A Link you won't find on the internet

This one illustrates several things about montage work that i have been noticing, increasingly, over 30 years, and that i must impress on any reader, anyone trying to do this kind of work.

#1 - it's not just about darkroom technique, (or photoshop tricks if you're working digitally), you have to have the basic building blocks (images!) first.
And not just any images, but images that are ... right, for what you want to build.

I don't know about anyone else, but the first step to any of my montage images is always...'being there' to take something that tickles my 'sixth sense' to begin with. I don't know what the trigger is for this sixth sense, i just know it when i see it. I just walk, i see something, and i am reaching for camera, instinctively. And then i shoot... sometimes many frames, a whole roll, of any situation.

#2 - Sifting thru all these images.... not just physically going over/looking at... the contact sheets, but also storing them in this strange thing, this 'cerebral cuisinart', we call a 'brain'... and letting dreams do their work. As i am drifting off to sleep, i see things...and as i wake up, i see... more things....not just my alarm clock either.
The brain ( or should i say 'the mind'?) works in ways we can't possibly understand... but can definitely appreciate.

That's how this one came about, here's the P'shop sketch, above.

The hole in the rock at Joshua Tree (at the top) was shot many (15?) years ago. And i shot a full roll of this situation. Just as the native american who made the glyphs surrounding the hole, i saw it as a magical place. (Click on the link at the bottom to a page on my site to see much more of this place.)

The big 'link' was found in the Marin Headlands just a few years ago, a remnant of military activity/building that ceased 40 or so years ago, and has been left to decay. I shot one frame....Sometimes?...one frame is..all that is needed.

This one just 'landed in my head', w/ no warning.
The concept is rather clear, isn't it? The hole is an escape, the single link is... being bound, chained. Perhaps this montage poses the choice, the challenge, 'whether will you go'?

The bird emphazies the freedom of the opening.

The dodging of the two frames is a bit tricky, gotta get it just right, i like the way the chain link bleeds into the hole, just barely - they are apart/different... but strangely attached, locked together.
Here's the final print:

As usual, larger images at:

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

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The 'whatever catches my eye' file this month:


http://framework.latimes.com/2013/01/23/behind-the-lens-star-trail-time-lapse-over-death-valley/
Gavin Heffernan - Sunchaser Pictures

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Framework
Capturing the world through photography, video and multimedia

http://framework.latimes.com/2012/06/05/reframed-in-conversation-with-fine-art-photographer-mitch-dobrowner/#/0

Awesome skies!!! Love it!!

http://www.kopeikingallery.com/artists/view/mitch-dobrowner

http://www.mitchdobrowner.com/
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http://noahpurifoy.com/

click on 'joshua tree outdoor museum'
the navigation in this site is a bit bewildering to me... but what i see is very nice!
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http://www.galletameadows.com/
click on the 'photo gallery' link. You will not be disappointed.

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Codex: Fair celebrates fine art of books
HOME & GARDEN Foundation focuses on handcrafted tomes, not just words on screens
Nancy Davis Kho
Updated 3:02 am, Wednesday, February 6, 2013
As far as Berkeley fine-art printer Peter Koch is concerned, the rising popularity of e-readers has nothing to do with books.

"The future of the book is assured," says Koch, who with his wife, Susan Filter, founded the Codex Foundation to preserve and promote the handmade book as a work of art.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Codex-Fair-celebrates-fine-art-of-books-4252956.php#ixzz2KAem4Uii

http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Codex-Fair-celebrates-fine-art-of-books-4252956.php

Contemplating mortality?

 Here's the sketch:

My darkroom notes:

"...started - 9:15, finished second of 2 prints of this one at 10:48.

Did just 3 step tests for the exposure on the 3 negs, as a half sheet.
The first final was really nice, a little bit light, needed more sky, but still quite presentable.
Did 1 more, lookin' even better.

The negatives/film:

1- Kern River gorge, btm.

2 - At the top, small bas-relief sculpture of the man and the skull,  from someplace in downtown SF, i don't remember where, on the front of some building.

3 - Sky from Point Reyes/ Limantour spit.

This one was rather premeditated, and followed my P'shop sketch, a good place to start, get 'warmed up'.. so to speak.
The image at the bottom of the Kern River gorge has always had a rather 'pregnant' quality to me. You are looking at a space that is lit from the side, out of view... like there is something happening around the corner, but it very much affects you, or will soon. The road leads down from Lake Isabella, California...follows this gorge, and empties you out into the Central Valley and Bakersfield. In another few minutes the mist turns into thick fog, no sunlight at all. Most of the time, the world seems to frown on me... but once in a while?... I get lucky.
The neg i used in the sketch? i used another one for the print, the  stream/water... and the road ( all of which lead 'down and forward') were more evident, contributing to the idea of the flow of time, always forward, onward.

The stone carving is of a naked man holding a skull, with some 'bottles' (presumably 'medicinal') behind/to the right of him. So... he is contemplating what is around the corner? The skull?? Death?

All however many billion of us there are on the planet, we share 2 things: we get born, we get to die, it is inevitable. (This should 'bond' us more than any of our many differences seem to divide us, but it doesn't seem to work out that way.)
So this guy is contemplating... the inevitability of death?

Printing this one brings up something i have noticed many times before that one would normally associate w/ shooting film. There is a thing called 'reciprocity failure' which means that as the light gets really low, it takes much longer of an exposure time than one would figure following the usual rules. I shot architecture for 10 years and one shot that architects love happens at dusk, when the lights in a building or home are on, but the exterior light is much darker, making the subject glow very nicely. Thanks to reciprocity failure, the quality of the color shifts, to otherworldly colors, oranges, reds, etc.

How this applies to this print/anything 'darkroom'?...
I want the figure sculpture to show up, but feel like it is floating in the distance/clouds withOUT the square dark border in the negative. So i burn in the figure thru my standard 'circular hole in black paper' tool, keeping the tool moving all the time. I can see as i am doing the exposures that i actually expose that border in the process of exposing what's right next to it, but the exposure is so weak, and quick, it doesn't show up. A 'reciprocity failure' of sorts. What little of it does, i can finesse/ retouch w/ standard spotting tools.

The order in which I expose the negs is important, it goes like this: landscape first, sky second, and then the figure last, so i can adjust the figure as needed - this is the part that is important to be able to 'exercise flexibility' with.

The final print:

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

http:www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2012/Mortality/index.html

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

http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Unphotographable-at-Fraenkel-Gallery-4162466.php
http://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/the-unphotographable

The Slate photoblog = 'Behold'... is excellent:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/01/01/david_keochkerian_surreal_landscapes_through_infrared_photography_photos.html

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2012/12/28/katrin_korfmann_arial_photography_blends_thousands_of_images_from_above.html

I'm an old type lover, from way back, so this one definitely caught my eye:

Fonts of Inspiration
A book for the typography nerds we’ve all become.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/01/stephen_coles_the_anatomy_of_type_reviewed.html

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Many years ago, i passed by a place in the So. Cal. desert done by this old geezer who claimed he was on his 8th wife.
The stuff he did was magical....

It is now gone, but someone else is doing something similarly marvelous:

Assembly Required: The Desert Cure
Posted in 'The State We're In'

by Rubén Martínez

From Boom Summer 2012, Vol. 2, No. 2

http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2012/09/assembly-required-the-desert-cure/

"Shipwrecked", during the Sawtooth Complex Fire, 2006. Photograph by Noah Garcia-Brown.

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In 1992 I bought a book, "Secrets from the center of the world" - by Joy Harjo, photos by Steven Strom. It is only 52 pages, 6x7". I don't hang on to much 'stuff', but this is one book I love to be able to pull off the shelf and read from time to time, to center myself in what's become a crazy world. Joy's blog is interesting. Then again, it's sometimes downright searing, for me at least.

http://www.joyharjo.com/Blog.html

A recent entry goes like this:

"I have tried to write everything in one place, to keep it organized. Like, dreams in this notebook, poems in this one, notes for poems, story notes, play notes. But everything runs wild. And for me, all of these forms overlap. Yet, I find the material from these sources eventually coalesce in ways that I cannot imagine as I am jotting things down."

I feel like that alot too.

".... material from these (my various photographic) sources eventually coalesce in ways that I cannot imagine"

Yes, many times i see them in dreams.

Perhaps image making... in fact much creative work, is like 'stone soup'.

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

Here's the old story:

"Some travellers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travellers. Then the travellers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travellers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful, although it still needs a little bit of garnish to improve the flavour, which they are missing. The villager does not mind parting with a few carrots to help them out, so that gets added to the soup. Another villager walks by......"

...and so it goes on from there, on.....