Face Painting

I’ve been toying with brushes, masks and blending modes with my merges lately. Granted, I’m always using the three, but not usually so heavily and to such an artistic effect. My older merges were less reliant on the computer (and deliberately so) – I was trying to mimic the analog process as closely as possible with as few computer effects added (read: none) used along the way. Lately, though, I’ve found myself creating brushes from photos and painting out my masks that way. The results have been rewarding in terms of texture, and I’m thinking about printing some of these on canvas. I typically print on metallic paper, which works well for the shots of rust and water that benefit from an almost aggressive lustre and sheen. With these flower paintings, though, I’ve found that it results in a loss of detail in the more painterly areas of the shots. Nevertheless, here are three in the series – I’m particularly charmed by the color palettes as my work tends to be pretty dark. Always fun to work on the other side of the spectrum…

14: The Spooky Tunnel Legacy

It’s no secret that I have an ongoing photographic love affair with the Dale Carlia Tunnel, better known to me and my compatriots (read: Mom) as “The Spooky Tunnel”  An abandoned railway bed on the border of DC and Maryland, the tunnel is a popular jogging and bike path on the Capitol Crescent Trail.  It gained the spooky monniker after an early morning run where we were presented with this seemingly absurd structure cut out of a small hill, replete with fog, cobwebs and moss.  The tunnel still has the original stonework and duck-ins, which serve only to scare the crap out of you as you run past, imagining all sorts of horror movie-esque grab and snacth maneuvers some secret killer could perform from the inky darkness.  An all around good time as far as we runners are concerned.

This merge is primarily of photos taken just a few steps past the tunnel of a rusty, art deco looking bridge.  The squiggles are from a shot of the street lights on Memorial Bridge as I rode past in the car, and the black shadow in the center is a self-portrait of my shadow that I snapped in Central Park in Fall 2007.

14: Spooky Tunnel (16"x20")

The Latest (Not So) Corporate Mergers

Thought I would ring in the fast-approaching New Year with some of my latest merges. The glassy, bubbly shots are merges pulled from photos shot at the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the NY Botantical Gardens in 2006. It was my first Fall in NYC after moving back, and my first time since graduating that I had been back to Fordham. A truly delicious day, the aggressively colored spun glass pieces were set off by an almost movie-quality blue sky. Fast forward to a month or so ago, and you have these shots that play upon the reflective nature of water, glass and sky.

Chihuly (One)

Chihuly (Two)

Chihuly (Three)

Spooky Tunnel

Gallery | Spooky Tunnel

The annual “CCNY Women Make Art” exhibition is fast-approaching, and rather that submit old works from the photomerge vault (Sans Souris and Orvieto to name a few), I decided to work on something new. This time around, I was looking for digital pieces that seemed to retain the quality of light of their analog counterparts. I toyed around with printing digital photos on transparency sheets and then scanning these layers into Photoshop. I also thought about tearing sheets of photos and scanning them in, but that seemed more DIY than strictly photographic. The four finished photos, all taken along the Georgetown Canal, feature two of my favorite landmarks – the Dale Carlia Tunnel (aka the Spooky Tunnel) and Fletcher’s Boathouse.

Photo: Dale Carlia Tunnel II, 2007.

Faccia de Fiore

GALLERY | Orchids, Hilo

Taking a break from shooting the 11 of 13 climates present in the world, I had the opportunity to tour around an orchid farm in Hilo, Hawaii. The place was dripping with color, and a few surprises awaited me, to include orchids that smelled of chocolate. I’m constantly fascinated by the seductive (and sometimes lascivious) nature of orchids, all contained within their stately faces. Here are a few head shots from my trip to the garden.

Here, Fishy Fishy!!!

GALLERY | Lomo Fisheye | Central Park

So, I got the Lomo Fisheye Dos a few weeks ago (Lomographic Fisheye Two, $70 – although I got a sweet deal on it for $50) and it’s been no less than a wonder. I purchased the regular Lomo Fisheye a few years ago, and as much as the built in fisheye lens was amazing, its novelty wore off pretty quickly. Cranking the plastic wheel to rewind the film worked about 50% of the time (and eventually almost broke off). There weren’t any exposure settings, so controlling light intake was always a crapshoot. And with no real viewfinder, you must abide by Lomo’s rules of “You don’t have to know beforehand what you’ve captured on film,” and “You don’t have to know afterwards, either.” Basically, you get what you get. Needless to say, it was fun to play around with, but because the photos were either really, really, really (ridiculously) good-looking or horrendous, it didn’t have great staying power.

Photos: Lex’skimo. National Zoo, 2005.

Photos: The Thinker. National Zoo, 2005.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I noticed the Lomo Fisheye 2. With an actual true-to-print viewfinder and a multiple exposure setting, this camera has the funkiness of a Lomo with a lot more control. I’ve been enamored with the prospect of photomerges in the camera (no shock there), and get a laugh every time I have the film developed, and the technicians ask what the hell I did to my camera. Here are the results of the first few rolls.

Photos: Bethesda Angels. Central Park, 2007.

GALLERY | Lomo Fisheye | Central Park

My Friends are Prettier than Yours

From the collection, My Friends are Prettier Than Yours, also known as the walk to the living room. I haven’t established whether I got into the practice of gardening solely to take pictures of my flowers, but now that I’m in NYC, I do admit that I miss digging in the dirt and then snapping shots later on. These were with the Canon XT with a macro filter (hence the bowing on the edges). I like the flower in the fishbowl look, despite the fact that it’s sometimes considered the tapered leg jean of photography. We can’t all be cool.

Photo: Bleeding Hearts, 2006.

Photo: Iris, 2006.

Photo: Cosmos, 2006.

Photo: Cosmos, 2005.

Trashed Cars // Clouds and Trees

GALLERY | Clouds and Cars…

As mentioned before, I am head over heels for the process of photomerges without leaning on Photoshop. Sans Souris kicked it off, and the love has grown to include merges of other kinds – for instance, what happens when you sandwich negatives in a scanner? The output is no longer analog, but you are still working in the same manner as you would at an enlarger, with the photo captured in pixels instead of on paper.

Photo: Arizona’s endless clouds meet Alexandria’s stormy weather. (Trashed Cars :: Two. 2007)

Trashed Cars is a set of photos created in this manner – I merged b/w negatives for the set of smoky, film noire inspired shots. The photos were taken in Phoenix, Arizona and Alexandria, Virginia, and were particularly chosen for the close relationship between cloud formations and smoke from steam grates. The streaks are actually from the light catching on windshield wipers at night, and the graininess is thanks to the ever lovely 3200 film.

Photo: Savannah’s bridges are defined by the lights of DC. (Clouds and Trees :: One. 2007)

Clouds and Trees came about in a similar fashion, but deals more with the dynamic created by combining negatives of different spatial layouts. Lines to infinity are cut off by bisecting verticals and horizontals. The odd geometric shapes were created by filming moving light at night (does anyone know the technical term for this?) – in this case the streetlights flying by while driving across Memorial Bridge in DC. These shots were combined with photos from the waterfront in Savannah, Georgia. These shots were all digital (shot with my Canon Rebel EOS) and were layered in Photoshop.

I think what baffles me in both sets is that the quality of light is consistent, but only one set works with pixels as the original photographic data.

GALLERY | Clouds and Cars…

Sans Souris

GALLERY | Sans Souris…

Does photographic style really differ from analog to digital? I know that as a digital native (for the most part), it’d be an act of treason to say yes. But if you ask painters about Photoshop, or sculptors about 3D renderings, they’d tell you that there’s a lot to be said for the act of creation without the aid of a computer. A few years ago, I decided to take a look at what I had come to know as the photographic process, and distance it entirely from my collective digital knowledge.

Photo: Dentelle et Mousse, from Sans Souris. Gelatin silver print, 8.5in x 12 in. 2005.

I started with photography in 5th grade, back when (for me) the process of creating photos had absolutely nothing to do with computers. Loading film onto reels in a light-proof bag and learning how to work an enlarger were as far removed from the digital world as fish are to the desert (…yeah, I don’t know where that analogy came from either). It wasn’t to say that I couldn’t imagine a computer doing all that I was doing by hand, but rather that to forge something in the darkroom was something more intrinsically artistic than to do so digitally.

Later, as the tools for the digital process grew exponentially (“What? You can print on luster paper at home?”) and edits in Photoshop both saved time and fostered new creativity, many artists realized that maybe the digital darkroom and the wet lab were actually quite similar after all. Cameras became more powerful, paper and ink choices grew, and more and more hobbyists became pros in the new age. In turn, the analog era faded as several photo companies (Kodak and Ilford included) decided to discontinue many of their products and services. I’m still mourning the loss of TechPan. And I wonder about the reception that Jerry Uelsmann received for his work back when Photoshop was yet to be born. A good friend of mine (and a fellow artist) was studying my work, and we laughed at how so many balk about spending time figuring out how a piece works. Isn’t that the best part of discovering art? My goal was to create photos that people would need to take time with.

Sans Souris was my attempt at separating myself from the computer to work with seemingly digital manipulations in an analog environment. The photo merges that resulted were created with multiple exposures at the enlarger or by sandwiching negatives. In the exhibit, I’ve featured thumbnails of the original photos that make the composite piece. At first I thought that this was helping the user cheat, but I’ve since changed my mind – 1.) because at some point, it’s lovely to see the origins of an object and 2.) because you get an idea of how far apart (geographically) many of the photos were taken. In this digital world, it’s no myth that we have the ability to bring seemingly disparate elements together, but with a little patience, it can also be done in an analog setting as well.

GALLERY | Sans Souris…

How to (Proverbially) Work It

OCD as I am, you know that there is some sort of ridiculous organization to all of this. Rather than make this all for myself and publish willy nilly, I’m including a breakdown of how I plan to do this. If you feel like a peek into my organizational psychosis, read on. Otherwise, browse around the site and I’m sure you’ll get the drift.

In Lens Flare, I’m trying to organize the amassed work that I have thus far, but also take a look at some of the different techniques that I’ve employed in the past (or am looking into for the future). There isn’t really one way that I do any particular thing, and I want to keep a tally of it all. Any sections marked as Observatory are going to be about the technical work and methods that I am playing around with. All of my compiled work (collections, portfolios, shows, etc.) will be marked as Gallery.

I am still playing around with how to best display work on the web, so expect there to be links to all sorts of web slideshows and interactive galleries. I can’t help but fuss with web design a whole lot – aside from being a powerful tool to display visual artistry, it’s an easy way to junk things up as well. I have photographs that look stunning as framed and mounted 16 x 20s that lose all meaning on a 1024 x 768 res screen. I’m just trying to find the common ground here.

Anything marked as an Intro is an explanation of how the site works (…kind of like this is). Anyways, enough on this. I do believe that good design involves less words and better visual cues, so consider this your invitation to skip out on my rambling and take a look around. Cheers.

 

Photo: An absolute favorite of mine, and a reminder that art is a great deal of serendipity. I keep this grainy version up for a reason, as I have a 4′x6′ painting that I’ve done of this, and it’s grainy as hell as well. (Winston, Coney Island. 2003)