Thinkin’ Spring

Oh…the weather outside’s disgusting,

I can hear my knee-joints rusting,

so it’s here inside I’ll grumpily remain,

let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

With apologies to Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne for fiddling with their classic.

I’m staring out the window at a medium waterfall that earlier was the downspout-less end of the  eaves trough.  It’s overflowing.  The narcissus and daffodils in front and in back of the house resemble a lost colony of colorful morning-after fraternity row students, crashed face down all over the yard where an overindulgence of rain has left them ’til they dry out a bit.  The last few days of seeing them up and alert seemed to promise a return to getting out into the yard with a camera.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking drab little scattered thoughts, as disciplined as a herd of cats, so I am going to post some spring-like pictures, photographic and fractographic, to keep my anticipation going, although some of these need to be re-taken using  better eyes.

Translucent petals on flowers alway make me want to saturate an image with their color. To that end, closeups taken from in front of (in some cases inside of) the flower with the sun or a pair of flashes lighting it from behind, can bring out shades not seen in reflected light shots.

Eye-eye, Cap’n

Just a quick post, inspired by Bean’s post on February third about the I ♥ Faces contest themed, “the Eyes Have It.”   It is also a lesson about Seeing when you are looking through a viewfinder. And making spare copies of prints you like.

I had a particular photograph in mind to enter into that contest.  It was one I took when my sister’s silver-tipped Persian was alive. He had just been bathed, and being a small kitty under all that fur, was peering over the rim of the tub with such a look of hurt and utter betrayal;  I took his picture from bathtub-rim height and it turned out quite well.  I didn’t find out that the only print was no longer here until after the contest’s closing date. (Lesson: make extra copies to file, ya never know). I’ll need a negative scanner, a real one, soon.

While looking for that picture I brought out more slides to scan, (please forgive the dreadful resolution in these scans, it’s as good as I can get out of this scanner)  as I’m trying to digitize my photo files, and came across a series of Dare, sitting in his carrier.  He loved his carrier, an ordinary particle board, wood and hardware cloth cat carrier, to go outside and remain in, lying  on its side with the door open on a small hill overlooking the humans in the vegetable garden, supervising double-digging, hexagonal layout interplanting and so forth.  Anyway, he was in the carrier in the front hall, at night, with the carrier door swung wide open and I thought it would make a good close-up; Dare looking out through the wires.

I turned off the room light, got down on the floor, put a flash well off the camera to my right and took great pains trying to see well enough, without any modeling light, to judge if his eyes and facial fur were sharp…really concentrating on the subject.  The first shot was taken with the door mostly closed

and was rather dark, even for the “abandoned kitty in a cage” look.  I liked the possibilities and decided to use a little more film on the idea.

To reflect a little bit more light into the carrier, I opened the door widely enough to position it to bounce flash in to Dare. With the room light still off, in the dark but for ambient light from way around a corner in another room, I got back down below the rim of the carrier and carefully strained my vision, to focus on eyes and fur again (with the lens closed down to get good depth of field it was VERY dark in the viewfinder), and took the shot.

At this point I’d like to emphasize something for all the photographers out there who fall in love with the subject in the viewfinder: always…always, always check everywhere in your viewfinder when you compose a scene,  especially if you’re in darkness.  I know it’s a beginner’s concept but it bears repeating, or, in my case, tattooing inside my eyelids. I know I’m not the only one with unicorns made of a subject plus a stick, a sign, or a lamppost unnoticed in the background.  I, for example, had never paid much attention to anything but the function of the cat carrier and in the dark, thought nothing of bouncing light off the inside of the door, which I’d never really examined…it’s just particle board, after all.

Well, with this bounced-flash shot, I discovered the manufacturer’s mark for the first time. Sigh.

Check those viewfinders!  *Grin*

Is it possible that this is the first post of the Out-take blog? *laughing*

What have you found in your viewfinder, lately?

Cheers,

pete

In the Spotlight

Taking, and retaking, beginning and intermediate photography courses is a fun way to make sure that you find a time to get out, in my case into the yard, to keep in contact with your ’seeing’ muscles and whatever imagination can be mustered that day. After all, it’s an *assignment*, isn’t it? Unfortunately, Real Life (remember when the internet was young and real life was called the “Meat World”?) has a persistent way of demanding regular chunks of the day which usually leaves me taking images in the hours from the very flat, unattractive, light of noon up to the possibility of the jackpot of ’sweet’ late afternoon light, depending on the current level of suspended particles in the local atmosphere. During the seemingly interminable hours of flat, contrast-y light it can get too hot, in Summer or Fall, to stay out in the open, practicing honeybee/flower action shots, or what have you, and the heat sends me either inside for a drink or in under the cover of the podocarpus and the split-leaf maple in the courtyard, where it is quite dark and generally cool in comparison. And the breaks in the dense shade spark Ideas.

In under the canopy, in a mini-micro-climate held reasonably comfortable by the dense intergrowing branches overhead, is a great place to watch the shafts of sunlight, shifting like white spotlights across the gloom, picking out forms in that saturated-green of the protected leaves of the split-leaf maple. It was just that sort of day when I was out with my sketching mannequin (my patient, hardworking and *only* cooperative photographic model) to get an assigned shot of a portrait in a natural setting (I got a nice shot of a twenty-inch tall mannequin ‘climbing’ in the maple tree…nice except for a small leaf-hopper which hopped aboard the mannequin while I was working with the camera too far away to see it, and made itself at home where there would normally be a nose on the blank wooden face. Sigh.). After getting my class shot, I couldn’t resist the lovely greens up in the “spotlight” and waited a few minutes until the light worked its way around to this grouping of leaves, which I particularly liked, and made a few exposures of the grouping. I like to put it up on the computer as wallpaper, for a calm influence during hectic days.

May your Holidays be only mildly hectic, if hectic they be, and happy, memorable times!

Cheers,
pete

The Gauntlet, taken up

Okay, you’re right: this is NOT one of my photos or fractals. This is a line drawing that I wish I could credit to its rightful owner; please let me know if you know of the source? Thank you,

The reason for the switch in art today is that, as a student in John Kramar’s LVSonline introductory course on techniques for Remote Perception, the drawing was given as a subject with which to practice ‘blind drawing’. Blind drawing simply means that all of your attention is kept on the subject while, without looking at your paper, you draw its contours. For the exercise, the drawing was also turned upside down, so that one is truly just copying the shape and flow of the lines; a technique taught by Betty Edwards in her ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ courses and book.

Karol Grace posted about blind drawing in her Three Dog Studio post: Making Art with your Eyes Closed, just as the remote viewing class was introduced to it. In both uses, it is a warm-up for getting the figurative muscles of your art brain flexible and engaged. The results of blind contour drawing can be, um, disappointing and humbling, and , in friendly discussion, hilarious. I left a comment on the blog, saying something to the effect that her linework looked good even if the subject *was* a little (cue the friendly discussion *smile*) ‘randomized’ and she tossed down a grinning gauntlet, challenging me to nerve up and post my own stab at blind drawing; here we go-talk about ‘warts and all’ blog entries!

I attempted my first copy of the subject above, on the honor system, and found that I could not be trusted. Failed miserably; caught myself several times sneaking a peek at the drawing hand to try to place it for the next line. Predictably, the drawing was reasonably close to the original above. But, oh, the guilt! *grin*. I didn’t include that first drawing here, as the second of the truly blind attempts was made on the same paper and overlay it; very hard to tell which part was the peeked-at version and which was the second blind try in the resultant mess. To ensure that I couldn’t look at my drawing hand again, I went off and found a milk-jug box, the sort that holds two one-gallon plastic jugs of milk. It was just the right size to lie on its side on the desk, with room for a stack of paper and for pen maneuvering, inside. With my hand out of sight in the box, I tried it for the first time without being able to look. Horrible. Shudder-inducing. Really dreadful; you can find her right eye and eyelid floating in space next to the main..er…collision of lines. More Practice!

The third blind attempt a wasn’t a whole lot better. I have no recollection of drawing her nose three times, lol.

The final try has some recognizable copies of lines from the original, even if the misplaced right and left contours make it as much like the original face as a mask run over by an 18-wheeler. It is progress, however halting.

For me, blind drawing, in spite of the name, is a great way to practice seeing, seeing what is really in front of me, which I think is of great importance to how I make choices when I’m working with the camera. One of my most common errors is looking at, but not *seeing* the truth of the scene in the viewfinder. How is the light *really* distributed, how is the color from the thing closest to my center of interest altering the picture I think I’m taking, are my technical decisions with the camera and lens really setting the center of interest off from the colors and forms that might distract the eye. Having practice at seeing helps assure I don’t just find new ways to depict the proverbial lamppost growing-out-of-a-subject’s-head image.

I’m glad to have been re-introduced to this form of art exercise, it’s also a neat way to subtly shift my state of mind into something more focused and quieter. Not smarter, obviously, otherwise I’d've burned the evidence!

Well, that’s it, that’s my blind drawing come-uppance, lol. Let the friendly discussion begin!

Pssssst….on Karol’s Three Dog Studio blog there is also a very cool idea for making a sketching journal that is much less unnerving than a daily confrontation with a plain, blank page; check it out!

cheers,

pete