dark-field

during endSomewhat different than a straight dark field setup in that these were lit from the side with a pair of strobes in front of a dark background, rather than with a single strobe from behind the background. The exposure on the right has an additional small spotlight on the front of the mug in order to define the etching on the glass surface.

Interestingly, the exposure for the image on the left was an ordinary flash timing of 1/100 second @ f/14, whereas the image on the right was 13 seconds @ f/14. Because the light on the front of the mug was so insignificant in comparison to the flash, the subject is illuminated by the modelling lamps + the spot on the front of the mug.

Update on Saturday, January 19, 2013 at 05:07PM by KMW

There were several other iterations to this photograph. The one I spent the most time with was this one that uses a white reflector the exact size of the mug, which gives a consistent color to the liquid.

another during

bright-field

before afterEntirely too many How-To books around here. With enough time and dedication I'm going to become an expert at HTML, Javascript, Snow Leopard, video Color Correction/Grading, photographic lighting, motion picture lighting equipment, Cinematography, Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut Pro, CSS, Microstation, Autocad, etc. etc. Pretty much all of them are hard copy print editions, overflowing the shelves, only a few of them current.

Tellingly there are no Pop Psychology titles in the lot. DIY should not be confused with Self Help. I can't find a breakdown in the categories, but the Educational Book Publishing market in North America is worth something like $4-5 billion a year, most of that in secondary and university textbooks.

DIY is probably only a small fraction of that, but it seems I'm doing my part to keep publishers busy with new titles all the time. This work with "bright-field" strobe photography is from the inappropriately titled Light: Science & Magic - An Introduction to Photographic Lighting.

lost time

There's only so much abuse one can take. I gave it a chance, really. But she hung herself. Or me.

Who would have thought someone who could write seven Potter books, full of such imagination (and many explanations of what had happened) and whimsy, generating an immense fortune in the process, would compose such a leaden work as The Casual Vacancy? Rowling no doubt knows how to tell a story, but in it's telling here, it moves at an almost glacial pace, nearly in real time, amongst a large cast that it takes some time to sort out.

But once that's done, we're left to hear them drone on and on. They're a fairly boring lot for a 503 page novel, despite all the back stabbing and sneaking around in the bushes. With not a one of real interest, other than possibly 15 year old Krystal, a truant who lives with her heroine addicted mother in a trashed public housing apartment. Several of the male characters are such extreme examples of type -one a foul mouthed, abusive father; another a bleeding heart liberal despised by his own Raskolnikov like son - that they crash into absurdity, their puppet strings all too clearly visible. The women are small minded and always loyal to their men. The teens are grubby grifters who have nothing but sex on their minds.

After a while the pretty little borough of Pagford becomes a claustrophobic caldron. As it's meant to be. The residents may not have an option to leave. But I got the hell out, and bailed before the end of the line. Not a common experience, after investing 10+ hours. I've got to cut my losses though.

The Pale King

A posthumously published (on April 14, 2011) collection of writing fragments that revolve around an assortment of characters who work at the Peoria, Illinois IRS Regional Examination Center, The Pale King is hardly a novel in any traditional sense. While there are recurring characters in multiple situations, D.F. Wallace was far from ready to release this material to the world. No doubt he would be aghast to find that we have it available in published form. Which is not to say that there is no enjoyment to be found in his writing. Far from it. Many of the pieces are astounding bits, hilarious, intense, descents into weird gibberish, maddeningly opaque, clever word pictures, but never boring. It is boredom in fact that the book is ostensibly about:

...I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy...

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

 But don't be looking for a plot.

contemporary art

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art - Don Thompson, 2008, Palgrave Macmillan

An informative, and ultimately depressing book about art in the 21st century.

How does a work then come to be worth $12 million, or $140 million? This has more to do with the way the contemporary art market has become a competitive high-stakes game, fuelled by great amounts of money and ego. The value of art often has more to do with artist, dealer, or auction-house branding, and with collector ego, than it does with art. The value of one work of art compared to another is in no way related to the time or skill that went into producing it, or even whether anyone else considers it to be great art. The market is driven by high-status auctions and art fairs that become events in their own right, entertainment and public display for the ultra-rich.

Branding has become the most important element in any work's provenance - whether through a collector, a dealer, an auction house, or a museum.

Auction houses have nearly taken over the market for high end art work.

"80% of the art bought from local dealers and local art fairs will never resell for as much as the original purchase price. Never, not a decade later, not ever."

At the end of the book, Thompson, who has lectured on economics at the London School of Economics, offers a few rules:

With the work of western artists, what kind of painting will appreciate most? There are general rules. A portrait of an attractive woman or child will do better than that of an older woman or an unattractive man. An Andy Warhol Orange Marilyn brings twenty times the price of an equal-sized Richard Nixon.

Colors matter...

Bright colors do better than pale colors. Horizontal canvases do better than vertical ones. Nudity sells for more than modesty, and female nudes for much more than male...

Purebred dogs are worth more than mongrels, and racehorses more than cart horses. For paintings that include game birds, the more expensive it is to hunt the bird, the more the bird adds to the value of the painting... There is an even more specific rule, offered by New York dealer David Nash: paintings with cows never do well. Never.

A final rule was contributed by Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer. Meyer was auctioning a 1972 Bruce Nauman neon work, Run from Fear/Fun from Rear, which referred to an erotic act. When the work was brought in, a voice from the back of the room complained, "Obscenity." Meyer, not known for his use of humor on the rostrum, responded, "Obscenity sells." Often it does not, but for a superstar artist like Jeff Koons or Bruce Nauman, it does. It did.

"The Nature of Photographs"

A second submission to the Vimeo 1 minute movie.

 The rules:

• exactly one minute long
• no camera moves
• no edits
• no credits or music

Something I've been/not been working on for 10 - 11 months. Probably time to learn some lines. Am I repeating myself?

desolation relieved

Gray Winter Morning

Feels like I might recover after all.

Last night I subjected myself to a reading of The Road,  Cormac McCarthy's most recent (2006) book. It feels like he resorts to frequent usage of invented language. Or maybe my vocabulary's not very good. But his imagery is clearly striking, and obvious why his books have been adapted by Hollywood in recent years. As always, they get the imagery, but jettison the language. And it is the language that sets him apart from other story tellers of the land. Its sparseness, especially revealed during the few encounters that take place during The Man and The Boy's journey from inland to the coast, is remarkable for its precision and truthfulness. He has a penchant for descriptions of the most evil acts imaginable, so a story set in a post apocalyptic world seems a natural fit.

What is our fascination with end-of-the-world stories? It certainly has a long history, from the Book of Revelation (69-90 C.E. - itself probably based on Hebraic revelations from 165 B.C.E. and earlier) to The Book of Eli (2010 C.E.), and beyond. The cinema in particular is enamored with the genre.

In a world where the ordinary has been destroyed, and only a few strong survivors prevail, the central story gains power from the focus. External concerns are jettisoned. How to live in a complicated world of daily compromise amongst those we know and love becomes irrelevant. Existence is reduced to the level of survival. All that counts is how clever you are about using the tools and few resources that can be scavenged. Life and Death amongst the few.

The focus achieved, at the core of The Road is a simple message of Good vs Evil. The Good Guys don't eat people, the Bay Guys do. Maybe they each "carry the fire" for their continued existence, but at least in this world of destruction, the end of humanity in its most noble dimensions is not definitive. They may not prevail, but at least the Good Guys will continue to exist. Through resourcefulness and complete self sacrifice to ones progeny the continuation of the morality of the species will be assured.

In the bleakest of wasted landscapes imaginable, a glimmer of hope prevails - an affecting tale of parental love.

an appropriation or an homage - pt. 6

click here to see the final image

David Plowden's fabulous images in A Handful of Dust are evidence of the changes taking place throughout our land, a country constantly in search of the "next great thing." His travels and photographs for this book concentrate on the  Midwestern states. One doesn't have to go nearly that far to find the same effects on small towns here in the east. In pursuit of my courthouse project, I've been through a lot of small Virginia towns, and many suffer the same neglect that Plowden documents in his book.

In fact on our main street here in Charlottesville, a pedestrian mall with $7.5 million in recent renovations, a quarter to a third of all retail space are vacant store fronts. How the ones that are active manage to hang on is rather a mystery. It's an area of restaurants and botiquey shops, but due to its inaccessibility there is nothing of actual necessity along its 8 - 10 block length. Instead it's become an entertainment destination.

But in fact, it feels like this is old news. It's a trend that probably began after WW2, as globalization and urbanization driven by the North American need for efficiency in all areas - agriculture being a primary one - has pushed people out of their rural communities into a WalMart conglomerate. The wars and suffering reported from distant lands are sad reminders of the human condition. But in our own land Plowden's pictures from the rear lines in our own personal war with commodification (of everything) are important reminders of an innocence lost.

final day for Frank

This scan is from the dust jacket of the most recent edition of the famous book first published in 1958 in France. The first US edition was published by Grove Press in 1959, and it's never really been out of print since.

Under the "better late than never" theory, some mention should be made of last week end's trip to Washington to see the exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of this landmark book. Being only 6 at the time of publication, and not interested in photography books until 2001, I have to accept the opinions of the experts that The Americans truly was something radical for its day. The exhibit doesn't dwell on that aspect of the book, merely mentioning here and there the reception. What is examined in great detail is the process that Robert Frank went through to produce the book: his earlier photography in Peru, Wales, London; his grant application for a Guggenheim Fellowship (which took advantage of his friendship with Walker Evans who edited his application, reviewed it as one of the grant committee, and recommended his acceptance as same); letters to Evans while on the road; recreation of many work prints to give the impression of his editing chores; a display of all the contact sheets from the travels; and two large galleries devoted to the prints selected for the book.

Having exhibition size prints to evaluate the photographs is obviously a big help. None of the prints in the Steidl edition of the book are larger than 7.75 x 5.125 in - not large enough to get more than an impression. The show presents them in a manner which really honors the photographs. The book is more about sequence and context and groupings. The exhibit allows one to appreciate the individual images, while also making some of the sequencing more obvious when prints are directly beside one another on the wall, rather than on following pages of a book. (The most obvious for me was "Belle Isle - Detroit" with an open black car driving left to right followed by "Detroit" of a closed white car driving right to left. They're certainly heading for a collision, which came twelve years later.)

For those who don't have a copy of the book and are interested in all of the material in the exhibit, the catalogue contains much of it, including all the contact sheets, and all the images in the original book. BTW, the sequence is the same, but images are printed in facing pages, whereas Frank's design of the book has each image on its own page facing a blank page with caption.

Today is the final day to see the exhibit in Washington. Sorry this isn't much warning. Alas, the show travels to San Francisco and New York later in 2009. Go see it. The images are still powerful fifty years later.

Thanks to Roger Wiley for making the trip and meeting me in Washington.

Charleston - South Carolina by Robert Frank

whose wysiwyg?

 click 'er for biggerclick 'er for bigger

Obviously the same photograph, from William Eggleston's Guide. The first scan is from the 2nd edition copyright 2002 of the Guide. The second scan is from The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore, the 2nd edition copyright 2007. Both these books are recent additions to my library. I've never seen the original editions of either.

Given that Eggleston's color photography is supposed to be about color, and not necessarily the content, how are we to evaluate the photographs when the colors are reproduced in such widely varying shades of yellow? This is far from a scientific study, merely a quick & dirty reproduction of what I see when looking at the two books side by side. The prints are reproduced as closely as I see them given a reasonable amount of time. And what I see is that the reprint of the Eggleston book of his own photographs is not very well done. Both books are printed in China.

What this suggests to me is that our current obsession with color management is a fundamentally bogus concern. If you're making your own prints to either sell or hang on the wall of your own house, naturally you want to get them as close as possible to the originals. But that's never going to be very close, given the disparity of materials - digital and transparency film being transmissive, and paper prints being reflective. Once you enter the domain of book printing, whether POD or offset, the fidelity to the original becomes much more of a challenge. There are so many variables, that getting an image good enough seems to be a much more sane goal than chasing the vanishing tails of perfection.

The other thought this suggests is that our current obsession with technical perfection is merely an excuse for either pretty pictures or images that don't communicate much thought or feeling.

crewdson

click 'er for bigger

Gregory Crewdson's Beneath the Roses has been sitting on the table in it's plastic wrapping for several weeks now. This afternoon I finally opened it up. Since I've already got a copy of his previous book Twilight, there isn't really anything new. It's pretty much more of the same, which I find to be enormously intriguing. He's moved some of his compositions from the outskirts of the small Massachusetts towns to their "downtown" sections, to good effect. But the staging of his "actors" I find to be remarkably wooden. While there isn't a close up anywhere, there is enough detail in these large format photographs to see that the modern malaise that overcomes these people renders them much like zombies. Heads down, they plod across the landscape hoping for some motivation from their director. They're fun pictures, nonetheless. The last section of the book includes production photos, lighting diagrams, and set designs. What would have been more interesting would have been production budgets and financing agreements. But no one wants to air their financial laundry, do they?

These are first impressions. After I've spent some more time with the book, I'll try to write something about Russell Banks' introductory essay. This is a clever pairing, since Banks' early, powerful books are set in the very towns where Crewdson photographs.