"Ready or Not"

#1 of 2 images I worked on, during one day, 4/17/10.
But first....!
A lot of things in the 'whatever catches my eye' file this time:
Travel - N.Y.Times:
Rugged Country, Rugged History in California’s Owens Valley
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/travel/07owens.html
I haven't been to the places mentioned above, though I have driven through Owens Valley:
http://www.bobbennettphoto.net/DV2001/index.html
(the top 4 images in the white background)

Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans:
Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html?hpw

My questions are:
What does Hugh Hefner think about this?? ;-)
...and... is this why some days I 'just feel a little bit mean'?

The SFMOMA Museum panel asks, 'Is photography over?'
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/07/PKPU1D5P9A.DTL&type=art
The link in this article to the SFMOMA material does not work - this/below, does.

http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/research_projects_photography_over

"But when virtually every antique process — daguerreotype, tintype, and cyanotype; albumen, salt, platinum-palladium, and wet-plate collodion printing — has been revived over the past few decades, there's no reason to think gelatin silver will disappear totally anytime soon. There's never been just one kind of photography, and now there are many."
Yep, definitely.

I've always been a typophile (is that a word? I hope so - it's just 'someone who appreciates typography, big-time'.)
And this/below is good news:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/home_blog/2010/05/the-changing-typography-of-the-web.html

Why Arizona Drew a Line
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/opinion/29kobach.html
I totally agree w/ the AZ law!

Now, on to photography!

This one started w/ the collection of stuff at the bottom. It was shot in the Marin Headlands a decade or so ago, as some kind of display, lying on the ground, of what soldiers packed when they went off to war duty (I think that's what is was, anyway). Some gloves, some matches, some soap, a clean pair of socks, a straight razor.
Compared to what troops pack now in Iraq, these guys were definitely ill-equipped, to say the least.
What I connected/juxtaposed this with was a 'landscape' of some kind, whatever sort of place someone might pack this stuff for the trip. I got quite a few of those, from many places in the desert. 'A nice thought'...but they were all pretty sunny and bright landscapes... and I'm no where near ready to pour out some dektol into a tray yet.
This definitely needs 'something else'. And it would/should..not be sunny and bright.
It needed to be something exactly opposite of that.
...back to sifting thru contact sheets...until...! :-) ....
I find a shot taken in Nevada, a year or so ago - a VERY cold and severe mountainous landscape - the Pentax shutter froze up pretty quickly, but I got off a few frames.
(I love this camera, the 55mm lense is sooo sharp, you can slice slice salami with it. ;-) )
The juxtaposition of the two was great - 'hot and cold'... but not 'there' for a print yet, it still needed something else.

I came upon a neg shot years ago at Rhyolite, a ghost town of sorts at the NE end of Death Valley. It's the shadow of myself cast upon a ruined building's basement.
This managed to do an excellent negative/positive thing, between top and bottom.
NOW I am getting somewhere :-)
And that's how I printed it.
A larger view, with the negatives contributing ( 'partners in crime', aren't they? ;-) ):
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/ReadyOrNot

As for the 'title' inspiration?

Michael Hedges - 'Ready or not' - studio version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uzNDNdyJpI

or a live version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwYIynBWfIE&feature=related

"As the whole world turns us around
I keep hearing life's echo sound
songs of rhyming, meeting, hiding
somehow... ready or not!"

RIP Michael - you have many imitators... but no equals.

A surreal hourglass

This was the first montage print of 2010, a nice way to start the year :-)
What's above is my photoshop 'sketch' of the image, not the final print.

I had spent a number of days ruminating over many photoshop sketches of potential ideas during the week before New Year's.
I also read this NYTimes article...

Time, The Infinite Storyteller
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: December 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/arts/design/01time.html

...and for whatever weird reason, I woke up New year's day thinking "I gotta print this one - & this is the perfect day to print it, too."
I wake up w/ 'strange thoughts' in my head - don't you sometimes, maybe from a dream?
( 4.5 years ago I landed in a hospital w/ burst appendix/peritonitis... which got me 9 days in a hospital hooked up to god-knows-what - a drip feed of morphine, some saline/sucrose? definitely loads of antibiotics!... also a catheter and diaper (how humbling!)..& there were many side effects from all this, that none of my doc's can explain.... including *remembering my dreams*!!, which never EVER happened to me before.
Nice side effect :-) ... i have been enjoying it ever since, however scary it can be sometimes.)

This one started w/ an hourglass, of sorts, built on Ocean Beach in SF, which I shot in silhouette, no detail in shadows.
(Ocean Beach is the kind of place where most anyone can show up, and do (or build, however temporarily) whatever they want, very few rules, very little law enforcement. Nice place to be for a while, hunh? :-) )

Something needs to flow down from the top, right?
I chose a waterfall I shot somewhere in the Santa Cruz area mountains, years ago. The light was pretty dim, this is surrounded by huge redwoods, so the exposure is a second, or maybe more.
What happens at the bottom? The rushing water of the waterfall?...goes to... what?
Hhmmm....how about that it yields only a few drops, that create the ripples of water at the bottom?
(The ripples were shot at a Pt. Reyes tide pool, tide-water stranded in a shallow depression.
I threw a rock into the pool, and shot the ripples, did it a few times....
I am glad there's no one around to see me doing this crazy shit, they would definitely think I was wacko.)

There needed to be something more going on in the middle, between the waterfall and the ripples, something..uh.. 'transformative'? in some way?..
So I made a 'sandwich' of some really abstract lens-flare things shot thru a cross star filter,...and a sky, and that's what I burned into the middle.
What does it all mean?
Well... uh.... I'll give it a try -
'Time flows forward, a torrent that knows no end, and has had no beginning - but our experience of it, is a drop, a second, at a time'.

That works for me, how about you?

The final print at:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/Hourglass/

Next entry, more darkroom :-)