by clw

What Is Inspiration? - Sonnet (homework)

I am standing here, beneath the gray clouds,
Hid by the shadow of the rain. It seems
That I had come here to escape the crowds,
But every drop soaks me and flows in streams.
My ears are filled with the thuds as they land,
Blending into a dull roar around me.
A thought occurs as I hold out my hand,
Which splatters the droplets that surround me:
Being alone is harder than you think.
Even in dark, there is something waiting
To turn on the light, even the black ink
Is made of colors. Here I am, stating
That I am alone, when I have the rain,
The sky, the music, and nothing to gain.

more Tarkovsky

I'm not sure what the fascination with Tarkovsky is about. He's obtuse and totally non-commercial. You might even have to think about something to understand what is going on in his films. Continuing my fascination, the past week has been spent watching on several different occasions The Sacrifice. This was Tarkovsky's final film prior to his death from cancer in 1986. It was a co-production of the Swedish Film Institute and Film Four, photographed by Sven Nykvist, and stars Erland Josephson.

This is the third viewing for me. It's finally beginning to come into focus. The opening sequence, after the titles, is a single nine minute tracking shot with a mention of Nietzsche, the "rotation" of the cycle of life, hope, despair, death, another life's performance, no chance for an Absolute Truth. During this shot, and then slightly later, there is the not so distant sound of an explosion, or is it thunder. For the characters on screen, the sound  barely registers. It is only later that they find out that war has broken out, and that their country probably faces annihilation.

Alexander, a journalist, actor, critic, and lapsed man of religious faith, collapses and prays to his God for the first time in years to save his family, and humanity. He wants to make a bargain that he will give up everything he has if God will stop the war and put everything back the way it was the day previous.

By the end, when time has been turned back on itself, and the day of his birthday begins once again, Alexander goes mad at the possibility that he must uphold his end of the bargain. But we are left wondering if Maria the "witch", a pre Christian animus of power has been the cause of the reversal of destruction, or the God of organized religion has spared us one more time.

Rather than these two incompatibles, the final image returns us to the opening location, the track beside the sea, with the spindley tree once again center frame. Only this time, Little Man has decided to take his father at his word and initiate a "system" that will change the world. He drags two buckets of water towards the tree, determined to start a daily watering ritual, much as the monk in Alexander's first story of the film did.

The Kino International DVD copy of the film is rather standard quality, hardly a signal to demonstrate the superior capabilities of the HD format. But as per usual, the sound can be dramatic, such as when jets fly closely over the house and it becomes obvious that the world is at war once again. At least the film is available to watch the mastery of Tarkovsky as captured by Nykvist - in the comfort of our own screening rooms.

Any other Tarkovsky fans out there with something to add?

passing by

the museum is dead - long live the museum

 

 
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 With the arrival of BIG SCREEN teevee and full 5.1 home theater audio to the folks on the E'ville ranch, the space formerly known as The Museum is radically transformed into The Room. The furniture is rearranged so that the new gear is aligned along the interior stair wall. It's true that it sits opposite the three unit window, and prior to purchase I was concerned that glare from these windows would be a problem on the proposed plasma screen. Salesmen that they are, the guys at Stereotypes said "We've never had a problem." When it comes to glare on the screen, that is. All their plasmas in the shop are in windowless rooms. As it turns out, during the day glare is quite apparent, but not so bad that the screen becomes unuseable. Who is doing any serious viewing during the day anyway?

I think the teevee picture, as seen on one of these excellent plasma screens, has finally reached the quality of being able to compare the experience to watching film in a cinema. With this setup, I expect to be able to do some serious viewing. The 50 inch screen is actually big enough to read credits and even subtitles.

What's been seen so far, after a week? We're still getting used to the reality, but have sampled a variety of sources. The BluRay disc that came in the box with the player, Spiderman 3, is yet another lameo effects laden picture. For something really different, I tried out some Bad Cinema: XXX with Vin Diesel. This too was viewed in BD, and is not as high budget as Spidey, so the signal's not quite as good. I think I've been seeing this movie since Connery was doing Bond and Dean Martin did Matt Helms. With the attitude Diesel has at the beginning of the picture, why should he care at the end whether the entire population of Prague is poisoned?

Trying out a current release on standard DVD, the picture was still a phenomenally great cinematic experience. We watched Namesake, and travelled back and forth between the U. S. and India in Mira Nair's film about immigrants who never feel at home anywhere. There is much allusion to the Ukranian writer Nikolai Gogol (one of the main characters is named after Gogol by his father, and hence the title of the film), who I've never read. Probably time to pick up a book and do some fiction reading for a change.

With so much cinema to watch on a great system, who has time for books? 

really retro

In this day and age, it's really old news to talk about film emulsions. But a minor - very minor indeed - realization has come upon me these past few weeks. As a landscape photographer, and one who has mostly moved to working with a 4 x 5 view camera and a tripod, there has been little or no motivation to use fast film. A couple of years ago I discovered Fuji Astia 100 and have been mostly very happy using it, along with the comparable Kodak emulsion, E100G, as well as an equivalent b&w, Ilford FP4.

For something different, I think it's time to try portraits. On the rare occasion when it's tried, the success rate is usually fairly low. Not necessarily because of film speed problems. The photographer's eye is more the problem. But one technical detail that could be altered to help ease subjects would be to use a faster emulsion. It would help ease the photographer's (my) anxiety somewhat as well. It's obvious to me now that watching the light move across a landscape is hardly the place for fast film. On the other hand, humans sitting before a camera lens is a good application.

quickly now

 

 
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In case there's a chance someone comes here that hasn't been to the Landscapist recently, be sure and go here. Mark asked us to make the link, so here it is. I try to be accommodating.

I'd like to learn more about this Print On Demand photo book concept. Or more correctly, I'd like to see the output. I question the quality, the paper, the size, the pricing. But others seem to be quite enthusiastic, so inevitably it's something to try out. I'm not quite certain I'm ready to put something together at this time, however. I feel like I'm still collecting data. I'm not going to be modest and claim that my work isn't good enough, or I don't have enough good photos to fill a book. What I do feel is that I've not got enough good photos that hang together to put in a book, at this point. I work so much more slowly than my digital compatriots, that I often feel like I'm in the center of a whirlwind, spinning around like one of those cartoon characters being wound up like a top. The work here at Man Made Wilderness is an attempt to put things together in some coherent context. But I need a lot more material to cull through before I'm ready to build a book.

Could this be a failure to commit? Possibly... I want to move at my own pace, one of the reasons I've been keeping my own company on the web the last couple of weeks. There's plenty of work to do around here without taking on projects that someone else deems to be worthy endeavors. 

time for another change

Perhaps a word or two or three about the change of status in regards to the display of prints at Old Rag Photography Gallery in Sperryville, VA. I retrieved all the prints from the gallery Jan. 20. The word is that the gallery is going to be painted - which it needs to be. But there is so little attention given to the enterprise by its owner that there is hardly any point in being there. It was more exposure for physical prints than I receive any other way, but the company kept there did not exactly enhance my aesthetic. Quite simply, there was too much mediocre pleasantly pretty work. My direction has changed as well, moving away from pretty pictures of the wilderness with no traces of humanity anywhere.

It's time to re-evaluate the entire desire to display and sell prints. 

vernacular

 

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While thinking about this location, which is on the other side of the crown of the watershed from where I headed this morning, I was reminded of another location from three and a half years ago, which can be seen here. There are obviously a number of similar elements, but it was the Quicksand sign that really did it for me. It's not in view in this one above, but there was a sign at the edge of the frame seen in another exposure that didn't capture the overall view as well as the one that's been posted. I went for the better view of the two eras of architecture that stand buttt to butt across a diminishingly small "natural" area.

The quicksand warning has got to be someone's wry idea of a joke. Does anyone really believe such a thing exists - in Virginia? Yet another illusion manufactured by the image makers in Hollywood, that has become embedded in the popular culture. Some more vernacular, in the imagination.

33-2-go

 

 
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A day of rather great variety, and many miles. But only two counties yielded exposures of courthouses: Grayson and Wythe. By the time I got to Pulaski, the sun was fully filling the sky, and for the newer facade, it would have been right above the building. The entrance to the older building is 180 degrees from that, so would have been fine except for the abundance of direct sun falling on that elevation. Grayson is questionable, since it was fairly bright there this morning as well, but I couldn't wait the entire day to find out if the light was going to change.

After all these many miles, what do I have to show for it mentally? Not much, that's for certain. A couple of miserable calculations, but nearly no thought given to the project at hand. I'm collecting data at this point. What anyone eventually does with it is beyond me for now. 

Independence

 

 
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Being able to take the entire enterprise on the road is still a remarkable thing - no? At least there is some familiarity to be found in the very act of putting together one of these little entries. Nothing much else is very familiar about the surroundings, other than the ubiquity to be found in modern American motel rooms. I'm not out here for long enough to succumb to the dreariness of it and resort to attempting Stephen Shore type imagery.

It was a fine day today, with another three counties visited, with their various courthouses: Bedford (one large building with one pseudo entrance from the 50's, and one actual entrance from the 90's);  Franklin (where once again I set up on the roof of the van on the main street through town and attracted no attention whatsoever); and Carroll (with one large new building from the 1990's and another older building from the 1870's not far away beside a WiFi hotspot that worked just fine) where I visited last year one Sunday morning and found the light was in the sky right over both the buildings. Today I didn't arrive until later in the day, and it was much more overcast, so the light was nearly perfect.

Where all this is headed is still a big unknown. At least I am beginning to conceive of possibilities for display around the state. But I'm still not willing to relinquish any control over how I photograph the subject matter, so I am not ready to take anyone else's money yet. After talking briefly to Doug Gilpin the other day about his knowledge of courthouse siting around the state, I realized again that it's probably about time to put some kind of portfolio of a few of the images together to show. It's not going to go anywhere until I can show some of it to other people.

can we change?

 

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With probably thirty-six or thirty-seven more courthouses to chase down, it feels like there is a possible end to the driving the back roads of Virginia. Probably not this year, but possibly '09  will see some kind of completion. Finality is a scary thing. There will be the inevitable reshoots of places such as Sunday's encounter with Prince George County.

The day started clear, which was not expected, and I was facing into the sun with it right above the roof of the new court house building. Gave that one up and went a short distance away to work on the older building. It became apparent that it's been a while since I've used the Sinar. It took a while to set up, then I realized the first exposure was aligned incorrectly, the second was still too low, and when I've gotten all exposures for the day back, I see that with the third exposure that my centerlines are aligned, but the rear should have been shifted to the right to include all of one of the peripheral buildings, and exclude the extra space at the left.

What I'm finding, and finding interesting as well, is that specifics such as this are slowly evolving and changing. As I get better with the material, when I'm presented with more unusual symmetry, it's possible to stay basically true to the dead on alignment with the tripod set directly in front of the primary entrance. But the lens can be shifted slightly one way or the other to include ancillary structures.

This worked out quite well in Southampton County where I was able to include the old and the new entrances from one camera position.

Multiple exposure stitches have also worked successfully for structures too large in locations where the camera could not be moved far enough away to include the entire building.

None of this was planned at the outset as I learn what works. The methodology needs to be allowed to evolve. The project was always the goal, not the end product of having the collection. It was to learn along the way. 

Update on Friday, January 18, 2008 at 02:38PM by KMW

What this ultimately means for me is that I need to pay more attention to what I'm doing. Be less mechanical in my approach to the subject. Too often I'm banging through the steps to get another notch on the gunstock, and move on to the next victim (county). After all, this is supposed to be an Art project, not simply a documentation or a trophy hunt.

what's wrong with my brain?

 

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Somehow I've suspected this might be true, but it came to me rather loudly earlier this week when I was in a conversation with a couple of other people and wasn't entirely following the details. In the building business, there is nothing but details. It's a requirement that I follow along.

When  I thought about it later, I realized this was another instance of my visual problem solving brain needing an image to hold in the mind's eye and visualize an understanding. What I need is to translate words and the concepts they represent into some kind of picture that can be studied for clues to the meaning of the stated concept. This is why I'm so hopelessly at sea with mathematics-finance-philosoiphy. I can't generally create a physical picture of the concepts in these fields, so I can't look at it with my visual mind and understand them.

I clearly remember in school that geometry made sense, but algebra did not. For the above stated reasons. One would think architecture would be the perfect discipline for me to study. A certain amount does come naturally. But again, because of the translation problem, I often find myself lost because I can't orient myself in the model fast enough.

How does this relate to my photography? It's not clear, at this point. But what I sense is that it - photography - surely reinforces the strengths that I naturally possess, while not exercising very vigorously the conceptual realm that appears so weak. 

Update on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 10:53PM by KMW

That was a wonderful old square cast iron bath tub up top, BTW. How else to get something like this out of a second floor of an occupied office building?

to the city, pt.1

Nighthawks, 1942, The Art Institute of Chicago

The family trip to Washington was focused on a stop at the National Gallery of Art, where several shows of some distinction continue through most of January. The first exhibit we attended was a fairly large collection of paintings and watercolors of American artist Edward Hopper. A grand showing of work from one of this nation's greatest painters of the 20th century, heavily attended on a midweek afternoon between Christmas and New Year's.

I've never studied his work before, so it was illuminating to see the depth of his modernism. While he turned his back on both the work of the French Impressionists and other Modernists early in the century, and then again in the middle of the century when Abstract Expressionists ruled the Art World, his compositions and subject matter predate the coming tidal wave of photographic images later in the century. Many of his images have become truly iconic in the pop culture of the present day, Nighthawks being the best known. Years earlier he showed his interest in capturing the color of light falling on the geometric planes of rural farmhouses and barns from Massachusetts and Maine. He would go to seaside resorts that often attracted other painters, and instead of showing ships and the harbor, he concentrated on simple buildings and the land they sat on. Always a realist, Hopper never idealized his landscapes: power poles and other signs of the modern world appear in nearly all these paintings. He was always able to show the beauty in the commonplace, directing our gaze towards  scenes of mystery in everyday life.

Hopper is better known to many of us for his city scapes, such as Nighthawks and New York Movie, Office at Night, Morning Sun, and Chop Suey. Despite the apparent loneliness of his paintings, there is a strong universality to the common stares into space by the silent individuals. It is a recognition that despite the noise and busyness of the urban environment, everyone is ultimately alone with their self and their thoughts. Towards the end of his life, Hopper showed it clearly when he dispensed with the human element and simply painted light on the walls in Sun in an Empty Room.

the loot

                  

With the entire enterprise "scaled back" from what it's been in previous years, and with attempts to not participate in the end of year consumer panic, this was a suitable amount of gifting.

It was good to see the fam for the annual gathering here in Virginia, and we hope all made it home safely. More tomorrow about some of our activities. 

self portrait & a confession

Not quite sure what it means, that these last four images are all from the same day 14 months ago. Could it be as simple as:

• I like the shapes, textures, & colors
• they are flat, nearly 2 dimensional compositions that expose my predilection for simple, shallow visuals

As for the confession, here goes:

All the images included here on ManMadeWilderness and printed for the  exhibit of same have been manipulated in an image editor. Yeah, yeah, what's the big deal? Okay, here goes... I don't use Photoshop. There, I finally said it out loud.

I'm prompted to make this outlandish confession because of the amount of time I spent working on today's photo... in my demo copy of PS CS3. It's slick. It has cool features. I don't really know how to make it work. But I got better results in only a couple of minutes by using my standard editor: Corel PhotoPaint. It does pretty much the same thing as Photoshop, costs a third as much for twice the functiionality, and I've been using it since version 8 so I know it fairly well by now. There you have it. The full truth. I've outed myself to the world.

I DON'T USE PHOTOSHOP!!! If people start looking at me funny from now on, I'll suspect it's a result of this late night admission.

dante vs homer

    

somewhere around the corner...

 

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This is how I'm feeling about now. While all is overtly working out well - near as I can tell, at least - there is some nagging feeling that I'm going about things in an awkward and round about fashion. But it could be that I'm spending entirely too much time at work, and not enough on photography. My own, that is, rather than reading about other people's thoughts about what is or isn't dead. You'd think there was another crisis in faith, ala the God Is Dead  revolution of the 60's.

Be that as it may, I need to go lie down. 

kamera klubs

 

 
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I don't know, is this the proto-typical "leaf on a rock?" I like the view of the damage done by the striped and hairy critter in comparison with the fresh leaves.

excuses

 

The weather for today turned out to be exactly as predicted: 100% cloud cover, but only a 40 - 50% chance of precipitation. The leaves are finally off the trees, for the most part. In other words, perfect conditions to work on my Courthouse Project. Yet here I am, still in the basement typing. What are the excuses for today's lack of desire?

• Could it be that I stayed up too late Friday reading and "experimenting" with VueScan and ColorNeg? I'm not sure my results are even worth bothering to write about at this point. But by the time I finally went to bed, I had already nodded off several times in front of the screen.
• Could it be that I woke up too early?
• Could it be that there were planned activities for the day - CLW dancing at the Paramount; dinner out with friends; retrieving CLW from her friends - so no rest was available for the missed sleep the night before?
• Could it be that by the time we got home and I had done a bit more reading it was "too late" to get motivated to empty the van, load film holders, and get my pack together for an early departure this morning?
• Could it be that I never looked at the past exposures of Amelia and Lunenburg counties that I thought I was reshooting?
• Could it be that after referring to the sun plots that I created with this cool bit of software, it looked likely that I would end up with the same results that I already have after driving two hours one way?
• Could it be that I'm having second and third and fourth doubts about this project, even though I'm only a little more than half done and it's already two years old?
• Could it be that the idea and design of the project are from a time when I was looking to do something specific with a view camera which I didn't have much experience with?
• Could it be that I was looking for excuses to stay home today?

Looks like I found my excuses.

Instead of driving for four to five hours, I walked around the house with the Mamiya and a couple of rolls of Delta 400. I almost - but not quite - even had some fun doing it. 

my continuing examination of world cinema

After my recent recollections on favorite films from my distant past, it seemed appropriate to relive another cinema experience from my yout. Last night I watched the film Solaris, by the great Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky. By all western standards of storytelling, this film at something like 2 hrs. 45 min. is nerve wrackingly frustrating. While some called it Russia's answer to 2001, it's beyond low tech - it's no tech. Tarkovsky was not that kind of film maker. Nor was he the slightest interested in the conventions of the sci-fi genre. While the story is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, Tarkovsky does his best to frustrate the expectations of anyone looking solely for a story to entertain. Where Hollywood would pump up the action and streamline the story (we'll have to save comments on Soderbergh's version for a later date - it's farther down the queue) so as to quicken the pulse, Tarkovsky's pace is exactly the opposite. He is in no hurry to tell a story, but many of his trademarks are evident: the beauty of the natural world, the alienation of the man-made city, the dominance of water in the visuals, and the complex and fluid dance of the camera with the actors.

As frustrating as the experience may be for even those with an open mind (I won't deny nodding off several times, but always felt as if I hadn't missed anything), it's one I'm ready and fully prepared to subject myself to again. There is something ultimately hypnotic about Tarkovsky's visuals, if not always his ideas about faith and the alienated human. The slow zoom into gently waving underwater grasses, repeated in Stalker, is an image to fall into. Unfortunately, Tarkovsky's films may be more intellectually challenging to write about, and rewatch in the mind's eye, than they are to actually sit through.