Halloween Hand

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Can the
Costumes of
Daytime
Become the
Magnets of
The night
Time
Stalker?
Bwa-Hah-Hah-Haaaaaaaaaa!

Canon 7D, New York City, All sorts of PS/Topaz/AlienSkin/Textures... Wheeeee!

Abruptly Dieter Understood

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When the ancient safe was cracked there was only the letter. Vaguely it hinted of treasure. Hidden? Buried? Lost?

Lost.. except the letter spoke of “the hand’s lifeline.”

What? Every hand has a line, right? RIGHT?

For year’s he searched the old city of Lancaster. Almost giving up until the shot barely missed him.

Why? Was there something? Where was someplace still as old as that letter? Only site still exposed… St. James… It’s cemetery older than the Revolution… Older than the country.

Where? Was there a life line somewhere on one of the buried… buried…. hands?

Hands?

Lines?

He stopped, stared… and abruptly Dieter understood…

Canon 7D, PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Oilpaint, Various custom brushes and filters.

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

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Sidewalked
A vendor
Hawked his
Carvings.

Tabletop
She screamed
At crowds
Leaving.

She was then
For sale.
Carved art
Ignored.

Directly in front of the doors of the New York city’s Whitney museum, a street vendor’s table sat filled with carvings. Strangely, the seller was nowhere around, yet none from the jostling crowd seemed to want to steal his stuff.

Canon 7D: PS4: Custom brushes/filters, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, pastels.

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.

Terrible Frozen Beauty

Rebecca knew better but...

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naughty Samuel had skittered through the door into the darkness toward the crumbling Herr place. She ran behind him in a night momentarily lit by a Fall moon breaking the cloud spattered sky.

Grabbing up Sam, Becca twirled toward home when from the abandoned place she heard, or perhaps felt, a whisper.

—

Camera: my Verizon cellphone’s 1.5 mpx. Had it with me just as I heard… or perhaps felt… the whisper :-)

PP: PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: Bokeh2, SnapArt:2 -> Pointillism. Custom brushes. Construct from images found at a country tag sale and lonely farm-in-the-night pix.

Catallegorical

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Bokeh2 #3

Are they
Coming back
For us
Tonight?

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There's a surreal quality to Bokeh. So... that brought me to this here cat... Heh heh heh...

1Mpxl Phone Cheepo Again

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Another from Friday night. I'm thinking that a lot of folks have gone out and bought Hulga cameras. Those are plastic film cameras that look like 1950s Kodak snapshot boxes.They're so shoddily made that light leaks onto the film and the crappy plastic lenses have all sorts of imperfections so that the final images seem like spiritual vomit. People look at the results and go, "Heavy Man! Soooooo DEEEEEP!" And I try not to put my finger down throat.... GAG!


They also expect that the point and clicker (as opposed to a photographer) will go through the hassle of sending 12 shot film rolls off to a lab somewhere and wait for "instant gratification" when the prints arrive a week or so later.

BUT why go Hulga when most of you, like me, are carting around 1mpxl cameras in our cellphones that come equipped with super crappy plastic lenses? And of course we've smeared those openings with all sorts of finger grease each time we use the phones. Nothing like random grease on plastic to smear highlights delightfully into shadows. And the result?

"HEAVY MAN! RANDOM! and Sooooooo DEEEEEEP!"

Huh?

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Like yesterday's post the image was captured just after the sun set through my Verizon LG. Question... why have I spent bundle on cameras and glass when all the while I was carting around this portal into the mystical world? It's a puzzlement don't you think.

Anybody want me to do a cellphone wedding shoot? I shall charge TOP PRICE for my ethereal interpretation.

Take note Andreas Manessinger :-)

By Its Cover

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Last

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Where do you go when every place else has tossed you out?

Here...

Suckability

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John Updike in an essay quite critical of photography as an art form wrote, "We cannot expect the camera to suck in, with light and shade, the photographer's emotion." Mr. Updike died recently before he got to fully appreciate what photographers can do now. We can suck... and we can regurgitate... at a level with painters. Now whether we can suck as well as they can... Hmmmm... That depends upon the suckability of the individual artist, huh?

Rita's visiting her family this week, so I went to NYC for the day last Friday with my buddy Chis Herr to do a day of pre-processing with my Canon G10. A peculiar thing happened. It felt claustrophobic. I've not ever been as aware of the teeming masses that crammed the sidewalks and streets. The police were enforcing the traffic lights in teams with solid white chains to corral the pedestrians from simply ignoring the signals. Crammed, jammed, slammed about I had no sense of fear, but lots of discomfort as the tide rushed along the grimy ways.

The city's showing its age, and melancholy.

Oh... Post Processing for this surreal capture was done with Lucis Filters in CS4. At the moment at least, my recollections of last Friday seem best described in surreal.

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?

Lure Of Maniacal Boutique

Prey For A Shopping Day
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At first it merely caught her eye. The window display, filled with dresses and shoes that were so... so... subtly wicked. It couldn't hurt to go in, right? Just to look?

She missed the name above the door.

It read: "PREY".

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Okay... okay... So this is a tad, um, murky. But you did see the name above this blogsite, right? It reads, "ImageFICTION"!

Wasn't Going To Post This

Entry Into A RedBubble Challenge

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I suppose many of you know of the Red Bubble forum? I'm fascinated by the talent of many of its participants, I'm finding them both instructive and VERY challenging. They accept all sorts of art including short stories, poems, and other fiction. One of the groups, WMG - The Writer's Market Group is bringing out an annual "Best Of" E-Book and this year they will apparently combine submissions from 2008 which shared "Epic" as a theme.

To that end, they challenged group members to submit entries into a contest to design a cover. Now since it is an eBook I decided to break with the convention of a horizontal book format (so far I'm alone in entries which have done that). Of course all of the text on the cover can/will be eventually tailored to the forum's specific needs. However it seems to me that a graphic which screams EPIC needs to have some pretty common elements, right?

(1) VAST... It's gotta be BIG... HUMONGUS... SWEEPING! Hence the panorama format.
(2) Sexy... Gotta imply all sorts of moist liaisons which of course demands a blonde... Obvious, hun?
(3) Weird, scary, sinister villains.
(4) A mysterious object.
(5) A palette that oozes something spooky either reds or yellow-greens, or cold-cold blues.
(6) Suggestions of edgy texture? Gritty.
(7) Action.

Now I probably should have had armies massed in the background along with booming cannons, lots of smoke, and squirming bodies. But, lacking any squirming bodies ... well y'gives it what y'gots. Right?

Wuddaya think.... does it screech "EPIC!!!!"

Hope so, if you're Red Bubble members... please vote for the sucker. K?

OOOPS!!!

Okay.... I should read the rules. Seems that the dimensions had to be A4 size.... Sigh.... I still think that the pano screeeeechs out EPIC!!! But if it has to be book cover size... well, hey.... I can do dat.... Which do you prefer? Choices?

Election Street Week

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After years: Election Street’s there.
Is a smiley umbrella sufficient?

Unfocused bright, shadowed darkly
Obviously ambiguous
Poised at the noisy silence.

From here
It gives up so little
Of its Rewards or
Risks.

Creepy Guy

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A Halloweenie....

I found parts of this guy at Governor Palin's rally last Saturday. Somehow his essence (changed to protect the innocent) felt right at Pigeon Point, huh?

Can you believe this guy?

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Yesterday I Amtrak'd up to New York City. First stop? B&H camera, right across from Penn Station. It's one of the world's largest camera stores all tricked out with video, computers, audio, and everything else that the video/audio professional community likes to cram into its toy boxes. It took me at least ninety minutes to lumber about in. Since all photographers are gear heads... well... everywhere you look feels like a ten year old's Christmas list.

So spontaneously I decided to trade in my Canon 20D for a new Canon 40D body. YIPPEEEE! And there I was with a day in New York and a new camera and... the world was bright.

Now... B&H has a sitting room right inside of the exit doorway where most folks go and un-box their new thingees. So I pulled mine out, mounted a lens, jammed in a battery and popped off a few test shots. Here's one. So... look around the room and out onto the New York street. I pulled up the test shot just now and blew it up large to test the resolution of the new camera's legendary processor when... when.... See anything odd in the photograph? Go on.... look about.

See the guy on the other side of the room? The one covering his face in exhaustion? Hmmmm.... But wait a minute, he's got a B&H bag on the floor. He's obviously just bought something so why the need for rest? Then I saw it. Can you ID the gee-gaw in his hand? I sense he's done this before and whatever it is he bought makes it even easier. No, he did not ask me for permission. And for all I know there's a picture of me on some website somewhere right now taking a picture. OF HIM!

Can you believe this guy? The nerve!

Street Shots - August '08

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Is it what the artist brings to the image, or what the viewer takes away? This is one of those great primal questions, like which edge of the scissors does the cutting.

This dude sat down, kicked off his shoes... pulled off his shirt... wrapped that towel around his neck... and... Was he waiting? Resting? Why the towel? Why the display? Shorts or briefs?

Night Truck

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Here's the virgin image of Night Truck - direct from the FlashCard