theartdiary photography

Pears part two and then some

2012-02-18T08:12:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has followed my blog for more than a fortnight, knows of my passionate affair with pears. I have always adored pears. I paint them, I photograph them. I even eat them.

I have always felt this way. When I was a child, my great aunt used to give me pears from her tree. Most kids today probably think pears come from a supermarket. It's a funny old world.

These two shots are made in my studio. I have developed my own preset (a set of adjustment steps that group together for one click alteration to a final state) in LightRoom 4 . The top action is a sepia toning. I like how it gives a vibrant and somewhat old fashioned feeling. But it also has something of the new photography edge to it, I hope.

Pears real and imaginairy

2012-02-17T07:32:00.000-05:00

In high school art class, still life is a way to practise drawing, shading, seeing form etc. In real life, still life has graver implications.

Oh sure, it can be a pretty picture. But who ever liked an ugly picture (except perhaps for an occasional Francis Bacon!).

Pictures have to be good to look at. But in still life, there is often much more going on. Morandi used to ascribe an entire metaphysical analysis to his paintings: looking for the meaning of life.

Still life often invites the questions : "what is it?" or "what does it mean?".

In that sense, still life can be quite philosophical.

Still life...part 8

2012-02-16T07:03:00.000-05:00

One of the great things about a permanent studio is being able to evolve ideas. I can leave a few bottles on the wash stand, put some in, then take some out. I can add tools.
Yes. Tools. I want to photograph rusty old tools, large rusted nuts, as opposed to large roasted nuts, so I dropped a monkey wrench into the mix. If anyone local has rusted tools, I'd like them.

I'm not sure if it worked, but one always gets a lot of learning from failures and successes.

Hills part 2 in sepia

2012-02-15T06:22:00.000-05:00

There were sepia sections of the hills, where the land and soil supplanted sky and water. They were linear and etched farms, furrows and fields.

A fine cerulean line at the horizon

2012-02-14T08:14:00.000-05:00

Winter snow strikes with a ferocious beauty that sometimes leaves us hot and cold at once. We had a two-day blizzard that seemed to lie mostly along the lake shore. I ventured north to the hills to see the landscape. The lake is in the sometimes distance here as a fine cerulean line at the horizon.

Apples in a row...part 2

2012-02-13T07:40:00.000-05:00

The funny thing about creating a still life is evolution. I start with objects in a scene and begin fiddling: Move this to the left, move that to the right, add an apple, turn another, remove that and add this.

It is a dark, diverse dance, often going sideways, backwards, forward only to end up where I started. But I do find that changing one thing alters another, like life in that regard.

Morandi use to trace the footprint of his bottles on paper to get them back where they belonged. The papers he used as table clothes, were abstract art themselves.

It is magic, as my friend McGuirk sometimes says of creation.

The old apple lineup strikes again...

2012-02-12T08:39:00.001-05:00

I had an idea in the middle of the night that apples, red ones and green ones, would make a good still life. I must have been having a Cezanne dream. I think he used to arrange apples along a table front.

So I did one. I put a warming filter on the lens (in LightRoom, of course) and I find the result pleasing. I am not a shill for Adobe, but I am trying the LightRoom 4 beta and find it very useful, intuitive and photographic. At this point, because it is a beta, it is rather s...l..o..w.. I'm sure they will fix that later.

Pass the bottle part 7

2012-02-11T07:58:00.001-05:00

It is difficult to know how to evolve a series. One wants to avoid repetition. And yet a series should have a unifying principle; something that says it is in the family. In the case of Morandi, the changes to his paintings were sometimes so subtle that people criticized him for repetition. But he was simply trying to see what the slightest change would do.

If you have ever looked at a Cezanne still life, it is often said that moving an apple a millimetre would destroy everything, it was such a fine balance.

I am neither Cezanne nor Morandi and don't cliam to be. But I too am interested in how subtle changes alter an image.

Pass the bottle...part 6

2012-02-10T08:23:00.001-05:00

Three glass bottles hang out together on one of the north window sills in the kitchen. I have shot them many times before. I usually like the result. Over the past nine years, I have shot them in colour and black and white. They seem very old but perhaps not.

So I fetched them for the new studio and put them in with my oil pallet and a few other objects for colour contrast. I didn't like the reflections from the shiny dresser top so I went and got some other old soldiers; the slate tiles to put under them.

Then I didn't like the extensive depth of field. To get a larger f stop with less depth of focus, I folded the white sheet in two and threw it over the soft box to reduce the light. It also had the effect of making the light source bigger and softer.

And voila, more of the bottle series. I like the result.

Shirt portraits have some history it seems

2012-02-09T08:54:00.001-05:00

My shirt potrait series continues. According to Wikipedia, shirt derives from " Chemise, a French term (which today simply means shirt).the Italian word camicia, and the Spanish / Portuguese language word camisa (subsequently borrowed as kameez in Urduall deriving ultimately from the Latin camisia, itself coming from Celtic. The English called the same shirt a smock and the Irish called it a léine from Persian via Arabic and ultimately Greek, Kameez."

Clearly, shirt has a long history and is somewhat like one of those core words: bread and water and fire. Who knew? But that is the sense in which I mean shirt portraits--as a kind of covering in the metaphorical sense and revealing in the artistic sense. It stands for our persona in some way. In modern society, we choose the clothes we wear and we intend something by those choices; a statement.

Today's shirt (chemise), like yesterdays belongs to a writer/artist friend. Yesterday was all drama while today put me in mind of the poses in Seurat's painting Le Chahut, where dancers skirts fly high in the air in a gesture of joy. Felix Feneon observed that a line with three points skyward was a primordial line sign of human joy as in raising the arms in victory at a sports event.

The cat has taken to sleeping on the set and I had to push her off to get on with the photo. Above, a little snap of the photographer negotiating with the cat for real estate. The other image is the set with the large soft box light visible on the left.

Shirts and dresses

2012-02-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

Here is another in the ongoing shirt series, which may have to be renamed vestments or some equally exotic sounding name. This red dress is quite expressive.

And now for something completely different

2012-02-07T08:52:00.000-05:00

For those of you finding the bottles tedious, I'll do better tomorrow. But I just had to find out what this whole thing looked like in colour.

Passing out yet bottles?

2012-02-06T07:39:00.000-05:00

People said of Giorgio Morandi that he painted the same picture over and over again. Those people tended to dislike his work intensely. Others saw his still lifes as a life-long study in painterly subtlety. I gather Timothy Greenfield-Sanders gets the same criticism of his portraits from time to time. I adore both artists, so you know where I'm coming from on this question.

I am in the subtlety camp. And so I am exploring yet another bottle image. If you see this as the same picture over and over again, I will try to inject some frontal nudity from time to time to keep things moving forward. In fact this shot has a pretty nice pear right at the front.

Shirt tackles shirt

2012-02-05T16:14:00.000-05:00

What the heck? It's Superbowl time.

Pass the bottle part 2

2012-02-05T07:12:00.000-05:00

Here is a variation on the bottle theme. This one was shot with a strong side light flash set up on my new small dressing table. The table is a bit of an antique and I plan to shoot it too to see how its ornate front looks. But one thing at a time.

I'm also printing some of my shirts on water-colour paper. And it's Superbowl Sunday.
How is a person supposed to get anything done?

Normal lights are a delight

2012-02-04T08:46:00.001-05:00

The saga of the new studio continues. I cranked out a group of strong baroque Rembrandt-like lighting (one light to the side with strong shadows) which is probably my favourite. But my book of Kodak Portrait Lighting Techniques For Photographers has a number of other set ups, including a front light just to the right of the camera raised right to the ceiling. It is more of a beauty light which they politically incorrectly characterize as more feminine. The book is 40 years old.

I don't do politics (correctly or incorrectly. fukit. not interested. i vote. period)

But I do photograph lots and I find the beauty lighting very flattering and soft versus the strong side lighting which is moody and harsh. If the light casts a tiny shadow under the nose in this set up it is called butterfly lighting. This was shot with the canon 7d at 100 iso and it is grainless. It lacks the tonality of the larger sensor 5d but it's still pretty good.

Formal shirt with apron

2012-02-02T18:23:00.000-05:00

Here is another of the shirt series. It's a lot of fun but it is a challenge to keep coming up with new ideas.

flash 2

2012-02-02T11:19:00.000-05:00

New studio light running

2012-02-01T21:13:00.000-05:00

The strobe and soft box are installed in the new studio. I have a small north window for still life in natural light and painting. I also want to leave the big soft box set up for some still life and figure work. It is a hassle to wrestle these lights. So leaving them up is great.

Here is a portrait with one light soft box three feet away, high to the sitter's right. I had to crank the iso down to 100 and bump the exposure to f16. I used the 70-200 f4 on the 7d. Pretty sweet lens.

Pass the bottle

2012-01-31T10:24:00.000-05:00

The quote from Joseph Conrad, "pass the bottle" was one of those haunting phrases from the early school years. I remember Lord Jim, Youth, Typhoon, as tales of exotic adventure and also learned from Conrad that heroes are made in the split second one is confronted with a crisis. One acts almost on instinct and in that moment, you find out what you are really made of (as opposed to what you think or would like to be made of).

Oh bother......I ramble.

Well I am in the north studio. Modem is up. LightRoom functional and the north window light is flooding in.

Here is the very first still life with the north window in the new upstair studio. I like the quality of light. I just put the bottles randomly on the table with no particular arrangement. Pass the bottle.

Square...part 2

2012-01-30T11:36:00.000-05:00

It's hip to be square

2012-01-29T08:06:00.000-05:00

I am continuing my shirt series. I have a few ideas on how this will evolve. I'm excited.

After reading a brilliant piece by Kirk Tuck on Mike Johnston's TOP site, I realized that I have had a love affair with square all my photographic life.
No. Not that square....square format as in Rolleiflex, my all time favourite camera.

Kirk suggested to just crop. So I did.
I find square can be very in your face and strong compositionally.

The top image is my clothes and the bottom one is a kind of series homage to Steve Jobs.

Get your shirt together, man

2012-01-28T09:42:00.000-05:00

I want to do a series of figure studies but I am still looking for a woman model. In the meantime, I have begun a second series. The idea is that clothes can convey feeling without the people in them. It is sort of the obverse of people conveying meaning without the clothes on them.

It is one of those philosophical positions that is supposed to support aesthetics.

Anyway, here are the first attempts at the shirts.

Colour photos...part 2

2012-01-27T08:26:00.000-05:00

Here is another colour shot of pears. I have been trying a new skylight and I'm still not sure if I like the effect.

Some colour today

2012-01-26T08:10:00.002-05:00

I have a backlog of colour images that I haven't published yet. I'll share these over the next while.