table.

Canon 20D: PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: Bokeh2 & SnapArt: Water Color

SIZZZZZLE!

<- Borrowed my friend Chris's Bugatti last Sunday and took it to Musser Park nearby to my home here in Lancaster. Wanted to pop this beast out of the rich lighting. I'm not a MotorHead. But the art of design makes me twitch. And the Veyron ... well now this is one manly beast! And probably a chick magnet, huh?


GEEK STUFF Here's Chris's Bugatti Veyron shot with my Canon 70D through the Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) in macro mode. Post processing happened with CS/PS4 • Topaz • AlienSkin Bokeh, AlienSkin SnapArt/Water Color • Custom Brushes • Custom Textures all upon a background captured one night in Intercourse, PA.

Power Points

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Two in the AM
Sax snarl from speakers
Neon blares power
Careening it back
From designer points
Onto hot summer
Blur.
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Adamstown, Lancaster County, PA
Canon 7D: PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: Bokeh2, Snap Art – Custom designed brushes.

Geek Stuff: Visited Adamstown last weekend. It's about ten minutes north of Lancaster. AND... it's the antique capital of the Northeast. There are scores of dealers. Two of the largest are in-door walk throughs with vendors renting stalls. One is a monstrous glade with vendors in tents planted beneath huge shade trees. Some are box stores filled with crystal cases, each leased to a different merchant. And others are traditional antique shops.

Which means tens of thousands of things are all out there for my lens. So... I collect the items which let me tell the stories bouncing about inside my head. Or the stories that those things set a-abouncing. Or both.

Adamstown is about inspiration.

Summer Starts Here...

Found this letter. Sort of... maybe... kinda....

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Doll Face Puddle

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Found her at Valley Forge. Really. She seems right for that encampment, eh?

I've begun to notice that I don't seem to have a dark side. I look at my images and yeah, they hit the three bases... they appeal to visual, emotional, and intellectual puddles of the mind. I'm happy with the way they communicate what I want them to... It's just that dark side stuff is considered so... so... DEEEEEP, right? Everything else splashes about in shallower puddles.

Ah well... she's charming... and I'm guessing that there's still a tiny place in a lot of us for sweet, huh?

On the other hand.... maybe I'll go upstairs and think some dark thoughts... I'll letcha know :-)

Have You Found Bokeh?

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The software magicians at Alien Skin have a new application called 'Bokeh'. Oh, alright, I don't know how new it is, but I just discovered it. There's a free thirty day download and you can play with all of its functions.

I discovered Belle on a shelf in a run down tourist trap. See there on the bottom of this post? That's where she stood among a bunch of Gone With The Wind flotsam.

I never could figure out what to do with Belle. She seems to niggle at me to find her a place in an image. And maybe I shall some day. But that's not the point. Nope, I wanted to try Bokeh out on something, so I pulled Belle up and in about ten minutes this is what I made. I can see so many subtle (yeah, I know this one's over the top... don't nag me... K?) ways to use the effects this PhotoShop fllter allows. I'm in love... I think. Wuddaya think? Let me know, and if you try their free demo offer, let me know where you've posted your experiments, this looks like a silver bullet, huh?

Oh, and here's the link to AlienSkin's Bokeh , enjoy...

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And here's the original...


Click There




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And here's a last variation.... Hmmmmm.... Not real manly though... Gotta think on this one, eh?

Boys Dream Of Angels

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There's a myth about Victoria's Secret angels. They're supposed to be the fantasy of healthy young boys. When in fact the angelic dreams of the healthiest boys I knew had nothing to do with jiggling women in sparkly underwear. YUCH!

Nope, we dreamt at a time when things like cars were made NOT to feed the nightmares of grim governments obsessed with sanding away anything powerful, dangerous, wasteful, or romantic about them. Uh-uh. Then they were sleek, muscular, responsive, and melodic angels gleaming squint-bright through our boyhood night-times.

They let us drive a glowing enthusiasm that's somehow dimmed.

Ahh… but those were childish times when leaders preached optimism and its reward was angels that glimmered in a boy’s sleep.

The Photograph Is A Fact

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It's not the difficulty of technique that makes something into art. Nope... nope... it's the challenge of what an image expresses, you know what I'm saying? Hmmm.. Lemme try that differently. The greatest thoughts have been expressed by the simplest technique... writing.

A photograph is a fact... well it is a couple of facts. What it is about is factual. And the thing itself... you can see it, examine it - its very existence is factual.

An image on the other hand. This thing here... It is not about something factual. But you can see it, consider it. It exists. And its existence is a fact, right?

So... so.... What it is is NOT a manipulated photograph. What it is is a feeling that I've enhanced. And how was I feeling? Um, well... just like that image there. Right?

And that's a fact!

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By the way, the feeling I mentioned was all about what's going on in America right now. Urban ideologies are pouring over the countryside. The liberal has broken through the conservative. The taxis are swirling through the covered bridges. How will they be received? Are the country roads two-way? Will they? Can they - ever go back? Are urban feelings way out of place in a foreign country? Or are they the ones that we have been waiting for?

Image Compositing

One of my favorite images is "The Spirit" which I made last summer
<- and you may enlarge this tutorial by clicking on it.

Recently I entered 'Spirit' into a challenge on a forum where it was initially rejected because the moderators felt that the rules required that all entries be photographs. As you can see, Spirit does not have a traditional photographic look. And that is the wonderful thing about being a photographic artist today. Just like composers, novelists, poets, sculptors and painters... we are totally free as photographers to create anything we can imagine. This is wonderful but sometimes confusing to visitors.

'Spirit' is completely a photographic composite. It only differs from the wet darkroom technique of sandwiching negatives into an enlarger in nuance. But that nuance is magical, eh? I've invited the judges to visit this site, and to look at my explanation here, showing how I made Spirit soar.

Academic Freedom

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Actions have consequences
Rights have responsibilities
Unless... You have...
Tenure.






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I'm still experimenting with my new Canon G10 so again - for the geeky folk like me who enjoy this sort of thing... Direct from my HD card, here is the virgin photograph of my professor just as I caught him at ISO 400 in the existing light "on campus" in Adamstown yesterday afternoon. Nice automatic color balance, eh? And the painting effects? All done with assorted brushes in PhotoShop... Enjoy.

Chick Magnet?

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Parked outside of Madison Square Garden my Mercedes 500K Special Roadster glimmers in the city, huh? It belongs there with its top down and motor purring. Purring.... it's a sound that attracts, right? :-)

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Okay, here's another shot, a virgin photo of that 1936 Mercedes on my office desk top pulled right from my HD card. Sigh, I like it better in NYC. Whadaya think?

Getting Ahead

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I've figured out that in life we have to deal with loud noises, abrupt bangs, and metal lumps like this that can trip us up if we're not looking down. Which of course is a problem if we walk around looking up.Hmmm... There's a moral here, right?

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The way I look at it, a photographic artist works backward from a painter. See, a painter starts with an empty canvas and edits it full, we start with a full frame, and edit down. Or at least that's the way it used to be. Now we start with a full frame and fill it up more even while we toss stuff away like in this image. It's a lot more complicated what we do today. Painters sure have it easy.

Allegory 2:

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Hmm.... so in the rear view mirror, what do you see back there? And is it getting closer? Are you careening ahead of it? Who's at the wheel? Huh? Huh?

La Passione Di Santa

"DECK THE HALLS..." TRA-LA

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And why the title? Well let's go deep, okay? The etymological origins of the word "passion" lie in the Latin passus (stemming from pati, patior- "to suffer [to happen]", in the passive sense).

Now it's clear, huh? As Christmas decorations and carols appear on the earliest days of October (this one in Hyde Park, NY)... It's The Passion of Santa!

BTW: Although they work cheap, there is no evidence anywhere that Santa Clause actually likes elves. Actually their whacky little voices are so hard to understand – it's a little know fact that bending to hear their tiny prattle damaged Santa's back.
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And here's my erratic convention... The virgin image posted directly from the FlashCard. Comments?

Soar

About Style

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IN 1885, in an introduction to Leaves Of Grass, the legendary poet Walt Whitman wrote that the writer, "Says to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I wfll not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is."

He was writing about the phenomenon of style. Whitman argued that style was an ornamental 'curtain' which distracts the viewer or obscures meaning. In a sense there are many who argue something similar about photography today. They are concerned that the new techniques of post processing come between the meaning of an image and the viewer... that they are so much distraction. But as virtually every art critic living now agrees, there is no way to strip style from statement. They are as married as skin is to a body.

Soarr is a photographic image. Notice I do not write, 'Soar is a photograph.' Why? because it is more than the photo which underlies it. Better? Here's the virgin image from the Compact Card....

That's for you to judge from the virgin image below. But certainly we'll all agree that it's different as a result of my style.

Style is the manner in which an artist presents an idea or feeling. It can be critiqued - probably should be. But style itself cannot be dismissed as a curtain. Take it away and there is no message. Whitman was wrong.

Hallucinations #2

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We say an artist has a voice. We say an image has an attitude. Okay, so what's the difference?