In the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with photos of Home Kitchen meals, from the last decade of trotters in the trough, using Adobe Premiere and posting the results to YouTube. The results so far are available via http://oook.info/HKC/, and sport soundtracks from my duets with Daniel Heïkalo.
Three tiny experiments, steps in getting comfortable with Adobe’s Premiere Pro. All are Talking Dogs (it’s not what they say, but that they talk at all):
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Ondine and Imam
Two beings discovered in ice and rock, respectively
(another brace, Adobe Draw again)
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A first try at mirroring (there will be many more…)
A fourth YouTube video is up: Ken Burns has Hash at Home Kitchen Cafe, again and again
I have at least half a dozen other clutches of photos that video presentation would enhance, at least in terms of distributability, and I’ve realized that I need some more sophisticated tools, and more careful consideration of where I really want to take this phase of photographic exploration. And so I’ll be doing a 2-day Premiere Pro workshop at Maine Media during the coming weekend.
It’s very useful to consider Ken Burns himself on the “Ken Burns Effect”:
…a very honorable attempt on my part to will old photographs alive…
…willingness to not hold a still photograph at a distance. To just merely acknowledge its plasticity, to not just see its two-dimensionality but to go into its world and to trust that that world had a past and a present. And to activate it. And to be the feature film-maker that I wanted to be with a master shot, a wide shot, a medium shot, a close shot, a pan, a tilt, a reveal, inserts of shots. And to listen to that photograph. To ask the question, “what sounds is this photograph making if it were alive?” That’s what I do…
from Ken Burns: the Kindle Singles Interview (conducted by Tom Roston)
It will be interesting to see how this particular toboggan ride goes.
Going through the photo archive:
ow.
Time Bandits
what the Brits call “falling about”
Some photographs resist simple interpretation, even when their ostensible subject matter (ice, sand, rock…) is clear. Sometimes it’s possible to imagine a figure or a face, but even the most fertile imagination runs up against limits now and again, and one is tugged into surreal territory. Here are three such that I’m puzzling over, from a trip to Drift Inn a few days ago:
? a demonic cocktail shaker ? a flamingo executing a jeté ?
scale indeterminate: ? a view outward toward the Cosmos? satellite view of a caldera?
Here’s one that seems to have all sorts of possibilities:
And this one, so obviously some sort of heffalumpy pachyderm, seems to have a dancer included:
The term ‘revenant imagery’ seems handy for bits of déjà vu that resonate in memory. Thus:
My first thought when this came up on the computer screen was “absolutely The Duchess from Alice in Wonderland!” in the Tenniel illustration. And sure enough the retrieved Google image is almost perfect:
I’ve been thinking that I should explore water in its liquid phase, but I want to avoid the clichéed stuff of falling water and flowing streams, and address more directly the forms and the energies within. This morning as I was reading Christopher Williams’ Origins of Form: The Shape of Natural and Man-made Things―Why They Came to Be the Way They Are and How They Change it occurred to me that these two photographs were about the same thing, which might be sketched as ‘fluid dynamics’:
(the original image of the latter was much less dramatic)
and here’s another Shubenacadie River sediment shot,
taken at the same time and reprocessed today for dramatic effect:
Twenty Meters of Rocks: Revisiting the Same Spot Multiple Times (Ole Henrik Skjelstad) is a lovely meditation on Place, with 17 quite stunning early-morning photographs of sunrise from a Norwegian beach. They are ‘landscape photography’ and so in a different realm than what I experience looking down at the rocks on the 30-odd meters of the Drift Inn beach that I frequent, but the point of seeing different things with each return is beautifully made. I see the Usual Suspects again and again, but they are subtly different every time:
I’m making a space to accumulate material for a future Blurb book, continuing from WYGIWYS, at oook.info/bestiary/ and expecting that it will include the work I’m beginning to do with Adobe Draw. Just how it will be laid out and organized, and how its workflow will look, will take some experimenting. The basic idea is to develop an effective means to display what I see and to record the process of learning to refine the initial outline sketches into something like elegance.
At the moment there’s almost nothing there, but I’m working on it. Meanwhile, two of yesterday’s images:
(and this one appears to be a rather grumpy Persian kitty swimming under water)
