Happy New year!

Another year has zipped past both of us, so glad we are both still right here, right now. With a number of not so good health conditions under control thanks to a fistful of prescriptions, i plan on continuing on.....to make photomontage digitally even though my bad back has forced an end to traditional darkroom.

My New Years wishes?

I hope i keep seeing things that tickle my creative nerves.
The verb to 'see' is an onion - many layers, literally the eye sends signals from the retina to the brain.
But that's only the beginning. After the seeing ends, the perception begins...

I hope i take the time to 'stop, look, listen'. Carefully.

Not just once, but often. And at great leisure.

I hope to apply whatever skills and wisdom 
i have acquired to good use.

I hope my dreams remain sweet.

And i hope i always keep this saying, or prayer as it is called, close to heart.

The Serenity Prayer is the common name for a prayer written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). The best-known form is:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer

So right now you're thinking "uh-oh, is this guy some kind of evangelical religious ranter, standing on a soap box?"

No, only "sort of".

My parents made us say the Lord's prayer before bedtime, go to church and sunday school. Age 10, i was sent to a boarding school, mildly religious - a short (10 min.) chapel service every morning, a long one on sunday, complete w/ sermon.

Did it all sink in?
"Sort of".
The essence of the teachings is right on target, but i would delete any reference to an anthropomorphic 'God' or 'Lord'.

I think Buddhism gets closer to the truth = there's no 'higher power' but perhaps there is a deeper resonance in the universe. 
And in us, all of us.

I'll end w/ a very short bit of wisdom, a Warren Zevon song lyric:

"We contemplate eternity under the vast indifference of heaven"

Enough said - Thank you Warren, you left us too soon.

It's that time of year again........

Hope you enjoy the above.

Come back next year for more!

Some Spooky stairs

This is one of the last two prints i will make in the darkroom - old age, in the form of a bad back (sciatica! Yeeoowch!) - has gotten the better of me, just can't bend over those trays or the enlarger easel and grain focuser.

There are two reasons why i am entranced by this print:

#1 - it goes to show something i have believed for a long time - montage isn't about lots of fancy darkroom tricks, at least not for me. It's about having the right negs, and finding/choosing them from amongst the thousands i have... and then composing very, very carefully. And then printing/exposing negs with some amount of care, but w/ some variation, improvisation. As an old song lyric goes 'hold on loosely, but don't let go'. Sometimes a mistake is a mistake, sometimes it's a blessing in disguise. Figuring out which is which, now that's the hard part.

The top part of this one is simply two monster sculpted rocky orbs w/ a space between them in Joshua Tree. The place is full of impossible jumbles of rock formations. 

The frame at bottom right, some machinery at the Wall St. Mill:

The legacy of one William Keys, this was his ranch:

And one notation of his handiwork, the place was lawless.

Another thing? ...they didn't have triple A out here in the early 40's.

#2 - This is the perfect image to end my darkroom work with - the stairs lead up.. and disappear into... the rocks? ..the space between them? Will i find myself between a rock and a hard place, going digital w/ my montage??

The answer is ...NO! Since the aborted-on-account-of-sciatica darkroom session, i have done over a hundred new images. Yeah, i know, my old photog. friends are saying 'what took ya so long, dummy-dude?'.

I really like the limitations darkroom imposes, they make you 'shit or go blind'. Good training. And as I've been saying for decades 'it's the most fun you can have with your clothes on'.

I took a stab at digitally coloring this one, w/ mixed results:

Digital coloring has a 'fake' quality to it sometimes, this is a good example.

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In the occasional 'whatever catches my eye' file, as i cruise towards my 66th B'day, this one sure did:

What Happens to Creativity as We Age?

Gray Matter

By ALISON GOPNIK and TOM GRIFFITHS AUG. 19, 2017, New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/opinion/sunday/what-happens-to-creativity-as-we-age.html

There's a lyric in a Jefferson Airplane (?) song, Grace Slick sings it:

'You're only as pretty as you feel'.

You're only as old as you feel, too.

Encryption machine

The basic/most important neg was shot at the 'Musee Mechanique' in SF/Cliff house, 

which was situated below the classy restaurant level:

Yes, this is the montage, sand and sky:

Cliff House over the years.

Don't know where the idea for this one came from, after all i did it many years ago, in 2008.

The basic shot is of the guts of an old fashioned player piano, you wind it up somehow, the wheels start spinning, and the perforations in the paper roll in the middle strike the keys of the piano. The clouds and the sand, above and below? Which is being recorded?... or played back as the case may be? A tantalizing enigma, come to your own conclusions.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_piano

"A player piano (also known as pianola) is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music recorded on perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls,............"

Another great item to be experienced here:

Here's more from the Musee Mechanique:

'Pick a card, any card'

Secrets

Old muscles never need a tune up

Where do ideas/images like this one come from?

Where does inspiration for images like this reside?

Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies. Perhaps it comes from pondering our recent drought... which has now reversed itself, and may well become floods this spring/summer. The west has been shaped by water, you can't help but look at the desert and not see that no matter how dry it is now, it's sloping playas were formed by water, massive amounts of it.

In this image you are looking at Mono Lake, the horizon in the middle, and what's called tufa rising from it.

Just below the horizon, a few tumbled boulders leak a bit of the water into the foreground - the lake is ...drying...?

The tumbled boulders are from Tioga Pass (above Yosemite), at 8,000+ feet elevation. What and how does anything get tossed around at that elevation??

Don't ask me, ask a geologist.

Here's the contact sheets:

And here's a digitally colored version:

I've always liked this one frame, just one person, sitting... thinking, i suppose., or hope.

A tree grows behind him, several 'rolling stones' frame him.

From the 'whatever catches my eye' file, this one deserves your attention:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2017/06/21/Report-Killer-whales-harass-fishermen-steal-fish/6011498022455/?utm_source=fp&utm_campaign=lh&utm_medium=7

Many of the other creatures we share the planet with are a lot smarter than previously given credit for.

And we are plundering the planet in more ways than you can imagine:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-running-out-of-sand

Window to soul

I've been wrestling w/ some nasty developments lately - my aging (65 YO) lower spine has gifted me w/ this thing called sciatica, which makes bending over the easel, especially to use the grain focuser, and bending over those smelly trays of chems. into a very painful experience. So it's time to go digital with montage. I never thought it would happen but now that it has? ....WTF, 'continue on, dude'.

Taking 'fun' drugs is a youthful pursuit. 

The drugs i take now stave off several not so nice conditions.

This one was done painfully, refusing to take one of the 95 or so hydrocodone pills i have. They totally wack your system. I won't join the legions of people who are addicted to this shit.

It went thru quite a metamorphosis from beginning to end.

It's a sandwich, two negs together in the enlarger neg holder, exposed at the same time.

The P'shop sketch looked pretty interesting.

Here's the window neg:

And the sky:

It needed some serious photoshop help, and got it, 'cause i really like what's going on. The window was shot somewhere in the mojave desert; the totally weird cloud, shot off my rooftop deck in SF, both many years ago. How i managed to combine such disparate elements i have no idea.

There's a saying: 'shit happens'. 

But serendipity happens too.

Is the cloud inside the room, or somewhere beyond? 

Make up your own answer. 

Mine is 'both'.

Windows are common and finite, the clouds are infinite, at 20,000... 30,000 feet.

First, the digital sketch that got me going.

Then a quick dig colorizing that had some interesting possibilities:

Then the darkroom print:

and finally the darkroom print w/ some digital color.

The key to making this work w/ the digital coloring is 'balance'.

There's a blue hue sat layer affecting the window, a selective color layer hitting up the background, and another SC layer wacking the details in the background. It's not really very complicated, you just have to have a plan that really addresses your ideas, and execute it, carefully and tastefully.

Yes, beyond 'balance'? - 'careful and tasteful' are the keywords. Always!

=============================

After many years of making darkroom photomontage (since the late 80's), and not being able to get arrested for it except for a few appearances in competitive group shows, and some assignment illustrations in various magazines ....I am designing & publishing books I make at Blurb with 'Bookify' - two of them are on Amazon, one is at Blurb.

'California Beach Trip':

On Amazon:

www.amazon.com/dp/1364579138

'Desert Trip'

On Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1367900190

This includes an image i have recently posted, titled 'Desert Time'.

'Seeking the Vibe'

On Blurb:

http://www.blurb.com/b/6834807-seeking-the-vibe

Previews of all at:

http://www.bobbennettphoto.net/BB_Books/index.html

Signing Off - the silverwizard ;-)

An old fashioned gas pump, a derelict arrow/sign

This gas pump no longer pumps, hasn't for a while. A symbol of....? I'm not sure what - power that was, but is no more, at least here at this station. 

And a big blank arrow, pointing... but to where or what?

It all started when i came upon this abandoned store, if memory serves me halfway well, in a place called Death Valley Junction, Ca. Rtes 127 & 190. These frames were taken over 20 years ago, i have been by more recently, and 'progress' has caught up with it. The abandoned gas station was an active/open store of some sort catering to tourists. I didn't even go inside. 

Here's the contact sheet from the first visit: 

I got sooo much mileage out of this, it was one lucky prescient discovery.

As for the horse shoes on the antler? I'll get back to that later.

I did numerous 'sketches' & studies of what to do with the gas pump and the direction sign:

Ended up doing this darkroom print:

The dodging/blending is very simple on this one:

Dodge out both top and bottom, starting about 1/3 way from top or bottom, ending

beyond the halfway point. 

I've always found that overlapping 2 images more than i might think would work actually works the best.

Then I hand colored it, and added a bit of digital saturation.

So maybe the image asks a question of the viewer - when you are out of gas, and got no clear direction, whaddaya do then? Punt? Give up and rollover dead?? I hope not - snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, turn a lemon into lemonade.

This not the obvious take away from this image = 'you are out of gas, and got no clear direction'.

But the best response is: Life hands you a lemon? Make lemonade!

In the very so often 'whatever catches my eye' file:

https://boomcalifornia.com/2016/05/31/the-code-of-the-desert/

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2017/01/27/week-one-of-go-to-hell-america/

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2017/01/20/the-day-democracy-died-an-epitaph/

We live in times of 'alternate facts', a president that is IMHO spinning out disgraceful behavior on a daily basis. I keep replaying this track in my mind, regularly.

Orig. studio recording:

Gimme Shelter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phxNVx3Jyq0

 "Oooo storm is threatenin' my very life today,

If i don't get some shelter yeah, i'm gonna fade away"