Down Town Abbie

No drama Annie cleans up!

Geek Stuff: Found paper mâché Abbie a dozen years ago and snagged her with my Canon 40D. Lancaster County's home to a score of high-end antique outlets. Dealers and buyers come to Adamstown to  pick stuff for chi-chi city galleries. Estates from all over the northeastern slice of the U.S. consign goodies to weekly auctions. Sometimes I go to photo-bag characters like Abbie along with toys, jewels, and gee-gaws for my inventory of augments. 

Abbie's sellers boasted her resemblance to a well-known monarch. Me? I don't see it. But then, the U.S. doesn't do Royals. Regardless, it struck me that this gal'd make terrific business cards, posters, and other ad gear for a trendy business. 

Downton Abbey wasn't aimed at me, but lots of others, particularly ladies, are delighted with the TV series and movie. So  I'm thinking that Down Town Abbie'll have explosive name recognition, huh? 

Anybody wanna buy their very own franchise? 

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.

New Hope

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For some New Hope
Is a place where
There is an
Expectation

On the part of
Some that they will
Not ever need
To conform to

What others think
That they have to
Do with their lives
Filled with new hope.

Canon 40D: PS4, AlienSkin:SnapArt: Topaz, Lucis Filters, custom brushes.

New Hope canal, New Hope, Pennsuylvania

Anniversary Today

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On September 10, 2006 I launched ImageFiction. And I am not home today... nowhere near my images. So... so... since Apple managed to lose my original, first-ever, post... (See Rotten Apple Explained over there on the right)... I thought you might like, as much as I liked, "Heavy On Metal". Y'know, I'm still reeeeeely proud of this. Happy anniversary to me.. Tah-Dah!

Just More Flowers

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I won’t send flowers
They’re too easy
And yet flowers
Are too difficult


So I won’t…
Except once or
Four times
Each year…
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Pre processing in my Lancaster back yard this weekend through my 40D with its Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) screwed on. Aperture priority of course with the thing opened full to squeeze the depth out of the field. And Post processing? Well I hunted for the personality of these girls in CS4 with AlienSkin’s SnapArt tuned to play the music.
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See… Back in late March I posted the first in this series of my manly attempt to picture girly flowers. Sigh… No matter how I try, they come out hard and muscular. Flowers are about nuance… but I’m not certain a man quite gets that… Which makes flowers for the guy artist simultaneously too easy… and too difficult. Well, there’s always Fall, eh?
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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?

The Horror Of Wealth

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An archetype is a kind of cliché. It lets the artist let the visitor do most of the work. For example if I wanted to quickly develop a warm romantic mood I could start with a dreamy, golden sunset. That's one archetype. Want determination? How about a sweating blacksmith... And so on. But... but... what happens when you smash a couple of archetypes up against one another? Suppose I took a haughty dowager and a stumpy admiral? And suppose I suggested mystery with some heavy texturing?

Wouldn't the elements all steeped in a dark, even murky light, kick your brain into gear to work out the pattern? Wouldn't they crank up the engine of your imagination to explain how this stern babe related to this little guy?

I knew the answer when I planned the whole thing. See, I wanted to show a relationship which could be explained only one way. I wanted to show a pairing that nature alone would never make. One that only culture would create. And here it is. Let me ask you now, would these two be a couple if humans had never invented ---- wealth? Money? Inheritance?

And just think, in a brief three or four generations they'd produce a great grandchild... named Paris.

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Here are the originals from my flash cards.

Did some flea market exploration and among the junk found the babe hanging on a garage wall and the admiral on a rickety table. Realizing their ability to explain the power of 'Old Money' I hunted for the right texture screens and thanks to RavenSoul I suddenly had not one, but four options Seems that she discovered the textures as devices for an artist's challenge at redbubble.com for the Fine Art Composites group. And each of the textures brought depth to different parts of this final image.

I really like it when filters, effects, brushes, textures, and other tools allow us to pull out components of our intentions from different sectors of an image to create a whole that was simply impossible a decade or so back.

"Wheeeee...." And it's terrific when someone else does the work for you in discovering just the right textures, huh? So everything's come together nicely here... my idea filtered in part through the feelings of Raven Soul's textures. All powerful archetypes, huh?

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?

Catwalk

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High fashion model does the catwalk. Fashion Rocks!

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"!

A Feminine Problem

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And the moral is....

What A Card!

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I'm almost out of my website/blogsite cards. So it's time to think about a new design. Hmmmm.... Since there was a lot of nagging from people who were in disbelief that I wasn't transfixed with taking pretty pictures of Fall - well, how about a tongue-in-cheek presentation of a Fall image? A BIG Fall image. On the wall of a gallery. A BIG gallery. Of course it's a virtual gallery. But why not... I am a virtual artist. And here I am presenting a virtual Fall. Hmmmm.... maybe the gallery's not BIG enough?

What do you think? Maybe it should be presented on the wall of Grand Central Station? Or how about I put it up and present it on the wall of The Metropolitan Museum? Or... or.. how about St. Peter's Museum in Rome?

Maybe I gotta think on this, eh?

You've Seen This Before But....

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See this? Yeah, I posted it before during the Summer, just click on the keyword "sailing" below to see the series. That's not the point. Fun is the point.

Steve wasn't posing here. I was standing in the gangway to below decks, taking picture for so long that I became invisible. Now I like it that this mid-afternoon picture is something that we can do today that used to take me a bank of lights to create back in the day. But that's not the point either.

The point is that Steve's just had a major birthday. So I took the image over to Dave at Poppit Studios and he blew it up for me to a size that would get big-time attention. The idea was that Rita and I would invite Steve and Maria to dinner at a top of the line restaurant. And we'd arrange to get a table off to the side last Saturday night where we could prop the image against the wall behind a covering. And of course we'd rip away the cover during the meal, and well... embarrass the hell out of him... heh heh heh...(Okay, women won't get this... but to men it resonates, right guys?) Think of it as a really big Birthday card.

So Dave, he blows it up... and up... and up... to FOUR feet by SEVEN FEET!!!! SEVEN FRIGGIN FEET!

You should see it. It is tack sharp (where it is supposed to be tack sharp) and the colors ROCK! And I invited my buddy and partner Steven and his wife Julie so we could carry the thing and.. and...

Well Dave doesn't own a truck at Poppit Studios. And we couldn't get the print into any of our cars. Or into our station wagon. And well, what the hell to do? The practical joke careened back on me! How to give it to him when I couldn't take it out of the printer's studio?

Meantime Dave was so proud of it that he set it up right by the door of his place (the guy owns massive printers, and cameras, and even a large device that will computer-cut images out). In fact he offered to have it cut Steve out of the big image as a stand-alone figure. Have you noticed, or imagined, that he's life size in the image? I took it with my old Canon 20D and you can count the hairs in his mustache... it's that detailed. Imagine what my new 40D will do... but I digress.

So what to do? Well finally my colleague Tammy, the layout artist at my magazines brought her huge RV over to Poppit and last Friday we got it to my house. So.. we changed plans and had a dinner party for the six of us.

During cocktails my partner and I went upstairs and hefted the thing down the steps et voilá .... we swung the thing around to reveal... "Heroic Steve At The Helm".

Great reactions... Everyone loved it. Super fun... BUT.. BUT!!!!!! He couldn't get it home. The BILLBOARD is sitting in our living room. YIPES... Didn't see that coming.

Steve's first reaction was, "Holy S**T, that thing will cost a grand to frame!" Um, well, yeah. It's printed on a fairly solid substrate so it stands up by itself. But what do you do with this .. object the size of Romania?

I suggested he take it to his plant, frame it in busy golden gilt, and put a tiny plaque engraved... "Our Founder". Mount it right behind the receptionist, right? Get her a tiny sailor uniform.... Somehow Steve isn't crazy about my suggestion. Particularly my plans for installation of track lighting. Pity.... Some folks don't have enough imagination, huh?

What do you do with a 24 foot square heroic image? Steve told me that "It ain't my problem!" He's right. It was fun, but I'll probably throw it away tonight.

The moral to all of this? A four by seven foot portrait might not be the best idea. Bummer.

Heart Flutter

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Okay, given the financial news, howzabout some Jazz-Age romance? Huh? Huh? Time for escape...






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For those who like to see the starting points, here are the virgin images from my FlashCards. The auto is from the gift shop at the Vanderbuilt Mansion in Hyde Park, NY. The blonde was in a glass case at an antique dealership in Adamstown, PA.

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?

Pew Nude

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

Self Important

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Didja' ever notice how, um... important almost anything can be made to look if it's simply matted and signed? Why izzat?

Dixie #5: But... Izzit Art?

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Ever been to Tybee Island, Georgia? Been into the biggest restaurant on the beach? If you have, you've seen this (welll the male half of you have). Okay, so why's it here?

(1) It is one of the most colorful sites on Tybee. Somehow it sums up my feelings about my visit. It's a good humored good-ole-boy scruffy place. Um... colorful.

(2) In 1917 Marcel Duchamp went down into art history by submitting a porcelain urinal from a plumbing equipment manufacturer which he mounted on wood and signed R. Mutt. He then submitted it into an UN-juried art show. It was refused. Now notice the show was UN-juried and yet the organizers wouldn't allow him to exhibit what he called, "Fountain". It whipped up a furor over who decides what is art.

Look at the color of this image. Look at the texture. Look at the formality of the composition, the shape, the form... And of course look at the lighting. I get grief for my enhancements. Folks who insist that images must look, well, 'real' don't like the way I carve holes into my images through post processing techniques that allow the viewer fly through the image plane into their own narrative.

So here's a non-enhancement. But... but... it still provides a plane ride, right? Is it art? Was Duchamp's 'Fountain'?

Hope so, but it's your call...

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No need for a virgin image today... up there... that's it.