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.

Darkroom - "Spinning World" - improvising, as usual

Last darkroom day of my year-end 2012 darkroom binge, I did an image that had been haunting me for a while, but it was the sky that wasn't quite right. The basic part was a shot made in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada.
I walked past it on my way in to the canyon, and didn't 'see' it...
but on my way out, it knocked me in the head, like a 2x4 - the reflection of the landscape in the water, that's the key to this one.
I shot an entire roll on this one, on my Pentax 6x7, this is just part of it:

I had done PSD sketches of this one... and had overlaid an image of a wheel, a neg taken at the end of the trip:

 

Funny how whatever i take on any particular trip just kind of 'finds a place' w/ other images, on the same trip. Is it because it is... 'the same trip'?

As usual, when i got down to printing, the sketch was just a starting point. I exposed the landscape first, dodging out the blank sky & some of the distant rockscape, and holding back the water at the bottom a bit. Then I added a much more interesting sky, both top and bottom, and developed one copy of that, I had 2 more sheets left.

So I added the 'wheel', once again exposing top and bottom one at a time.

 

So it's 5 exposures all together. Took less than 2 hours, when i get goin', i really bang it out, not much hesitation.

I was recently featured at a site called 'Analog Advocates', the interview has a good bit to say about my process if you're interested:
http://www.analogadvocates.com/page/bob-bennett

The site itself is pretty interesting, guess alotta people haven't given up on film and it's many possibilities.
http://www.analogadvocates.com/

In the 'whatever catches my eye' file this month, 2 items, one very amusing:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/10/world/how-to-be-a-photographer/index.html?hpt=hp_bn14

And one, very thought provoking:

The Susan Sontag Guide to Photography in the Age of Digital Culture

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/11/susan_sontag_photography_and_social_networking.html

Happy shooting & printing, to one and all!