Today I woke up to snow and harsh winds. I think winter keeps telling the other seasons “ok guys, your turn.” It then turns warm for a few days and then winter says “PSYCH!!!” and drops the temperature and dumps more snow on us. Seriously, I’m only in one less layer than I was in January. When is winter going to let go of its death grip?
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
Here are the scans of the Lumens I did on Thursday and one from last weekend:
These next two are from the same plant. I really like the difference in the two. I thought the plant would hold its shape a lot better than it did, but as they are now, I think unless the viewer was told that they wouldn’t know any better. The exposure times were also different; the first one was exposed for about 4.5 hours and the second was exposed for 1.5-2 hours.
Many thanks to my friend Tyler who hooked me up with some tempered glass that will really help me crank these out (provided I have plants). Now all I need to do is get a statement written up and finally email it to the guy in Nebraska for the possible show.
Edit: I got sick of the previous template not wrapping the text (or not not wrapping the text) around photos in the posts, so I’ve changed to this one.
My dad just gave me this photograph he took on the way to Little Lemhi Scout Camp. It’s about 3 years old, and I thought I’d share. You don’t see too many photos of myself.
Oh, and due to bad winds, we took the day off from work, so I took advantage of the situation and made three Lumen prints. I made 2 with the same plant, as was suggested by my friend Scott. The second exposure was a bit shorter than the first, but it’s still interesting to see what the re-used plant does. They were both exposed on Kodak Ektalure. The other print was done on Oriental Seagull. I’m really beginning to like that paper when exposed for 2-3 hours. When exposed for much longer the paper goes a purple color that I don’t particularly like. Exposures of 2-3 hours causes the paper to stay a subtle purple-ish brown that I do like. Once they dry, I’ll get them scanned and posted.
I’ve finally decided to take the plunge into the digital world. After using Jon’s D300 a few times, I’m finally convinced that digital is nearly capable of what I can do with film. I’ll still shoot film like crazy because I love how it slows me down and makes me really think about and analyze the scene I’m photographing.
So to help me afford the $1800 body, I’ve just listed my Xbox 360 and all my games, totaling about $600 on Craigslist, and am going through all my junk asking if I really need things and wondering if it’s worth the hassle of trying to sell. I figure within about a month I should have the money scraped together to get the body, and then another month to get the lens I want/need.
I’ve settled on the name lumens.
Today after work I went up to Market Lake. We’re building in Osgood, so it’s only a short jaunt up the road. There’s still quite a bit of ice on the water, but there are a few open spots with some really cool birds (Darren, you up for a birding trip?). One of the open spots had just enough plants to start a couple new exposures.On the way home, the thought hit me to see what they look like inverted, because technically they are negatives, so I was curious to see them as “positives.” Here are a few examples (I really like them, especially the first one):
Sunday’s open portfolio sharing at SPE was really successful. I ended up getting a potential show of my photograms/Lumen prints, and was asked about publishing them. I was, and still am, very excited about it. I wasn’t totally convinced those would be well-received, or cared for. After showing them at the conference and getting so much good feedback, it gave me just that much more motivation to continue them.Yesterday during lunch I went to a canal which has a little flowing water near the job site in Osgood. I didn’t find anything floating in the water, but I found lots of plants on the thawing muddy banks. I just set one out to expose about 15 minutes ago. It’s really cloudy and overcast and raining a little, so the light is pretty weak, but the whole spirit of doing these is experimentation, unpredictability, and serendipity.I’ll try to keep track of things on twitter if anyone is interested in somewhat of a live update to the exposures.Oh, and I can never settle on a preference of calling them photograms or Lumen prints, the term coined by Jerry Burchfield.
Day 3 at SPE has drawn to a close. Again, there were some really good presentations, and some not so great ones. The first one I went to this morning was about the Three Gorges Dam on the Yhangtze River in China, which has been photographed by Edward Burtynsky, who sat in for the last half of the presentation. At the end he and the presenters had a very interesting and informative discussion about what’s going on and what has gone on there with all the people that have been displaced, and the many environmental changes that the construction and filling of the dam has caused. Oh, and I got his book “Quarries,” which he signed.
This evening Burtynsky was the featured speaker, and his presentation was excellent. The whole theme of the conference has been about advocacy and change; the title is Agents of Change: Art and Advocacy. In his presentation, Burtynsky mentioned that his earlier work wasn’t about advocacy, but sort of evolved into such after he began photographing rail cuts in the Rocky Mountains where sides of mountains have been cut away to allow passage of rail cars. He walked us through his many projects ranging from quarries to mine tailings to E-waste (waste products from computers and other electronics).
These past three days here have really helped feed the photography fire, and they have also given me some great ideas about current and future projects and reminded me how much more I need to learn.
The second day of SPE is finally over, and I’m beat. I went to some really interesting presentations, and one pretty boring one. Liz Wells gave a speech that was pretty much her reading out of a text book, but she showed some really interesting work by some Scandinavian and European photographers. I heard and saw several names of photographers that I’m sure I’ll be mentioning in the coming weeks at 52photographers.com.
The biggest thing that happened, at least for me, was the open portfolio sharing this evening. There was a big room with lots of tables for everyone to set out their work for other participants to look at. I was very apprehensive about showing my work, which was all of my photograms I’ve been doing, as it has been about three years since I’ve had to talk about and defend my work, but I found that I loosened up fairly rapidly, and the work was received pretty well. Actually, a lot better than I thought or hoped. Some people wanted to know how I was pushing the work further than it is and what Jerry Burchfield did, and others were interested in knowing if/when it was going to be shown. I guess I better pursue that goal more intently now.
Yesterday Jon and I traveled to Denver for the National SPE conference. Wednesday night we got on Google Earth and looked up the locations of some natural gas drilling rigs to stop and photograph them on the way. We spent quite a bit of time driving around the drilling and extraction pads, amazed at how large the drills were and how much land they occupied. After we were done there, we took a road that made the drive a little bit longer, but one photograph made it worth it. At least I hope it did. I shot it with the 4×5, so I don’t truly know how well it turned out yet. There was a bit of fog which reduced the visibility to about one mile, and we drove by some really huge power lines, and we stopped to make some photographs.
We finally rolled in to Denver at about 6:30, and got to the hotel just in time to make the Keynote. Susan Burke, a lawyer involved in the law suits against torture in Abu Ghraib and other Iraq prisons gave a presentation (which was really good, by the way) on her lawsuits and how they are using photography and art to put an end to the inhumane things going on in these prisons.
Afterwards, Jon, myself, Darren, Brian Atkinson, two old friends Scott Wheeler and Carolee Coy and a few of Darren’s students all went out to eat. It was really good to catch up, as it had been about three years since I’d seen Scott and Carolee.
Overall, it was a really exciting day.
It was really foggy this morning driving through Ucon and Menan. Every time I’ve driven by I’ve thought this tree needed to be photographed, and this morning was perfect for it.
By 10:00 am all the fog had burned off, and the sun was shining bright. I only wish I’d had had enough time to use the 4×5.