pictures

hello blog! i've been twittering and flickring and neglecting my poor blog. So some photo quotes, courtesy lens rentals blog and pictures.




There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. – Ansel Adams



In black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty. - Paul Outerbridge

seagull

seagull
Originally uploaded by wck

on the elizabeth river in virginia

Dust

I have finally- thanks to a 5 year old who was too inquisitive with my point and shoot digital camera and the rising costs of film development- broken down and gotten a DSLR. Yes, I'm the last photo nerd on the planet to get one, I know. I still adore film, but Kate's doing in of the lens on my little digital elph pushed me to just get a DSLR.

My new camera has one of the built in dust sensors, so over lunch today with another former art major (like me now slumming as a software person) we discussed how you used to deal with dust with film developing and printing. If you had a speck of dust on a print that you just couldn't get rid of, you had to manually paint it out. With a real paintbrush and ink. I'm serious! I spent so many hours hunched over my black and white prints before a show, with a teensy paintbrush, making tiny dots with a bit of ink to simulate film grain over dust spots. My eyes ache just thinking about it. And really... talk about an arcane skill! This is one of those spots where I guess digital technology really has a massive advantage over film.

Birthday Letters

Isn't it a bit weird how something can be so deeply a part of your life at one point, and then it slips away and you almost forget about it? And then the jolt when you suddenly are re-introduced to it... Marginal Revolution does a regular "what I'm reading" series, among other small series of posts, and today's contains Ted Hughes Birthday Letters, which is a book of poetry.

My sister gave the book to me for a 21st birthday present at the end of my junior year. The next year, I needed to do an indepent study project in the studio art department for my major, and I chose to do a series of digitally manipulated photographs inspired by on poem in the book. I lived in the darkroom and computer lab with that poem for months and months and so on. Then I graduated, and packed it all away.

There are two pieces from that project in my flickr stream, here and here.

black & white

kate & ana
Originally uploaded by wck

Just picked up a roll of black & white film from the summer, and I can't get over this picture. They look like they stepped right out of the 1950s. This picture is why I still shoot with black & white 35mm film instead of a digital SLR converted to B&W in photoshop. I swear I would never get this look that way... especially the texture in their dresses and the skin.

Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story

The Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story - Lightroom is Adobe's answer to Aperture. Very interesting article, with lots of photos inline.

circles

I need to shoot more black and white film. I think that the last photos that I took in black & white were sometime in April or so. There are two things that will, in my mind, forever look better in black and white than in color- water and skin tones. So here are two of my favorite black and white photos which I hunted out & uploaded to flickr.

Arun and I were talking today about how all of a sudden a couple of us upgraded to flickr pro. They do a great job of getting you addicted to uploading photos to it & looking at pictures there. It's completely usable for free, until you've gotten addicted enough that you want to upload more photos... sneaky sneaky. What a great business plan.

Since I gave in and upgraded, I've been uploading a ton of photos to the site. I figure that I might as well get the full use of my $25, and it's fun to see all the comments that people add. In fact, if I could find the cable to my digital camera, I'd upload some hilarious photos of Declan and Bandon. They've been driving me completely nuts, but some of the pictures of their antics are pretty goofy.

I love the amazing sense of movement in this picture of Kate learning how to walk. It was so dim in her bedroom (where I took this picture) that I was afraid that I wouldn't capture anything- if I remember, I was only using 200 speed film or something horribly unsuited to taking photos of babies indoors. It worked out well, though, because the small depth of field blurred everything together and made the light- which was just from a lamp or two- come out so diffuse and nice. And all the laundry in the background is great- not only do the socks and whatever on the rug make a nice bouncy border along the right side, but it pushes the picture miles away from being overly posed portraits. Those drive me nuts. Stiffness in photography is one of the worst things to me. I worry way less about screwy contrast or flat light than I do about really finding a moment.

almost

This is Kate after she got ahold of a waterproof disposible camera that I brought to NJ (useful for taking photos of the sailboat while swimming laps around it!). Look closely... she almost figured out how it worked.

luck and timing

   

I've been editing the pictures that I took at my sister's wedding, and I was struck this afternoon by the incredible difference between these two images. The second one was a complete accident- I don't believe I even was looking through the viewfinder when I took either of them- it was a rush of just pointing the camera at the steps & clicking away. Serendipity is such an incredibly huge part of photography that it's ceased to shock and annoy me that the good photos on my rolls are never ones that I expect to be good- the best ones are usually the throwaway shots that I barely remember clicking the shutter for.

This isn't a music post, just something to go with the darkroom musing below:
Article/photo gallery about Hiroshi Sugimoto in the Guardian. His photos are amazingly beautiful- go check them out.