Blue Skies

So the altruistic experience of free diving in the big ocean, coupled with the underwater cinematography of this, has continued to be most joyous reason for why sunny Florida is so great. Every dive is a new adventure, and the sightings, are never a bore.

 

In this instance, just minutes after I'd slipped my fins on and was floating in the crystal clear waters, a trio of Spotted Eagle Rays glides underneath me. They couldn't have been more graceful. I dove down to watch as they made their elegant passes and admired the coloration of their skin. Though it would be far from the biggest spotting of the day.. 

As we let the current drift us out near to the end of Palm Beach's inlet, we crawled up and over the rocks that separated the southern and northern parts of the jetty. Sightings of a manatee had been coming and going and sure enough, just as we slipped out of our fins to call it a day -- a sighting of our own is made! A large, dark mass is spotted not 15 feet from where I was wading at. Quick to delete some of the last pictures we took, I make chase of the creature without any fins at all! Scurrying to catch up, I watched from close behind how the big fella made his little fins push off in the sand to keep himself going. Once I got alongside it, the manatee began with the rear fin and took off toward deeper waters. I signaled to the pair of divers what was headed their way, and slipped back to watch as the creature faded from sight.

 Such marvelous encounters and much, much more is to come.

(Sept / 2011)

Under the Sea

Recently, I've ventured down to sunny WPB, Florida. I've been itchin' to get my dive legs going, and finally that aspect of my life has started to materialize. Starting off, the dives have been most excellent, but due to recent hurricane Irene, things underwater have certainly shifted themselves. The environment has drastically been changed and the tides are still recovering from Irene's after effects. That being said, there's still plenty to see and much to find and with the recent addition of Sony's new Vegas software, I've gotten to involve my fingers and design senses for the production of recent dive footage.

And as we head out of jelly season, things are startin' to look up already ...

Psychometry Reading

Carol Golemboski
Stereoscope
Silver Gelatin Print

This spring Carol exhibited her Psychometry series at the Rowe Arts Gallery, and taking the chance to attend the accompanying lecture with the opening, I was able to receive insight as to her methodology and inspiration for some of the images. After browsing the works, I became drawn to the various objects depicted in her images. Some were teeth, some were hands, some were photograms of small animals, and towards the back along with the later parts of her series, I saw stereoscopes being used in her images. I had a chat with the curator about the novelty of these items and how to photograph for their use. It was neat to see Carol reference this object, as a lot of her scenes depicted common novelty items.

Working with a Hasselblad 2-1/4, Carol gave account to how hard it was for her to begin scratching the negatives. For anyone that works with film, you know that the negative is all you have to revert back to.  If a print becomes botched, it can be redone, but if a negative becomes scratched, it requires reshooting altogether. After overcoming this feat, she felt liberated to make the marks become part of her methodology. The scratches were done intuitively based upon the image itself, often in conjunction with the shapes of the subjects themselves and sometimes expressive in nature matching the overall feel for the image. It often created a vignette for the picture plane. 

Most all her works were printed at 20x20 square format, with exception to her earlier works. For this print in particular, I felt as though it were in motion, as though these enchantments were being spun around the object, conveying the sense of a seance. Carol was interested in the popular superstitions attributed to her found objects, and for many of them, the objects selected were associated with varying points in her life. For a stereoscope, people were fooled by the appearance of a multidimensional space depicted in a 2-Dimensional picture plane. The lure of this image is still playing on the age-old hype of darkroom magic.

Retouch Extravanganza!

So given the recent assignment to retouch our professors face, I was inspired by the constant sighting of him with his son to do a bit of a tribute to how we look up to our fathers.


I think that sons are inspired by the tracks their fathers have made, and seek to push out further into the wild frontier than their predecessors. To boldly go where no man has gone before.


Happening to occur on the 50 year anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's voyage into space, it serves to be an example of what a contemporary frontier man might look to be.

Delinquents at Work

Collection of images as a pre-shoot for the final project at Jackson Training Center, Concord NC.

This series came from the abandoned dormitory residences found leading up to the main parlor house which is to be our primary shooting location. It wasn't easy for us to be in these spaces all the time, but after awhile they became familiar to us. Still, the most unsettled feelings came from within the residence buildings. It wasn't hard to imagine what life was like there, minus the personalities of the administration, because most of the structures were still intact. Of course, observing things in color was one way of viewing it, but I had no idea what the level of eeriness would be until after I had developed the b/w images.  

Considering the lives of patients there, and even under a heavy dose of mind-numbing medication, you wonder what level of scared and hopelessness one might've felt if they were a residence in this place. There is hardly a sense for freedom and a return to things normal. 

Being a delinquent means a lot of things, but I would describe it as being wild or untamed and independent, free from societal control. To have that spirit ripped away from someone and fed drugs to suppress those inhibitions must've been excruciating to all parts of the mind, body and spirit.

Visiting the residencies first helped us to become aware of our shooting location. Getting the insiders account to life in the Jackson Training Center as first a resident would better us in developing the narrative for our final shoot. Hopefully, the persons and places involved will then register in the final images. From that we could see a story unfold like none other, because it is our imagination teamed up with the preconceived notions we developed go hand in hand.  

Delinquents in a sense that we will reconstruct what we believe to have happened there and not take from it the press release version of how things we're conducted.

Film: Kodak Tmax 100 ISO

Camera: 120 format holga

( Mar-Apr / 2011 )

A Surrealist Journey

Train Stopping


Quite simply, I wanted to take the viewer on a 360º Journey through a Surrealist landscape.  Using the latest software from Pano2VR, I stitched together a series of images taken from the River Arts District in Asheville.


Thanks to the invention of photography, I was able to capture for the viewer a series of spaces, frozen in time.  The viewer is then able to travel around in circles within this space, free from those constraints.


A common misconception we have is that of linear directions. Take for example the notion of train tracks going in a straight line. We know that for anything to travel across the Earth's surface, it would have to be along a curved path.  For an even more astounding study to that of circles: + click. 


When we consider photography, we think of it as capturing fragments of time. The spaces we see become frozen in that instant, and it's often displayed as though caught between two endpoints.  Those being the frame edges, but consider that even the lens capturing the image is curved and the same goes for our eyes.


When we perceive, we are perceiving in the round, but we don't equate it to be so because often our rationale is to that of linear pattens, similar towards our outlook we have on time. Though if we were to zoom away from this observation, we would see that all things considered revolve about in a circle. + click.


( Mar / 2011 )

Cool! A warm...

Project 2 _ A warm-cool day

Spotted again is the urban rabbit refugee. This time, it's within the natural environment of this creature.  Scurrying through the swampy woodlands, the rabbit is scouring the land for food. Unfortunately, most everything he can find is decaying waste matter, and provides no sustenance for him.

Project 2 _ A cool-warm night

Much later, the refugee is seen here emerging from it's conspicuous rabbit hole. During the day, there is far too much commotion for the refugee to get out and hunt these areas, but at night, it's prime time for spotting discarded cheetoh bags. 
( Feb / 2011 )