The Beach Blog

Vehicle - photomontage

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:24:00 +0000

Here's the photoshop sketch of this entry's montage:

But first, the 'whatever catches my eye' file.

Is 2012 the year to hang up the phone?
Maybe you know the phrase(!): "Get off the (bleepin') phone!"
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/07/opinion/greene-cell-phone-driving/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

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A peaceful interlude at the Mojave National Preserve
Situated between Interstates 15 and 40, the preserve boasts solitude, Joshua tree forests, snow-dusted peaks and desert horizons, and it may be our best-kept secret.
http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-mojave-20120108,0,5481768.story

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Slab City, a trailer park utopia, thrives in remote desert
Refugees from society and the recession gather at a former Marine base near the Salton Sea. Residents, like Half-Pint and Moth, make their own rules, give talent shows and hold religious services.
By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
December 18, 2011 Reporting from Slab City, Calif.

Penny Puckett came to Slab City and fell in love.

After four years of "bumming around and hopping freight trains," the 25-year-old from Kansas City arrived at this hardscrabble section of the Imperial Valley desert and immediately embraced its sense of liberation from society's rules and norms.

What others might view as desolation and deprivation, Puckett saw as a way to reduce life to its essence: water, food and shelter (plus Internet and cellular phone service).

"Slab City people have a great need to live with just the bare necessities and are happy about it," she said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-slab-city-20111218,0,6359146.story

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Photobooth shop offers tintype, Polaroid shots
'our lives are increasingly lived in the digital realm. "People feel the loss of that tangible object...."

Nancy Davis Kho, Special to The Chronicle - Wednesday, January 4, 2012
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/03/DD9H1MDGD1.DTL#ixzz1idaZ3FBL
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The AFP has put together a collection of their most fascinating photos of 2011. From Occupy Wall Street to cuddly critters at the zoo, here are a selection of their choices for pictures of the year.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/g/a/2011/12/29/pictures_year_2011.DTL&object=

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Errol Morris: 'We've forgotten that photographs are connected to the physical world' - video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/dec/26/errol-morris-photography-video

Polaroid ain't dead yet! Check out this 'instant digital camera:
http://store.polaroid.com/product/9/356223/Z340/_/Instant_Digital_Camera

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Corporation

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Lost world uncovered on ocean floor:
http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/01/03/lost-world-uncovered-on-ocean-floor?videoId=227837121&videoChannel=74

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Sunday Dialogue: Reading Books in the Digital Age
Readers discuss the choices to be made in the digital age: buy books online or at the local bookstore? Read e-books or paper books?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/opinion/sunday-dialogue-reading-books-in-the-digital-age.html?_r=1

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In 1925, America’s first motel, the Motel Inn, opened in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Today we look at the ubiquitous motel architecture, from Niagara Falls to Las Vegas to the Gold Coast of Australia.
http://todayspictures.slate.com/20111212/
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Onward, to some montage! Here's the final darkroom print:

This strange vehicle was shot at Bodie, in Ca., a ghost town that has been very well preserved, is very visited and photographed. Didn't know what to do w/ this frame, for many years.... finally connected it up w/ a suitably arresting sky... and a very simple frame of a traffic sign, in the middle of nowhere ( 'what traffic is there to be directed in this totally vacant space?').

Looking at this negative, one could easily say 'why would anyone want to take this picture?', this is sooo painfully dull.
I got my own peculiar reasons for taking many negatives, i can't even define what they are, i just know i see something, some trigger in my mind goes off, and i am reaching for the camera.
Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) said: "First idea, best idea". I usually run with that one.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Beefheart)

Potential title for this one?
"Drivers wanted - must be experienced".... (but maybe that's not just experienced in the usual way... but, uh.... experienced in a Jimi Hendrix kinda way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX0XVEmwlfs)

(Rather than trying to be funny or clever, I just left the title at 'Vehicle'.)

Technically, this is very simple - there's the vehicle at the bottom, a menacing sky at the top, and the traffic sign somewhere in the middle distance. There is, however, a trick to burning in the traffic sign - look at the neg, the sky is not white ( which would make it easy to burn in). This was taken w/ a simple Yashica D med. format camera, since I am too cheap to find a glass screw on yellow filter - I am always shooting outdoors, the yellow filter makes skies much less 'blown out to white' since yellow is the opposite of blue on the color wheel, it makes blues dark - I tape a small piece of yellow gel inside the camera, behind the lense. But that doesn't allow me to remove it for a few frames, that's OK, I shoot away anyway.
How do i burn in that traffic sign smoothly/evenly? Well, along time ago, in the mid '80's when i was first starting to get into montage, i studied the work of other 'special effects' photographers, and came up w/ this simple saying: "There are no rabbits" as in rabbits that can magically get pulled out of a hat. What photogs had to do before photoshop was use many other tricks.
'There are no rabbits'...but if you think about it, a path to a finish can be found.
Hipgnosis was a British graphic design collaborative I tuned into - they did many striking album covers. Remember 33rpm 12" diameter LP? What a great venue for art! Way better than the lousy 5x5" for a CD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipgnosis

So what I did to burn in the sign seamlessly was to hold back the area in the sky where the sign was, maybe by 25% of the exposure time, softly, smoothly. So when I burn in the sign?... I don't just confine the burn to just the sign, it continues into the sky, compliments it, and... voila! it ends up being seamless, what i held back in the sky, was filled in by the tone in the sky beyond the sign.

OK, let's get to the obvious question 'what the hell does this mean?/what's going on here?'.
I have no answers, in fact i think the image asks a question, and leaves it open, and I like it that way - here's a totally unique vehicle set aside, unused, & confronted w/ a common traffic direction sign. What is the relationship between the two?
You decide. I can't... or won't, as the case may be.
Perhaps the driver of this unique machine was unable to follow the traffic directions, and just parked and walked away.
Or perhaps the driver was unwilling to take directions, he or she is thinking "If I'm driving a vehicle like this, do you think i need any directions of instructions?!?"
The lightest area in the image, just about dead center, is the perfect 'deep distance' - does this mean it's a destination of sorts?.... or is it the place the vehicle has fled?....
It's all enigmatic, and better left that way.

Larger images, a bit more talk, at:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2012/Vehicle/index.html

Handcoloring, again...

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:32:00 +0000

Several years ago, i did a post about hand-coloring B&W prints:
http://californiasilverwizard.blogspot.com/2009/06/hand-coloring-b-photo-prints-dying-art.html
and a follow-up page on my site:
http://www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2009/Handcolor/index.html
There's loads of info on these pages about basic techniques & materials, I don't need to repeat them here/again.

But first, the 'whatever catches my eye' file:

Bottle Tree Ranch is a folk art 'forest' in the Mojave Desert
Elmer Long's two-plus acres are crowded with hundreds of metal sculptures adorned with colored bottles and just about anything else one could imagine.
By Mike Anton, Los Angeles Times
December 4, 2011
(Photo: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times )

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-me-bottle-farm-20111204,0,4510530.story
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Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers
Published: December 3, 2011
By Julie Bosman
"...If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/publishers-gild-books-with-special-effects-to-compete-with-e-books.html?_r=1&hp
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Snipping the bud: Prep work is a payday in the marijuana business
An international, countercultural labor force prepares pot on its path to market. Trimmers can make $200 a day plus lodging, sometimes 'with a crazy guy in the middle of the woods with an AK-47.'
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
December 2, 2011

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1202-marijuana-trim-20111202,0,2941044.story?page=1&track=rss
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The Pot Republic - Frontline/ PBS
http://video.pbs.org/video/2070629540
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Shoot Stunning Night Photos Like a Pro
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/shoot-stunning-night-photos-like-a-pro/

by Jakob Shiller - for 'Wired' mag., 11/30/2011

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Sand has superhero qualities, as far as geological deposits go. Behaving at times like a solid, at times a liquid and at times a gas, it is a master shape-shifter. Formed by wind and water, sand allows large-scale geography to play out in miniature: settling into ripples, channels, canyons, valleys and deltas.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/sand-patterns-gallery/
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Learning To Spot the Photoshop
By KJ Antonia | Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011, at 10:30 AM ET at Slate.com

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/11/30/a_tool_to_spot_photoshopping_that_won_t_work_unless_advertisers_agree_to_use_it_.html
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Field Notes - Making Sure No Guest Is Forgotten
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
Published: October 21, 2011
After five hours of preparation, Terry Gruber was putting the finishing touches on the creation of a single, 12-by-20-inch black-and-white group portrait known in its heyday as a banquet photo. Most popular in the late 1880s, when Mr. Gruber’s banquet camera was made, until the late 1960s when it began fading from vogue, the large group photo all but vanished in a Nikon nanosecond.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/fashion/weddings/banquet-photos-put-everyone-in-the-picture-field-notes.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=field%20notes%20making%20sure%20no%20guest%20is%20forgotten&st=cse

Photo - Earl Wilson/NYTimes

http://gruberphotographers.com/Banquet%20Group
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James Durston: Photography has ruined travel
Next time you pack for your vacation, leave the technology behind
15 November, 2011

"......So here’s a challenge: get lost. Seriously. Next time you’re in a new town, ditch the phone. Disable your GPS. Close your eyes, point, then open them and walk. If you need to find somewhere, ask someone."
http://www.cnngo.com/explorations/life/tell-me-about-it/james-durston-photography-has-ruined-travel-361992?hpt=hp_bn13

One of the best rolls I ever shot was made when taking this advice. I woke up in some small town in SE Arizona, and did my usual road trip routine - 'wake, bake, coffee, and hit the road'!
I was heading for Chiricahua, it was a off the beaten track backroads route... and I drove thru this town that looked like it was a-dying on the vine, so to speak. Here's what I shot, I got a number of montage images out of this simple row of vacant storefronts, all perfectly lit by morning sun.

Being at the right place, at the right time?.... that's magical.
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It Started Digital Wheels Turning
Punch cards for the never-completed Babbage Analytical Engine, and Charles Babbage, the "father of computing," who kept refining his design.
Published: November 7, 2011 - NY Times
By John Markoff
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/computer-experts-building-1830s-babbage-analytical-engine.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=First%20Computer&st=cse

Someone who took it to the next level: Alan Turing, during WW2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Turing.html

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Camera Lost at Sea Returned with the Help of Social Networking
http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/camera-lost-sea-returned-help-social-networking-215800650.html
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Now, on to some photography, and the hand-coloring thing!

I recently traded a few emails w/ an old photographer friend, from back east, where i used to live in a previous incarnation, until 20 years ago.
One of his questions to me was 'how are you integrating digital into your work flow (=montage work)?' - Good question.
Up until recently, the answer would have been 'not at all'.
On the splash page of my website, i say:
"FYI/FWIW - A majority of the images on this site are made in a traditional / chemical B&W darkroom.
That includes everything in the 'Coast & Desert' Portfolios, & 'Assignments' above.. and obviously all the 'Darkroom 2001....2010' pages below.
And I'll continue to do so...until there just isn't anything traditional to work with."

Whereas that is still true, i have started to take darkroom prints into digital, and 'put some icing on the cake' so to speak. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing this, i know of a few people who do things similarly, and that's just the few people I know.
Soooo...here's two images that had darkroom origins, had really good hand-coloring possibilities, and were dragged into P'shop... and what happened then - "Coffee Shop" and "Ottta Gas".
I also did traditional hand-coloring on both, let's take a look at how it all worked out.

"Coffee shop" was inspired by a neg I took in Blythe CA., not too far from Joshua Tree. It's one of those desert towns that seems to close down at sunset. The coffee shop sign was still brightly lit at 7 PM... I took a few frames, moved on... had some dinner.
The table w/ coffee cups was taken in Marin Headlands, many years ago, as a display of US military stuff. I did this one in the darkroom, and knew that it was a candidate for hand-coloring. I decided to try the 'hand' coloring digitally (with the hand being on a mouse).
I can do some things w/ this, digitally, that i can't do in traditional/chemical darkroom - i can fix the bottom of the 'c' in coffee shop, for one. And once you get into fiddling w/ an image in P'shop... well, I've heard many photogs say, in so many words, the same thing: 'the best thing about P'shop is that you can do anything; and the worst thing about it is?..you can do anything (and get lost in the possibilities!)'.

I think being focused in advance on what you want to accomplish is very important, and I had a good idea of what i wanted to do w/ this one: the glow of the coffee shop signs needed to be reflected by everything on the table, lots of yellow/orange colors.
So here's a look at the digitally colored:

..and the handcolored.

Yes, there's a link at the end of the post to a page on my site w/ larger images, and a small P'shop file so you can see how it was done.
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"Outta Gas"
Not sure where i took the photo of the defunct gas station, it was that kinda road trip... i know the sky/horizon was taken in AZ. Here's the darkroom print:

I didn't do a digital hand-color on this one, but i did scan the traditionally hand-colored, and worked on that in Photoshop.
(The photoshop tweaks are too subtle for the image size here - click the link below to see larger images)
Suffice it to say that none of the photoshop tweaks are sea changes - they are really 'tweaks'....

As usual, larger images, a few more comments, on a page at my site:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/Handcolor2/index.html

Oh, BTW...have yourself a merry 'christ-moose'!!

Darkroom - 'Transformation Tree'

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:34:00 +0000

Here's the photoshop sketch of the darkroom print for this post:

But first, as always, the 'whatever catches my eye' file...

Short video, HUGE wave!!!!
http://www.grindtv.com/surf/blog/30981/is+this+the+largest+wave+ever+ridden/
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A Store of Images, From a Time When ‘Cut and Paste’ Meant Just That.
(London Bookstore sells clip art in an online world)
By Noam Cohen - Published: October 30, 2011, NY Times.
"... The books that dominate the shelves — large paperbacks with prosaic titles like “Animals” or “Plants” or “Hands” — are more like catalogs of random images that have one thing in common: their age.
Dating largely from the 19th century and culled from old magazines, advertisements and books, these pictures are not covered by copyright laws. Artists around the world can use the images any way they want — cut and copied, altered or combined. No one “owns” them anymore.
Artists describe these books of “clip art” as a spur to creativity — a way to conjure up the curved outline of a lion or the way a hand grasps a hammer. But they are also ready-made images, often of high quality, that can be easily reused or repurposed.......
These clip art books, with dozens of examples of plants, pipes or old-fashioned mustaches, show that people were happily doing image searches long before they had the benefit of a search engine. And people were manipulating those images long before they could click and drag them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/business/media/a-london-bookstore-sells-clip-art-in-an-online-world.html?_r=1&hpw

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Friday, November 4, 2011 9:10am PDT
Flock of Starlings aerial ballet
By: Pete Thomas - GrindTV.com
Do you know what a 'murmuration' is, and have you ever witnessed such a dazzling display of avian behavior? The accompanying video shows an enormous flock of starlings - a murmuration - swirling through the sky in a magnificent ballet that almost seems choreographed.

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/blog/30930/flock+of+starlings+dazzling+aerial+ballet+captured+on+video/

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Menacing storm clouds
Photographs of dark thunderstorm clouds from around the world.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/menacing-storm-clouds-1319573041-slideshow/
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Loving the Chambered Nautilus to Death
Published: October 24, 2011 - New York Times - By William Broad
It is a living fossil whose ancestors go back a half billion years — to the early days of complex life on the planet, when the land was barren and the seas were warm.Naturalists have long marveled at its shell. The logarithmic spiral echoes the curved arms of hurricanes and distant galaxies......

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25nautilus.html?_r=1&hpw

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Giant amoebas discovered 6 miles deep
October 24, 2011 3:00 PM

"The identification of these gigantic cells in one of the deepest marine environments on the planet opens up a whole new habitat for further study of biodiversity, biotechnological potential and extreme environment adaptation," said Doug Bartlett, the Scripps marine microbiologist who organized the expedition."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-20124830/giant-amoebas-discovered-6-miles-deep/?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.10

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Op-Ed Contributor Running Out of Bandwidth
By LOWELL C. McADAM
Published: October 21, 2011
Demand for faster speeds and more applications is growing at a tremendous rate. But without prompt government action, the lifeblood of this innovative sector of the economy is at risk of being choked off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/opinion/wireless-spectrum-should-be-reallocated.html?_r=1
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Close encounters in the Galapagos
By A. Pawlowski, CNN
updated 6:17 PM EST, Fri October 21, 2011

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/18/travel/galapagos-tips-destination-adventure/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
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Big-Game Hunt Adds to Evidence of Early North American Settlement
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
Published: October 20, 2011
For many years, it was thought that the Clovis people were the first humans to populate North America, about 13,000 years ago.
But recently, evidence has suggested that other settlers arrived earlier, and a new study lends support to that hypothesis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25mastodon.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1319241721-NGnEqRRWoAruTZvxHXpHew

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Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

Jonas Pfeil, a student at the Technical University of Berlin, noticed that there was no easy way to take a complete spherical, panoramic photograph. Even if you had enough cameras and the right software, you would still have the problem of a tripod or camera mount blocking one angle. The solution? A rubber ball camera -- just toss it in the air.

http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera

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Lytro ready to release 1st light-field camera
Unlike existing cameras, the Lytro captures all the rays of light in a given scene, as opposed to flat images, creating a range of new possibilities. Photographers can change the focus of an image as often as they like, for example, and by next year they will be able to present their images in three dimensions.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/the-revolution-in-photography/8733/
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/21/BU6S1LJOO3.DTL

One sentence in this article really caught my eye:

"Regular cameras are too hard to use," Ng said. "They had all these modes and buttons and settings. We stripped that all away."

Yeah, i 'second that emotion', but i don't think the Lytro is the answer, at least, not for me - how 'bout a digital camera without all the bells and whistles, just controls like traditional cameras ( shutter speed, depth of field/aperture ) and.... a lense that is SHARP! And, yes, at a decent consumer level price!

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Fear and Loathing.... at Rolling Stone
Excerpts from the essential writings of Hunter S. Thompson:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/fear-and-loathing-at-rolling-stone-20111021

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‘Cassette tape’ kicked out of ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ edition
http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2011/10/17/cassette-tape-kicked-out-of-oxford-english-dictionary/

Playtime is over for cassette tapes.
Wordsmiths over at the Oxford English Dictionary say “cassette tape” has been removed from the pages of its Concise edition to make room for words such as retweet and cyberbullying, USA Today reported earlier this month. (Note: The word will remain in the unabridged version.)
Yes, it’s a sad time for cassette tape enthusiasts and those of us who still have a dusty shoe box filled with mix tapes, their labels decorated with colorful doodles and lame titles such as “Amy’s RAGE tape” and “Madonna Madness.”
But while it might be depressing to think tapes are so passé that they can’t even make it into the dictionary, Oxford’s decision makes sense. Auto makers recently stopped equipping their cars with cassette decks. And who has a working cassette player in their home anymore? My Sony boom box died years ago.

--------- oh please!!! As soon as you hear anything is 'over the hill'? it will have a resurgence, bet on it. I have one (cassette) that smokes just about anything: 'South-side Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' - "Love is a sacrifice". I bought it at a 'roadside shack' in 'not-so-surburban Va.' in... uh... 1982?? or 1983??It stands the test of time - just as awesome now, as it was then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7NCz9lP11I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJLo5EkU7Lo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VSf90_uPYc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI_LjHiYTgg&feature=related
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Album Connoisseurs Eschew the Shuffle, Embrace Flaws; That 'Sweet Plasticy Smell'.
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/113689/cassette-tapes-connoisseurs-wsj
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Chevrolet Turns 100

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/10/21/automobiles/collectibles/100000001128225/chevrolet-turns-100.html
A Century of Chevy, From Cheap Date to America’s Sweetheart
By JERRY GARRETT, JAMES G. COBB, PHIL PATTON, STUART ELLIOTT, JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN and NORMAN MAYERSOHN
Published: October 21, 2011
"Its Impalas dropped us off at school. Its pickup trucks hauled our produce on the farm. Its Corvette sustained our sports car fantasies through the boredom of high school algebra class. Earlier than almost any other automotive brand, Chevy created a palette of vehicles that ranged from the small and thrifty to the sleek and sporty to the large and smartly trimmed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/automobiles/chevrolet-unlikely-cornerstone-for-gm.html?hp
("Full disclosure" here??....Yep!, my dad owned and ran a Chevy dealership in a small town in Maine, '55 - '78.)
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Onward, to some photomontage!

Transformation Tree

This image is ridiculously simple - a gnarly and warped tree trunk, in Chiracahua (Arizona),
which waited for many years for an answer, for a complimenting sky, equally spinning and swirling.
Is 'mother earth' breathing?... exhaling?.... I dunno. What do you think? I have called it 'transformation tree', which works, for the time being.
The print is very simple dodging/blend - sky dodged out to zero by about the middle, tree dodged similarly, but from the bottom up.
Once again, it's about having the right negatives, and taking the time to figure out which ones work together, to come up with a '1+1=3' kinda thing.
This one is a good lead-in to some discussion about hand-coloring. Some of my prints scream 'color me!'... some don't, but I color them anyway.
This is one image that does not benefit from handcoloring, at all. It works because the texture in the tree bark and in the clouds is so similar. It works well as simple B&W... if i add color?

No way, this works against what is going on, it splits the image into 2 sections, brown tree bark, blue sky. You've heard the old saying "less is more"?.... yep, that's the ticket, here. You might think that this rather similar image, "Driftwood face", would strike me the same way.

It didn't - my idea? - that some color in those eyes ( what a penetrating stare, hunh?) could 'bleed' into the sky. I did a photoshop sketch, and this one has possibilities:
There is one challenging/difficult thing about that idea - the eyes are pretty much dead black - can I inject enough color into them, to make this idea work? It's easier to do digitally than by hand/on the print... I'm gonna give a throw anyway. For larger views of some the images above, a page on my site:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/TransformationTree/index.html

The Pass

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 03:37:00 +0000

Here's the photoshop sketch of this post's print:

But first, as always, the 'whatever catches my eye' file:

The science of the Mojave, and scorpions that glow in the dark

Cal State's Desert Studies Center, a 1,200-acre field station near Soda Springs, is one of the world's few desert research facilities. It gives students a close-up view of life at 100-plus degrees.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-desert-studies-20111009,0,1108402.story
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Photographers find light in the dead of night

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/08/DDBM1L4LCA.DTL&type=art
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Lovin’ Letterpress | Week 1

http://megancharland.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/lovin-letterpress-week-1/

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Talking to Koko the gorilla
By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – 11 hrs ago

http://news.yahoo.com/talking-koko-gorilla-123500449.html?bouchon=807,ca

"This 40-year-old lowland gorilla, says Alex Hannaford, understands English and longs for a baby........."

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Amazing desert animals
Deserts are often viewed as desolate and devoid of life. But author James Parry proves otherwise in his new book "The Desert" (Carlton Books). Parry showcases fascinating creatures and plant life that thrive in the heat. View more photos from "The Desert" in this slideshow.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/desert-creatures-1317239813-slideshow/

How I Did It: Hartley Peavey of Peavey Electronics
How Hartley Peavey took his electronics company from a one-man shop to a $270 million global brand
Growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s, Hartley Peavey dreamed of becoming a rock star. Though he lacked the chops to become the next Chuck Berry, his name has been etched into the pantheon of rock 'n' roll history. That's because Peavey amplifiers, sound equipment, and guitars boast a devoted following among rock stars and wannabes alike. More recently, airports, government buildings, and other facilities are turning to Peavey gear as well. Peavey started 46 years ago as a one-man shop. Now it is a global brand with about 1,000 employees and a reported $270 million in annual revenue.
By Kasey Wehrum | Inc – Tue, Sep 27, 2011 12:00 AM EDT
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/did-hartley-peavey-peavey-electronics-070000229.html

----------------------------

Magic Mushrooms Can Make Lasting Personality Changes, Study Says
Elizabeth Lopatto, ©2011 Bloomberg News
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Psilocybin, or "magic mushrooms," can make people more open in their feelings and aesthetic sensibilities, conferring on them a lasting personality change, according to a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/09/29/bloomberg_articlesLS96451A74E9.DTL

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How Far Will Dolphins Go to Relate to Humans?

OFF THE BAHAMAS — In a remote patch of turquoise sea, Denise L. Herzing splashes into the water with a pod of 15 Atlantic spotted dolphins. For the next 45 minutes, she engages the curious creatures in a game of keep-away, using a piece of Sargassum seaweed like a dog’s chew toy.
How far will dolphins go to engage?
“The key is going to be coming up with a system in which the dolphins want to communicate,” said Stan Kuczaj, director of the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Southern Mississippi. “If they don’t care, it won’t work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/science/20dolphin.html

------------------------
Portraits of sea creatures
What’s the best way to create up-close images of sea life? Photographer Mark Laita built an aquarium in his Los Angeles studio and shot more than 80 species borrowed from aquariums across the country for his new book “Sea” (Abrams). View more of Laita’s fascinating photographs in this slideshow.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/portraits-of-sea-creatures-1317072248-slideshow/

---------------------------
I can't beleive his song has not been covered, in the last 40 years, in some way shape or form.

Yardbirds - You're a better man than I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jj2R69qRxU&feature=related

This is the second print done inspired by a print a friend sent me of an in-camera (unintended) double exposure. Sometimes mistakes can be awesome, much better than anything you can make while trying to be logical/organized/etc.
I was rather inspired by not just the image itself... but the concept of a double exposure, as applied to my montage work.
I have always blended together 2 or more images top to bottom, side to side, or any combination thereof, with a relatively short area of 'blending'... but I haven't tried anything that was this long/deep... a blend.

Sooo.... there's some rocks in 'Valley of Fire', Nevada - i loved the way the huge rocks kinda 'gave way' to a few straggling clouds, & the 'pass' (thru) between them.
In this country, there's always a few Joshua Trees, everywhere... that's what filled up the rest of the space. This was taken outside Las vegas, NV a few years ago.

Don't know why or how this came about... it just did. Many times, i don't ask for an explanation, i just 'do it' ( Thank you, Nike, for a seminal thought). In recent years, I have been using Photoshop as a 'sketch' tool. I take a lot of low res digital pix of contact sheets, or various frames, and just start slamming some things together. I don't expect to come up w/ anything immediately, what I've found is that you just start somewhere, get the ball rolling, start by 'playing', sort of.
I learned this many years ago, when I worked as an art director, which was a great experience for a budding (future!) photographer - you got hire interesting photogs, and watch them work/ figure out problems. Several times I watched as they worked on tabletop shots, w/ many objects grouped together. They started by just messing around, playing - "hey, that doesn't look half bad let's do a polaroid'... they'd look at it and say ' nah,... let's try this'. Another polaroid... 'well, not bad, but how about this?...'.
And somewhere along the line, the 'play' would yield something that really started to happen = "now we're gettin' somewhere, can we move this item abit like that? and that item about like this?...'
And all of a sudden, the 'play' got a lot tighter, more focused... and we got some work done.
So that's how i work w/ all the dig pix of contacts, just mess around, 'play'... until that "aha!" moment happens.

You will find a much better visual explanation of which negs got exposed how, here:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/ThePass/index.html

There's also 3 more prints, all a bit different.

"Out of gas"

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:33:00 +0000

Here's the photoshop sketch that led to this entry's darkroom print:

...but first, the whatever catches my eye file....
here we go!

Eight eerie, abandoned amusement parks
".....there’s something inherently spooky about abandoned amusement parks, there’s also something beautiful and poetic about them, particularly in the curious way Mother Nature goes about reclaiming landscapes punctuated by idle roller coasters and collapsing funhouses. In some cases, neglected amusement parks have proven to be more photogenic in death than they were in life."

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/photos/8-eerie-abandoned-amusement-parks/take-a-ride-or-not?hpt=hp_bn11
---------------------------

Google Details Electricity Usage of Its Data Centers
By James Galanz
Published: September 8, 2011
Google released what was once among its most closely guarded secrets on Thursday: how much electricity its enormous computing facilities consume.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-electricity-output-of-its-data-centers.html?_r=2
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On Maine's coast, art runs wild

Robin Soslow, Special to The Chronicle
Sunday, September 4, 2011
I am originally from Maine, this one caught my eye.
Sometimes they call us 'mainers'... sometimes they call us 'maniacs'.
Not sure what the difference is... :-)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/04/TREA1KSHUK.DTL

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NASA’s Cassini orbiter snaps unbelievable picture of Saturn

For a larger view:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/nasa-cassini-orbiter-snaps-unbelievable-picture-saturn-144133480.html

For even more,
Images from the Cassini space probe made into a beautiful video:
http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/06/03/cassini-saturn-space-video/

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Don Henley: Record Companies 'Not Going to Roll Over' on Copyright Issue
'My hope is that artists understand what's at stake and what their rights are,' he says...
By David Browne
September 7, 2011 4:50 PM ET

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/don-henley-record-companies-not-going-to-roll-over-on-copyright-issue-20110907
----------------------------------------------------------
The 9/11 Decade
Ironworkers of the Sky
By Randy Kennedy
Published: September 1, 2011 - NY Times
"You need to have a very unique trait inside, to go running out on the iron," says Kevin Sabbagh, 24, a fifth-generation ironworker known as Woogie.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/us/sept-11-reckoning/04Mag-ironworkers.html?_r=1&hpw
"I look forward to sweating. And I look forward to finishing this building. I plan on staying all the way to the top"
---------------------------------------------

Errol Morris Looks for the Truth in Photography
By KATHRYN SCHULZ
Published: September 1, 2011
One of the first things we learn in “Believing Is Seeing” is that its author, the filmmaker Errol Morris, has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision — “My fault,” he writes, for refusing to wear an eye patch after being treated for strabismus in childhood. It’s hard to think of another writer who so neatly embodies the theme of his own book. “Believing Is Seeing” is about the limitations of vision, and about the inevitable idiosyncrasies and distortions involved in the act of looking — in particular, looking at photographs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/believing-is-seeing-by-errol-morris-book-review.html?hpw
--------------------

Offbeat Traveler: Darwin Falls in Death Valley National Park
Death Valley (http://www.nps.gov/deva/index.htm) sounds like an unlikely place for waterfalls, but near Panamint Springs at the western edge of the national park, Darwin Falls flows year-round.

http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-trb-offbeat-traveler-darwin-falls-in-death-valley-20110826,0,5235750.photogallery

www.nps.gov/deva/planyourvisit/panamintspringsarea.htm
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Crash witnesses make off with spilled marijuana
Vivian Ho, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, September 1, 2011

(09-01) 13:17 PDT SAN JOSE -- A pickup truck hauling large bags of marijuana overturned and spilled its load in south San Jose, but passers-by took care of much of the cleanup, police said today.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/01/BADU1KV0IC.DTL#ixzz1WkTZ1ixN

He..He he.... what did you expect in California!!!???

--------------------------------

Earliest Signs of Advanced Tools Found
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: August 31, 2011
One hallmark of Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans, was his stone tools, an advanced technology reflecting a good deal of forethought and dexterity. Up to now, however, scientists have been unable to pin a firm date on the earliest known evidence of his stone tool-making.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/science/01tools.html?_r=1&hpw

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The Glamorous Past and Desolate Present of 'America's Dead Sea'
By Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg

"The Salton Sea was once a tourist destination, a "Palm Springs with water." Now the largest lake in California is an environmental disaster....

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2011/08/the-glamorous-past-and-desolate-present-of-americas-dead-sea/244341/

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Green - a blog about energy and the environment - The New York Times

"Just as traders use various stock indices to monitor the global economy, microanalyzing each blip, a team of nearly 50 scientists from many disciplines is designing an analogous tool to track the health of the world’s oceans and the implications for human well-being."

August 15, 2011, 2:36 pm
An Index for ocean health - by Dylan Walsh

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com

----------------------------------

NASA Rover Arrives at Huge Mars Crater After 3-Year Trek
YEEEEAHHH!!! all right!!!!!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-rover-arrives-huge-mars-crater-3-trek-173601595.html

--------------------------------
Shouts & Murmurs
God’s Blog
by Paul Simms - August 8, 2011
This one is a hoot, good for a few hearty laughs, check it out!

It starts...
"UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out."

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/08/08/110808sh_shouts_simms

-------------------------------------

Affordable art is the new reality
New technologies have given emerging artists a shot at building an audience -- and consumers a chance to buy quality art for a reasonable price.
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-affordable-art-20110806,0,6328319.story

----------------------------

Calligraphers still going against type
In a fast-paced world dominated by computers, these masters of handwriting continue to make art from letters. For them, the pen is still mightier than the keyboard.
By Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times
August 9, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-calligraphy-20110809,0,2269586.story

Calligraphy was the thing that really got me started on art - i learned it at one of those brick-walled ivy covered NE boarding schools, when i was 10 yo.
Then i started taking in Celtic illuminated manuscripts...and then....
islamic/persian illuminated manuscripts, and... so on, and so on, and so on.
I lived in Wash DC for 20+ years. I first arrived in 1969 to 'study' at American Univ. Yeah, right, did anyone in college in 1969 actually 'study'?... i sure didn't. I walked a mile to all the great art museums in DC, probably stoned and then some.
Took it ALL in.
I have to thank my mom, long gone, for taking all her kids to every good art exhibit you could drive to in Maine. Which included a lot of Winslow Homer originals, that kind of thing.
No wonder I went into some kind artistic work.
No regrets.

On to some photomontage!

I got a print recently, made by a very good friend of mine, made w/ a panoramic camera.

©Jan Faul / Artfaul.com

It was a double exposure, made by mistake. Sometimes mistakes can be awesome, much better than anything you can make while trying to be logical/organized/etc.
I was rather inspired by not just the image itself... but the concept of a double exposure... as applied to my montage work.
I have always blended together 2 or more images top to bottom, side to side, or any combination thereof, so that they blend into each other, most of each image remains distinctly itself.... but haven't tried anything that was this long/deep... a blend - like about 80% of the image, one negative overlapping the other the whole 80%.

But i came up w/ 2 images that were like that... took 'em into the darkroom, here's the first one:

On this one, the only part of the 'gas station' neg. that didn't overlap the landscape/sky was the ground at the bottom. There's a lot of tension here, which I liked, it makes you wonder 'what am I seeing here?'

I exposed the gas station first, the sky second.
First pass just didn't work, too heavy handed, too dark.

Since I had the sky neg already there in the enlarger when i saw the heavy handed/way too dark of the bottom, i exposed a few more sheets (much lighter/better),....and then returned to the bottom/the gas station....& added a much lighter 'bottom' exposure.

AAAaaah! That's it....

It's not the same as my PSD sketch. So what? it's called a 'sketch' for a reason - it's provisional, open to improvisation/further improvement.
This one is kinda spooky, you're not quite sure what you are seeing, or if you are seeing it at all.
Compared to the 'sketch'? this is much spookier, harder to decipher.

As usual, for more, & larger images, a page at my site:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/OutOfGas/index.html

Illumination

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Here's the Photoshop sketch of the darkroom print for this post:

But first, the 'whatever catches my eye' file......

Gray Matter - When Data Disappears
By KARI KRAUS - NY Times - Published: August 6, 2011
"...for all its many promises, digital storage is perishable, perhaps even more so than paper. Disks corrode, bits “rot” and hardware becomes obsolete."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

-----------------------------

Yosemite: The nature of danger
"Nature has a power and thus an unpredictable danger all its own; that is its very attraction."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-yosemite-20110804,0,7603422.story

I have done a lot of wandering in places out west where it is easy to get lost, easy to encounter circumstances that are less than 'safe'(whatever that is). When I first moved here in '92 I did things that now seem downright stupid.
Now?... my rule of thumb is: if the worst that can happen, happens, can you survive that?/are you ready for the consequences?
If your answer is 'No!' then that's the answer to 'going there, trying that', whatever it might be.
As an example, try Joshua Tree Nat'l Park, an awesome place, but with all those similar piles of eroded rocks, a very easy place to get lost just a mile or less from the parking lot. I am VERY careful - no picture is worth getting in any serious trouble for, ya know?
--------------------
Photographers Capture Mysterious, Beautiful Patterns in Sand
Wired.com - July 25, 2011 - 7:00 am - By Danielle Venton
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/sand-patterns-gallery/
A nice gallery indeed. I have done many, many images using all the marvelous things sand can do!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Grains of Sand Reveal Possible Fifth State of Matter
....as if the states of matter we already have to deal w/ aren't enuf!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/sandgrains/
------------------------
How the drugs of the 60s changed art
By Emanuella Grinberg, CNN - July 15, 2011 10:33 p.m. EDT

"The words "psychedelic" and "art" likely conjure images of acid rock posters, fluorescent mushrooms and tie-dyed ... stuff."
But New York Times art critic Ken Johnson wants to expand your mind. "Psychedelic culture had a really central impact on art beginning in the '60s and really changed the direction of art." I agree.. and i was there.. and i actually remember a good part of it!

http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/07/15/ken.johnson.psychedelic.art/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

-----------------------------------------------
On to the darkroom!

I have quite a number of shots of 'holes thru rocks' (with some sky beyond) taken both at the ocean/beach or the desert, and have been struggling to do something with them for years.

They are a great visual opportunity, I shoot them for hi-lites, and let the dark areas die into black, so I can burn back into some of the fading black, and blow in something 'surprising'... but so far I have had limited success figuring out what that was.

Finally, a blast of inspiration came my way (at least on this one) - the hand w/ the candle, and some petroglyphs from Joshua Tree. I think it's the quality of light that makes this hang together - the candle illuminates this 'cave' of sorts. Below, the photoshop sketch:

The rocks at the top were sandwiched w/ the hand & candle, as one exposure, the 'glyphs @ bottom, the second exposure.
Print #1 was a total winner!!

.... and i still had two more partially exposed sheets to work with. When that happens, i feel free to really wing it on whatever sheets are left. My attempt to use some different 'glyphs on #2 really sucked, i missed by a mile and then some.... but #3?
Hey, i was happy to see i can learn from mistakes, and quickly, too! This one worked well... but i was left with some doubt - everything is tweaked w/ photoshop these days - these glyphs are little dark and low contrast - should i give these glyphs a bit of a 'boost'?

Why not, I could just as easily give them a boost by handcoloring... so WTF, a levels layer in P'shop, 'painted in' carefully to boost just the glyphs ain't much different.

Once again, an old adage becomes true - I collect negatives that i think have a purpose, though i don't know what that is when i trip the shutter. Many times it takes years before i find a place for a negative.
The hole thru the rock was shot in 2008, the first glyph was shot in 1996, and the second one in... 2008.
The hand and candle?... i don't remember, i think it was '93 or '94, at night in my apt. after I'd shot something else for an assignment illustration, & had a few frames left on a roll.
Took a while to get around to using that one, hunh?
If that's what it takes?... then that's what it takes. I am patient.

And music has taught me some lessons, at least that done by the most talented:

"Learn to be still" - Eagles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npoKHsjpQ9I

There's times when it pays to shut yer mouth, turn off the internal chatter in your head, and be 'open'.
That's what I do, let my raw thoughts (negatives) speak to me.

Was it Rumi who wrote "only an empty vessel can be refilled"?

Yeah, that's it. I think...

This one definitely is Rumi:

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/875661.Rumi

So if you are asking 'what does this image mean, if images can 'mean' anything?'...
Hhmmm... my best guess is:

First of all the title points in the right direction - 'Illumination'.

If your viewpoint is inside a cave of sorts, and the only daylight that gets in is scant illumination, you may not see much. If you bring some additional light (man-made, hand-held)... you may 'see' much more.
So there's two kinds of 'illumination' - what happens every day when the sun comes up...
and what happens when we add our own 'illumination'........
Chew on that one for a bit....

As usual, for larger images, etc... a page on my site:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/Illumination/index.html

Reservation required

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:45:00 +0000

The image du jour? This one:

But first, as usual, the 'whatever catches my eye' file, FAT! this time 'round! What a crazy and interesting world!

Photos: Elusive Snow Leopards Thrive in Surprising Spot
Thanks to the vigilant eye of camera traps stationed high in Afghanistan's remote northeast mountains, researchers have uncovered exciting news: A population of endangered snow leopards, one of the most elusive big cats on the planet, is thriving in the region.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos-elusive-snow-leopards-thrive-surprising-spot-150801114.html

-------------------------------------------------

Is ocean garbage killing whales?
http://news.yahoo.com/ocean-garbage-killing-whales-044425228.html
I think we humans are killing just about anything else, at a way too rapid rate...
---------------------------------

Amazing Arizona landscapes
By Floyd Yarmuth, CNN
July 9, 2011 5:54 a.m. EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/07/09/snapshots.arizona.landscapes/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
-----------------------------

Reintroduced condors flying farther afield
Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, July 4, 2011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/04/MNST1K4E4C.DTL
------------------------------------------

The Longform.org Guide to Weed
Great stories about how marijuana is grown, bought, sold, smuggled, and smoked.
http://www.slate.com/id/2298218/?from=rss
---------------------------------

Health July-August 2009 Magazine Feature Story
June 25, 2009
Perfect Quiet
Searching for refuge — and, perhaps, health — in a sickeningly loud world.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/perfect-quiet-3620/
By Craig Childs

http://www.miller-mccune.com/

------------------------------------------------
Luzon: Expedition discovers 300 species on island
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Saturday, June 25, 2011

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/25/MNP21K2CL1.DTL
More images at:
http://www.livescience.com/14776-image-gallery-species-philippines.html

------------------------------------------------

June 24, 2011 12:50 PM

Digital photography trumping film for good?
"Film harkens back to a time when photography was an art and photographers were master craftsmen."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/24/earlyshow/leisure/gamesgadgetsgizmos/main20074024.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.1
----------------------------------------

June 22, 2011, 9:15 pm
Finding the Score Within
By KEN UENO

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/finding-the-score-within/?hp

Hendrix’s electric guitar is visceral. It is somatic in Whitman’s sense — the song of itself — and emphatically American. Hendrix’s guitar is immediately recognizable in the way speaking voices of loved ones are immediately familiar. It taught me that a sound, in and of itself, can embody a feeling and that there is a meaning that can only be expressed with that sound, that voice, that guitar playing in that unique way. It also taught me, by extension, to look for my own voice, my identity, in sounds. Yes, rather than putting on a uniform, or trying to fit in with people around me. To not only embrace my idiosyncrasies, but to amplify them.

------------------ Uh...yes, Jimi Hendrix speaks to most everyone, and ANYone.....
only 3 or 4 years he recorded his own music.... his influence resounds, waaaay beyond the few short years he lived. You can't pick up an electric guitar, without feeling, and playing, his influence.
Dig this: All along the watchtower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIhtafqZvy8

One great comment:

So today i prayed to God..and said:
"If you give us Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley back will give you justin bieber and the jonas brothers."
Well God replied and said, "No, i like good music too."
Dig this:
Third stone from the sun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUg7xl4kKUw&feature=related
Wanna talk about 'cutting the world a new asshole'? this track definitely did that.
But one thing should be noted: Jimi couldn't have done this without Mitch Mitchell's drumming, no two ways about it.
He was quoted as saying 'he's my Elvin Jones' - enuf said.
If you don't know Elvin Jones??? It's about time you did:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YVOd1hK0_w

Elvin Jones- Big Solo - Waaaay awesome!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8YRrUg1E8s&feature=related
----------------------

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 4:21pm PDT
Annual 'Sardine Run' off South Africa an unforgettable thrill for divers
By: Pete Thomas, GrindTV.com
http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/blog/27919/sardine+run+off+south+africa+an+unforgettable+thrill+for+divers/
-----------------------------

The Pacific Ocean's 'corridors of life'
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
(06-22) 15:57 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Two broad and unmarked ocean highways where countless sea creatures migrate, feed, mate and reproduce, have been discovered across the Pacific by scientists tuning in to thousands of radio signals.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/22/BAMB1JVGU5.DTL&tsp=1
---------------------------------

Southern California Moments
A daily look at scenes from the Southland captured by Times readers.
http://www.latimes.com/features/socalmoments/
-----------------------

Offbeat Traveler: Sand-sculpting contests
This summer, relive those days when you were a kid at the beach building sand castles. Besides sun and vacation time, this season offers sand-sculpting festivals and contests geared to novices and pros. You wouldn't believe what people make out of sand.

To see the masters compete, head to the Revere Beach National Sand Sculpting Festival in Massachusetts. If you're more interested in the fun, check out the Long Beach Sand Sculpture Contest, where you can build sand castles, eat BBQ and listen to live music.

Wherever you go this summer, be prepared to marvel at some amazing creations.
http://www.latimes.com/travel/deals/la-trb-offbeat-sand-sculptures-20110614,0,5255670.photogallery
------------------------------------

Op-Ed - LA Times
Kindle vs. books: The dead trees society
Kindles are convenient, but they just aren't as good as books.
By Sara Barbour
June 17, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-barbour-kindles-20110617,0,5490224.story
----------------------------

Harry Partch: The Dreamer that remains (1972)
The most amazing 'music' I've heard in quite some time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl5DGWn-utk
---------------------------------------------------

"How to Land Your Kid in Therapy"
The Atlantic Magazine -The Ideas issue - 2011 July August 2011

Why the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods. A therapist and mother reports.
By Lori Gottleib
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/8555/
This makes me appreciate my parents (long since departed) a WHOLE lot more.
They weren't always easy on me, and sent me to a boarding school at age 10.
I think that now might be called 'tough love' - it worked fine for me.
--------------------------------------------------

June 16, 2011 10:41 PM
Get used to mega-fires in the U.S. West
By Chip Ward
'The old gospel got it mostly right when God told Noah, “No more water, the fire next time.”.......

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/16/opinion/main20071835.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.13
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Opinionator - exclusive Online commentary from the NY Times
June 12, 2011, 5:35 pm
Philosophy As an Art of Dying
By Costica Bradatan

It happens rarely, but when it does it causes a commotion of great proportions; it attracts the attention of all, becomes a popular topic for discussion and debate in marketplaces and taverns. It drives people to take sides, quarrel and fight, which for things philosophical is quite remarkable. It happened to Socrates, Hypatia, Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Jan Patočka, and a few others. Due to an irrevocable death sentence, imminent mob execution or torture to death, these philosophers found themselves in the most paradoxical of situations: lovers of logic and rational argumentation, silenced by brute force; professional makers of discourses, banned from using the word; masters of debate and contradiction, able to argue no more. What was left of these philosophers then? Just their silence, their sheer physical presence. The only means of expression left to them, their own bodies — and dying bodies at that...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/philosophy-as-an-art-of-dying/?hp
-----------------------------------

Deer dropped by eagle knocks out power in Montana
"It's a first-time thing," Northwestern spokeswoman Michelle Sullivan said. "A deer dangling on the line, that's never happened before."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110617/us_nm/us_deer_power

What was most amusing was the comments many people made...a couple of the best?

'And the moral of the story is ...."Don't bite off more than you can chew" '

'I guess the eagle wanted to barbecue his lunch, hunh?'

'Now only if an eagle would pick up a piglett. We all know the saying....'

On to some photography/photomontage...!!

Sometimes when you're drifting off to sleep, do all kinds of oddly connected thoughts and images drift thru your brain? If they don't, I'm sorry for ya. It happens to me often, that's how this one came about.
During the week between Xmas and new year's (2010-2011), I was hoping for some decent weather, and wanted to go check out SF's Ocean Beach & the renovated Cliff House.
http://www.cliffhouse.com/
(Don't skip the intro, that's the best part. The rest of it is just a promo for the new Cliff House. Snore.)

In the ten years I lived in SF ('92- '02), I went there ALL the time, it was 20 minutes and only 1$ bus fare away. But I haven't been there much since I moved to Marin County.. it was about time to check out an old haunt. So one night while drifting off, before intending to visit the next day, I played back in my mind many of the shots I had taken there, and when I got to this table, set up for some kind of party on the viewing deck behind Cliff House, I hit "Pause"!

I think lot of the reason I shoot the the things I do is that they have a certain sort of 'pregnancy'.. that is to say there is a certain emptiness, incompleteness.. that is begging for more.
This table sure fits the bill, doesn't it?

Hhmmm... this is one for the very simple, just 2 negatives 'side to side' blend, with the other side being 'completely different'. An empty table is awaiting some guests ... but their view won't be on the menu.

Barker Dam Lake in Joshua Tree (above) is about as removed from fine dining as a place can be, but it's a feast for the eyes, and the camera. So that became the right side of the image. The fun part is positioning and dodging and burning a bit differently for each print, and hoping for serendipity as they melt into each other.
Took me all 4 sheets I started with to 'hit it', but eventually, i got it.
Here's the photoshop sketch:

And one of the final prints:

(I ended up going to Ocean Beach on Wednesday 12/29, the first clear day of the week, and it was brutally windy, i had trouble just standing up... and the new Cliff House wasn't nearly as photogenically funky as the old one. Had you noticed that sometimes progress sucks?)

For all of the 4 prints:
(The ones that succeed, and the ones that aren't quite 'there'...)

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/ReservationReq/index.html

Be happy now

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:40:00 +0000

"Wherever you go, there you are."
"Be happy now, with whatever you have, or have been given".

Both the above, good words to live by. Give it a try.

It's July 4, when Americans celebrate their independence.
OK, you say: 'how independent are we if congress is ruled by special interests'?... or perhaps one of many other complaints about our democratic system. Someone well known was quoted as saying something like "Democracy is a messy, fractured way of getting things done, a far less than perfect way of governing... until you compare it w/ any other way of governing." (Then it looks pretty damned good, doesn't it?)
Yep, ain't it the truth! Would you rather be in the USA... or Libya? Or Pakistan??
(yeah, i thought so, you aren't moving there anytime soon.)

Buddhist thought says that 'desires' are the root of of our human problems. Yes, indeed.
I don't subscribe to ANY religion, but if i could be caught adhering to any, it would be buddhism.
....and I think our (western) constant desires for... more, more, MORE!"... are whacked.
Who really needs a 'McMansion' in the 'burbs?
Or a triple cheeseburger w/ a ridiculous amount of fat and salt?

While i was writing this, i checked my yahoo email, and here was one of the articles on yahoo news:

"From a $500 towel to a $2,600 bottle of water, items that aren't worth the money."

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/113042/dumb-money-products-not-worth-price-smartmoney?mod=bb-budgeting

Enuf said.
Time to get our heads fixed, find a new direction. I'll suggest one: "less is more".
Here's a page w/ a few images, and of course, some accompanying text/comments, about keeping your head screwed on right, appreciating what you have, enjoying whatever you encounter.
Alotta the best things in life are free... happiness is one of them.
Hope you enjoy... and turn off yer computer sometime soon..... and dig the real world.

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/HappyNow/index.html

Darkroom Montage - 'Strength in Numbers'

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 18:55:00 +0000

First...from the 'whatever catches my eye' file...

Ancient world dictionary finished — after 90 years
By SHARON COHEN, AP National Writer Sharon Cohen, Ap National Writer – Sat Jun 4, 9:56 am ET
CHICAGO – It was a monumental project with modest beginnings: a small group of scholars and some index cards. The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries — and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110604/ap_on_re_us/us_postcard_the90_year_dictionary_project
------------------------------------------------

So Much More Than Plasma and Poison
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07jellyfish.html?_r=1&src=dayp
By Natalie Angier
Published: June 6, 2011
Among nature’s grand inventory of multicellular creatures, jellyfish seem like the ultimate other, as alien from us as mobile beings can be while still remaining within the kingdom Animalia. Where is the head, the heart, the back, the front, the matched sets of parts and organs? Where is the bilateral symmetry?

--------------------------------------
5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet
By John C Abell

June 3, 2011

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/ebooks-not-there-yet/

--------------------------------

The Arctic Light
Wed, Jun 1, 2011 3:00 AM EDT - 3:21 | 190,320 views
Follow TSO Photography on Facebook.com/ TSOPhotography for more photos, videos, and updates.This video was filmed between 29th April and 10th May 2011 in the Arctic, on the archipelago Lofoten in Norway.
A very nice video... check it out:
http://video.yahoo.com/editorspicks-12135647/featured-24306389/the-arctic-light-by-tso-photography-25412815.html?nc#crsl=%252Feditorspicks-12135647%252Ffeatured-24306389%252Fthe-arctic-light-25412815.html
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A Stream of Postcards, Shot by Phone
By Jenna Wortham
Published: June 3, 2011

Digital camera sales may be weak, but thanks to cellphones, picture-taking has never been more of an everyday thing. Now a wave of mobile applications is letting people tweak their cellphone snapshots and share them with friends and strangers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/technology/04photosharing.html?_r=1

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How much longer can photographic film hold on?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_film_s_fade_out

Well your blogger here sure hopes the answer is... at least until i die.
------------------------

Saturday, May 28, 2011 11:05am PDT
Surfers brave the "biggest day ever" at world's craziest wave: Tasmania's Shipstern Bluff
By: Chris Mauro, GrindTV.com

http://www.grindtv.com/surf/blog/27243/surfers+brave+the+biggest+day+ever+at+worlds+craziest+wave+tasmanias+shipstern+bluff/

watch the video!!!!!

------------------------------

On Virginia’s Crooked Road, Mountain Music Lights the Way
http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/travel/on-virginias-crooked-road-music-lights-the-way.html
By SARAH WILDMAN
Published: May 20, 2011
IT starts with a well-worn fiddle, held in equally well-worn hands above a tapping black cowboy boot. Then in comes the banjo, plucked with steel finger picks, followed by the autoharp, the mandolin, the percussive beat of an upright bass. Another banjo grabs the melody, and suddenly the room is bursting with knee-slapping, country-porch music....

-----------------------------------

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/us/22snow.html?_r=1&hpw#
Record Snowpacks Could Threaten Western States
By KIRK JOHNSON and JESSE McKINLEY
Published: May 21, 2011
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — For all the attention on epic flooding in the Mississippi Valley, a quiet threat has been growing here in the West where winter snows have piled up on mountain ranges throughout the region.
Thanks to a blizzard-filled winter and an unusually cold and wet spring, more than 90 measuring sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May, according to a federal report released last week.
Those giant and spectacularly beautiful snowpacks will now melt under the hotter, sunnier skies of June — mildly if weather conditions are just right, wildly and perhaps catastrophically if they are not...............

-------------------------------

The Trouble With E-Mail
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/the-trouble-with-e-mail/?hp#
May 29, 2011, 5:30 pm
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
The idea that e-mail is chiefly a conduit for anger and lies seems almost quaint. After too may careers ruined and personal lives upended by online indiscretions, it should now be crystal clear that there are some things one must never, ever commit to e-mail.
And that’s why some bankers developed “LDL.” “LDL” — which means “let’s discuss live” — is an acronym that surfaced during the S.E.C.’s investigation of Goldman Sachs for its role in the nation’s financial shame spiral...

On, to some photography.......

At left, my photoshop sketch, at right the final darkroom print

I've mentioned before that my montage images come from a variety of inspirations - sometimes it's about a concept, sometimes it's simply something visually surreal, sometimes somewhere in between the two. And sometimes it's just plain 'winging it'.
This one is definitely 'concept'. It had been kicking around as a drawing on tracing paper.. & then a P'shop sketch... for quite a while, and I finally decided to do something with it. Like..uh... print it.

I shot the palm trees that are propped up in front of a wall somewhere in southern Ca., the desert. There's a number of attempts at development there that never came to fruition. I think the wall was 'sposed to enclose a nice subdivision... but just 'cause you think it can be built, doesn't mean anyone will show up. And no one did, and these poor palm trees were left to suffer...

The forest of very healthy lush palm trees (behind the wall) was virtually a farm - the trees in very nice rows.

M.C. Escher would love it!
What? you don't know who MC Escher was?
I thought this was just my blog, but if i have to educate you, OK, here goes...
http://www.mcescher.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher

Oddly enough, both images were shot on the same trip, in the mid-90's..took a while to put the two together, but once it landed in my brain, it stuck - the forest was on the other side of the wall, trying to help it's prodigal brothers/sisters.
Yeah... definitely, 'strength in numbers'! Or maybe i should call it 'prodigal palm trees'...?
The dodging / burning on this one is really pretty simple - the two palms @ bottom are dodged out part way up the palm trees, the palm trees at the top blended from top to bottom, ending just above the top of the wall.

I also added some nice clouds above the palms, at the top, which are actually flipped vertically to wrap around the palm tree tops.

Technically?... simple. Putting it all together, and knowing what to do? Not so simple - many miles of driving... many rolls of film, full of frames that were made thinking "There's something about this i like, I'll shoot it now, and figure it out later". And then a few more years until a light goes on inside yer head - "Aha! That's it! that's why i took that frame."

As usual, more/larger images.. at a page on my site:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/StrengthInNumbers/index.html

Pointing the way

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 14 May 2011 19:03:00 +0000

Here's the image (photoshop sketch) du jour:

First, the whatever catches my eye file...
I was a guitar player for many years, reluctantly had to give it up thanks to a serious 'metal (oxide?) allergy'... but I still perk up to much about guitars...

Building the Guitar You’ll Keep
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/04/santa-cruz-guitars/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&pid=764
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It's a Small World After All
A slide show of aerial photography, from pigeon-mounted cameras to Apollo 17 and beyond.
By Elizabeth Weingarten Posted Friday, April 22, 2011, at 7:00 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2291710/

---------------------------------

Mystery of Grand Canyon's Formation Revealed
Charles Q. Choi, OurAmazingPlanet Contributor
Date: 27 April 2011 Time: 01:23 PM ET
The birth of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau through which it carved have been a geological mystery. Now a giant anomalous structure discovered on the underside of the plateau could shed light on how it was formed.

http://www.livescience.com/13903-grand-canyon-age-formation-colorado-plateau-uplift.html

Desert town clings to its quirkyness
Quartzsite, Ariz., is a truck stop town of 3,600 that draws about 1 million visitors in winter with its gem shows, swap meets and 'naked bookseller.' Officials are looking for ways to boost revenue in the off-season, but locals and the snowbirds don't want the town's character to be lost.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-quartzsite-20110416,0,575043.story

-----------------------------------------

Toxic Art
On shelves, in studios, and at schools, art supplies containing toxic ingredients pose risks to human health and the environment.
By Jessica Carew Kraft
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/toxic-art/Content?oid=2533379
I mentioned my metal allergy above? Beware of all the chemical things you work with... enuf said.
--------------------------------------
The Digital Pileup
By SHELLEY PODOLNY - Published: March 12, 2011 - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13podolny.html?_r=1
"SOME facts of life are just plain counterintuitive. It can be too cold to snow. Heavy things float. Martinis have calories.
Here’s another one with significantly greater import: Electronic information is tangible. The apps we use, the games on our phones, the messages we incessantly tap — all of it may seem to fly through the air and live in some cloud, but in truth, most of it lands with a thump in the earthly domain.
Because electronic information seems invisible, we underestimate the resources it takes to keep it all alive. The data centers dotting the globe, colloquially known as “server farms,” are major power users with considerable carbon footprints. Such huge clusters of servers not only require power to run but must also be cooled. In the United States, it’s estimated that server farms, which house Internet, business and telecommunications systems and store the bulk of our data, consume close to 3 percent of our national power supply. Worldwide, they use more power annually than Sweden."
---------------------------------------------------
The best of geology and earth science on the web:
http://www.all-geo.org/
----------------------------------------

Postcards from the recession: Got knocked down, got up, and then got better
Though I wasn't a voluntary casuality, the truth is, I live in a happier place now.
By Ann Brenoff
March 13, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brenoff-recession-20110313,0,6962977.story
--------------------------------------------

Conjuring the desert
Spirituality and politics, stillness and violence -- all meet in the 'land of little rain.'
Every Wednesday afternoon, my colleague Douglas Burton-Christie and I try to conjure the desert in a classroom at Loyola Marymount University. We are both bona fide desert rats, but we come to the "land of little rain," as Mary Austin once called it, from very different places as we teach an interdisciplinary seminar called Into the Desert.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-martinez-desert-20110313,0,7700063.story

and now, on to some photography.....

(photoshop sketch above)
The petroglyph was found in Red Rock Canyon, just west of Las Vegas, December 2008.
There are alotta 'Red Rock Canyon's because there's alotta red rocks out here - consult your local geologist for a better explanation - the best one I can come up with is that this land has always been in transformation, for millions of years, including a few massive eruptions from Yellowstone, that covered the land for many hundreds of square miles, with ejecta/lava/etc.
The Mississippi river *flowed backward* in the great 1812 earthquake!
Buy yourself some John McPhee books - There's a series about North American geology, the formation of the continent - 'In suspect terrain', 'Basin & Range', 'Rising from the plains' and 'Assembling California'.

Anyway.... this glyph was carved on a rock about as big as a VW van, on the way to a tinjaha (sic?) which is a place water collects, and native peoples would obviously be drawn to. I watched many people waltz right by this, didn't notice a thing.

Stupid modern people! we notice so little of what is staring us in the face!
The human figure means ' "the people" are here'... I think. The figure is much the same as a 'glyph on the wall below White House ruins, in Canyon de Chelly.
What more would you need to know?
But now that the original artist's culture is long gone, maybe it could be pointing elsewhere...?

(darkroom prints above)
This quirky cloud seemed to be just right, I shot it at least 15 years ago, from my apt. rooftop deck in SF. It's kind of like a comet, with a head and tail.. but a soft slow moving, earthly one.
Maybe it's a modern spin on things, what with 'the cloud' taking on a new meaning these days.
In my sketch, i wondered if there were a horizon on sorts in there somewhere. The one i added to the sketch was a place-marker, the light is coming from the wrong direction.

I did the first 2 prints w/ just the glyph and the sky, the third w/ a bit of 'land' (barely discernible) in between the glyph and sky.. and the fourth/last with a much better 'horizon', some Joshua Tree rocks.
The dodging and burning on this one is pretty obvious, i shouldn't have to explain it much. It isn't a truly horizontal thing, but not far off.
What does the image mean? Hhmmm.. good question. Since the arrow points to what seems to be the leading edge of the cloud, and clouds are obviously temporary and insubstansial things, maybe what it all means is 'whatever it all means, i can point you to, but it is, was, and always will be transitory, elusive..
You better enjoy, take it in, while you can. In an hour, a day it will be gone. Follow this hint while you can!'

I don't usually try to explain my images, even to myself, not to mention anyone else. I wrote a statement 25 years ago:
".... Many of the pictures just seem to 'happen', because the individual negatives are 'looking' for each other. I'm just a chaperone, and a really loose one at that...."
Still true today. I try to stick w/ whatever immediate impulse inspired me. I'm not quite 100% in the "First thought, best thought" school... but it's never far from my mind.
And everything digital has made me acutely aware of the 'tweak things to death' impulse.
I also remain steadfastly adherent to the idea that a montage image is not necessarily about technique in blending things together, it's about the choice of images you use, and which ones you choose to 'montage' together. That one takes a while (and then some) to work out.

One thing I have started to do is tweak the prints in Photoshop, to refine them a bit. There's a difference between the values of the top and the bottom, here.. which I could fix very easily in the darkroom, printing from a copy neg (4x5, which I used to do all the time). I definitely don't 'remake' the composition, I only tweak values ('dodging and burning').

Larger images at:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/GlyphDirections/index.html

So what happened to the digital part of this blog?

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 18:41:00 +0000

Seems like the digital part got lost, you say? Yes, it definitely has been somewhat 'lost' .. What can I say?..not that inspired.. I've been working for many months on some 60+ digital files that are.... nice, interesting... but nothing sizzles the way darkroom does for me. But in the last few weeks, I went back over them again, and there emerged a few that I managed to find the icing to put on the cake, so to speak. Could I find more 'icing' for the cake?...perhaps.

But first! :-)... the 'whatever catches my eye' file.

Why We Travel
“Don’t go there,” the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger wagger says of many a distant place. I have heard it my whole traveling life, and in almost every case it was bad advice.
By PAUL THEROUX
Published: April 1, 2011
http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/travel/03Cover.html
--------------------------------------
A Guide to Entice Heads Into the Clouds
Gavin Pretor-Pinney confronts his new book’s major problem right up front. “You might well think,” he writes, “that cloud collecting sounds like a ridiculous idea.”
“The Cloud Collector’s Handbook,” published by Chronicle Books, is a serious yet charming field guide to clouds.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29clouds.html?_r=1
Published: March 28, 2011
By Cornelia Dean
-----------------------------------------
Several interesting articles about the new media in The Atlantic Monthly, April 2011:
Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media
By James Fallows
"Everyone from President Obama to Ted Koppel is bemoaning a decline in journalistic substance, seriousness, and sense of proportion. But the author, a longtime advocate of these values, takes a journey through the digital-media world and concludes there isn’t any point in defending the old ways. Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future."
"We have created a technolgy that has wonderful potential, but increases our ability to lie to ourselves and forget it is a lie."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/learning-to-love-the-shallow-divisive-unreliable-new-media/8415/
------------------------------------------------
A Vaster Wasteland
"Fifty years after his landmark speech declaring television programming a 'vast wasteland', the author surveys the reshaped media landscape and lays out a plan to keep television and the Internet vibrant, democratic forces for the next half century."
By Newton N. Minow
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/a-vaster-wasteland/8418/
--------------------------------
Suit over purported Ansel Adams negatives settled
SAN FRANCISCO – A California man has agreed not to use Ansel Adams' name to sell posters and other merchandise connected to dozens of glass negatives he bought at a garage sale and claimed were the renowned nature photographer's work.
"I want to share this work with as many people as possible," he said in a statement. "I think that the public will appreciate these stunning images."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110315/ap_on_re_us/us_ansel_adams_lost_work
Glad to see this has been resolved, highly in favor of AA's trust.
I don't think the images are stunning, I think Mr. Rick Norsigian is full of it, and should be relegated to obscurity.

---------------------------------
SF residents learn to coexist with urban coyotes
Wildlife researchers estimate that about a dozen coyotes live in San Francisco, with the first sighting in decades reported in 2001 in the Presidio, a federal park and residential neighborhood located on the city's northern tip.
The coyotes' ability to adapt to life in the country's second-most densely populated major city has intrigued experts and provoked even far-fetched theories about how they came to set up residence in a city surrounded by water on three sides.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110313/ap_on_re_us/us_san_francisco_urban_coyotes
'It's about time' on this one, quit calling coyotes villains.
All they want to do is eat, and they are not interested in messing w/ humans.
A great comment to this article:
"I keep finding these empty boxes from Acme Products.....Flying suit, complete with cape?....Rocket-powered shoes?....Giant rubber band?"

Yep, it's wiley coyote and the roadrunner!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUq9hynzCVo

and another comment:

"There's a lot more dangerous things in San Francisco than coyotes"

Ain't that the truth!!

--------------------------------------
Joshua Trees Losing Ground, Fast
By Gretchen Weber
March 24, 2011 | 3:58 PM
http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2011/03/24/joshua-trees-losing-ground-fast

-----------------------------------

FEBRUARY 26, 2011

All Hail ... Analog?
When it comes to the quality of photos and music, the digital revolution may be failing us.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160300649048270.html#ixzz1GiM9gHZ8
---------------------------------

Onward, to those digital montage images. Even though they might be... uh... 'failing us'...

I am always working on themes that I started on a long time ago.

I think everyone has some themes of one sort or another that they keep working on. Here's a darkroom print from 17+ years ago, that got one particular theme started:

I like... the beach, the sand, all that washes up.... & the skies. Mother nature puts on a great show, 24/7/365.

(If you're in the mood, here's a nice slide show of shells:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/07/12/science/071210Shells.html

My mind works the same way as with darkroom montage - it ain't gonna change.
(If I was 30 y.o., i would worry about my 'attitude'.. but at almost 60? I don't give a flying f*** anymore.)
But I do find myself wandering off this beaten track, as you can see below...

Here's 10 of my latest digital montage efforts, you can see the images and download a small PSD file to see how they work, at:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/WorkingOnThemes/index.html

Next entry, definitely darkroom :-)

Driftwood Face

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:11:00 +0000

Here's the image I'll discuss...
But first, from the 'whatever catches my eye' file, which is really fat these days - an old saying goes: 'may you live in interesting times!'... and we definitely, definitely do, don't we?

I am sure we are all watching the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
There's no words anyone can come up with that mean diddly when something like this happens, I'm not gonna even try. I sit here typing a few miles away from the San Andreas fault - California is often cited as the place where 'the big one' is overdue, and we may well slide into the Pacific Ocean. I think that's a crazy apocalyptic fantasy, probably cooked up by easterners who envy our hedonistic ways ;-)
The biggest quake in recorded US history was in... Missouri!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Earthquake
Put that in your bong and smoke it!

As for the Middle East? Who knew an angry Tunisian fruit vendor could inspire such events??
Fareed Zakaria (ABC News) says the Arab world is breaking out from centuries of foreign domination. "Buckle your seat belts. You're watching history in the making," he says.
I sure hope so. They totally deserve to 'break out'!
( I have also read at least one other columnist swiping Fareed's line 'Buckle your seat belts...!')

There is a common connection here - any 'power' that is pent up over time (be it tectonic plates, or popular discontent) will eventually be unleashed, no two ways about it.

I read something very interesting, VERY inspiring at the end of an article in The New Yorker magazine:

Letter from Cairo - On the Square
Were the Egyptian protesters right to trust the military?
by Wendell Steavenson - February 28, 2011
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/28/110228fa_fact_steavenson
The last sentence in the article reads:
'Many people celebrating said that there could never be another dictator now that the public had found its political voice. “We know the way to Tahrir Square,” one told me.'
(In arabic, 'tahrir' means 'liberation'.)
I suspect that most regular people, all over the world, they 'know the way to tahrir square.'

------------------------------------
Women of the revolution
Egyptian women describe the spirit of Tahrir and their hope that the equality they found there will live on.

Fatma Naib - Last Modified: 19 Feb 2011 12:11 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/02/2011217134411934738.html
Bookmark this: http://english.aljazeera.net
You need to install RealPlayer to stream the broadcast - do it, well worth it, even though they haven't worked out the 'buffering' thing as well as they might be able to.
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Lawsuit alleges solar projects would harm sacred Native American sites
Native American group and its allies sue to stop six solar facilities from being built in the Southern California desert, arguing that they would affect treasured geoglyphs, burial sites and relics.
By Phil Willon and Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times
February 24, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-solar-suit-20110224,0,539145.story
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The Medium - Magic and Loss - Published: February 18, 2011
By Virginia Heffernan
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/magazine/20FOB-Medium-t.html?ref=magazine
"The magic of the Internet — the recession of the material world in favor of a world of ideas — is not working for everyone. In essence, we are missing something very worthwhile and identity-forming from our predigital lives. Is it a handwritten letter? Is it an analog phone call? Is it a quality of celluloid film, a multivolume encyclopedia or a leatherbound datebook? Is it a way of thinking or being or even falling in love?"
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Diagnosing the Digital Revolution
Why it's so hard to tell whether it's really changing us.
By Alison GopnikPosted Monday, Feb. 7, 2011, at 6:51 AM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2283467/
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The 'Daily Dish', on SF Gate.com, 2/23/11:
George Clooney says no political career because of sex, drugs.
George Clooney says, "(I'd) start from the beginning by saying, 'I did it all. I drank the bong water. Now let's talk about issues."

That's gonna be my campaign slogan: 'I drank the bong water.'"
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/dailydish/detail?entry_id=83656
George, you would definitely get my vote!

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This one I would expect to show up at Rolling Stone - the making of 'fuzz' tone, but here it is in The Atlantic:
(It's well worth the click, there are some great audio clips.)
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/50-years-of-making-fuzz-the-sound-that-defines-rock-n-roll/71959/

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House Proud - A Glow in the Desert

Ever thought about living "off the grid?" ..Well here's a guy who did just that, in west Texas. Don't miss the slide show/accompanying photos!
Published: March 9, 2011 - By Penelope Green
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/garden/10texas.html?_r=1&src=dayp
Photo by Tony Cenicola/NYTimes

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On to some photography/photomontage....

Here's the driftwood face - photoshop sketch on the left, darkroom print on the right
One of things that not having a travel budget of any kind (a once a year/7 day road trip! - 25 or 30 rolls of film!... and a few gigabytes of digital pix!... & a few weekend car rentals) is... it forces me to dig back into the negatives, digital pix, stuff I have already done, and see what else I can come up with.
"Life hands you a lemon? make lemonade!". It's been working out pretty well. :-)

I like this 'totem face' guy - I shot this on a trip to Oregon in 2003, if you ever get a chance to drive the coastal hiway (101) in southern Oregon, from the Umqua Dunes, south to CA, do it. These places are so cut off from most of the world by mountains, it's like the rest of everything doesn't even exist.
The totem face was shot somewhere along the way, it was in front of a defunct real estate company, a very clean, clear easy shot, one that I have gotten a good bit of mileage out of.
The driftwood was also shot somewhere along the Oregon coast, as was the sky. So it's 'all Oregon' here.
This one is mostly about textures - the striations in the driftwood.. and in the totem face...complemented by the sky. But it's even more about the 'face'!
Wouldn't you be shocked to see this piece of driftwood on the beach??
I sure would! His gaze is penetrating... his origin? who knows! Even if he's lying on his side, his stare is still penetrating.
The dodging and burning on this one? ... a good bit more free-form than usual. And much more free form than the previous blog entry "The Winding Path", in which the dodging/burning was confined to a narrow area in the middle.
This time I started from the bottom, exposing the driftwood - kept the dodging tool at an angle so as to expose more on the left side than the right.
Next came the totem face, burned in thru the 'black card w/ a circular hole in it' tool.
Finally the sky, which I think I did roughly horizontally, and overlapped what was below a good bit. I've found that I am better off overlapping more than not overlapping enough. Since I am scanning all these for any future prints, and can use Photoshop to lighten things a bit, overlapping more is better than not having enough, and having an area that's too light and doesn't have enough image to be able to adjust, either digitally, or in the darkroom w/ a copy negative.
As usual, much more at a page on my site:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/DriftwoodFace/index.html

And if you hadn't clicked the link to my 'darkroom methods' page, here's an updated version:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/Tools/index.html

What's up next? I'm not sure, I still have four new darkroom prints waiting in the wings.. and also a lot of digital montage. Unfortunately, a lot of the digital montage seems, at this point, to be half finished. I have 60+ files, only a few of which really 'sing'. But who knows what will happen with them in 3 or 4 weeks.

The Winding Path - Darkroom montage

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:53:00 +0000

First, from the 'whatever catches my eye' file:

I couldn't possibly update you, as a once a month blog, on what has been going on in the middle east.
It seems that 'people power' is rising it's most beautiful head, every day.
I watch events on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis - CNN, ABC, Aljazeera.

NONE of the prognosticaters saw this coming. I am really glad to see this happening - this part of the world has so many problems, autocratic/dictatorial governments... rampant corruption... and a youthful hip wired population that has decided it ain't gonna take shit anymore.
Maybe Pete Townshend was writing about them, many years in advance - "we won't get fooled again".
But of course the final chorus was 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss'... and i hope they do better than that.
The studio version (the best! - Keith Moon's drumming = awesome!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q

This brought to mind an old song, by Billy Joel (it may be 30 years old, but it nails the mood of today, doesn't it?)
"We didn't start the fire, it's been burning since the world's been turning"
yes, yes, YES! so true!!
(The fire was lit when Leaky's 'Lucey' stood up on two feet.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m50p-XScreM

I guess people die every day, everywhere.. but it seems like recently there's been too many really good ones leaving us.
Gary Moore died recently - he was an excellent guitar player, part of Thin Lizzy several times. Dig this!
Gary Moore - Don't Believe a Word - live
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzpMBscDNbM&feature=related

Absolutely marvelous!! "a heart is like a promise.. to be broken"

Gary Moore - 'The stumble'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0nKJFVVoYM&feature=related
This track has been recorded by a number of people - Freddie King, who wrote it, ..& Eric Clapton did a superbly tight version w/ John Mayall in the mid 60's. I think Gary smokes both of 'em.
As if that wasn't enough?....
The last track on Jimi Hendrix 'Are you Experienced' is 'Red House', which is a great way to end the album. After Jimi singlehandedly reinvents the electric guitar, you might well ask "yeah... but can this guy play the blues? Does he have roots?"... and Jimi's response is this track. Much as I love Hendrix, and have worn out vinyl, then cassettes, then CD's of his stuff, Gary gives Jimi a run for the money, so to speak, on this one.
Gary Moore doing 'Red House'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXYjEMTQRm0

If you like great drumming, click on this link - it has many great drum solos embedded. Enjoy!!!
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/photos/rolling-stone-readers-pick-best-drummers-of-all-time-20110208

A recent blog entry was about Alcatraz, and I mentioned how interesting and unique a place San Francisco is. Many great films have been shot here, including "Bullitt" w/ Steve McQueen, which has what many would call one of the best car chase scenes of all time.

The making of the famous car chase in the movie 'Bullit' - as told by the stuntman who worked w/ Steve McQueen:

http://jalopnik.com/5744523/the-real-story-of-the-chase-scene-in-bullitt

(In all the popular opinion polls of 'what's the greatest car chase scene on film, ever?' ..this one is always in the top ten, if not number one.)

If you like Steve McQueen's work (he died waaay too young!) you have just got to see the movie - 'Papillon' - an 'escape' film like no other. If you haven't seen it?... rent it, buy it, stream it.
When the ending comes?.... you will stand up and cheer, even if it's just by yourself, in your own living room.
(I sure do, every time I watch this, and I watch this every few years, just as I do 'Apocalypse Now'.)
And after you've watched this... if you haven't watched the movie 'The Great Escape' with an all star cast, including Steve M., watch that too...
(Steve does a great motorcycle attempt at escape... he fails... but the attempt is awesome, it's a classic movie scene)
RIP, Steve M.!
He had this 'presence' (on film).... even when he did next to nothing....

There's another great scene in this film - as best I remember it, it goes like this - Bullit goes shopping, at his corner convenience store, on the way back to his apt.... he goes to the frozen food section, scoops up 3 or 4 TV beef dinners... then scoops up a few chicken TV dinners... then goes to the cold beverage aisle - slaps a six pack on top of the TV dinners... heads for the cashier, and then slaps a newspaper on top of it all.
That's all he needs or wants.
Ladies? this is how 'real men' shop! No BS!
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You've probably seen something about how Jeopardy is testing artificial intelligence as a contestant..
Many people are writing about this topic, artificial(computer) intelligence vs. "the good fashioned human brain".

'The internet may connect us in unprecedented ways, and it may put more information at our fingertips than ever before. But just as it's changing how the world works, one psychiatrist says it may be irreparably altering how our personalities develop'.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/online-life-harms-civility-creates-aggressive-personality-psychiatrist/story?id=12771299

I think the internet has definitely made many people more hostile, aggressive and racist.
Go to craigslist.org, and read some of 'rants and raves' - the hostility and racism is overwhelming, at least in the sfbayarea version.
Why?? You can post something, anything, and no one can get back to you other than online. If you were to say these same things to people's faces? They want to slug you, and you would think a good bit harder about what you said, tone it down a bit. Most people like to keep all their teeth, and not pay for bridges/replacements.. do they?

Online, you can also find/connect w/ people who share whatever sick opinions you might have... but if you went to your local bar or diner, and voiced the same views?... the reaction would be much different. You could easily lose a few teeth.

On this same topic, this is well worth a read:
"Why machines will never beat the human mind"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/mind-vs-machine/8386/

Enough chatter... let's get down to some photomontage!

The one at left is my photoshop sketch... at right one of 3 darkroom prints

Just two negatives in this one... The rocks were shot in Chiracahua Park, SE Arizona, along the trail that leads down from the highest point. If you missed a previous entry that used another shot taken here, check this out:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/Monumental/chiracahua/index.html

http://www.nps.gov/chir/index.htm

The trail is spooky, to say the least - it winds thru all these various spires, and in several places, the tops of the spires have fallen and become stuck below in precarious positions. I felt like at any moment I could round a corner, enter a warp in time, and come face to face w/ an Apache.

The path at the bottom was shot at the Furnace Creek Inn ( not Furnace Creek Ranch - that's a mile or so down the road, and a different style), in Death Valley, which would remind you of the hotel on the album cover of the Eagles 'Hotel California'. It's built in the style of the grand old hotels, like what the Canadian Pacific Railroad built many years ago, and it has a small park of sorts beside it, with palm trees, lush grass, and these stone paths. It is a bizarre sight in a place as barren as DV.

http://www.hilary.com/travel/hip-furnace-creek.html

This site has a load of good DV info, if you're interested:
http://www.death.valley.national-park.com/

In my photoshop sketch, the path connected with a highlight leading off to the right, out of frame.. and it also de-empahasized conflicting things in both negatives. Easy to do in photoshop - what happens when I take it into the darkroom....?
A few of those 'conflicting details' are visible, and actually make things more mysterious - it kinda reminds me of montage work I did 15+ years ago, when I didn't know where I was going, and had open/empty spaces that I then scrambled to fill.
The shadows on the grass beside the path were cast by something... but what kind of rock would cast that kind of shadow?... I don't see anything like that in the top part of the image. I like the dissonance, it makes things interesting....:-) Technically? this is very easy, just dodging out the bottom of the Chiracahua neg, and dodging out the top of the DV/path neg. But exactly how that works out was a roll of the dice, to some degree.

The way each print worked out was a bit different, and that's just fine w/ me. I don't try to control everything to the max, I like some variation in the different exposures, and however it works out?... is how it is.
It's like jazz - free form, ya do something, and react to/run with.. the results.
I've seen plenty of articles in digital-photo magazines, that give detailed explanations of what people do to their so-called 'photos'. At certain point, this stops being 'photography'.. and becomes something else. My question to many of these 'artists' would be the same - can you take a straight, unaltered image that knocks me out?
Can you do something in an old fashioned chemical darkroom.. that knocks me out?

3 final versions, all amusing, at the very least:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/WindingPath/index.html

Much more Darkroom montage in the near future! MUCH more! :-)

"life liberty and pursuit of happiness!"

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:05:00 +0000

1/29/2011
I've railed for along time about the down sides to this new technology, and there are many... but when i see what is going on in Egypt, and watch the constant stream of twitter updates on abc.news.. and how ( egyptian) people are making some things happen that were not on any prognosticators map?
I can't help but cheer!!!
I am also listening to a collection of Mark Isham work, soundtracks to recent war related movies, that's my soundtrack to this... a very good one.
People are standing up, and some are dying....
MLK said in his speech on the Wash. DC mall many years ago, in so many words.... "life liberty and pursuit of happiness!"
"the riches of justice, the security of freedom"
http://video.yahoo.com/network/100000054?v=100768&l=8576754
if you have never watched it, watch it NOW!
The message seems to resound, and echo, across the world.... no matter how many years it's been.
...and no matter who hears it? they definitely get it!
Bob Marley said it pretty well too - "get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!"
I think many americans are watching w/ bated breath - we definitely want you to succeed! - !!! an end to the dictator!!!!

1/16 - A day trip to 'The Rock' - Alcatraz!

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:28:00 +0000

But first... the 'whatever catches my eye' file is fat!

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The Slow-Photography Movement
'What is the point of taking pictures?'
By Tim WuPosted Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011, at 10:25 AM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2279659
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Photo Enlargers Loom Like Dinosaurs of the Film Age
January 18, 2011 - by Pete Brook

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/01/photo-enlargers/

well, my Beseler 45MX has a very secure place in my bathroom... which doubles as a darkroom. Hell will freeze over before this changes....

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Mon Jan 17, 9:49 am ET
Scientists warn California could be struck by winter ‘superstorm’
by Liz Goodwin

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110117/us_yblog_thelookout/scientists-warn-california-could-be-struck-by-winter-superstorm

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Font fans may be typecast, but they love it
Alec Scott, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/11/DD0E1GOSHF.DTL#ixzz1As0BbuZ8

(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/12/DD0E1GOSHF.DTL)

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Tue Jan 4, 3:36 pm ET
Famous ‘shoe tree’ chopped down by dastardly vandals

Definitely dastardly vandalous assholes!!
'Hang 'em high', I say!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110104/us_yblog_thelookout/famous-shoe-tree-chopped-down-by-dastardly-vandals
There are a few shoe trees that haven't made headlines, and I hope they don't suffer the same fate.
They are a marvelous communal work of art, that should be left for all passerbys to enjoy - there's nothing nicer than coming upon something like this, in the middle of nowhere.
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Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You
Published: January 1, 2011 - NYTimes - By Steve Lohr
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/science/02see.html?_r=1&hp
'Despite such qualms, computer vision is moving into the mainstream. With this technological evolution, scientists predict, people will increasingly be surrounded by machines that can not only see but also reason about what they are seeing, in their own limited way...'

Watch the series of 'Terminator' films.
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AWESOME!!! If you haven't seen this, check it out!!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110103/ts_yblog_thelookout/explorers-discover-spectacular-caves-in-vietnam

If you want to see ALL the images:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/largest-cave/jenkins-text

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Once again...we have another very significant passing to think about:

R. Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps Leader, Dies at 95
Published: January 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/politics/19shriver.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp
Mr. Shriver, who scouted talent for the incoming administration — people who came to be known as “the best and the brightest” — was assigned to the task of designing the Peace Corps, which was established by executive order in March 1961.
As director, he laid the foundations for what arguably became the most lasting accomplishment of the Kennedy presidency. As the Peace Corps approaches its 50th anniversary this year, more than 200,000 Americans have served as corps volunteers in 139 countries.
"Break mirrors", Mr. Shriver advised graduating students at Yale in 1994. “Yes, indeed,” he said.
“Shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own.”
'begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own'
Yes, exactly. Thank you SS, for a life well lived.... and some excellent advice.

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This one just appeared yesterday (1/25) - what a hoot!!! I love it!
Whoever did this has a great sense of humor... and some serious boating skills, don't you think?!

Mysterious piano appears in Fla. bay:
http://news.yahoo.com/video/odd-15749658/mysterious-piano-appears-in-fla-bay-23964769
Now if Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard showed up to pound those keys?... that would be awesome, wouldn't it??

--------------------------------

Time to take a break, shake it up a bit... some dig. pix from a recent day trip...
San Francisco is a pretty unique place to live, there are so many interesting places to go for photography. I guess you could say that about many other places, too...But so far, after living here for 18+ years, I have no thoughts of moving anywhere else.
Alcatraz is in the middle of the SF Bay, 1.5 miles from the city, but that 1.5 miles is a killer, literally. The water is never more than 55 degrees, the tidal currents are treacherous.
A great place to put ... a Starbucks and Burger King?... No way - how 'bout..a prison!

Initially Alcatraz was a military prison, and eventually became a federal penitentiary, for the most hardened & incorrigible inmates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatraz_Island

You get there by buying tickets (for the boat ride) in advance, online, they are usually sold out for several days in advance, if not more.
So I got myself a ticket on 1/15 for the next day, being totally bored w/ living in front on monitor.
We'd had a whole lot of fog in recent weeks - not coastal fog, but tule (valley fog) that forms on the central valley, and works it's way out thru the delta. It's super dense, and it hadn't been clearing hardly at all. I took a chance... and it paid off - I like some good strong sunlight - just what i like! -
Sunlit hi-lites, and deep shadows! Big contrast!

The island has a lot of interesting architecture - I photographed architecture for 10 years back east ('82 - '92) and I still find it interesting.
So here's a small preview:

For more:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/Alcatraz/index.html

Got a lot more darkroom cooking... check back in, in a few weeks...
I think the first one will be this 'path'.....

If, after all this, you need a laugh?....
I couldn't possibly come up w/ anyone who could do it better than Richard Pryor!
Star Wars bar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kJkhEcQ44k

I always check the links before I post, and just checking the link?... I watched at least half of this, again. For the 20th time!
RIP, Richard. This was broadcast on SNL, so it is heading out into deep space, indefinitely.
I hope whatever aliens receive it?... are 'LMFAO' too.

On comments to the blog....

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:25:00 +0000

...and a year's end wrap-up.

Yeah, I know I wrote that the previous entry would be the last of the year, but I received a comment made about a print I did on New Year's day 2010, and figured it was perfect for N.Y. Eve, a year later.
Oh, and also some interesting & timely ('year's end') 'whatever catches my eye' file things:

December 27, 2010, 6:00 pm
Here Are the Snows of Yesteryear
By David Dunlap
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/here-are-the-snows-of-yesteryear/?hp
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Kodachrome: The Legendary Film's Last Days
The World's First Consumer Color Film was Used in 100s of Iconic Shots; After Dec. 30, It Won't Be Sold or Processed Anywhere
By Jim Axelrod Dec. 26, 2010

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/26/sunday/main7185884.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.1

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Op-Ed Columnist - NY Times
Thinking of Aretha - Published: December 24, 2010 - By Bob Herbert
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/opinion/25herbert.html?hp
"Nineteen sixty-seven was a tough year in many respects — riots, protests, an unwinnable war — but I can’t think of it without thinking of the glory of Aretha Franklin, a woman in her mid-20s, introverted and somewhat shy, who sang soul and rock ’n’ roll with the power and beauty of a heavenly choir....
So a toast or a prayer for Aretha this holiday season would be terrific — just a moment of appreciation and a wish that she continue recovering nicely."
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2010: The Year in Pictures
Bearing Witness
Published: December 23, 2010
by Michael Kamber
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, Joao Silva was a troubled high school dropout on the streets of Johannesburg. His future looked bleak until the day a friend took him along on a photo shoot. Joao fell in love with the camera.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/weekinreview/26kamber.html?hp
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The NY Times: The 10th annual year in ideas:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/19/magazine/ideas2010.html?ref=magazine#-1
For the 10th consecutive December, the magazine has chosen to look back on the past year through a distinctive prism: ideas.
Our digest of short entries refracts the light beam of human inspiration, breaking it up into its constituent colors — innovations and insights from a spectrum of fields, including economics, biology, engineering, medicine, literature, sports, music and, of course, raw-meat clothing. Happy thinking!

Personally, I really like that they do this splash page w/ typography! Well done!!! Herb Lubalin is happy!!!
What? You don't know who Herb Lubalin was??? Well, it's damn well time you found out!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Lubalin
http://www.typogabor.com/herb-lubalin/
http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1977/?id=276
http://www.linotype.com/483/herblubalin.html
http://www.itcfonts.com/Ulc/2511/HerbLubalin.htm
http://new.myfonts.com/person/Herb_Lubalin/

---------------------------------
RIP, Richard Holbrooke, a giant among men, who took on challenges that would make most others cringe... and run.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/26/magazine/2010lives.html?ref=magazine#view=richard_c__holbrooke
"Holbrooke devoted his life to public service, a notion that is now derided in many quarters. Some say his death marks the end of a Kennedy-inspired generation — and an America — that believed it could be a virtuous force in the world. I fervently disagree.
All of us have the chance to follow his example."

The photo shows a guy who is not looking at the camera, and probably not interested in his picture.
He is looking off, somewhere else, perhaps to the next big problem to solve...?
We need more people who think like he did, and 'march into the fire', and do some good things.
"All of us have a chance to follow his example" in some small way....?, by doing what we do best, to the max.
Let those be words to live by.
---------------------------------------------------
Yosemite National Park, in winter's grip
No voices, no crowds. Just Times photographer Mark Boster, a few fearless wild animals and a host of winter-in-Yosemite memories.
The skies behind majestic Half Dome in Yosemite National Park take an eerie glow as the sun sets on another beautiful winter's day. (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times)

http://www.latimes.com/travel/destinations/yosemite/
http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-yosemitewinter-20101212,0,3041116.story
_______________________________

Framework - Capturing the world through photography, video and multimedia
My New Year’s photography resolutions
http://framework.latimes.com/2010/12/27/my-photo-new-years-resolutions/
Posted By: Robert Lachman - Posted On: 12:15 a.m. | December 27, 2010
---------------------------------

And yes, the weather is treating California bad these days, but the storms do have their good moments. Above, the Golden Gate bridge
last Sunday the 26th. Yep, there's a pot of gold in the bay, not far from the north end of the bridge.
In 50 degree water, with treacherous tidal flows. Guess it'll have to stay there, untouched...

On to the comments:
I've gotten a few that are interesting, among the many Viagra URL's, and breast enlargement possibilities... these spammers spare NO one, do they? I mean spamming comments on a blog?? Please, get outta here!
From a few months ago:
'Anonymous' has left a new comment on your post:
In my "Shadows - Darkroom Print" posted 2/28-ish I included a quote you should commit to memory:
"Failure is an option, fear is not..." James Cameron

The comment: "In it something is. Thanks for an explanation. All ingenious is simple."

Yes, all 'ingenious' is many times simple (maybe it just looks simple?)... but it takes a lot of work to get there - a bit of a paradox isn't it?

"E=mc squared" is pretty simple, and explains a lot...but getting to that statement, you've got to be (an) Einstein = ingenious!

I have a saying I made up just for myself, many years ago, before photoshop, to get a handle on 'special effects', it goes like this...
"There are no rabbits! (that can be pulled out of a hat)" = it's a matter of using the available tools, VERY smartly... and..uh..ingeniously.
That's how special effects were done before computers.

I guess now that there's photoshop, you don't have to plan that way, you can 'fix it all later'... an attitude I hate.
It breeds 'sloppy'! of which I have seen a lot in recent years.
Anyway, thanks for the comment, and... take James Cameron's advice.

On 12/23 - 'Anonymous' has left a new comment on your post "A surreal hourglass" - Posted 5/2/2010.

I ended the post by wondering out loud about what the image meant:

"What does it all mean?
Well... uh.... I'll give it a try -
'Time flows forward, a torrent that knows no end, and has had no beginning - but our experience of it, is a drop, a second, at a time'.
That works for me, how about you?"

The comment I got:
"Hey great post. Thought I'm not sure I agree with you 100%. Keep em coming. Are you interested in having anyone guest post opposing views?"

I got no problem w/ publishing comments of any kind or opposing points of view, giving them their own post no less, as long as they are on topic, and polite/intelligent.
Whatever it was in the post that 'anonymous' didn't agree with? ( what this image might 'mean'?)...Sure, bring it on!

And finally:

'Anonymous' has left a new comment on the post "Darkroom - a 'silver lining' in a cloud":

"Hi there, Thanks for sharing the link - but unfortunately it seems to be down? Does anybody here at californiasilverwizard.blogspot.com have a mirror or another source?
Thanks,
John"

Dear John (what a great way to start any letter/note!),
I don't know what you're talking about - there's only one link in this post, to a page in my website, and it works just fine.
For any future comments? Please read the instructions in the right hand column, about how I much prefer comments be sent to me directly, at my yahoo.com email, and about not being anonymous, After all, if you are 'anonymous' I can't reply ( other than doing a post like this) can I? And I'm only gonna do a few (and far between) like these....

Need a bit of music?...(Don't we all!)

Hendrix - The wind cries mary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKbf5xxfaVE

Warren Zevon - back in the high life again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo3lxKrjABE&feature=related

Steve winwood:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K82nMSy-IWQ&feature=related

Happy New Year!!

'Private' - darkroom montage

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 19:45:00 +0000

First, from the 'whatever catches my eye' file...

Eye of the storm: The jaw-dropping image of an enormous 'supercell' cloud
Nat'l Geo photo contest

An incredible sky!!! ( it's the last one, # 13 of 13 )

(all rights reserved to the photographer, I am sure!)

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/The2010-National-Geographic-PhotoContest/ss/events/lf/112310natgeophoto#photoViewer=/ydownload/20101123/photos_net_web_yn/1290540476

use the 'back' arrows on this page to view all the winners - a great collection!

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1334672/Jaw-dropping-image-enormous-supercell-cloud-Glasgow-Montana.html#ixzz17xJ1LKQB

------------------------------------
The "Burritozilla" - A Monster 5-pound Burrito!!!
I like burritos, for sure - it's a meal (or two) all wrapped up in one package...but this one is awesome!
http://beta.local.yahoo.com/burritozilla-monster-5pound-burrito-turn-here?woeid=2487956
-------------------------------
Spindly Species

Wed Nov 24, 6:07 am ET
PARIS (AFP) – Scientists unveiled on Wednesday a gossamer, ghostly creature discovered in the deepest reaches of the ocean between Indonesia and the Philippines.
The squidworm, up to 9.4 centimetres (3.7 inches) in length, is far more elegant than its name would suggest.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101124/sc_afp/scienceoceansbiodiversity
----------------------------------------

Apple's Steve Wozniak:
"All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control," he said. "We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers."
"You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God," he quipped.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/12/08/steve.wozniak.computers/?hpt=Sbin

--------------------------------------------------

The Record Industry's Digital Storage Crisis
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/gear-up/blogs/November29/241172/238012
'The advent of digital technology was supposed to preserve content, including multitrack master recordings for songs and albums, forever. But when record labels have gone into their vaults to work with masters, they sometimes find that the recordings are just ... gone.
"That's the problem with digital," says Steve Webbon, head archivist of the Beggars Group, who faced that problem when he tried to reworkthe Cult's 1985 album Love. "When it goes, it's just blank." '
so.... has this made your mental wheels start spinning, w/ back up plans?
It should.
--------------------------------------------
Rock stars: World's greatest temples in stone
Hop on a tour with some of the world's most famous "rock stars," some with legacies that span thousands to even millions of years.

Thursday, December 9, 2010
photo caption:
©Yory Frenklakh
Found in Ma'an, a governorate of Jordan, Petra was established around the 6th century BC and is famous for its rock cut architecture.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/12/09/rock_star_photos_120910.DTL
You may well be familiar with some of these, but some were surprises to me, that I wasn't aware of.
Sometimes comments sections are just a bunch of idiot wackos.. but sometimes there are very valid and intelligent remarks:
'No mention of the fact that the Taliban destroyed one of the greatest examples of large scale Buddha rock statues in the history of Afghanistan?'

'How can you forget Ayers Rock (Uluru) in Australia?'

Another commenter lamented 'what about Angkor Wat??'
Good question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat
http://www.devata.org/
-------------------------------------

On to darkroom montage!

I've done a print previously, w/ this delapidated shack as the focus...
but there's nothing wrong w/ revisiting old images, and doing something new w/ them, is there?
Here's my photoshop sketch:

And here's a final darkroom print, one of 3:

I have really liked what happened w/ this montage for a very long time:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/2003_4/7_stairs.html
It's just 2 images.....blended ( if I don't say so myself!) *Purr-fectly*!
If I had wanted to 'plan' this one?... I think i would have 'thought' too much, and that might get in the way of serendipity. And 'serendipity' is a thing you should have a lot of respect for!
When it happens? get out of the way!
I took much the same approach as I did to the 'stairway' image, expose the landscape, and dodge back the center to accommodate whatever I wanted to burn in there.
I had the neg of the 'desert space' with the cones placed 'just so' - i have no idea why someone placed them there - warning anyone to 'keep out' - keep out of what, exactly? I mean... who in their right mind would wander into this space/place without being 'heads up'?? And why should these silly cones slow anyone down?
That connected w/ the sign on the shack "Private property..."
The sky in the 'cone zone' shot is dull, so I replaced it w/ a much more interesting one. And did three prints, all slightly different, all 'keepers'.
Not as surprising as the 'stairs' above, but keepers just the same.
I don't think I've ever done a piece w/ 'spot' handcoloring, but this one could use it - just a wee bit of orange on the cones :-)
As usual, If you are so inclined, proceed on to a page at my site:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/Private/index.html

That's all for this year, folks - Have a very Merry 'Christmoose'!

Monumental -photomontage

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:43:00 +0000

First, from the 'whatever catches my eye' file:
So we are some 15+ years into the effects of this thing called the internet/web... and where has it gotten us?
I would refer you an article in a recent Atlantic Monthly article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/truth-lies-here/8246/
WELL WORTH READING!

"Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said (or is famously reputed to have said)
..."we may each be entitled to our own set of opinions, but we are not entitled to our own set of facts."
Yes, indeed.
But facts and opinions seem to be seriously muddled these days - it's hard to tell which is which!
Once Sarah Palin gets on the podium?.... forget about facts, this is opinion, and BS opinion at that.

Now, on to some photography

It started with the Native American ruins shot, which was a bit more underexposed than I expected, but that turned out to be fine. (I never carry or use a light meter - I did architectural photography for 10 years, I've got a pretty good eye for the exposure, and with B&W, you a good bit of flexibility. And if I screw it up? oh well, c'est la vie!)
So if all i had was the hi-lites? that's OK. I kinda like having shadows that are close to clear film base - that means I can dodge that shadow out smoothly, with very little detail, and burn in something else overlapping into the shadow and not have conflicting textures.
Soooo what could I do with the bottom of this image, below the ruins?...
Hhmmm..... I came across this very enigmatic petroglyph, found in Joshua Tree.
A lot of petroglyphs, at least you can make some sense of them, they represent something (people, animals, etc) in some relatively clear way.
These glyphs?...... are an enigma.
I think they are older than many of the others I have encountered/photographed, and less easily 'interpreted/understood'. They are just 'symbols' of some kind. What's amazing to me is that someone, a long long time ago, made some considerable effort to 'speak'... to someone, anyone, who might come across this. In hopes of...communicating....what exactly?
I 'hear him speaking'... but I guess I don't understand. That would be asking a lot.
I feel humble and stupid. I am sure someone, way back when, was trying to SAY.. something.
And these are in a most unique location - in the hollowed portion of a stone about 12 ft tall. Whenever I am in Joshua Tree, I look at the many rock formations, and ask to no one in particular - 'How does it get like to be that(what forces created this?)??'.
( If you follow the link at the end of the post to my site, there's an opportunity to see more of the glyph rock, and some 'How does it get like to be that?' views of Joshua Tree.)

Anyway, back to the image...
To just blow in the 'glyph below the ruins wasn't spooky enough for me, I had somethin' going on, though.
So I came upon a shot made at Chircahua, in SE Arizona, that added yet another spatial twist to things - the ruins are probably 30 feet wide, the glyph is about a foot wide, and the Chiracahua landscape is probably, oh, several hundred yards wide.
This played with the sense of size and space very nicely, that is to say, you look at it, and can't resolve the sizing!
Is the glyph that huge?... Where the hell am I?? what kind of place is this??

The sky above the building ruins was pretty unremarkable... so time to blow in something better, more interesting.
I have loads of nice B&W skies... :-)
So, four negatives got into the act on this one.
There are 3 slightly varying prints (it was the sky (last exposure) that was the variation), and as usual,
larger images, and more darkroom info is at a page at my site:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/Monumental/index.html

Have a good Thanksgiving holiday, if you are in the US - may your turkey stuffing be at least half as good as my mom's was!

Stormy Skies, California style

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 02:14:00 +0000

Winter has arrived!... And I've got the skies to prove it!
But first, from the whatever catches my eye file....
The Medium - NY Times
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: October 29, 2010
Funeral for a Friend
Mourning the analog (old fashioned!) phone call
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31fob-medium-t.html?ref=magazine
--------------------------------------

12 Bizarre Sea Creatures
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/g/a/2010/08/06/hearstmaggreen649629.DTL&o=0
-----------------------------------------
Remarkable Creatures - Translating the Stories of Life Forms Etched in Stone
PUZZLE- Many of the creatures found in the fossil record from the time immediately preceding the Cambrian are so unlike modern forms that deciphering what they are and how they lived continues to challenge paleontologists.
By SEAN B. CARROLL
Published: July 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/science/27creatures.html?hpw
--------------------------------
Deep Sea Treasures: Amazing Pictures from the Census for Marine Life

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/slideshow/sea-census-5832218

This is where all the news sites are gathering their info, Check out the real deal:

http://www.coml.org/
----------------------------------

Deep-sea images reveal colorful life off Indonesia
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100826/ap_on_sc/as_indonesia_us_ocean_explorers_3

---------------------------------------

The Scales Fall
Is there any hope for our overfished oceans?
by Elizabeth Kolbert

This reviews and expands upon several recent books about the topic:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/08/02/100802crbo_books_kolbert
---------------------------

OK, now on to skies, and a bit of photography. Winter has arrived in Northern California....
No doubt about it when the sky looks like this!:

For more:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/StormyOctober/index.html
I have accentuated all of these a bit in Photoshop, with 'levels' adjustments, but that's all - I could no more create these knarly, angry, twisted cloud-scapes than I could fly to the moon!
'Mother nature' is a bitch sometimes... but she's always creative about it - it's never the same sky twice.

Fog

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 19:04:00 +0000

October 3 - Took a day trip to the Marin Headlands, not only in hopes of 'fog' (and the many curious things it can do) but also just to get out of my apt., and away from this blasted computer screen. I don't do it often enough. My hunch, for some good fog, paid off. It was well worth the 12$ bus fare!
Fog is definitely a very curious and inscrutable thing, here's a start, if you want to learn more...

The thesaurus that comes w/ my Mac OSX defines 'fog' as:
"A thick cloud of tiny water droplets suspended in the atmosphere at or near the earth's surface that obscures or restricts visibility"
"an opaque mass of something in the atmosphere"
It continues, to cover the more figurative uses of the word:
Phrases - 'in a fog' - in a state of perplexity, unable to think clearly or understand anything.
That kind of fog is well beyond anything I can comment on! - if you are experiencing it? you need to consult someone much more professional than me, a photographer!
How 'bout 'webmd.com'... or if there is such a thing: 'web-shrink.com'.

(Of course they would have to mention photographic fog, but we won't have any of that will we??
I sure hope not!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog

"Fog can form suddenly, and can dissipate just as rapidly, depending what side of the dew point the temperature is on. This phenomenon is known as flash fog."
It's no surprise to me that a number of the photos on this wiki page are of San Francisco, or California.
I have seen fog form in less than a minute - you can go from miles of visibility.. to zero... and vice versa, in no time flat. (And if you ever have to drive in CA's central valley when there is tule fog? Can you please drive at less than 80 mph??)

So I did little google searchin'....

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wfog.htm
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/jkl/?n=fog_types
(http://starryskies.com/try_this/fog.html)
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_is_fog_formed
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/clouds/fog.html
http://www.aviationweather.ws/067_Fog.php

And that's just an edited selection from the first 4 pages.. after which *I* was feeling a bit foggy.
So here's a bit of my 'foggy day' in small size.

For larger images, and a bit more commentary, as usual, a page on my website:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/LscapeDigital/MH_Sept10/index.html
'Heads up' if you are on a slow connection - It's a long page of full size images.

Other/Older fog pages:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/LscapeDigital/BLOG_MH_9_07.html
www.bobbennettphoto.net/LscapeDigital/05_07MH_Fog/index.html
www.bobbennettphoto.net/lscape6_2006/index.html
www.bobbennettphoto.net/LscapeDigital/7_09_06_MH_FOG/index.html

A few days ago I noticed an article in the LA Times - the linked image to the article was a *sweet* picture of Yosemite valley... with some fog drifting through:

Yosemite: My special place, a photographer's journal
By Mark Boster Los Angeles Times staff photographer
October 17, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/travel/destinations/yosemite/la-tr-yosemite-boster-20101017,0,7226286.story

And there's this one, just recently, probably more important than ALL the above:
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/widespread-impact-from-an-afghan-mine/?hp

------------------------------------------
Last but not least, a musical suggestion (or three) :-)

Jethro Tull - 'Nothing's easy' - 1969 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoSOuYNNXjU
Nothing's easy in 2010 either...
The more things change? the more they stay the same!
Thank you, Ian Anderson!
------------------------------
'Come rain or come shine'
Ray Charles :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVMYs3enTF8&feature=related
Billie Holiday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqECFy_qzkM&feature=related

View from a desert shadow

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:09:00 +0000

First from the 'whatever catches my eye file':
A whole lot, this time round.
Still playing with toy cameras

Posted By: Bryan Chan
Posted On: 11:05 a.m. | September 23, 2010

http://framework.latimes.com/2010/09/23/still-playing-with-toy-cameras/#/0

If this catches your attention, a place to shop these cameras is:

http://www.freestylephoto.biz/

'Lee Friedlander - America by Car'

If you don't know of Friedlander's work, it's about time you did.
http://www.whitney.org/
http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/LeeFriedlander
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2010/09/lee-friedlander-american-icon.html

While we're on the topic of photographic road trips, this one is very nicely done:
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/in-pictures-the-great-american-road-trip/

http://jenniferokeeffe.com/

Now Showing | The Graceful Dead
By Andrew Belonsky
September 9, 2010, 6:35 pm
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/now-showing-the-graceful-dead/

“People dealt with death differently in the 19th century,” says Eva Ulz, the curator of “Memento Mori: The Birth and Resurrection of Postmortem Photography” at the Merchants House Museum. “People looked forward to a reunion in heaven. Creating portraits was considered a precursor to that heavenly reunion. They shouldn’t be thought of as creepy.”

On to some 'darkroom'!!!

The second print from my most recent darkroom session was this one - 'View from a shadow'.
I'm not happy with the title, but haven't been able to come up with anything better...yet.
Got any suggestions?
The key neg. ( the view from a shadow, under a huge rock, looking out over the desert) was made in Joshua Tree. What a great place, I never get tired of it. Someday maybe I'll bump into the ghost of John Keys (one of the first guys to try and stake a claim here), or Gram Parsons.
(If you don't know who Gram Parsons was, google the name. You've probably been listening to his musical influence for many, many years.
Here's a stunning, chilling track, especially considering Gram's unfortunate demise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reGtZnzDfek&feature=related)

If you walk out to the 'Wall St. Mill'?..

..you will definitely feel like a ghost could appear at any time!
Or maybe a mountain lion. I'd much rather see a ghost!
If you'd like to see the Wall Street Mill images larger, and more of Joshua Tree:

www.californialandscapephoto.com/2009/TN_Page_JT.html

The starting point for this print? - I (re)discovered a 'sketch' I had made quite some time ago.

When I searched my contact sheets, I couldn't find the interior shot at the right. No way, no how. Best conclusion I could come to was that it was definitely something I swiped from elsewhere to do this sketch, as some sort of placeholder, 'remember this thought'.
When I sifted thru my contacts sheets, this one got the thumbs up:

It's is a shot of the captain's dining room on the 'Balclutha' ship harbored at the Hyde St. Pier/Maritime Museum in SF. Perhaps it came bubbling to the surface, so to speak, 'cause I made the trip into SF recently, to take this in again, after many years. A very interesting place.
If you are wondering something like 'this is a bit underexposed, isn't it? there's very little shadow detail!'... well, yes, you're right, and it IS intentional. All I wanted was the sky light, and if the shadow detail 'dies', fine.
I shoot for hi-lites, and let shadows fade into clear film base for a good reason - it makes it a lot easier to blend into another image if there is little shadow detail - there won't be conflicting things going on in the shadows.

Lots of interesting things happen in shadows (or darkness!), don't they?
(I don't care, nor should anyone else, what you do in the dark(ness) - hopefully that is protected by the constitution: "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness', whatever version of it you make up!)

I saw the bottom rt. corner as being a vortex of sorts, and worked with that. So I sandwiched the neg of the dining room skylight... w/ a sky.
Since this was the second print of the day, and the first one worked out so well, I felt obliged to... 'just fucking wing it'. Glad I did. So I did a couple of prints like the one above
..and for the third one? I added 'something else'....
As usual, click on the link to see much larger images, a bit more talk, and the visual conclusion - the print with 'something else'.
http://www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/FromADesertShadow/index.html
Need a musical interlude?
Check out this guitar playing,Totally awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2BOApUvFpw&feature=related
Next entry?.... Hey! some marin headlands fog, shot last weekend!

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:18:00 +0000

I've had a number of comments submitted, over the course of this blog.
I am not real good at dealing w/ all the "in's and out's of the 'blogsphere", or 'moderating' these comments in any way.
Perhaps showing up to say "thanks!" for the comments, will suffice? I hope so.
I will continue to attempt to write something intelligent, come hell or high water.
I do this in large part, because of the excellent teachers I had many years ago, at Northern Virginia Community College. They 'passed it on' and i would be relinquent not to do the same. Joyce Tennyson, Anne Salley, Bob Capps, Frank DiPerna, Tom Devlin and Michael Platt?? I love all of you, I hope i am 'continuing on' as you would wish. I've always loved the 'path' you set me on, no regrets, ever!
Thank you!!!

Darkroom - 'Edge of town 2'

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:34:00 +0000

But first, from the 'whatever catches my eye' file, this one:

It's 18 minutes long, worth every second of it. Most of you reading this are in the developed '1st world countries' - we have no idea what goes on elsewhere, but we should. This kinda makes me feel guilty, that all i can do is make pictures.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/09/05/wudunn.women.oppression/index.html?hpt=C2
Watch it! every 18 minutes worth!!!

Tens of millions of 'missing' girls
September 5, 2010 10:28 a.m. EDT

Editor's note: TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to "Ideas worth spreading," which it makes available through talks posted on its website. Author Sheryl WuDunn spoke at the TED Global conference in July in Oxford, England.
(CNN) -- Discrimination against women and girls takes a staggering toll around the world, says author Sheryl WuDunn. It leads to as many as 100 million fewer females than males in the world.
Ending the oppression of women is the great moral challenge of the 21st Century, a cause she compares to fighting slavery in the 19th century and totalitarianism in the 20th Century.
------------------------------
I don't think I should have to mention the recent Time magazine cover image, of the afghan girl w/ no nose, cut off by Taliban lunatics, but I will anyway.
A very excellent decision, to publish this. If it makes you gasp...?! ...maybe it will also make you think, and feel, a few things you didn't before?
GOOD!!! That was the point, wasn't it?
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Time magazine editorial/photo editing staff!!
Do this more often! You have the 'bully pulpit' - use it, to good ends!!!
------------------------
Now for a bit of hopefully interesting, but i must admit, compared to the above, rather inconsequential images.
I don't get into the darkroom nearly as much as I did 10 or 15 years ago.
Goddamned computer is why, I guess.
And when I do, sometimes I am 'on'... and sometimes not. Getting a bit rusty, but when everything goes right, it's marvelous, this was one of those good days.
I started by working on an image that came from a neg. taken right after the key neg. in 'Edge of town'.
(http://www.bobbennettphoto.net/art/edge.fp.html)
Here's one of the photoshop sketches that got it started, below.

It is an abandoned building facade, and in contrast to the 'edge of town' neg, it was dead on, no angling off to one side. This imposes some limitations, in that whatever it blends into must also seem similarly 'dead on', or at least I have to deal with this, somehow. I found an image taken in Joshua Tree that fit the bill, and once I did a photoshop sketch of the two together, I noticed something happening - a big shadow in the JT rocks, kind of like an ear. It seemed like something had to be going into, or coming out of this dark shadow ear. Wherever you go in the desert, no matter how remote it seems, there's always a crow.

Aha!.......So i found some birds ( actually they were gulls shot at Ocean Beach in SF, but in silhouette, who can tell the difference?)... and that's what i wanted to have coming out of the 'dark shadow ear'.
10 or 15 years ago, Ilford made an RC version of it's matte surface B&W paper, which I liked alot. The matte surface was excellent for handcoloring, and being RC, I could dry a test strip out in a few minutes, tape it to the easel in register, and build a really good 'preview' of how things were coming together. This paper is history, can't do that anymore, so now I go w/ Ilfords Matte surface Fiber paper (which doesn't dry so fast, can't dry it out, tape it down in register, like the RC paper.)....I think making the prints on fiber is the way to go, and because I love that matte surface - it scans well, and I can hand-color it if I want to.
(I have found that photo paper w/ any surface texture is a bad choice for scanning - that surface texture (pearl, luster, whatever it's called) shows up in the scan, and is impossible to get rid of. but mybe that's just because of the scanners I have at my disposal.)

And I have devised a different mode of working - I make more prints than I did before, so I can develop one or two that are 'unfinished' (but many times quite useable), to see how the image is shaping up. You can see the progression (much larger) at the usual 'at my site' link, below.

A few words about my various dodging tools, if you haven't clicked on the link in the right hand column to my 'darkroom methods' pages. Many years ago I devised a 'below the lense' filter and dodging tray... 'contraption'.
I simply add a strip or piece ( or multiple pieces, as the case may be) of black construction paper, positioned as I wish/need into the 'tray'.
Very improvised and "Rube Goldberg'-ish, but it definitely gets the job done. I can accomplish some simple dodging, and still have two hands free to do more dodging or burning.
I also set my exposure meter to 2 or 3 second intervals, and decide on a total length, and also on number of exposures for dodging/burning.
That way I can keep track of them easier, and can also switch tools when necessary.
For instance... 4 'hits'( I am 'hitting' the button, so that's what I call them.. as opposed to other kind of 'hits' ;-) ) of full exposure, plus 3 more hits dodging out this, plus 3 more hits burning in that...you get the idea, break things down into manageable chunks.)
Here's the tools:

Pretty simple, hunh? The dotted line is where i fold this over, so it becomes the simple/'straight edge' tool.
Bill Gates? Adobe? Steve Jobs? Don't even think about stealing these radical and cutting edge tools/ideas! I have lawyers that will make pit bulls look like pussycats! Patents are pending, I've already shopped Caribbean islands for sale, mine will be next to Johnny Depp's!! ;-)

Back to the print.......

Once I was happy w/ the way the building and the rocks were coming togther (50/50 combination of a straight right to left dodge, and a curved/oval dodge tool) I added the birds. I suppose one would think I would make a hardline/litho neg to burn these avian rascsals in. I'm too lazy for that, it's excess/one time use toxic chemistry, which the planet doesn't want, ...and besides it's not necessary. I use the tried and true 'black card w/ a circular hole' and burn in what I want, and I use the 'below the lense' tray to blend out any hard edges. If I expose some background, the exposure is so fast and soft it just doesn't show up much, there's no 'hard edge', things just blend together.
Are you familiar w/ the term 'reciprocity failure'? It explains some things that happen w/ film, when light levels are really low, and your light meter is basically 'lying to you' (the reciprocal relationship between shutter speed and f-stop breaks down) and you need to expose longer to compensate for the much lower light level.
Same thing works in the B&W darkroom, for the exposure of the birds.
The very slight and very short exposure of the background tone just barely shows up. The birds, a bit darker, definitely do... which is what i wanted.
No mask necessary.

So here's the progression, Prints 1 - 4, much larger:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/EdgeOfTown2/index.html

Next time round? the second part of this darkroom session, a mysterious place in the desert, the view from a hiding place, a shadow........

"Somewhere.. in the middle of nowhere..."

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:15:00 +0000

This is a diversion of sorts - some thoughts and links accumulated over the past few months.
Darkroom photo enthusiasts, I haven't lost my mind, next couple of posts will *definitely* be darkroom montage!
There's some digital images here, if you follow this all on, to my webpage.

Has this miserable economy affected you? I guess not many people reading this would say 'YES!'.
It hasn't affected me as much as many, but the drop-off in a second passive/inheritance income has reduced my travel budget to Zero! Nada! Zilch!!
So I relive my last trip, to Nevada in late 2008 by looking over, yet again, the digital/color captures frame by frame, all 600+ of them.
("Yum, yum - & don't bogart that joint, puh-leeze!")
Late one night, after looking over a lot of these, & after a few drinks, and a couple of bowls, I used a few Kb's of memory to record these thoughts.
You can 'like 'em...love 'em... or hate them...' but at least, I suggest you think about them -
how many mystics and religious savants have found wisdom or enlightenment of some sort in the desert?

Somewhere.. in the middle of nowhere, in the desert...there is something incredible to be found.
it's called 'yourself'. Just you, and nothing but you.
But the hard part is... you've got to drop 'everything else you think you know' to get there.
NO cell phone, blackberry, none of that crapola. Get out of the car, walk a mile into the landscape.

I like....
the silence, except for an occasional crow.
...the enigmatic qualities of the land - it is very dry now, but if you think about it, and look at it hard, this land has been formed by water (rain), over the passage of probably hundreds of thousands of years.
The land is soooo raw and rough, yet there are many plants and animals that happily call it home.

That's why I like the desert. It has no mercy, cuts you no slack.
Even if you are a casual observer/traveler.. it's hard to miss.
It's severity is stunning. You either 'get it' or you don't.
The people who lived here a thousand years ago...?
They apparently didn't think it was too severe - they survived just fine.
Could you?... or me?... I highly doubt it.
Most of us pass thru in gas-guzzling oil powered vehicles, oblivious to anything but...
our personal comfort, and maybe the next exit, restaurant and motel.
I must admit, that describes me much of the time, but at least I can realize what I am missing/forgoing,
by making the choices I do.
I don't expect to get any medals or gold stars on my forehead for realizing this.
I am more than a bit of a wimp, compared to people who lived here long ago.

Yeah, all 'wild & crazy thoughts', from a rather civilized suburban guy.
...."A rather civilized suburban guy" who will keep going back, to lose and regain his sanity in this crazy-ass world.

A few more images from a Nevada trip in late 2008:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/Nowhere/index.html

If you want to read about someone who is much sturdier than I am?
(That would be a certain writer, Craig Childs)
http://www.houseofrain.com/rantsandwritings.cfm

'House of rain'
http://www.houseofrain.com/bookdetail.cfm?id=1183863026528

'Secret knowledge of water'
http://www.houseofrain.com/bookdetail.cfm?id=1183863164364)))

No matter how much of the desert just northeast of LA has been consumed by development, it's pace has been greatly slowed not only by economic implosion, but by the reality of the places we attempt to civilize. - they are just too raw for modern living.

California City’s “second community” has miles and miles of mostly unpaved streets -- a ghostly monument to overreach. In the background are a park and country club.
(Photo credit:Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times / August 3, 2010)

A desert city that didn't fan out
Nathan Mendelsohn, a professor turned developer, believed California City would become the state's next metropolis. Instead it's a sleepy outpost that exists largely in the imagination.
The rest of Mendelsohn's eccentric dream unfurls to the east, some 185 square miles of mostly unpaved streets — a ghostly monument to overreach that, from above, looks like a geoglyph left by space aliens. Only Los Angeles and San Diego leave a bigger footprint in the state.

"Nature wants to take it back," said James Hanson, a California City public works employee.
Yeah, nature definitely wants it back, I suspect nature will eventually win.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cal-city-20100814,0,2325763.story

I've driven through here, once many years ago - it looked exactly like the outskirts of Phoenix, or Las Vegas. Big plans... come to nothing.

How little we know or understand., especially about people who lived here only a few thousand years ago. They seemed to have do just fine, and had the time to make some 'art' - that's what we call it, I think they would call it 'worship'.
I have found this to be the most interesting petroglyph I have stumbled upon.
The human figure seems to be related to the cracks in the rock.... or maybe not?
If you think petroglyphs are an enigma, geoglyphs are even more so.

This is the story that kicked this particular entry off, it's months old, but the header in this blog reads "no attempt to keep up w/ the frenetic pace of many blogs " - this is a leisurely and I hope well thought-out series of posts.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/02/25/peru.crash/index.html?hpt=T2
Plane crashes near Peru geoglyphs
February 25, 2010 4:30 p.m. EST

"There are more than 1,500 geoglyphs extending over 190 square miles, according to the National Geographic Society. They were constructed by the Nazca culture about 2,000 years ago.

Though they're virtually indecipherable from the ground, from the air they are clearly visible as a monkey, a killer whale, a hummingbird, a condor, a pelican among flowers, trees and geometric shapes.

The Nazca Lines are believed to have had ritual astronomical functions, according to UNESCO, which designated them a World Heritage site in 1994."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/nasca-lines-the-buried-secrets-4477/Overview

Ancient, Giant Images Found Carved Into Peru Desert
Gonzalo Castillero
October 8, 2002
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1008_021008_wire_peruglyphs.html

Ridgecrest/China Lake, CA -
"......there may be as many as 100,000 images carved into the dark volcanic canyons above the China Lake basin, some as old as 12,000 to 16,000 years.."
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/travel/escapes/18petroglyph.html

Canyon of ancient ones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpDeGsOUYZY

YouTube does a really good job of offering similar content to your choice, it shows up in the column on the right.
Here's one:

Zuni Sunrise - Newspaper Rock Canyonlands National Park Utah
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W08XL39KgU&feature=related

Ancient Aliens and UFO's - Ancient Cave Paintings
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqBssviYYY8&feature=related

No, I don't beleive much in aliens, or 2012 prophecies, but it's amusing train of thought. Who knows?... maybe, just maybe.....
Hhmmmm...

The Prophecy of Native American Elders
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TiCBrFQUa0&feature=related
2012 Prophecy

noreply@blogger.com (CaliforniaSilverwizard) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:06:00 +0000

From the 'whatever catches me eye' file, I see the news about the gulf oil spill, who could possibly miss it? It will haunt us for decades, I suspect.
Let's try and look on the bright side, marvel at what still exists.... ( in keeping with the blog title 'the beach blog'....)

Deep-sea discoveries off Canada's coast
By Derrick Ho, Special to CNN
July 22, 2010 8:34 a.m. EDT
Using high-tech robotic cameras, a team of scientists is getting a rare first glimpse of marine life in the North Atlantic that could shed light on the ocean's ecosystem and climate to as far back as 1,000 years.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/07/21/canada.marine.life/index.html?hpt=C2
-------------------------

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australian scientists have discovered bizarre prehistoric sea life hundreds of kilometres below the Great Barrier Reef, in an unprecedented mission to document species under threat from ocean warming.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100715/sc_afp/australiaenvironmentcoralreef
More images:
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/15/scientists-discover-bizarre-deep-sea-creatures/?hpt=C2

Say What?! Whales Shout over Noise Pollution
Just like a New Yorker shouting to be heard in a crowded deli, whales must shout to be heard in ever noisier ocean waters, a new study suggests.

Wed Jul 7, 4:10 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100707/sc_livescience/saywhatwhalesshoutovernoisepollution

Coral find in sanctuaries proves hotbed of life
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Thirty-five miles west of the Point Reyes Lighthouse, and 10,000 feet beneath the ocean surface, scientists steering a robot submersible have found beds of cold-water corals that provide a unique habitat for countless sea creatures, from brittle stars to octopus and rockfish.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/26/MNNN1E5577.DTL

Tuna’s End
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27Tuna-t.html?hpw

A few other things worth noting:
America's Strangest Roadside Attractions
These odd and quirky attractions lure in motorists to out-of-the sights.
http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/48HoursIn/slideshow/photos-americas-best-roadside-attractions-10322244

As for things digital???........
The Web Means the End of Forgetting
By JEFFREY ROSEN
Published: July 19, 2010
'The problem she faced is.......... how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?ref=magazine
----------------------------
Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes
By ROB WALKER
Published: July 19, 2010 - The New York Times
Progress toward perfection has genuine skeptics, who insist on sticking with marginalized tools. The newer thing may seem less flawed or simply easier, such traditionalists insist, but it sacrifices warmth, soul, depth, personality, chance and the human touch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25fob-consumed-t.html?ref=magazine

On to some photography!

A Cryptic Signpost

This is one of those 'don't know where it came from, why I did it, don't have a clue what it means' images.
But I did it anyway. In fact that's the very best reason to definitely do a print.

I love the signpost, at the left, directing one towards...'who the f*** knows where', since the letters are rather illegible, and it points to...nothing? - maybe that's what I liked about it. I found the collection of stuff at the right along a road somewhere in the desert, at an 'L' turn in an otherwise straight as an arrow road.
On one side was the (aptly named) "No Gotta Ranch", on the other side, a place that shoulda been named "No Gotta Ranch #2", but wasn't named or described at all, no 'shingle' hung.
And probably not interested in visitors - that's why people move here.
What there was on display were racks of various old collected things, lanterns, mining equipment, bottles, etc... and also, in a corral by the roadside a couple of friendly donkeys (or burros? I don't know the difference ) ...who heard me stop, and came to the gate to say 'hello'.
I returned the hello (all equines have the most marvelously velvety soft noses(snouts?!), don't they?
& shot a frame of the 'collectibles'.
With a name like 'no gotta ranch' I figured the owners were not much for strangers pointing cameras in their direction, so I worked fast, and moved on.
For whatever reason, this image made sense, to be somewhere in the distance.
The print is, as always, technically easy at first glance, but the subtleties of how things get burned and dodged is where it either succeeds or fails.
There were 3 final prints, all interesting in their own ways, the differences were subtle, to be sure.

This is one those images that whispered 'hand-color me'.
Why do some images 'ask' to be hand-colored, and some not?
Maybe the B&W image is still a bit too ambiguous?... not that I have a problem with that, but perhaps viewers may.
One thing I have learned from years of working w/ images and seeing how people react to them, and what they buy, is that too many people want something that isn't too challenging, and looks good over the couch. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public, did they?

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/Desert_Directions/index.html