Just a new experience. A 5 dollar camera I bought at a thrift store, with new Impossible Project instant film. Busy separating the emultion (image layer) from the film and transferring it to Art paper.
I plan to start a project or a few with this but right now it’s just practice
Another trip to Double Peaks Park in San Marcos, Ca. I truly love to shoot here, and have gone to this place multiple times in recent years. Today I came with Art Wolf and Robert Adams in mind. Specifically I was thinking of painting inspired frames.
As I stated in a previous post I started in art as a painter inspired mainly by impressionist and surrealists, so I decided to follow these previous inspirations on this outing. So through a combination of of different camera techniques and post processing I attempted to come up with some more painterly works.
I also tried working with some more traditional photographic type images. The tree at the top of the park is a gem in my world. I really appreciate the aesthetic of trees and this to me is just an amazing specimen.
I also tried to concentrate on the play of light in shadow on the geometric steps of the amphitheater there. The combination of deep shadows and bright highlights, as well as a good angle of light made for interesting texture as well.
Finally using the natural golden hour light a few portraits were created. Portraiture is where I started working in photography and still enjoy shooting portraits. I think these came out well.
Not a whole lot to say about this shoot. Working with my fathers band “The Penny Stinkers,” for some promotional work. A could we day shortly after Christmas in Bellingham, Wa. The group wanted a vintage look to their photos so rather than reinventing the wheel I went with the Nik Analog, Color, and Silver effects pro programs. Included are the original images with Lightroom edits, and then the Nik Edits.
I have written already about exploring what a photograph is, and what is a portrait. Continuing to look into the work of Sally Mann I decided to do a series of myself to add on to this continuing on this path of looking into myself in the project. I originally included this in the first post about abstract portraits, but I wanted to include it on its own.
Recently I have been looking closely at the work of Sally Mann, an artist that works in a wet plate techniques known as ambrotype. The above pictures are from the faces series that that she created after an inury. This piece I find extremely interesting, its elevated something I have always been interested the portrait to a new level.
All of Mann’s work has that dark other worldly feeling that i enjoy so very much. And the changing of the portrait to a new level is quite amazing. So I decided to work on this in my own work a little, avoiding some of the long learned rules of portrait framing and focus, etc.
Mann also has a series called battle fields that with out realizing it I was greatly inspired by in a recent project that I have been calling tentatively The Wood Project, all though the title is very subject to change, and more than likely will in the near future. These haunting images are something I only briefly looked at before but the influence can be seen.
When handed the assignment of an environmental portrait, I really wanted to do something more out of of my box. I did not want to just go out and find a friend to shoot. However by the time the assignment was do I had not received permission to do this shoot yet. I reached out to Iron Fist brewing one of my favorite purveyors of brewed beverages in the county. Eve one of the owners responded and after a few exchanges of emails we scheduled a date and i was allowed in for a little behind the scenes visit with the staff. Unfortunately the head brewer was not there but the assistants Mike, Chris, and Zack were as well as one of the owners Greg.
I arrived around 11 am the brewers where busy involved in a cleaning day cleaning out used kegs and sterilizing for reuse. Leaving them to wait to be filled. Around 1130 Greg arrived and curious to try some new brews they had been working on. Greg was gracious enough to allow me to partake with them. What an honor to be allowed to try some new experiments that were not yet released to the public.
Overall the guys were really accepting of me being in there space and willing to stop and pose during their day. Overall I tried to stay out of their way and allowed their work day to continue. The brewery was warm but dark inside, part of the heat was the hot water used to clean the kegs, part of it was the abnormally warms days we have been experiencing in San Diego. The lighting was difficult, overhead fluorescent mixed with bright sunlight let in from large rolled up doors industrial doors.
Although I wish I had been there on a day they were brewing it was great to be involved in a part of the work that gets little recognition. The following photos are part of the project, and not all i gathered mostly the guys and the tasting part of the day. I hope to return on a brew day to capture some of those very important images of the creation process.
Spending an afternoon at Double Peaks Park in San Marcos California contained a lot of inspiration. I wanted to really show some of the regrowth after the fires earlier this year. Overall I found it difficult to tell that story. However, I did find some inspiration in the light and some of the small details.
February ninth was not the greatest day for weather at the park. It was one of the few days a year we had wind in San Diego and it was slightly on the cooler side. The wind broke down the use of tripod, and there was a lot of haze flowing in over the land from the ocean. For me sweeping landscapes of north county were in a way called off for the day. Instead I decided that small details of the small are were something to pay closer attention to. Also I looked into the people, going back to portraits one of my crutches but I enjoy portraits. I also Decided to use the sunset itself to explore more abstraction in my photographic work. Using long exposure and panning the camera while hand held i distorted the landscape, in this I tried to portray the brush fires of last year, a distant memory using light as the fire.
The Following Images are from my top blog posts this semester, i think they all came out very well and am overall happy with the body of work i have created this semester. These are the top posts for me, the Joshua Tree images were possibly the most successful images I have done all semester, at the very least they are some of the most dramatic. Inspired by Penelope Umbrico, I feel is possibly one of my most creative and ambitious projects the following image was created after the blog post was created but I tried to combine the images int a similar fashion to Moving Mountains, even though they are not being displayed upon on wall. Finally the Portraits are always some thing near and dear to me and usually at the top of my list of images and things I enjoy as images. I chose the studio portraits because over all I feel that these images are stronger than the earlier portrait series. Please Click on the images to be taken to the blog posts and enjoy.
I have always been a great fan or portraits, I enjoy creating them and i enjoy being in the studio to create portraits. This was a new experience with half the class being in the studio at the same time, and also not setting up my own lighting was new experience for me, although I would not have chosen the particular lights that were used it is only my personal preference for that, also I do realize that with that many photographers and subjects in the studio large light sources are preferable.
Last week I had the pleasure of being able to attend and photograph the Diversity Month Kick Off Event at CSUSM. This was a great event to shoot, and for being something of an ultra controlling photographer events are always a little difficult for me. Learning to let go a bit is difficult when it comes to creating in an event atmosphere for me. I decided to treat most of the event as I feel Annie Leibovitz would have, as an observer that is still part of the event, i wanted candid shots of people. Some of these were posed shots near the end, obligatory pictures needed in an event. In Editing i wanted to go for some thing a bit warmer but still gritty, people are gritty and this event is about the understanding every ones grit. I left harsh shadows and highlights in place, i warmed up the images buy adjusting the white balance in Lightroom. I wanted some of the digital noise created by high ISO to remain, so I did not remove it all in post production, leaving some of the film noir effect.
I attempted some of these in black and white but did not feel that the images worked, for some reason though i prefer black and white most of the time, i felt it even left the images cold. The warm feeling of hope and pride in seemed left out of the black and white images. So i want with a light desaturation, my personal aesthetic simply shies away from purely saturated images, unless the color is the important part.
Jerry Slough Photography 