Masks Edit Reality

Image & Likeness?

Just outside of New York's Whitney Museum sat a table. You know, a street merchant parked a van and on this cold January day back in 2011 he'd unfolded an aluminum surface filled with African wood carvings. They weren't cheap.

Not In The Whitney

Perhaps it was the color, but this yellow guy grabbed my lens. You know how you collect images that whisper to you, but you can't quite hear their words? For years now, like a tune that worms through my brain but won't go away, I've wondered about this one. We live three houses down from The Lancaster Museum of Art and I wander through each new exhibit, frequently several times. This month the show is Masks Of Mexico. So, the other day in the shower it occurred to me that masks edit reality! Wow, an epiphany. But that's what those Mexican masks specifically did. The wearers assumed new identities and entered obscure feelings. They became a cast in stories, some ancient, others spontaneous.

Most Mexican and African mask-stories are deeply spiritual linked to legends of gods.  So I said to myself, "Self... If as the Western Holy Book claims that we are made in His image and likeness, then studying what we do must be a tipoff about what He does... Y'think?"

And since He rested on the seventh day... Well we sure know a lot about the night before Sunday, huh? And maybe why He really needed the rest. 

Over There: See?

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Brambles always return. We are only so far in front of life’s jungle. But as long as we’ve got the energy and tenacity to keep ahead of the suckers…. To whack ‘em off when they’re little more than scratchy stubble – Well, it is as if civilization’s here to stay. But it takes a bunch of individual effort – an every-day-thing.

Because the jungle’s really just below ground, and sometimes – even in the middle of a city its fingery brambles claw back through like… like…

Over there: See?

Restoration • YEA!

As you know (or can find out by clicking upon "Rotten Apple Explained" on the right-hand sidebar. See it?) a massive number of my blog's images were deleted as a result of the caprice of Apple, Inc. Sigh. Well anyway... I'm slowly but surely restoring hundreds and hundreds of postings and doing it by portfolios. So... I hope that you'll visit them as the come back on line by clicking on the appropriate portfolio there on the right-hand sidebar as they appear.

It's a lot of work gang! And I will really be in your debt if you'll visit some of them and let me know if all is coming into place? And of course, new comments on particular postings will especially warm my heart.

Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks...

Ted

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FALL COMES TO EAST DENNIS


THERE'S A PROBLEM
WITH FALL
IT LACKS
A HAPPY ENDING....

Mixing Media

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The evening of July 4th was bathed in glorious light for Banjamin's play. I cranked my Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) lens all the way out to capture the lad twirling in the hot spot.

The way that lens churns backgrounds into delirious bokeh is spellbinding, huh? And look how it captures the rim lighting! The optics we've got at reasonable prices today were beyond my dreams as a young photographer in the 60s. Whoa! The SIXTIES! They don't seem 45-50 years ago. AAARGH!

I knew as I took this series that I'd be cropping to reinforce the vertical feelings of the boy reaching toward the sun. And I suspected that I'd want to emphasize the romantic nature or eternal summer with an oil painting... plain air... mood.

So in PS4 I cropped it, adjusted the tonal range, snuck in some additional background flora, then turned to Topaz Adjustment to tease out the colors and the details in Benjamin's hair. From there I loaded up Alien Skin's Snap Art and carefully created a number of layers in Oil Paint, each with different brush sizes and shapes which I masked back into the image to emphasize the glow of the evening light. However, you can see I was careful to mask out the SnapArt entirely around Benjamin's face so that the final image is truly mixed media.

I like it as a portrait of a boy in the summer sun.

***

And the original? How much did it change? Here.. you decide. I'm certain you would have seen the boy so much differently in this original capture, huh? That's the nature of art isn't it? Each of our imagination's create a different story arc... Personal wonder... But of course... art without wonder is merely craft.

Sold In The USA

Deep beneath the Jefferson Memorial is a gift shop. Inside they sell, like, trash. Trash pens, trash, tee shirts, trash, mugs, trash, busts. For example, here are two... see my point?

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On the left there's a cheepie statue of the Great Man himself (1.) and on the right you can see a representative cup (2.). And now... lettuce turn them over, OK?


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Here's the bottom of the cup sold by the United States Park Service from the Jefferson Memorial gift store (#2).. And its label? See anything, um. odd? Okay.. now let's turn Jefferson over (#1)...


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Sigh... in the entirety of America there was only one place they could find a bust maker. Um, well, a bust importer. The bust maker apparently lives pretty far to the west of Washington, huh? by the way, the folks who knit most of the store's shirts and "Washington D.C." golf caps weren't from Washington's west. Nope... Honduras - sort of to the south, right?

Yep, this is the Uited States government, using US. taxpayer taxes to buy the inventory for the store of the Jefferson Memorial. I didn't see that coming. Did you?

Global Chilling.... Brrrr....

Yesterday my friend Andreas posted a comment to my bitterly cold ramblings on global chilling (please read it). Since his serious response to my lighthearted shivering deserved a serious response ... well I tried to post one, but it failed to fit in the comments box. So... how about this...

Hey… Hey…. HEY! I wasn’t the guy who PhotoShoped multiple hurricanes to the cover of his latest book (propaganda?), nor the same fellow who pointed to tsunamis and Katrina as evidence for “theories” of global warming. That guy’s named Gore (a Nobel Laureate by the way, but not in science… Hmmmm…. Wonder why that is? Of course he got that award from the same committee that recently gave one of those things to one of our Presidents who’d been in office two weeks before the nominations closed… so much for propaganda and propagandists…. Heh, heh, heh.) Incidentally, in Texas they are giving out Nobel Peace prizes with each oil change, but I digress.

As for things anecdotal… Theory to be useful must demonstrate twin necessary and sufficient conditions…. (1) It must be internally consistent, and (2) It must have predictive capacity. Scientific conclusions must have one necessary condition… they must be reproducible.

The internal consistency of global warming is thinner than a starlet’s tee shirt. Point in fact, when you take the computer models that the Climate “Scientists” are using to “predict” some future event…. And simply reverse them to “predict” some known point in the past… That is when you check their assumptions against known points… they are ALWAYS wrong and by amounts way beyond any tolerable levels of error. And they are wrong on the COLD side. I.E….. when they are focused forward, they are biased toward warming… way biased, every single model! And the weather stations used to collect their inputs are further biased by their positioning in or around toasty warm urban centers. The recent announcement by the Russians that the Hockey Stick Team failed to use any of their Siberian data is a wonderful case in point which makes most statisticians break out in giggles.

So much for internal consistency… as for reproducibility… Well it seems that after the ClimateGate revelations of climate “scientists” cooking their books, there were renewed outcries for their original data to see if their results could be reproduced. Oh, how unfortunate, the same guys who were coercing and defaming any and all critics and tricking out their methodologies suddenly can’t find any of the original data. It seems to have been lost. Not enough storage space. It got tossed out.

The dog ate their homework?

BTW-a... I am ashamed to say that I have a graduate degree from Penn State where one of these characters is diluting respect for my credentials. PSU had better crank up that investigation they are doing of this guy, his recently revealed emails, and the former debunking of his statistical competency are quite embarrassing.


Which leaves us with three questions, (1) is global warming occurring at all? (2) If so, does it differ in any degree from the previous cycles over billions of years, And (3) Have humans contributed in any significant way…. And a policy question… If (1) is true and (3) is true to whatever degree…. Are there policy alternatives available which will have any significant impact upon (1)? And what are the cost/benefit effects of that… those… policies?

BTW-b… some say that the polar ice caps on Mars seem to be melting along with those on other planets. Hmmmmmm….. the sun couldn’t have any part in this, could it?

Look, we shouldn’t foul our nests. I am a conservationist… even a modified Green. I drive a tiny car, always have. My home is super insulated and retrofitted. It’s a decent idea to find alternative and reproducible energy resources. In fact, nuclear makes sense to me even though I get some of my electricity from Three Mile Island which is a stone’s throw from where I’m sitting. Conservation is not an ideological issue nor a political power grab… Climate “science”, however is both walking and quacking like it is both of those things. It is, however, the perfect device to bring about central control of all decision making, something that a lot of people have been anxious to do in order to overcome the pesky irritation of democracy and rule by citizens, as opposed to rule by rulers over subjects.

As for the anecdotes… Given the state of research into climate…. I conclude that we are the first generation of any animal/plant/mineral in the history of history which demands a right to its own climate! How much hubris does that take? And isn't any theory based upon a few thousand years out of the many billions of earth history merely an anecdote? Can it really be taken more seriously than a few overheard conversations in a pub?

Hockey sticks are for ice rinks, of which we have more right now in Lancaster County than anytime in the last fifty years. Why isn’t a frozen pond also on the cover of Mr. Gore’s latest piece of propaganda? Hmmmmm…. Maybe because it would create doubt? Demand the funding of unbiased research? Threaten his income flow?

The future of the world remains a mystery to me and consequently I am a global warming agnostic… The case has been neither proven nor disproven. Which means that the human role in any of this is way far from being investigatable. Maybe this year we shall get closer? Happy 2010 :-)


BTW-c: Okay, don't believe me. I am merely a subject as far as the politicians are concerned and consequently unqualified to enter into this grand debate. Of course so is Andreas, and for that matter, Al Gore. So let us turn to a fully qualified expert, okay?(and one who Mr. Gore refuses to debate) Here.... Click here, check out this link I've posted and let me know what you think... Um, even if you are "only" a subject as opposed to a citizen and not an expert. BTW-final... have you noticed that in this debate, politicians forbid (or shame) their subjects from commenting because they are not experts? Spooky, eh? I guess they sort of figure that some of us are just smarter than all of us?

Teasing Baby

Hmmmm….. some interest in the mechanics of yesterday’s post. Folks want a how-to. I’m not much good at demos… but lemme try.

First off the challenge here was plucking an idea from a snapshot from my G10 on Christmas day and turning it into a feeling I could communicate. Fortunately the Canon G10 packs more than 14 mpxls into a snapshot allowing a bunch of information that leaves room to crop away as much as thirty percent of an image and still have sufficient material to allow traction in post processing. BTW…. I used an ISO of 400 to avoid introducing too much noise…. The downside of the G10's densely packed mpxls.

As you can see in the full frame capture in Image One… the lighting was contrasty tungsten which needed a bunch of adjustment in Adobe’s Camera Raw application. Fortunately I used a gray scale swatch in the first of this series to allow easy color balance.

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IMAGE 1

I used the auto rotate function of PS4 to rotate the image as shown by the arrows in the corners. Then I did a crop to get rid of the mass of confusion around the chair as I’ve shown with the orange squiggles. But even with tight crop, there was still a lot left to compete for the eye, when Katelynn Rose was clearly the subject. And the confusion was not just in a cacophony of shapes but also of palette and light. Sooooo…. I've suggested the final crop with the white outline in Image 1 and that's what you see below in Image 2.

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IMAGE 2

Now to get down to mood. With adjustment layers I saw that I had to not only create some mysterious drama but also burn away most heavily in areas 1 – 4. However, since I wanted to allow supporting visual interest in those four areas: How to do that yet not provide sufficient information to quarrel with the main story of the baby? Alien Skin’s Bokeh of course. After changing the over-all dynamic range with curves adjustment layers (six I believe carefully masking them in to different elements of the final image) I flattened the image, copied the layer… and applied Bokeh to it. Masked it away, then brushed back the creamy results into the four problem areas above and to a lesser extent to any of the chair’s fabric which continued to distract attention while introducing a dreamy sense consistent with the child's nap.

None of this is particularly challenging, but it’s all a matter of applying the right tool to the proper area to tease out the feeling I visualized when I took the photograph.

Does this transition from snapshot to moody image help anyone? Hope so….

Happy New Year….

Jim & Lenny and Battles

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In 1962 the guy on the left up there was 26. His name? Jim Furlong. The other guy was also one of my college roommates, Len Freiberg. Like Lenny, I was twenty years old and behind the 4X5 Speed Graphic triggering the shutter. Jim wanted to comment on the idea of subjectivity. You know, how opinions are all a matter of perspective, where you stand, how you view stuff. How people can see the same thing and one guy comes away thinking, "Hey, nice picture of a couple of men commuting on the subway." But someone else goes, "Holy dung! Those characters are dangling from the ceiling!"

Jim kept coming up with ideas like that, and talking us into risking our asses to make them work. He's the guy who taught me photography. We spent a bazillion hours together in a small darkroom at King's College where we were, I guess, the photography departments for the school paper, the literary magazine, and the yearbook. We also freelanced and sold pix to the local papers and some mags.

Lenny sent me this diptych last night. The originals had faded and frankly I was pretty sloppy back then, losing the battle against the dust storm that swirled in that darkroom. It was nice to have a second shot at them after forty eight years. I'm a lot more meticulous now and I've scraped away most of the lint, motes, and dribble that covered the images like a Spring snow.

Judging by the St. Patrick's Day Sale in that paper, it was early Spring when we did this thing.So there was probably as much white stuff on the ground outside as I left on these pix. Still, try as I might I couldn't restore one aspect of that cool evening. There was no real way to bring Jim back. He died recently. At least his body did. But that smile... that cheer... those ideas and feelings... They're just as real as my memories of two friends dangling from that ceiling and the way we laughed and still do... all three of us. Len and I here and I'm sure Jim somewhere else.

If it's a battle between death and Jim's warmth... Death runs a poor second.

Betrayed

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"It's ending," he thought.

"They're breaking it apart right now," he thought.

"And it will never come together again," he thought.

"Not like that," he knew.

The Poet Wrote...

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"For beauty's nothing but the beginning of terror." - Rainer Maria Rilke

Sigh, don't you love great German poets? Explode-the-milk-through-your-nose FUNNNNY! You get the feeling that Rainer Maria Rilke had a dazzlingly pretty mother... Who gave him that middle name.

Which wasn't totally funny in high school. Um, well not to Rainer Maria Rilke. I've always thought, as I read Rilke, that his mommy's beauty probably talked his dad into a lots of stuff. Like naming his boy, Maria. Which results in either a totally tough youngster... or a kick-ass sour poet. I'm guessing that Rainer wasn't what women call a bad boy, huh?

The Artist

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Regardless of what art is... there's another question: Why do people do art?

Hmmmm.... I've got three reasons:

(1) They have an instinct to gather parts of life for themselves or,
(2) They want to save parts of themselves for the future or,
(3) They want to stuff a market in a bottle cast into the tides of time...

You want to add more?

New Link Under Ted's Essays!

Lookit! Yippee, Vonne from The Fine Arts Composite Group at the explosively popular RedBubble forums interviewed ME! And she probed into my photo/art influences, what triggers and maintains my inspiration, what I want to get across artistically, the hardest obstacles, my plans, and my advice to the novice.

I'm psyched. If you've wondered about any of that stuff that I wonder about... just click on the link under "Ted's Essays" in the right hand column and enjoy... and gimme your reactions here... K? That'd be reeeeeely cool and visitors will get a chance to react to your reactions and on and on... Kew-el!

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.

The Violinist

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Hmmmm.... can art be entertainment? If it is, is it then a 'lesser art'? Is the intention to entertain too shallow for a serious artist? Maybe... maybe the word 'serious' is automatically negated by the word, 'entertainment'? Which makes me wonder if I should be entertained by Mozart? Picasso? Tennessee Williams? Fellini?

Here's an image... my image... of a violinist, a woman who is quite gifted. She wields her bow like a fencer's foil. It darts, stabs, dnces, and glides cutting feelings from the air. Her training was serious, so can her performance be entertaining?

Is this image entertaining? The jaws of my camera bite a moment free from the blur of time. And that provides me with an opportunity to express my feelings and thoughts about the frozen instant. So? How much is art, how much is entertainment. Or can it all be entertaining art, or artistic entertaiment?

Particularly when it is an image of an entertainer interpreting art?

Grumble, once again, my head hurts from all of this. Goodnight.

Pretty... Very Pretty

Help, I'm under attack by my tools!

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Help, I'm under attack by my tools!
My dad used to say, "Ted, it's a poor worker who blames his tools." Sigh... But it's true. I'm living in a shoddy Steven King novel. I can't seem to tame my filters or techniques. Look at this image taken at Eleanor Rooselvelt's Hyde Park, NY home called Val-Kill.

Nowhere does it communicate my political feelings. Nor does it show something else. Hyde Park is the Land Time Forgot! There has been no change there since maybe 1947! i swear, right in the center of town there's a roller rink. Everyone who toured this place with us remembered the Roosevelts. Now you have to remember that they governed in the 1930s-40s. I felt as if I was suffocating in a musty pile of my parents clothes. And yet, instead of creating an image of moth balls, or reaction to a tour of the Democrat Party's Vatican... instead what came out was that image up here.

I have become an obsessive romantic! Look at this thing. It is .. charming. Charming is not how I felt. How I felt was like... MMMMMPH! I am quite happy to be a citizen of today. It is as if I was visiting the old country while holding daddy's hand. Much as I loved them, today is the world I watched and helped to get made. I like it.

You know what happens when anti matter hits matter? KABOOM! ... Right?

Somehow I KABOOMed! in Hyde Park. Nostalgia kicked me into a psychotic break. AAARGH! And did I get an image of it? Huh?? Huh? Nope... What I got was On Golden Pond up here. I gotta get control of my tools.

And Then Came The Senator

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Pennsylvania is a battleground state in this Presidential election. When our local TV stations take advertising breaks there are, like, frequently three minutes of the senator's ads in a row. It's as if everything is being brought to us by Him. The whole world and everything in it are sort of a gift he's giving us. It's an unusual kind of experience, you know what I'm saying here?

So anyway, when he stopped by for one of his many speeches, I stood there surrounded by buddies, each taking pictures of Him. The crowd was enthralled. We all snapped dozens of images. But strangely when we compared them later... Well, it seemed hard to make out anything sharp. For that matter in lots of the pictures all we got was glowing light. But as far as any details... Nope. Just grainy impressions.

My equipment's worked fine since... What do you make of that?

The News

Yep the news is distracting. However the value that we place upon things has not changed, just their monetary descriptions. Only for those who have valued stuff for its price tag... only for those people is the present situation truly alarming. My wife, my dog, our home, our friends, these photos... and so much more are worth no more or less to me at this moment than thye were a moment ago and will probably be worth more in the moments to come. Maybe I'll find a way to express this as an image, perhaps not.

There's an economic expression which is worth understanding just now. It's "The Monetary Veil". Too often we categorize things by their position on a dollar/euro/whuddever scoreboard. Even people, wondering how much someone makes for a living. Sometimes we're fortunate to pierce that monetary veil and see the reality on the other side.

We'll leap this financial chasm that's appearing in front of us on the TV and in the papers. But as we steel our nerves to jump, it's valuable to look around at everything on this side and see it denuded from some monetary number... and actually value the worth of the things beneath that coverlet before they're all tricked out once again in price tags.

NOTE: If you want to read my take on the causes of this economic malais.... In my other - real - world, I have a published article on the causes you can find if you Click here

Fish Girl

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Can we evolve down? Have we evolved up? Hmmmm.... There's this belief that we've reached the top of the evolutionary chain. Okay, let's buy that for sake of argument, okay? And since the Darwinian thing is all based upon natural selection and genetic adaptation – well – does that assume that every species always goes one way? Well, no. Any one can slip, right?

And anyone can get a step ahead.

I guess all we can assume is that we humans have got an edge. For the moment.

Although every now and then I meet someone who makes me wonder if, just possibly, we're already slipping some. And I'm going to bet you've also met them... right?

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Want to see the virgin image from my FlashCard? Here you go....

Next October

SUMMER'S CHAIRS ARE EMPTY

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I'm sitting here on the last Sunday morning in September hearing the hourglass sand drop away. It's flowing inexorably toward October. So my fingers work to remember the future. Each time we wish that this time we'll hold this glory forever. Each time we hope that it all won't die. Each time it does.

We are the only species in history who expect that we are entitled to a Fall, and a climate, that never changes.

Fall would be the finest time of year except... it lacks a happy ending.


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Here's the virgin Middlebury, Vermont image from my FlashCard... Comments?

Scooter

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Voice lessons... I take them every day. Like a lot of you who are photographers, I sort of frame things around me. It's a dorky habit, but useful when you want to see stuff through a range finder. Problem is, you look through the range finder long enough and you feel like your looking through it even when you're not.

After a while though you stop looking at what you are looking at. Say what? I mean you start looking at things as if they are about something different. It's like someone learning a new language. Sooner or later the breakthrough comes and your dreams are now in that tongue. That voice. And it's what happens to most artists. They see things and wonder about them. In frames. First you wonder what they are saying, and then you wonder what you might say with them. Not what they say... but what they might say.

You find your voice. But like a singer, each day you exercise. I find that the city does that. All the time it gives me voice lessons... Like Scooter here.

See his expression? That wonderful look of comfort and confidence. No fear. No worry. All boy-to-man in a brightening light, still colored with the vapors and innocence of kid-world. What a moment, eh? No... not necessarily this specific moment, no... that last moment ... or first moment... between then and now. And here's how I see it... in my voice.

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BTW... want to see the virgin image from my FlashCard? Well here. Enjoy.