Welcoming a New Artist

Today I want to welcome a fellow artist to the network of creative artists on the Web.  Norm the Nomad, my partner in life, love and art, has just created his own arts blog, which will showcase the astonishing digital abstracts that he creates using Photoshop and his own heart and soul.  I'm helping as much as I can to create a place where viewers can explore his work and (we hope) make it their own.  Here's the signature piece from his first blog page.

New Things

I've begun looking into how to make slideshows and DVDs of photographs, using them to create a narrative or to tell a story in pictures. In order to do that, I'm building a collection of images on my theme of street art. My next challenge is to find a musical piece that would fit.  It's a new way to work with images and I'm finding photographs I'd forgotten or tucked away in a file folder.

I came across this pic of a door with random paint strokes on it behind some forbidding ironwork, and with a bit of Photoshopping ended up with this piece that suggests the digital abstracts of my mentor and teacher, Ken Milburn.  The door and iron gate were photographed in normal light. Then I increased the brightness and contrast and applied Photoshop's neon glow filter at full opacity.  A bit of grain sharpened the image and provided a little texture. The end result looks as if the paint strokes are floating -- an unexpected but intriguing outcome.

Take It To the Streets?

I've been reading a discussion on Photocritic.com about the future of street photography. One poster asked if there were markets for that kind of photograph, and if there were ways to make a living from it. The responses were largely negative -- several people said that kind of work was of interest as a hobby or with limited local exposure, such as in a coffee house or craft fair, but that nobody really buys it. Others observed that street pix are problematic because of the issue of model releases -- fear of legal repercussions tends to stifle the kind of candid street shot that made people like Cartier-Bresson famous. The other question raised had to do with the genre itself -- is "street photography" as it's been traditionally understood actually dead?

I've been asked many times what kind of photography I do, and it was difficult to describe it until terms like "urban dereliction," "urban decay" and "urban landscape"  came into currency.  Photographers like me are interested in what happens on the street itself, when there are no people around, and what we find there. One dereliction photographer pointed out that what is fascinating to us is the traces left behind by people -- buildings, found art, abandoned items and so forth - which creates the urban landscape. This ornate trash can on Tucson's bohemian Fourth Avenue is one example.

Street photography, on the other hand, is something different, focusing on the candid capture of street life and the movement of people.  And in our litigation happy society, when people are finding inconvenient images of themselves all over the Internet, the person with the camera becomes a threat and the  shot is something to be feared.  Stifles creativity just a tad, I'd say.  So maybe street photography as it's been traditionally known really is dead, or at least moribund, and street photographs have lost the impact that they once had.  Related types of photography like the photoessay or photojournalistic work do seem to be flourishing though.  Maybe it has to do with that blending of narrative and image.

Anyway, although I've always counted the great street photographers to be my main inspiration, I'll stick with photographing that gutted couch I saw in the alley the other day.  I don't think it's too concerned about signing a release.

Among the Ruins

I'm writing a piece about little-known scenic places in Tucson, and one of these is the Fort Lowell Historic Neighborhood, just west of the better known Fort Lowell Park at Craycroft and Fort Lowell. It's a little stretch of street where time seems to have stopped, or at least overlapped itself - a place where satellite dishes sit atop adobe houses in a style of a hundred or more years ago, a place where the crumbling walls of the Mexican settlements around the original fort stand alongside utility meters and recycling dumpsters. I walked along this stretch of street last week, photographing many things I hadn't noticed when driving through to preview the shoot.  It's been said that the camera forces you to slow down and see, and see I did -- the dry little wreath atop a stake in the ground on the side of the road, the line of trees, palo verde and mesquite, lining a walkway alongside the street, each with a marker commemorating a death or passage; the fresco of the Madonna inside La Capellita, the little chapel on the grounds of the larger chapel of San Pedro midway down the street.  I talked to a couple of residents selling firewood, and they told me their families had lived here since the 1930s, and they'd grown up on this very street when it was a desert. Yes, and they rode their bikes out into the desert to shoot their guns. You can't modernize your house too much, they said. Got to keep the look of the neighborhood.

I love the look of this crumbling building.  I've added a bit of grain to the original image (captured in RAW, then converted to a JPG for the web), which has the effect both of sharpening and of adding a little texture. 

My Review of Flashpoint 22" 5-in-1 Collapsible Disc Reflector, Translucent, White, Black, Silver & Soft Gold.

Originally submitted at Adorama

Flashpoint 22" 5-in-1 Collapsible Disc Reflector, Translucent, White, Black, Silver & Soft Gold.

Flashpoint 22" 5-in-1 Collapsible Disc Reflector, Translucent, White, Black, Silver & Soft Gold.

I'd buy this again!

By cyberwitch from tucson, az on 1/10/2010

 

4out of 5

Pros: Good Color Value, Durable

Cons: Case is hard to open

Best Uses: Low Light, Indoors

Describe Yourself: Pro Photographer

These reflectors are really handy little things for controlling light in tight quarters. I also like the way the set is packaged, giving you several options in one. The most annoying thing about them, though, is the little black case that they come with.The zipper was sticky and it was hard to pack them back inside for storage. Overall though for the price they are very functional, especially for macro and small product shots.

(legalese)

Street Walking

On December 25 I did a photo shoot under the best conditions -- the streets were deserted, and in the clear brilliant light late on a winter afternoon I photographed street murals, facades and gargoyles without having to deal with traffic and crowds.  I collected a number of new images for a collection I'm hoping to put together on street art.
Street art covers a lot of things, from  community-sanctioned murals to guerrilla art on sidewalks and signs. The artists may be known or only guessed at.  Some of my favorite images are of the blue dogs on a long-gone construction fence downtown: carefully drawn and colored, racing off into the cracks in the wall. Who did that? What other art did that person make?  Why? We'll never know. It's art for art's sake, to leave a presence in the world, or maybe to make a bit of beauty on something so functional and impersonal as a fence. Anyway, for the most part, these artists create their work on houses, walls and other public and semi-public places without a wish for fame or even acknowledgement, just for the sake of doing it.  And so I suppose that my love of photographing that kind of thing comes from a wish to capture and preserve those pieces of anonymous creativity that pop up to decorate and personalize even the most prosaic things in our day to day world.

This piece is a new favorite -- a wild little bear that's part of the facade at Hippie Gypsy on 4th Avenue. 

See more from this shoot on my Facebook page. I'll also be talking more about street photography this week on Examiner.com