2/26/11

About Santa Fe

Binaural

The Second Dusk

--Lost in La Cienega

Brewery

Dog Park

By the Dieing of the Light

The View from the Ovelmen Residence



The Chronic Feeling of Driving Oneself Through The Desert
Santa Fe and Back 50+

 

This series is about looking back, places that I have called home, the feeling of comfort, really.

This is a very much process peice about looking out, which is something i have tried to abort for years, but which has been revived by large format. HDR has taught me a new way of seeing.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

1/20/11

HDR



Taking a series of exposures and letting something cold and mechanical compare and decipher them seems so removed, but I enjoy it as a means of capturing a greater reality, not really a greater reality, just a somewhat closer version of reality. As more exact replica of sense perception. One can put their feelings onto the surface of the landscape in a more direct way. The compositional advantages are interesting, to say the least, working with light in a different way.That is the journey, seeing light, a new and different way every day. Photography is merely the chaotic interaction of light and time documented in a unique way. We change our world in our attempts to document the incoherent and yet inescapable lightness that is being. 

Trying really to find something that might express the feeling of something that can not be captured, such is noumena, but its different now, not deeper, better or worse, just different. Learning how to see light through the lens of altered dinamic range has evolved my sense of light, optics, and composition. I will not say that HDR is necesary for any shot, most obviously not, but that in terms of true ability to create the ultimate understatement of the dramatic landscape it is an extensive resource.  A deep well of inspiration. 

Walking in Oxley has become a source of inspiration, tracking deer, watching birds, all sorts of wildlife really. Sometimes it is very quiet, and you can hear the smaller animals whiskering about in their nests in the leaves and sticks. The sense of an armadillo walking by in the moon light. Someething that you could not photograph propperly or it would be ruined. We either document, change, or walk on. I was glad I was wearing boots for this shot as I looked down to realize I was standing in inches of water.

 

12-10-10

From

An image about many things. Looking back at the history of photo, in general, and my images as well. Like a foggy mirror of oneself through the lenses of noumena. To begin, looking at the end, the start of the end, a subtle and slow dieing of the light. A fading into darkness, the light that is and creates color. Like the feeling of wading too far into the ocean at night, up and down in a seamless continuum of brine. The green limey light in the nursing home, seeping sickly through the windows, trying to warm, and then falling cold upon death incarnate, another one of the event horizon. Hearing back at Burroughs, effects of, hearing the immortal, what passes on...

"Consider an apocalyptic statement: nothing is true everything is permitted. Hasaan I Sabah, the old man in the mountain. Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained and destructive behavior, that would a minor episode, which would run its course. Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-believe . . . illusion . . . dream . . . art. When art leaves the frame and the written word leaves the page, not merely the physical frame and page, but the frames and pages that assign the categories."

...The slow lingerering decay of the light, looking back at a day, a time, the past. Everything that has a beginning, has an end.

Thoughts of Hiroshi Sugimoto, sameness, simplicity, a reductive process. The world has taker outs and puter inners. I take out, I guess. Thought evolves from process which evolves from thought which evolves from process. Under the weight of all things there is little light which escapes.

 

11/27/10

Upon Retrospection

Trying to follow the Max Ernst idea that came back from Houston about cultural, or really just changes over time, but taking it to the next level. How do simple systems change over time and can that be more easily documented, change, the basic factor of entropy, narrative. Working on this image, trying to bring everything together, soften, rationalize. Lookingt back at Keystone. I always was absorbed by that name, Keystone, since I was a very young boy. I lived there for wuite a while, in my Jeep. Got stuck in the sand, adventure. Spooks' house and there muddy beyond. Many great moments of understanding, and fear, watching the way in which change ocuurs over time. Study, the great science of cause and effect. Keystone, sleeping on top of my Jeep, the sky, smells, and dim city lights. All tangled in the web, almst putrified, but part of what pushes onward. Lessons learned.

11/21/10

Meditating

I have found myself staring into space alot in my free time, when I have it, so I decided to make a short video about that. Just trying to embrace an emptiness, not having to always feel, positive or negative, restrained or inhibited. Feeling mildly schitzofrenic lately, these moments of staring into space thinking deeply about life, photography, loss, sometimes nothing at all. And that is what I wanted to represent with this video, just being there, watching the clouds drift by, exposures so long they really dont even delineate the clouds but rarely. Largely lost in colors, inperceptible movements which bear an obvious direction and flow but never approaching any cohesive narrative. Sometimes photography can serve to recreate a moment, a specific circumstance in time, which can be rebembered again and again through the details of the image, but with this there is little memory, just the feeling of the clouds drifting by all in one long flash, timeless, meaningless, and without any semblance of objectivity.  

11/14/10

Portraits

 I did some Senior Portraits this weekend, worked out pretty well. Tried to get as much of a range of styles as posible in shooting, a little something for everyone. Still found myself compulsively just purely trying to look at light, not subject, but it was good to be drawn into subjective process through posing, coaching, interaction. Sat down and tried to have fun editing the images last night, not the usual approach. I still lazily used mostly Actions on Photoshop, but really pushed a couple of them towards painterly, aesthetics. Just kind of playing the line between cliche and poppy, the ridiculous and the contemporary. 

11/7/10

Visual Metaphors (Revisited)

Reality is like the branches of a tree, in that ideas, as represented by each divergent offshoot must be allowed to fully expand and subdivide before a new major vein can be created. The leaves and buds of each branch provide the intellectual nourishment needed to create an entirely new system of thought. The root system of the tree represents our subconscious mind, ever growing deeper into that unknown darkness as its' counterpart, the youngest buds and tendrils of the treetop find light for the very first time every day.