Halloween Hand

<- Click here

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!

Strange Mysterious Feeling

Click!

Florence, Italy

Street scene(s)

Peach Spa

<- Click here

We look
For hooks
To which
We Can
Hang an
Order,
A map,
An under
Standing.

NYNY
Canon 7D

Canon 7D, NYNY

Work In Progress

Friday marked a year for my recent training regime. 365 days.... A friend Bill Hayek used my camera to grab some shots. Here's a first take from the set outside of the gym in the morning light. There were big fluffy clouds that covered the sun and brought the contrast down. But we still picked a shady spot on the building's north side. We're having a hot July spell here in Lancaster County... Shirt-off weather. So....

It is really hard for me to work on a self portrait. I'll leave this up for a short period, until I come down with a bout of humility (they really do happen... honest). But anyway... here I am 45 pounds lighter than a year ago. Rita's worried that I've become too skinny. Time to start packing it back on I guess?

Fashion

<- Click here

Fashion’s like politics: Their objectives are similar and so are their abuses.

---

NYNY: Canon G10. Two hats and a head.

So what's going on here? First off the G10's going out with me a lot more than my new 7D. Yep, the camera you've got is the best one possible, right?

Anywayzzzzz.... The idea of shop windows is so URBAN. On a rural winding road or majestic natural vista... well you just don't whap into store front filled up in ways meant to grab your feelings. The tug at my feelings and make me want to tease out their poetry.

And I've done it here first with the vacuum lens on my G10, then with square cropping the details which I hen used Topaz and Alien Skin's SnapArt2 to brush away anything but mood. There's an attitude along the streets of New York and a part of it, like the back melody of a fugue comes from the shops.

Here's one three note chord that I really enjoyed.

What Are You Doing New Year's?

<- Click here

Here's a variation.... a touch of New Year's fun while I'm awaiting ordering my new camera. Some of you might recall the original of this babe I posted some time back. Here she is again, all dressed up... and ready to PARTY.....

BEST WISHES EVERYONE!!! Happy 2010, and thanks for all of your support, suggestions, and comments both here and the passle who continue to lemme know what you think exclusively by email. That's why I've posted an email address over there in the colun on the right. You're my buddies... and you've made 2009 a nice year. In Angel's lingo.... MIL GRACIAS!

Blonde In Savannah - 2

<- Click here
Dolled up for her portrait, the little cutie posed in bare feet. I let the photographer work... And like a voyeur... snuck my lens into the posing space.

Catwalk

<- Click here

High fashion model does the catwalk. Fashion Rocks!

Lure Of Maniacal Boutique

Prey For A Shopping Day
<- Clck here
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".

---

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

Pew Nude

<- Click here
Found her sittting in a pew last evening. So of course I took her picture. Did I ask permission? Uh, sure. Right. Of course...

Naughty

<- Click here

Found her in Savannah... Where else?


----
Here's the virgin (!) image.

Framing

<- Click here
You know what, in every direction I look... I'm framing.


---

Here's the virgin image from the flashCard

Completion

<- Click here

What defines what? What completes what?

For example... is it the shoe that finishes the foot? Or the foot that finishes the shoe?

---


And here's the virgin image from the disc.

Veiled

<- Click here
Professor Jeff Curto in his on-line podcast of a course on Photographic History wondered when a photograph is made. Is it, he mused, when the shutter is tripped? Or is it when the artist says it is made?

Look here at this woman I found on the street not far from Rome's Trevi Fountain. I took one exposure through gaps between the heads of maybe ten or fourteen people. She was part of the street theater which surrounds many of the city's most popular sites. The day was warm, her costume hot and perhaps an authentic reproduction of 17th or 18th century pomp. In a lot of ways she was a mannequin. Oddly there seemed something poignant about the way she made her living standing there in the fading sun of a late fall afternoon.

I knew that I felt something as I looked at the mysterious veiled woman. And I wanted to tell that feeling to you in this image.

Which makes me wonder something farther about Jeff's question. I wonder if the photograph is made when it communicates? If that's the case, then it's not me who finally decides it's finished but... you.

Curious.

Thoughts?

Door Girl

<- Click here
The bar's door
Opens to the street
Where she sits
All day
Exposed.

Why?

****

Critics have written to me that the pole in that image above distracts them. Hmmmm.... I envisioned this composition from the moment I exposed the frame as a square. But the square format is so impersonally angular that it seemed to me the pole broke the plane into two softer areas that then balanced themselves in terms of dynamic weight. Yet, what I want to communicate here is best described in the words I've placed next to the picture above. So how about I try it without the pole? Does this re-worked image better communicate my questioning idea to you?

Longing

<-Click here
"In all species other than man, when an animal reaches puberty, it is all that it will ever be.... Only in man is puberty just the beginning... Puberty does not provide man, as it does other animals, with all that he needs to leave behind to others of his kind." - Allan Bloom in The Closing Of The American Mind.

I guess Bloom's philosophy's had the greatest impact upon my life. Or perhaps he merely turned into words ideas that already informed the way I live. Dunno about the chicken egg thingee. See, Freud, who has dominated so much thought about who and what we are and why we behave as we do, didn't agree with Bloom at all. He saw only one focus for humans, the same one that animals have. I don't buy that. See this girl on the right here? See her longing for something beautiful in the darkness? See how we have more than one peak that's accompanied by intense pleasure? See how we can reach beyond the drives of pubescent puppets?

Or not... After all... Wudda I know? Eh?

- - -

From the looks of this image, I seem to be able to control Photoshop in ways that let me express some ideas. I'm not sure whether everything's fixed, but for now at least - I can still show some of the thoughts and feelings I found in the streets of Florence. Whew....

2007 Award Winner: Florence & The Manessinger Challenge

Note: The window scene below has been accepted as one of the world's finest Still Life images of 2007 for Canon POTN Book to be published in the Fall of 2008.

<-Click here
Add Florence to its suburbs and you’ll tote up about 600,000 mostly Italian people the others being Albanian, Romanian, German, Chinese, and North African. They live at the epicenter of Renaissance art history. You can’t toss a rock in this city for fear of smashing some important sculpture or defacing a significant 15th or 16th century building. Florence emanates what the Western World calls elegance. As a partner with Milan, the city is home to legendary fashion creators. And its shops are branded with names like Ferragamo, Prada, Cavalli, and Chanel. Just to the north and north-west the textile industries continue to roll out some of the world’s finest fabrics.
Florence, or Firenze as it is called by Italians, is such a huge warehouse of art works by the historic masters that a firestorm or another catastrophic flood of the River Arno (which bisects the city) could wreak havoc upon the world’s greatest Renaissance treasures.

Artistically, Florence is overwhelming. For art it is our attic, our basement, and our garage. With only a week to spend, it quickly became apparent that we could do little more than take in the facades, visit some shops and look at the very highlights. But even then, I came away feeling as if I had merely seen, rather than come to know of any this astonishingly large - little place.

---

Mano-A-Mano

On Saturday, October 6th, world renowned fine art photographer Andreas Manessinger
drove down from his perch in Vienna to dine with me, and to accept my challenge to a single morning of photography the following sunrise starting at the façade and campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore, the city’s most imposing structure, popularly called The Duomo!

Sometime between 6:30 and 7 am on October 7th we met and decided to start at the campanile and work our way through the medieval winding streets toward the uncanny Ponte Vecchio some five blocks to the east. Andreas has already posted one image from that beautiful morning (there was a spectacular moon followed by a breathtaking golden sunrise), as have I. You will find Andreas’ image and a description on his blogsite posted as “Photo 359 – the Magic Cloud” On or about October 9th (which, BTW includes an image of me at work – showing Andreas’ very good taste, heh, heh, heh). But we have yet to see the depth of that shoot. He has not shared his with me, nor vice-versa. In fact, I have not looked at it, and will open the cards this week as I begin to sort through my Firenze images. Now the question is, how to best show our results in one place?

Suggestions?

Sweet

<- click here
Information is always tied to something physical. Look, take one of the most abstract of all concepts... Suppose you wanted to communicate sweetness. Now that's a concept that came through the sense of taste. It is as physical as things get. You bite into a lemon meringue pie and that's sweet.

What I'm saying here is that physical things needn't just come into our brains through sight or sound. We can smell, touch, and taste physical things. And we can value them so much that we'll steal the words we use to describe them to apply them elsewhere. Way beyond the realm of taste we can take the idea of sweet - it's wonderful, innocent, delicate, joyful, burst of happiness - and fix it to other similar wonders.

Like a happy young girl in Musser Park wearing her pearls to play with the other children at sunset on a Thursday night. A delightful child who turns to a man with a camera and cajoles, "Take my picture. Please... please... please!" And when the guy looks through his lens he sees a delicate, joyful, innocent, burst of happiness.

Sweet, right?

Geek Stuff: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), 1/80 at f/6.3, ISO 400, Focal Length 64mm, Time 6:45pm, Flash; off, Exposure Bias value: -1, Metering Mode: Average, Camera Raw.

Nothing Is Ever Black Or White

<- Click Here
We humans have a wacky ability to make others, or creatures, or things... into the instruments for fantasies.

Take this attractive lady last evening in Musser Park. How middle class she looks. And yet as she sits there on the phone… there is something, um, a tad edgy – wouldn’t you say?

Actually that depends upon what you find edgy. Okay, so how about I say "provocative" instead of edgy? Well, no… no… once again… that’s a meaning that careens about inside of your head.

Fine then let’s notice the 600 pound gorilla – the tat. It’s gorgeous work. It’s permanent work. She has imposed herself upon herself. Or at least allowed an artist to impose a statement upon herself. And you think exactly what about that? And why does what you think about that matter? Unless, what you think… your ideas… are what make you, you. And then it matters a lot to anyone who comes to know you.

What I’m thinking is that this “edgy something” which this lady has allowed – is now normal for her. But edgy implies avant-guard, no? Yet if we are all avant… what is left to guard? What do the edgy kids fantasize when otherwise middle class folks sport fantastical enhancements?

It’s a whacky mystery.

Palette, Texture, Shape & Form

<- Click here
Here's a background. There's really no subject, just another window... or set of windows - this time shuttered. I'm not certain what to think about images that are this static. And I do want to think about an image. Still, this grouping is just so perfectly executed by the artists who first imagined it, and the craftspeople who executed it.

So here... I've plagiarized it.

Or no... since the caption tells you the place - I suppose this is more a quote than a steal. And maybe it tells you something about how a current culture has dealt with the challenge of windows. Yet... you will note that they are not windows. Those shutters don't open, nor do they admit light or air. So even though they are dug through the walls - they're essentially decorative exterior objects which have been walled over on the inside. In a world where form follows function - these guys are odd. See, they have only an aesthetic function, yet they mimic a form. Viewers expect windows to decorate a building, so here form follows expectation.

Interesting idea... which seems to also fuel women's fashions. Or... does it?