Belt Rack

We just got through February Break, which I like to call, this year in particular, the “fake president” break, and Torrey and Jen and I took the boys to Goodwill in the beautiful city of Auburn. Well, seeing those boys in the toy section was almost enough, but watching them find “other” things was even more satisfying. Here, Em found a belt rack to play hide and seek in, so I snapped a few pictures, put them together, converted them into grayscale, and tacked on a little “drop shadow” to give the image some depth and separate the “poses”. There is something about how he is “revealing” himself in this series that I just find fascinating!

Backgrounds & Inversions

To me, this is an interesting concept in that it is a straight inversion of color and yet has a presence that feels like an echo of reality. A self portrait, this colorless background is so full of joy for me, with my grandsons held close and a smile on all the faces.

My inverted face at the bottom, along with the somewhat dour expression, in my mind represents the sorrow I feel during the times I'm away from those boys and the times I have to say goodbye to them after a weekend visit. All is not, and perhaps can never be, joy at every moment.

I do like this image for the structures and the composition, for the odd color of the foreground and the colorless and high contrast background, for the expressions on the faces, for the understanding of the processes that went into it's development, and especially for the spontaneity of those processes. That's the way I like to work.

Shadows Q3 2017

I was working with the concept of "shadows", an assignment i give to my Digital Photo students each term, and I thought I might use some transparencies that my darkroom class has been working with to produce photograms. The enlarging of an ink washed piece of film was amazing to me.

Playing with the effects of the shadows on not only the wall, but my face and expressions are seemingly leading me toward a re-examination of how expressions and background may relate to one another.

Too Much Snow

The East patio door is pretty well blocked, and I suppose that a trip outside will be required to begin shoveling out this mess, but not really looking forward to it! The last storm we were about three hours getting out, and this one I'm sure will be about five hours. A snowblower is a great tool, but when the snow is so deep and blowing, it has to be done in sections!







The front door is no exception, and for some reason, no matter how the wind blows, the biggest drifts are right in front of the doorways, both to the residence and to the garages. Oh, well.

Slow Shutter Lighting

Before I turned in for the night I thought I might put the light sticks I had made this weekend to use. I have seen cars used in light painting, and it occurred to me that Jen's car was in the driveway, so I gave it a go. After thinking, I would have liked to have had a much broader and deeper background than the house, but I do sort of like the window showing in the upper right as an accent rather than a distraction.






So the structure of these is all the same, but the lights are what kind of "make" the images and it is interesting to think of a photo in terms of time. The way an image is not locked in a split second, but has a sense of action and movement gives it another dimension.

The green light gives the imagery a sense of the natural and although it is at odds with the usual sense of night in a deep blue, I like the way it becomes a theme of color through the entire image, with a cast that is bright and subtle simultaneously. I am posting four of these images that I like for their sense of movement.