Cafe off the grid

No doubt you may have noticed that a lot of art photographers like shooting signposts, especially if they are old and reminiscent of past times. They also like abandoned buildings of any kind. Somehow they are very evocative, of times gone, of styles the world has passed by, and replaced with 100 ft poles beside the freeway, topped with a logo of a gas station or fast food joint, just get off at the next exit, your needs and wants will be satiated very quickly. 

I got a few of my own:

This one is my all time favorite!

Of course the straight shots can blossom into something... 'completely different', to quote Monty Python.

Here's a link you ought to click on. You can never back up enough!

It's like Bo Diddley was quoted as saying: "Whenever you negotiate any contract/commitment take a lawyer along. And get a second lawyer to keep an eye on the first one."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/smarter-living/backing-up-your-photos.html

On the NYT mission to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/01/opinion/Arthur-Gregg-Sulzberger-The-New-York-Times.html

Enuf said.
To 'The Donald?' ... eat shit....... and die.

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.

Seven sisters

If i come upon a few negs months ago, and make a montage, ...and then come back to the same negs/montage months later, unknowingly and most circuitously, and do another somewhat different montage.... am i repeating myself, wandering in the woods?

Or rather recirculating, revising, updating, improving?

This collection of rocks is called 'seven sisters', there are of course,
seven of them, all 50 ft. tall.

Here's the contact sheet:

I'm not sure, not sure i care which is which.

The color version was first, the B and W was second.

Just switching the orientation of the octillo (?)(foreground) changed everything.

Now the highlighted upper branch extends into the rock at the left in a different way, it's the same image, sort of, but not the same.

Soooo... here's 'hats off' to a second time 'round.

In the 'whatever catches my eye' file:

On Stephen Shore, and Looking for America

Nov. 9, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/t-magazine/stephen-shore-photographs-annie-proulx.html

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Maybe it's time we Homo sapiens re-evaluated our relationship with the oceans of the world.

"Prehistoric, Dinosaur-Era Shark With Insane Teeth Found Swimming Off Coast of Portugal"

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Ancient-shark-with-a-snake-head-and-300-teeth-is-12351432.php

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Mystery 'Shadow Patch' in Pacific Hasn't Moved For 1,000 Years And Scientists Finally Know Why

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mystery-apos-shadow-patch-apos-182803369.html

Please take a few moments to check out my self published books:

'California Beach Trip':

On Amazon:

www.amazon.com/dp/1364579138

'Desert Trip'

On Amazon:

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

'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

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

A digital montage that looks like darkroom

I've been doing darkroom/film montage for 3+ decades, i've developed a sixth sense for what i shoot on film, and a similar gut-level compass for finding the right two or three negs to weave together.

For the last few weeks, i've been wallowing in digital montage, color pix & symmetry, i stopped and wondered - "i am losing my B and W bearings?". 

So one Sat. AM i opened up a neg i'd made in Joshua Tree, and looked for it's 'companion', it didn't take long for one neg to step up to the plate, volunteer, and fit right in, nicely. It's sort of a sandwich in that the lower layer is 'normal' but the next layer up is on 'screen'. Yes, there are blending masks going on.

Here's the negs:

And here is the montage, it feels a whole lot like my analog darkroom work!

Making this confirmed my faith that some skills ( photomontage among them) are like riding a bike - once you learn, you never forget. Old muscles may be dormant, but only that - "dormant" - waiting to be used.

And those instincts lead me to make images that have some marvelous details - in this one, the rock formations at the top blend into the clouds on the bottom neg, most 'serendipitously' - if that is a word Webster's would accept.

Here's a screen shot of the PSD file:

The layers from the bottom up:

1 The Joshua tree 'window'

2 The Joshua tree 'window', cleaned up

3 A black gradient, making the bottom pretty much pure black

4 A levels layer, some contrast, the hi-lites got a kick in the ass

5 The Red Rock canyon landscape, with a mask layer blending out the bottom

6 One final levels adjust, that increases contrast on layer 5

This blog software won't show this at the size i loaded - if you'd like a larger view? - click on it, drag and drop it to your desktop, open that in a browser.

Several rules you should observe while building come thing like this:

• start at the bottom (obviously!) and add a layer at a time, don't change the order, that will affect the effect - yes, i am wording that correctly.

• good idea = to double click on the layer title, name it appropriately. I don't always follow my own rules if the layer palette tells me all i need to know.

* Third rule - TAKE YOUR TIME! Save... and return again, later.

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Finally, to tackle the big question 'what does it mean?'.....

Sometimes i have something resembling an answer, sometimes not. I don't like to try too hard on that one, it either happens or not.

There is a lot of tension in this one - at the bottom you are looking out from a cave, from under an overhang, of sorts. At the top you are looking up, at towering eroded cliffs. Maybe there isn't a simple answer, but something more complicated - a question - can radically different points of view coexist?

There is one spot in the center where the two images flow together.

And maybe that's what this means - there can be some unity, some confluence amidst the turbulence, the contrasts, the antagonisms of images, and landscapes before us.