Edge of Water Bubbles

This project sprang from the hot day last Saturday that we spent in New Gloucester. The grandsons were playing outside so we got the water table out and gave them some water to play in and maybe help them cool off. The next day brought out the "bubbles" to play with, and some of them ended up in the water table, so I started snapping pictures. The patterns began to evolve as a concept, and the large on is my favorite, with the contrast tweaked a bit and the sharp edges of the bubbles reflecting everything in the visual sphere.

Early Easter

That Easter Bunny must have his clock or calendar wrong because he came to the house and dropped a bunch of eggs around the living room. They were brightly colored with golden flecks throughout their surfaces... they seemed almost magical. I'm not sure what they had to do with the Christian version of Easter.

Here are several images of them.

Reflections

Matt and I just came out of Bull Moose in Bangor and saw a "dollop" of an oil slick just kind of sitting in a puddle, so I dragged my foot through it to make it move a bit. As it swirled around on the surface of the puddle, it began to take on some interesting shapes, and as Matt moved to the other side of I saw this shot come into "existence", and took it. He was just starting to light a cigarette, and I thought the shiny oil shapes made an "altered" view of smoke swirling around him.

I flipped the image too.

Young Artist

 Of course I'm proud of my youngest grandson's proclivity for all things artistic, and he is willing to take on almost any task around the use of materials, but things happen quickly in his world. It can take less than a moment for him to get from point "A" to point "B", and the mischief is an innocent interpretation of the world around him. His mother has taken marvelous pictures of him over the past two and a half years, and this is another one to put in the "forever" album. The gesture of that left arm, the apparent "cover up" of his work seems to say; "Mom, I was caught up in the moment"... and I am sure he was!

Waiting at the Car Wash

Jen and I have tickets to the Penobscot theater production of "papermaker", and so we thought we would get her car washed after filling up. I suppose "reflections" is not anything new in terms of photographic theme, but I didn't even notice these until after I looked at the shot on my phone. I was wearing sunglasses with polarized lenses and the reflection was minimized.
The shapes of the cars in the curved line across the image was what drew my eye, and the reflections of my hat just add interest to the open areas of the sky and parking lot.

Books and Baseball

 In looking back at the times in my life where my students are now; the end of high school and thinking about "new" directions for life experiences, I can see things boiling down to a couple of choices. The academic side seemed obvious, where my father had always encouraged my brother and I to go to college and get an education that would help us in life the push was toward learning. The athletic side, in hindsight, was much less so, even though I had a cousin that became a professional athlete I realized that the odds were against the average young person. School became important and photography became more and more a part of my artistic endeavor. I feel like I took the right path for me.

"Battered"

 Here's an image from B&W Photo class that works in the distortion and disfigurement of a human female face. Women around our country feel this as real every day. The image was a mishmash of materials intended as an example of process, but I just couldn't get away from seeing this as a topic here.

Re-Mix

A photo taken from an older post around the concept of food, but here food as presented as perhaps not all that tasty. There is more to this, but the fact that I had a plate full of scallops for supper tonight may very well be the reason my palette (pun intended) is not working quite like it should. Here are a couple of variations of the same piece of work.

3D Painting

Working with the new virtual reality painting system at our school was quite an experience yesterday as I was able to spend about twenty minutes exploring the tools. While I have worked with 3D image constructions, being "inside" a 3D environment is a totally "unique" world, where the dimensions of reality exist within the work. The tools are reminiscent of the early stages of Photoshop or Painter, where the early simplicity was forgotten by the fifth or sixth iteration. This is an early and spontaneous structure with a single "brush", but I am really enjoying all the realms of this new experience.

Receding Snow Line

Looking for a winter with some snow led me to placing my "snowshoes" into the back of my car and getting ready to do some snowshoeing, but after the February break from school, I discovered that there really wasn't enough snow left to actually use them. Disappointment is haunting all my dreams... not truly, as I went out in the courtyard to shoot some "background" images for composites that my students are working with right now. These are a couple that I liked for showing the "edge" and giving the sense of snow receding. Lighting was great early in the morning and the textures really worked for me here.