Monday, November 18, 2013

Oasis - kinda safe... kinda not safe..

This one is kinda safe, and kinda not safe, at the same time.
The top part is a sandwich, which I've started using a lot lately. It's some mountains in Nevada sandwiched w/ a cactus of some sort.

Here's the land...

 ...and the cactus.

I've always been a 'hi-lite' shooter, that is to say I expose for hi-lites, to hell w/ shadows, if they fall into clear film base/nothingness, that's fine by me. And the cactus was shot that way, and worked fine for being that way.
I keep seeing interesting things happen when 2 images are sandwiched, and one or both are thin(just for hi-lites) negs. You can't see it in the full image on the web, here's a detail:

So this sandwich was the first exposure, at the top.


The bottom part is something I shot at the Jack London State Historical Park in Northern California.
The ranch JL built was marvelous, this is a shot of the Koi pool, with a bench for some serious thinking.
I added the bench and Koi pool, second exposure.



(And the Koi fish? They ain't so stupid, we are seeing more and more examples of this all the time. When I came to the edge of the pool, they noticed me, and gathered, expecting food.
In the last week alone, I have read stories in the media about elk playing on a trampoline, a Orca that had become beached letting humans push it back into the water. It would normally attack anything it deemed a threat, but it knew it was in trouble, sensed the humans would help, and allowed them to do so.
And the German Shepard that suddenly left it's owner's side while on a walk, trotted over to a bundle under a tree, and wouldn't return. When the owner went to investigate, he discovered a baby was wrapped up in the bundle.)


Print # 1 (above) looked pretty good, so I did something i have done before, and i suggest you try it too - if print #1 looks pretty good? it's time to improvise! I did the last two prints w/ the bench/koi pool at smaller and smaller sizes.
The cactus starts as being very oversized, and gets larger, and even larger. This plant is maybe waist high, never seen one any larger than that, it's shot from down low to separate it from any background.

For some reason, this one felt like it could use some color, so first I did details w/ watercolor...


and then out come the cotton balls and Q-tips:


I'm still having trouble with the blue oil color, it just doesn't sink in to the paper as well as Marshall's oils did, so I scanned this, and added a blue gradient to the sky w/ Photoshop. Yeah, I am starting to do a few prints that are what I can only call 'hybrids' - they are largely analog, but get a bit of digital help at the end.

As usual, larger images on a page at my website:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2013/Oasis/index.html

Abit more about Jack London's ranch:
http://www.jacklondonpark.com/
http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=478


In the 'whatever catches my eye' file this month:

This should be enough to pique your interest:

"a 20-by-24 Polaroid camera, of which there are only eight left in operation."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/11/01/jeff_enlow_parallelograms_is_a_series_of_multiple_exposure_nude_images_shot.html
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Atlantic Monthly, November 2013
All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines


"We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?"

Good question, very interesting reading.


Nicholas Carr Oct 23 2013, 7:08 PM ET
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/

"One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it."

Read that last sentence a few times, let it sink in. You'll be glad you did.