As a lifelong fan of the window seat view and of American landscapes, I’m in, like, total awe of what Doc Searls has captured in 282 images on a flight from Boston to LA (watch it as a slideshow… just DO it). I’m beginning to GET what digital SLR is capable of (not quite ready to start carrying all that weight around, though).
Category Archives: photography
Shannon’s Barred Owl
This same feathered visitor provoked a couple of haiku:
feathered cryptogram
barred owl on a birch tree
grey on lighter grey
barred owl watching mouse
swift and silent conjunction
alfresco luncheon
Reynard
One of these in the yard the other day:
black nose, perked ears
red coat and waving brush
gone in a flash
080203_KateBetsyHughMakeshiftAlice1
better than most pictures of oook, and Makeshift is a welcome addition to the menage
If you buy just one book this year
…I suggest Claire Nouvian’s The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. This one will surprise even the most jaded palate, delight any passing children, change your view of what the world is all about. Sounds fulsome? Take a look at some of the images at the University of Chicago Press site, and sharpen up that credit card. You won’t regret it.
The Sin of Pride
This has been a long time in gestation… been thinking about how to do it, what to include, what software to use, and this is the FIRST of what might be quite a few:
I have a lot to learn about what works, what doesn’t, how to produce and edit narrative, etc., but the winter is long…
Unprepared
Flickr comments
I’m working on a new version of the Nova Scotia Faces project (the alpha version is here), exploring better ways of arraying and displaying. Today my attention wandered to a set of comments on the images by a prolific contributor, so I’ve strung together a presentation, as an experiment in access. For the Flavor of Luscher’s comments, click on this one:
Some new ancestors
A trip to a local antique mall produced a small haul. Admire this one
and see half a dozen more.
Introducing Congersman Putto, and all what he implies
This gruesome little creature was the first of series done by our dear friend Karen Truesdell, at the time of the Clinton Impeachment Hearings, as anodyne for the anger she felt at Congressional pettifoggery and hypocrisy. He’s magnificent in every part and detail, and an eloquent expression of what ‘artistic vision’ is all about. You can see a larger clutch of Karen’s work, and I have other as-yet-unscanned negatives from 35+ years ago, which I’ll get to digitizing Real Soon Now.
A series of encounters and juxtapositions seems to be projecting me in an unanticipated direction, and bids fair to eat up lots of time in the next while. Probably the first impetus was Philip Scott Johnson’s Women in Art
which I first saw about 6 months ago (see boni’s decoding of dramatis personae) –and Women in Film, from July:
and another vector was seeing a video that one of my sisters in law was working on, using iMovie to create a presentation of videos and stills from a visit to Barcelona. And the visit to Karen’s house and studio also contributed to the stew of graphical ideas.
In the last week I’ve had several bouts of “what if…” mostly having to do with rethinking my Nova Scotia Faces project. The pbwiki version doesn’t please me (many of the images don’t load, and it’s altogether too Web 1.0 in its approach), and I’m seeking a more dynamic presentation mode. A couple of days ago I woke up thinking about a morphing approach, creating short video segments which could be distributed to vast potential audiences via YouTube. It seems that Philip Scott Johnson uses FantaMorph, which offers a generous 30 day trial with all the features, and is less than $100 for the SuperDuper version… so I’m playing with it, and with Adobe Premiere Elements, and thinking of many possible applications and projects.
See, this feels sort of like 20-some years ago when the Penny Dropped about hypertext, and I saw the dawning of a new personal future… Multimedia presentation and distribution at my fingertips, and an endless series of little briquets of narrative.
A specific project (getting back to the Congersman): Karen’s remarkable sculptures really should be better known, and it would be fun to work on that project with her (though she’s in California and I’m in Maine… still, it’s basically digital stuff). I’m imagining her voiceover with a swooping sequence of visual details of a lot of different pieces (gotta avoid the Ken Burns clichées, though…). Another: chronological sequences of pictures of people… and presentations of any number of subsets of my Nova Scotia Faces holdings. And so on.