Gotta' catch up a little...

Okay, success on the internet demands the 3 Fs: Fast, Frequent, and Fresh. Which is why I am unsuccessful on the internet. I've finished 100s of images which I've meant to, but have been to lazy to... post. And I'm content with all of them. What I won't show, I trash. Well, mostly. So maybe it's time to do a little catching up? So here's a painting I did of a Mityana, Uganda Girl Scout Brownie. And...

Here are a couple of street scenes. The first is the 15th century gothic cathedral of St. Martin in Bratislava, Slovakia. It was built to match the Bratislava Castle which looms almost directly above it. The church tower's built into the city's defensive wall. Slovakia's a smaller European nation that would undoubtedly be much larger today had they not been the first European nation to export its Jewish population of 57,000 people  to feed Hitler's ghastly "Final solution to the 'Jewish Problem'". Of course that Catholic Church continued its activities as the cattle cars were crammed with writhing masses of people. A guidebook pointed out that, "A small but significant neighbor of the cathedral is a monument to the national synagogue which stood next door for centuries until the Communist government demolished it around 1970". Uh-huh, the image looks spooky, right. Well so is this street's history.

The other image is a misty morning street corner in Toledo. Spain. Can you sense the history veiling the neighborhood?

Speaking of street scenes, well howzabout a watery street's scene? This one's along the Danube between Dornstein and Melk, Austria. These folks live next to a busy floating highway. You think they have wet basements?

Here's a Spanish finca growing Valencia oranges in Spain. Finca? Uh-huh, these are country homes, usually plantations or farms of some sort. Usually is a tad old fashioned way to describe fincas. Today in hispanic countries the country home of affluent people are frequently called fincas whether or not they grow or raise stuff or animals. Pretty rich?

And this street scene's from the middle of Vienna - yep - the Austrian Vienna :-) Sooner or later I'm going to post a passel of totally gorgeous Viennese scenes. My dear friend Andreas Mannesinger hosted me for an entire day in the Austrian capital. It was wunnerful. But this image could be from almost anywhere, huh? But this thing jiggled my imagination for some reason - probably the reflections in the rear view mirror... And the jiggling caused this semi-poem to tumble free:

Through back-eyes Truck
Watches history suck
Time through a tiny
Vanishing point.
.
Watching and holding speed constant
To average 60 seconds per minute
Is what Truck does.
.
But larky:
Sometimes Truck’ll
Stutter-foot momentum.
Or jerk at the wheels.
.
Causing things to:
.
First seem longer
Than it takes for
Right-guy to text
The gal who gave
Up her info.
.
Or when Truck
Gooses its gas how
Time shrinks shorter than
The hours before a life-test.
.
And when Truck jerks
At the wheels?
.
Its windows reflect a
History that’s swirled,
Snarled, and sqooshed
Together In clots and breaches.
.
Truck’s wondering though
What happens to
History if …
.
If even for an instant
.
The truck stops here?

Jeff & Gina Paglialonga are the owners of Teaming River Cruises. It was their riverboat that drove us through the epicenter of Europe (Amsterdam to Budapest)  during the summer of 2017. Jeff's personality's bigger than the kilometers his river boat travels. OTH the food on The Royal Crown - his company's flagship - is good enough to gobble. So? Why not, huh?

Okay - I'm neither fast, frequent, nor fresh - but it was a turtle who beat the rabbit, right?

Meaning? 10/26/16 • Carthusian Tryptic.

Our brains really don't come empty. Millions of evolutionary years have wired in some instincts - which are sort of neuro-rules. Apparently ancient ancestors who were best able to make sense of a given moment, were more likely to live long enough to pass along an instinctual track in their babies' minds.I'm guessing that it fueled our ability to spot the tiger in the bushes, or the villain unsheathing his knife.

Anyway, what happens when there's really no order in what appears to be a simple moment? Granada's Baroque Carthusian monastery's like that. Its pieces won't fit together without some sort of key. But where is it? How to explain this happy couple, the dead clown and relatively ancient holes poked into walls - and an eye-fooling altar setting that's actually a painting? In fact, while the doorway steps there on the right are 'real', that alcove to the right of the painted altar piece was also, I think, painted to wickedly deceive the mind. 

So is there order among the couple and the tryptic behind them? Can your mind assemble the pattern, the order, the moment's reason and therefore its meaning? Or is this really a surrealist's romp? One thing's certain... Blown up to 7' on the horizontal edge - Here's an image that will ask everyone its questions each and every time they enter the room it dominates. 

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.

Para & Noid & Noid

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Was the room random?
Was the night darker?
Was the world hidden?
Were the watchers un-
Bidden?

Is alone ever
Where a man can be?
Or is the night just
A place where watchers
Spy in?

The thing about para-
Noia is that you
Must have secrets which
Are worth the big costs
Which make them way im-
Portant.

There are more para-
Noids than there exist
Secrets that are worth
The costs of their sur-
Veillance.

Pity…

Canon 7D, PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Oil Painting, Custom: filters & Brushes.
NY, NY

Uncertainty

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My friend wants to grow his business... step again on the accelerator... But... but... So much not the change he had been waiting for.... Hire? How much will it cost? Who knows? Borrow? How will investment be taxed? Grow? How much will it be redistributed? Incentive? Yeah... he remembers incentives. But now there's a new normal... Which is still... uncertain....

Catallegorical

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Bokeh2 #3

Are they
Coming back
For us
Tonight?

+++

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

Thing Over Seal Rocks

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On the edge of San Francisco
.
There's a thing
.
Above the seal rocks it sits there
.
Looking out
.
Which is what it does while we look
.
Back at it.



Have you seen it? If not... so look. There it is.

***

The thing tugged at my camera's lens. Look how pristine the place is. How sterile and bare. Scoured continually by Pacific winds. But out on this point poking over a cliff into the sea, against the sky hanging above the sand, is this human scene. And the mysterious thing just pokes at my imagining. There's a story here, right?

And this thing, by the way, sucks in light. Which makes it a lighthouse that works exactly in reverse to the way other lighthouses work. Now that's cool, huh?

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.

Talky

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"They said I was talking in them too much! They wanted documents, subjects, techniques, not expressive photographs." - André Kertéz on why the legendary photographer stopped working for Life Magazine in the 1950s.

The expressionists are less concerned with reflecting the real world than in revealing our emotional reactions to it. Hmmmm... I wrote "our" there. That's interesting.


This is my second visit to this surreal feeling. It keeps flashing back.

***

Pre Processing in Manhattan (the Figure) and in Lancaster County (The Armstrong farm). Canon40D, through my Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) – Post Processing: PhotoShop and enhanced in small parts here and there with thingees like Lucis, and AlienSkin filters. Which, I hope, makes the thing talk a lot?

Painterly? Yeah... painterly.

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I've been this way before which you can see if you click here.
But this time it's an exercise. I wanted to see how painterly I could make this image, and how surreal that effect would make the final image.

The idea of surreal is fascinating. Our minds evolved to seek patterns. If we could see a puma in the leafy bushes, we had a better chance of survival. So we've become hardwired to discover relationships among facts. The surreal image presents a number of sharp facts which are, essentially un-related. It's a kind of artistic tease. You know a picture of a salami, a mound of sand, and the back of a man in a derby hat. Surreal.

Now my question here is, can you remove enough of the image ... the facts ... to leave a pattern which is not explicable? Of course by linking this to the earlier version as I've done above perhaps defeats the deal. I guess I should have chosen an image for which you had no anchor, huh?

Hmmmm... Okay, back to the drawing boards... Literally! Grumble

Un-Captioned?

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One surrealist photographer of the 1940s claimed that the category was about exploring reality in ways that were insensibly sensible. Um.... okay. Does this qualify?

I considered the caption, "Look, it's... it's stopped!" And then I considered "Omagod! It's Coming THIS Way." Or possibly, "Sunset/Sunrise". Or... maybe, just nothing?

One thing that's certain is the the surreal lives only in the imagination. Which seems to be a necessary, but probably not sufficient condition to describe what a surreal image is. I shall continue to ponder.... (rubs chin and mutters, "Hmmm....")

A Child Is A Future Probe

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Buried deep within our children: a time capsule. To be opened... When?


***

At Andreas request.... Here's the virgin image from my FlashCard. Comments?

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?

***

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

Sidney Sees

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Sidney does not see
What we see.
Instead his world is felt
Inside his mind where
Sidney repairs a future
That will be different
From what we see
When it happens.

Dixie #8: Hush... Don't Wake It

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In school, photographers have been taught to pre-visualize so that the result will conform to their, and the client's, expectations. And for most of the genres of photography (forensic, fashion, wedding, sports, etc.)... this is perfect advise. But for art photography, the principles are broader.

Of course I frequently set out with an idea or a feeling that I want to capture. But today, we get two bites at the apple. We can pre-visualize before we click the shutter. And/or we can pre-visualize as we bring our images up in Aperture, LightRoom, Bridge, or whatever application you use to sort pictures. In this second place we can pre-visualize before the post processing.

This is a new space for photography in most cases. Oh sure there were artists in the old days who did spectacular enhancements in the darkroom. These were the pioneers for the digital enhancements we can now achieve.

Which means that in art photography the whole needn’t be the sum of its parts. Putting parts together is adding thoughts and feelings to them through the new power we have to express our imaginations. We can arrange pieces of moments the same way that novelists can arrange facts. And the final result needn't mimic reality at all.

Finding The Voice Of Your Instincts • An Essay

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With art, the idea is to look through the image to the meaning on the other side. Okay, so how do you do that kind of photographic based image? There are a cornucopia of digital enhancements available to us which make the creative process more exciting. But first, some words about processing.

All pictures are processed: life is too.

Image makers debate the role of enhancement, meaning processing. Yet every film ever made along with every digital processor… all of them process images. If the film photographer is very pure it’s possible to restrict the processing to “just” the stuff that’s done by the engineers who dreamt up a film’s chemical composition, plus the purest chemical mix needed to develop and preserve the paper image. But even this most restricted effort is still processing and there are a colossal number of wet-darkroom diddles that can take things way farther between opening the film canister and showing a print.

There's an organic photographic school that hates digital post processing since that movement grows out of a nostalgia for film photography. When it comes to photography, they want all engineering to end at say… 1988? Which is peculiar since there’s a lot more processing going on twixt lens and virgin image in the film world than in the digital.

Photography has always been an adventure.

And fine art photography explores the space inside of us just as surely as our lenses aim at the outside world. The digital photographic process allow us to explore deeper than film ever did.

They allow us to find the voice of our instincts.

Look, as I’ve written in an earlier essay, pre-processing has always gone on. We choose a lens, camera format, point of view, depth of field, blur, filter, lighting, even set, makeup and model. Is that manipulation? Nope… enhancement.

I’ve already discussed the post processing extremes of the film development chain. And now there are the tools of digital post processing.

An artist creates a pane out of a plane.

We make images on a two dimensional surface yet behind it lies more dimensions than Paris Hilton has shoes. The artistic moment occurs when the image plane that attracted us begins to shimmer and reveal, like a pane of glass, the artist’s ideas, answers, hopes, fantasies, dreams, questions, opinions and feelings.

But before we can do that we have to seek out all of those things ourselves. Then reveal them to first us, then to others as eloquently as our craft (technical & aesthetic) will permit. The viewer and the artist take a plane ride… through that pane… into…

Ultimately intelligence is the master processor of art.

But it is a two part thing. What lurks behind the plane is first what the artist has found inside of his or her self… and secondly what the viewer makes of what the artist has revealed. Art is a process of connecting beliefs and understandings in ways that resonate with meaning. Look, we all live in a bubble with walls created from our morality, ethics, tastes, education, loves, politics, hates, and DNA mix. We live in cultures, and simultaneously build our own inside of the larger ones. Our bubble walls are transparent, but colored and foggy so that the things that come through are shaped to our beliefs.

We are conclusions seeking confirmation.

Still, even though those walls constrain us, there are folks who’d want to impose rules that keep us from fully understanding even our own bubble-space. They create rules which hobble our ability to express ourselves.

There are two kinds of rules.

(1) Some rules are tools.
(2) Some rules are barriers.

Know the difference.

For example, drop a banana and it plops to the floor. That’s an example of rule (1)…. Gravity. If we understand gravity we can use it to do things, imagine things, grow. But suppose someone insists that (2) because of gravity we should never show floating bananas. That’s a barrier.

Organic photographers insist that photographic images should pass the reality test. The final image should not contradict any known principles of behavior. All shadows must have balancing light sources, colors must come from nature, things must be as they “could” and “should” be found.

Artists employ the (1)-rules to deconstruct the (2)-rules. Which can be disturbing. There is no (1)-rule which says that the conjectures and assertions beyond the image pane need not disturb.

Post processing enhancements now allow us to peer at the virgin image on a monitor, study it, and then find a way to poke through it. Good images are at least semi transparent. Great images are more like the clearest crystal. They are tickets to a pane ride into both the imaginations of the artist and the viewer.

Okay, so are there principles for employing the full range of pre and post processing enhancements to turn the film plane into a pane? I think so, and I'll discuss them in my next essay.


Ultimately they leave us wondering. And wonder is a very good thing.


***
Here's the virgin image from up top...

Kerouac #1

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After too many years I finally bought a copy of Jack Kerouac's classic little book, "On The Road". The novel was the first voice of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and 60s. It's described as pretty much of a free stream of thought which he pounded out in a few days on a typewriter fed from one large reel of paper. Wanderlust drove this guy. So he hopped trains, hitched rides, and hiked around America. Mostly it's a series of visceral snap shots each a metaphor for that mid-century moment in time. It's a useful book for photographers but... unlike the child-like adoration heaped on the thing by reviewers and teachers... I found much of it slow dealing with largely vapid people bored with success all about them. People driven to poke holes into reality to find - not something better - just different.

These are not people with ambition, but rather people with restless leg syndrome. Still, Kerouac's ability to toss off wonder-filled lines like the title of this image is exactly the fuel which the photographic artist thrives upon. These thoughts haunt us, and make me want to somehow express them visually... Here's one of my expressions from the tracks that neatly divide the City of Fort Lauderdale Florida. Somewhere up there in that unseen distance are Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore, Philly, and New York City. Somewhere, way... way.. way... far away.

It wasn't a destination that Kerouac sought... rather he was after the process of getting there. And that's the profundity of his drive I suppose... after all isn't life about... getting there? He was driven by the wonder of the trip not the destination. BTW, he died quite young.

***
Here's the virgin picture from my FlashCard.

Giant Camera

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Scientists say that writing was originally pictures of visual events. These were symbols designed to release information that the reader already had. You know, the bull getting pierced with arrows. You see the stick figures, you understand it's a hunt, right? But suppose someone who'd never heard of bulls or arrows came upon the thing. The information the symbols were supposed to release would be forever lost.

All images are like that. Here the Giant Camera looms against the sky in a starkly impersonal alleyway seared by a noon-day sun. How much do I need to tell you to have these symbols make sense? How much sense do you suck from information which you bring to the viewing? Do you need to know that this is Seal Rocks, at the edge of San Francisco? Does ithe name of the place settle your questions? Or is there still a massive amount of mystery here? Hmmmm?

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Should you be interested, here's the original of the image above. Enjoy...

Image Fiction

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Once upon a time there was something called, The Short Story, which was printed in weekly and monthly magazines. And it came to pass that those long gone magazines hired people whose imaginations created images from those fictional tales. And those illustrations became inseparable from those stories... defining as much for the readers as the author's own words. Perhaps more?

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And my original picture? Here it be...

Sexy Shop

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My idea in the streets of Florence was to find a moment that had no fixed connection to reality. Here in the vault of Italy's most cherished cultural legacies, where to find something that was physically Florence, and yet disconnected to its legacy?

Well, okay... could you have seen this coming? Huh? Is this a surreal pillow in the face? In the epicenter of elegance, tacky lives! And of course it advertises in English. Sheeze.....


***

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, 10/8/07, 5:55 PM: Lens 17-85mm, Focal Length: 17mm, Exp 1/40@f/3, ISO 400, Metering Mode: Average, Exposure bias 0, Camera RAW


And here's the original as my Canon saw it...