Darkroom Montage - 'Strength in Numbers'

First...from the 'whatever catches my eye' file...

Ancient world dictionary finished — after 90 years
By SHARON COHEN, AP National Writer Sharon Cohen, Ap National Writer – Sat Jun 4, 9:56 am ET
CHICAGO – It was a monumental project with modest beginnings: a small group of scholars and some index cards. The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries — and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110604/ap_on_re_us/us_postcard_the90_year_dictionary_project
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So Much More Than Plasma and Poison
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07jellyfish.html?_r=1&src=dayp
By Natalie Angier
Published: June 6, 2011
Among nature’s grand inventory of multicellular creatures, jellyfish seem like the ultimate other, as alien from us as mobile beings can be while still remaining within the kingdom Animalia. Where is the head, the heart, the back, the front, the matched sets of parts and organs? Where is the bilateral symmetry?

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5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet
By John C Abell

June 3, 2011

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/ebooks-not-there-yet/

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The Arctic Light
Wed, Jun 1, 2011 3:00 AM EDT - 3:21 | 190,320 views
Follow TSO Photography on Facebook.com/ TSOPhotography for more photos, videos, and updates.This video was filmed between 29th April and 10th May 2011 in the Arctic, on the archipelago Lofoten in Norway.
A very nice video... check it out:
http://video.yahoo.com/editorspicks-12135647/featured-24306389/the-arctic-light-by-tso-photography-25412815.html?nc#crsl=%252Feditorspicks-12135647%252Ffeatured-24306389%252Fthe-arctic-light-25412815.html
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A Stream of Postcards, Shot by Phone
By Jenna Wortham
Published: June 3, 2011

Digital camera sales may be weak, but thanks to cellphones, picture-taking has never been more of an everyday thing. Now a wave of mobile applications is letting people tweak their cellphone snapshots and share them with friends and strangers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/technology/04photosharing.html?_r=1


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How much longer can photographic film hold on?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_film_s_fade_out

Well your blogger here sure hopes the answer is... at least until i die.
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Saturday, May 28, 2011 11:05am PDT
Surfers brave the "biggest day ever" at world's craziest wave: Tasmania's Shipstern Bluff
By: Chris Mauro, GrindTV.com

http://www.grindtv.com/surf/blog/27243/surfers+brave+the+biggest+day+ever+at+worlds+craziest+wave+tasmanias+shipstern+bluff/

watch the video!!!!!

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On Virginia’s Crooked Road, Mountain Music Lights the Way
http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/travel/on-virginias-crooked-road-music-lights-the-way.html
By SARAH WILDMAN
Published: May 20, 2011
IT starts with a well-worn fiddle, held in equally well-worn hands above a tapping black cowboy boot. Then in comes the banjo, plucked with steel finger picks, followed by the autoharp, the mandolin, the percussive beat of an upright bass. Another banjo grabs the melody, and suddenly the room is bursting with knee-slapping, country-porch music....

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/us/22snow.html?_r=1&hpw#
Record Snowpacks Could Threaten Western States
By KIRK JOHNSON and JESSE McKINLEY
Published: May 21, 2011
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — For all the attention on epic flooding in the Mississippi Valley, a quiet threat has been growing here in the West where winter snows have piled up on mountain ranges throughout the region.
Thanks to a blizzard-filled winter and an unusually cold and wet spring, more than 90 measuring sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May, according to a federal report released last week.
Those giant and spectacularly beautiful snowpacks will now melt under the hotter, sunnier skies of June — mildly if weather conditions are just right, wildly and perhaps catastrophically if they are not...............

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The Trouble With E-Mail
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/the-trouble-with-e-mail/?hp#
May 29, 2011, 5:30 pm
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
The idea that e-mail is chiefly a conduit for anger and lies seems almost quaint. After too may careers ruined and personal lives upended by online indiscretions, it should now be crystal clear that there are some things one must never, ever commit to e-mail.
And that’s why some bankers developed “LDL.” “LDL” — which means “let’s discuss live” — is an acronym that surfaced during the S.E.C.’s investigation of Goldman Sachs for its role in the nation’s financial shame spiral...

On, to some photography.......



At left, my photoshop sketch, at right the final darkroom print

I've mentioned before that my montage images come from a variety of inspirations - sometimes it's about a concept, sometimes it's simply something visually surreal, sometimes somewhere in between the two. And sometimes it's just plain 'winging it'.
This one is definitely 'concept'. It had been kicking around as a drawing on tracing paper.. & then a P'shop sketch... for quite a while, and I finally decided to do something with it. Like..uh... print it.

I shot the palm trees that are propped up in front of a wall somewhere in southern Ca., the desert. There's a number of attempts at development there that never came to fruition. I think the wall was 'sposed to enclose a nice subdivision... but just 'cause you think it can be built, doesn't mean anyone will show up. And no one did, and these poor palm trees were left to suffer...

The forest of very healthy lush palm trees (behind the wall) was virtually a farm - the trees in very nice rows.


M.C. Escher would love it!
What? you don't know who MC Escher was?
I thought this was just my blog, but if i have to educate you, OK, here goes...
http://www.mcescher.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher

Oddly enough, both images were shot on the same trip, in the mid-90's..took a while to put the two together, but once it landed in my brain, it stuck - the forest was on the other side of the wall, trying to help it's prodigal brothers/sisters.
Yeah... definitely, 'strength in numbers'! Or maybe i should call it 'prodigal palm trees'...?
The dodging / burning on this one is really pretty simple - the two palms @ bottom are dodged out part way up the palm trees, the palm trees at the top blended from top to bottom, ending just above the top of the wall.

I also added some nice clouds above the palms, at the top, which are actually flipped vertically to wrap around the palm tree tops.

Technically?... simple. Putting it all together, and knowing what to do? Not so simple - many miles of driving... many rolls of film, full of frames that were made thinking "There's something about this i like, I'll shoot it now, and figure it out later". And then a few more years until a light goes on inside yer head - "Aha! That's it! that's why i took that frame."

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

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/StrengthInNumbers/index.html

Pointing the way

Here's the image (photoshop sketch) du jour:


First, the whatever catches my eye file...
I was a guitar player for many years, reluctantly had to give it up thanks to a serious 'metal (oxide?) allergy'... but I still perk up to much about guitars...

Building the Guitar You’ll Keep
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/04/santa-cruz-guitars/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&pid=764
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It's a Small World After All
A slide show of aerial photography, from pigeon-mounted cameras to Apollo 17 and beyond.
By Elizabeth Weingarten Posted Friday, April 22, 2011, at 7:00 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2291710/

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Mystery of Grand Canyon's Formation Revealed
Charles Q. Choi, OurAmazingPlanet Contributor
Date: 27 April 2011 Time: 01:23 PM ET
The birth of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau through which it carved have been a geological mystery. Now a giant anomalous structure discovered on the underside of the plateau could shed light on how it was formed.

http://www.livescience.com/13903-grand-canyon-age-formation-colorado-plateau-uplift.html


Desert town clings to its quirkyness
Quartzsite, Ariz., is a truck stop town of 3,600 that draws about 1 million visitors in winter with its gem shows, swap meets and 'naked bookseller.' Officials are looking for ways to boost revenue in the off-season, but locals and the snowbirds don't want the town's character to be lost.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-quartzsite-20110416,0,575043.story

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Toxic Art
On shelves, in studios, and at schools, art supplies containing toxic ingredients pose risks to human health and the environment.
By Jessica Carew Kraft
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/toxic-art/Content?oid=2533379
I mentioned my metal allergy above? Beware of all the chemical things you work with... enuf said.
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The Digital Pileup
By SHELLEY PODOLNY - Published: March 12, 2011 - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13podolny.html?_r=1
"SOME facts of life are just plain counterintuitive. It can be too cold to snow. Heavy things float. Martinis have calories.
Here’s another one with significantly greater import: Electronic information is tangible. The apps we use, the games on our phones, the messages we incessantly tap — all of it may seem to fly through the air and live in some cloud, but in truth, most of it lands with a thump in the earthly domain.
Because electronic information seems invisible, we underestimate the resources it takes to keep it all alive. The data centers dotting the globe, colloquially known as “server farms,” are major power users with considerable carbon footprints. Such huge clusters of servers not only require power to run but must also be cooled. In the United States, it’s estimated that server farms, which house Internet, business and telecommunications systems and store the bulk of our data, consume close to 3 percent of our national power supply. Worldwide, they use more power annually than Sweden."
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The best of geology and earth science on the web:
http://www.all-geo.org/
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Postcards from the recession: Got knocked down, got up, and then got better
Though I wasn't a voluntary casuality, the truth is, I live in a happier place now.
By Ann Brenoff
March 13, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brenoff-recession-20110313,0,6962977.story
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Conjuring the desert
Spirituality and politics, stillness and violence -- all meet in the 'land of little rain.'
Every Wednesday afternoon, my colleague Douglas Burton-Christie and I try to conjure the desert in a classroom at Loyola Marymount University. We are both bona fide desert rats, but we come to the "land of little rain," as Mary Austin once called it, from very different places as we teach an interdisciplinary seminar called Into the Desert.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-martinez-desert-20110313,0,7700063.story

and now, on to some photography.....


(photoshop sketch above)
The petroglyph was found in Red Rock Canyon, just west of Las Vegas, December 2008.
There are alotta 'Red Rock Canyon's because there's alotta red rocks out here - consult your local geologist for a better explanation - the best one I can come up with is that this land has always been in transformation, for millions of years, including a few massive eruptions from Yellowstone, that covered the land for many hundreds of square miles, with ejecta/lava/etc.
The Mississippi river *flowed backward* in the great 1812 earthquake!
Buy yourself some John McPhee books - There's a series about North American geology, the formation of the continent - 'In suspect terrain', 'Basin & Range', 'Rising from the plains' and 'Assembling California'.

Anyway.... this glyph was carved on a rock about as big as a VW van, on the way to a tinjaha (sic?) which is a place water collects, and native peoples would obviously be drawn to. I watched many people waltz right by this, didn't notice a thing.

Stupid modern people! we notice so little of what is staring us in the face!
The human figure means ' "the people" are here'... I think. The figure is much the same as a 'glyph on the wall below White House ruins, in Canyon de Chelly.
What more would you need to know?
But now that the original artist's culture is long gone, maybe it could be pointing elsewhere...?


(darkroom prints above)
This quirky cloud seemed to be just right, I shot it at least 15 years ago, from my apt. rooftop deck in SF. It's kind of like a comet, with a head and tail.. but a soft slow moving, earthly one.
Maybe it's a modern spin on things, what with 'the cloud' taking on a new meaning these days.
In my sketch, i wondered if there were a horizon on sorts in there somewhere. The one i added to the sketch was a place-marker, the light is coming from the wrong direction.

I did the first 2 prints w/ just the glyph and the sky, the third w/ a bit of 'land' (barely discernible) in between the glyph and sky.. and the fourth/last with a much better 'horizon', some Joshua Tree rocks.
The dodging and burning on this one is pretty obvious, i shouldn't have to explain it much. It isn't a truly horizontal thing, but not far off.
What does the image mean? Hhmmm.. good question. Since the arrow points to what seems to be the leading edge of the cloud, and clouds are obviously temporary and insubstansial things, maybe what it all means is 'whatever it all means, i can point you to, but it is, was, and always will be transitory, elusive..
You better enjoy, take it in, while you can. In an hour, a day it will be gone. Follow this hint while you can!'

I don't usually try to explain my images, even to myself, not to mention anyone else. I wrote a statement 25 years ago:
".... Many of the pictures just seem to 'happen', because the individual negatives are 'looking' for each other. I'm just a chaperone, and a really loose one at that...."
Still true today. I try to stick w/ whatever immediate impulse inspired me. I'm not quite 100% in the "First thought, best thought" school... but it's never far from my mind.
And everything digital has made me acutely aware of the 'tweak things to death' impulse.
I also remain steadfastly adherent to the idea that a montage image is not necessarily about technique in blending things together, it's about the choice of images you use, and which ones you choose to 'montage' together. That one takes a while (and then some) to work out.

One thing I have started to do is tweak the prints in Photoshop, to refine them a bit. There's a difference between the values of the top and the bottom, here.. which I could fix very easily in the darkroom, printing from a copy neg (4x5, which I used to do all the time). I definitely don't 'remake' the composition, I only tweak values ('dodging and burning').

Larger images at:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2011/GlyphDirections/index.html