For the Week of Dec. 13- Christmas!

 Christians in Indonesia attend a Christmas mass in a stadium. I've been looking for a picture that FEELS like Christmas for a long time to make my desktop background, and think I may have finally found one. You don't see the volume of people in the stadium, but the candles are a beautiful testament to how many people have gathered. Take some time to look at people's faces; there are lots of little stories being played out all over the picture. Many are simply peaceful, and I love that.

 Christmas lights behind a tree branch in Seville, Spain. I noticed in my own pictures from Christmas that lights look like this when out of focus, but I've never seen such a beautiful picture made utilizing that phenomenon.

This is a tree decorated with battery-powered lights in Canada. I love the cold gray feel of it, with the only warm colors emitting from the tree and car lights. The first night star appears in the sky. It's just a wintery, beautiful scene, and that's that!

For the Week of Dec. 6- Unusual Silhouettes

At first glance, this eerie figure cuts a close resemblance to a KKK member. However, it is actually a  penitent from "La Sed" brotherhood, walking to the church to take part in a procession in Seville, Spain, during Easter week. I love the framing of the figure, and the almost perfect color matches in the dirt and window panes, and black windows and black figure. 

 This is a Muslim woman walking in an alley on her way to worship at a mosque in Palestine during Ramadan. It is such a figurative representation of Islamic women and the concept of identity hidden by veiling--here, the women is nothing but her white veil. It's ghostlike and beautiful, but sad.

 An Afghan man walks on the street as the sun sets in Southern Afghanistan. There is nowhere flat enough in the America I know to take a picture that makes it look like one is walking on the sun, or directly next to the sun. He looks like the last man alive on earth. 

For the Week of Nov. 29- Nighttime

 A beautiful fog lies over Hong Kong at nighttime, twisting and blending the colors and lights so that it looks like tie-die or a dream.

 Mosques in old Cairo during Ramadan...will I ever see a moon this size or a night sky framed by such exotic and elegant shapes? The building structures are not shapes we are used to associating with a city sky line, and that moon is simply incredible, lending more mystique to the Middle East.

A torchbearer carries a flame beginning a festival followed by 28 horse riders in Sioux Valley Dakota, Manitoba. Once again, we see a moon and unexpected silhouettes, although the moon is not as thrilling in this picture. The colors of the sky are far more brilliant, and the whole shadow procession from left to right in the frame tells a story that makes us wonder exactly what is going on in this scene.

For the Week of Nov. 22- Hajj part 2

 There are many photos on the internet of the Kaaba during the pilgrimage, but this one, because of the time of day and play of shadows, suggests redemption and judgment, light and dark, lost and found. By the way, I posted all these pictures of hajj because I am about to travel to Saudi Arabia over break, not because I am Muslim:)

 This man is praying atop Noor mountain at sunrise overlooking Mecca. How incredible are the silhouettes, sunrise colors, and city lights in this photo? It was just the right time of day and just the right exposure time to make it look like this man has arisen early even as the city has not yet gone to sleep. 

Muslims wrote and touch the Jabal al-Rahma pillar on Mount Arafat in Saudi Arabia. I have never seen anything made this black with writing. It's even neater once you realize it's in Arabic. The writing makes me want to unlayer the writing and look at individual names and religious messages, decipher what people were thinking as they came to this holiest of holy sites.

For the Week of Nov. 15- Hajj, part 1

 These photos are all from the 2010 annual hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. All Muslims who are able are expected to make the journey once in their life. Millions of people come into Saudi Arabia every year for it. Here, men stand from the top of Noor mountain, looking onto Mecca. I love the feeling of intimacy we get with the silhouettes of the men, framed by city lights. It's a highly mysterious and somehow still holy-seeming photo. 

 Sometimes, I tend to think of America as the epicenter of the world, downplaying all other regions and their religions subconsciously. This photo of Muslim pilgrims circling the Kaaba at the center of the Grand mosque in Mecca is a tiny percentage of the world's 1 billion Muslims, and yet you get a true feeling that this place and these people are at the center of the world.

Here, pilgrims move around the kaaba inside the Grand Mosque. The long time exposure gives you a sense of the movement and quickness with which the outer spectators pray, compared to the inner group, who is content to remain near the kaaba longer without moving. Again, it looks like the center of the world.

For Week of Nov. 8- More snow!

 This is a long-exposure picture of an annual torchlit ski run in Colorado. It's confusing, because at first it looks like car headlights, but they are fire-colored, and who could drive so safely on that snow?

 Street performers near a gate in Berlin. I like the whimsy in this picture, how it looks like a movie still at first, but you realize quickly that there is something distinctly un-American about it, despite the American subject. What Star Wars would look like if it was set in Pennsylvania...or Berlin.

"The sun breaks through the fog over the inner harbor as below zero temperatures grip Stockholm, Sweden." How crazy is this? Because you cannot see any other identifying landmarks, it looks like it might be a shot from the 19th century, and the sun sort of looks like the moon. It's like Never Land, where there are two suns and moons. The dim building outlines look almost like mountains, and the color is beautiful, pinks and grays. 

For the Week of Nov. 1- Snow!

 I am wishing for snow lately, and so this and the following post are going to be dedicated to some beautiful frozen condensation. I love this photo because it would be interesting enough with the mountain range and city lights in the valley, but the stars in time-lapse are incredible, and I've never seen a picture like that taken in this setting. Looks unreal.

 This looks a lot like what Mercer looked like last winter, with snow illuminated by the lampposts in a warm orange light. This photo gives the feeling of safeness, softness, of being outside in fresh snow at nighttime, which I used to enjoy when I lived in Pennsylvania. The backlighting is beautiful.

I can't remember where this is, but at first, it looks like waves or heat waves in the desert with a strange mist and mirage. Instead, it's strangely blown snow and fog in Switzerland. Very mysterious, symmetrical, and visually pleasing. The snow detail in the foreground is very pretty, looks like glitter.

For week of Oct. 25- Awesome Time and Motion

 This post is to celebrate some rather brilliant time and motion photos. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with creative ways to capture and abstract things using time and motion for our project, and now, I constantly notice the use of time and motion in photography. The above photo is of moths flying around an outside light. You don't notice their flight patterns or their wing shape very much until being able to track their motion with a slow shutter speed. 

 This is a famous landmark road in Angola. The fog and near-60-second-exposure help capture what looks like fairy flights or snakes of light or fire. It makes this photo look like a movie still or fantasy landscape.

A woman in Bangladesh rides in between train cars to keep from having to pay for a ticket. With the sun and time of day, it would have been easy for the photographer to stop the train tracks underneath. However, I like the sense of motion and danger one gets from a moving ground underneath the photo's subject. It gives the viewer a sense of riding with the woman.

For week of Oct. 18- Beautiful storms

One of my favorite things to do to give myself the heeby jeebies is to look at pictures and watch videos of storm cells and tornadoes. I love storm photos. I think it is the comfort of knowing I will not be swept away but being allowed to watch nature's awesome, awful, destructive show in the sky. This photo above was entered into the National Geographic photo contest, in Montana. It looks unreal. I didn't know the sky could form itself into something this twisted and beautiful.

 

  I like the vertical motion of this photo. Often, skies look horizontal in pictures, with viewers forgetting that the sky continues above and behind and all around us. I like that we see so much of the sky, and that the clouds seem in motion, perfectly and abstractly sculpted.

I do not understand this photo, and there is little info in its caption: "Cosmic. Mother nature doing what she does best," by Patrick John O'Doherty. I have no idea what element or force of nature is going on, but it looks like heaven and is still quite clearly earth. Glorious. I love to be absorbed into it.

For week of Oct. 11- An Edwardian Family Album

I was searching for artistic renditions of family albums on Google and home upon these examples from an amateur photographer named Jack Urton, an amateur but skilled photographer during the turn of the 19th century. 480 negatives were discovered in a cupboard in an old house in Liverpool, England a few years ago, and these photos have been shown in museums as documentation of an average middle class family's life during the late 1800s.

They are not anything groundbreaking, but they are incredible in portraying aspects of life rarely documented during that era--most photographs we see from the time are formal portraits. They almost seem to sweet, too perfect to be true. Like Mary Poppins come to life. They are intimate, yet educational.

I find this one to be especially beautiful, with sky and land both dramatically captured by film in a way that digital isn't able to do without combining multiple exposures.

Week of Oct. 4- Monochromatics!

Forgive me, these three photos were supposed to be put up for last week, so please count them as last week's blog post! I started messing around on Flickr looking for interesting use of monochromatic color in photos, and here are a few of my favorites. The red is called "Running from Myself" or something like that. The total redness of the picture gives it a distinct feeling of panic or eeriness that I don't think would be there were it to be beige, or blue, etc. Very interesting use of color to influence how the photo feels.

 Oh, I love this one. It's blue/teal. I almost used my old blue ocscillating fan for my monochromatic picture. The bubble is an ingenious idea. Thing is, I was going to use bubbles in a bathtub for white--I didn't think about bubbles looking blue around their edges! It's whimsical and made more attractive to look at with its single shade of sea foam.

I liked the simplicity of this white-on-white still life. I think these are golden delicious apples, so somehow they must have manipulated the color. The use of the apples on the old whitewashed board give it a country twinge, but there's also a decidedly modern feel because of the use of only white and the simple lines. Very nice!

Oct. 3, 2010- Edward J. Steichen

Edward J. Steichen was at one point in history the most famous and well-paid photographer in the world. He was a jack-of-all-trades (photographically speaking). This above photo is of a dancer's daughter at the Acropolis in Greece. Steichen would manipulate the negatives to make certain effects. I don't know what he did to this one, but she looks like a Greek goddess, her clothing made from and flowing into the sky. It's fantastical.

  This one seems unreal, dreamlike--the vibrantly white cloud contrasting impossibly with the darkness of the horizon and reflecting eerily on the rippled water.

Steichen took photos during war time and then became what was considered the world's first fashion photographer. Therefore, he was great at portraits. This one was in a collection called Juxtapositions. I like that I can't tell if it's a "civilized" gentleman with some other negatives processed over him or if it's a native man from somewhere (he took pictures documenting people in undeveloped countries, too).

Sept. 23, 2010- Dali and Halsman

So last weekend for my best friend's birthday, we drove to Atlanta to see the Dali exhibit at the High Museum. I loved looking through each medium of art Dali engaged in, but--surprise!--my favorite part of the exhibit was a gallery of photography featuring photos from the famous Halsman and Dali collaboration. Halsman was famous for his portraiture of celebrities. All are more intimate and real than most other glamour photos from that era. However, I think Halsman's career really took off when he and Dali began to work together. This photo above, In Voluptas Mors, began as a sketch that Dali drew and wanted Halsman to create. They spent days building the structure to hold the girls and tens of hours placing the lighting and models. The structure of women looks effortless and elegant, a little unsettling because of their individual beauty, and yet the gruesome image they make up. Dali in the foreground is perfect, slightly out of focus, mustache a-flying, looking as complex and, well, surreal as ever.

This is Halsman's famous Dali Atomicus. Whenever I first saw most of Halsman's photos, I thought someone had taken vintage photos and photoshopped them to create all the effects his photography features. But no---far more impressive, Halsman created his whimsical scenarios and portraits through hours and hours of carpentry, throwing water (and cats), and making people jump over and over until things clicked. I was astounded by the dedication, time, genius, and eye for detail that went into every one of his photos (and here I was complaining about my 35-shot contact sheet!). I was also amazed by the rightness of their collaboration. Halsman seemed too personal and whimsical for strait celebrity portraiture, and I believe Dali brought out the best in him. And without Halsman, Dali would never have been immortalized or seen in the same way as one of the most bizarre and genius personalities of the modern era.

That said, I also love Halsman's portraits of all the famous figures of his day. They bring honesty through their off-coloredness. Face it--not every person is meant to be captured in the way that many portraiture photographers of the day worked- everyone was highly stylized, beautifully lit, utterly perfect. Those portraits are so beautiful that they are boring. And give little to no sense of the person's true identity. That's what the public really wants to see from portraits--the truth. They want the photos to reveal something no one is supposed to know about that person, or to see that person documented in a new way. This portrait above is of Tippi Hendron. It's a perfect example of Halsman's dedication to bringing whimsy and truth to each portrait.  

Sept. 19, 2010- All Roads Photography

National Geographic has a neat series of awards called the All Roads Photography Awards, and is "part of the All Roads Film Project, a National Geographic program dedicated to providing a platform for indigenous and underrepresented minority-culture storytellers from around the world to showcase their works to promote knowledge, dialogue, and understanding with a broader, global audience." Sumit Dayal, the photographer of both these photos, is from Kashmir, historically caught between Pakistan and India and the main source of conflict between the two countries. His story got to me because it combines my true loves- social activism, international affairs, and photography. His photo style is right up my alley, too. These photos seem like they could've come from a film camera roll shot in the early 20th century. I love pictures of people and situations and places I've never known even existed. Who knew that there are still entire floating markets in Kashmir? He has awesome tonal range and  a wide depth of field--you can view each man's expression. I love the photo below for some of the same reasons.

9/14/2010- Hockney!

I went to the swimming pool yesterday to attempt a Hockney-style photo for class, and I am incredibly frustrated, yet completely amazed at the skill required to take these composite pictures! It makes me enjoy the good composites once I come across them. This is actually one of Hockney's above. The quality of each individual picture is beautiful, with all colors and details standing out brilliantly. It is fascinating to behold the entire montage or the individual shots. His exposure is fairly uniform, too, which makes it easier to pass the eye over the composite and view it as a whole.

This looks like a composite I may be more capable of taking, although I still don't understand how to take 35 parallel pictures that aren't supposed to overlap! At any rate, I love this one because of the motion of the kite and children. It makes it look like a grand kite festival as a whole, until you realize they were simply running around with the photographer taking pictures of the different spots as they ran around. It's slightly curved and distorted from changing perspective, but not too much so. The exposures are less even in this one, but it's beautiful because most of the variation is in the blue sky, so you just end up getting to look at a pretty range of blues.

9/8/2010- Silhouettes

This was during some kind of ceremony in Japan during a festival. There are times when silhouettes, even without the detail you would normally have of the subject, capture something about the subject that could never have been exposed normally. Here, we are familiar enough with the form and dress of the geisha to know what we are looking at. But in her silhouette, she presents a certain grace, quietness, and flirtation that would have been lost partially with a higher exposure. We also see the beautiful textile in the background, whatever that it. I think it's textured wallpaper, making lines that seem to move when photographed.

9/7/2010- Boats

Another subject I love to see pictures of and photograph whenever I have the chance- boats and water. The one above combines several aspects of photography that I love: It's in black and white with beautiful tones, and there is, indeed, a boat in it. What I like most is that it tells a story...it makes you wonder, not about what the subject is, but about who this silhouetted boy is, what he is doing out in the ocean by himself, and whether something happened to his boat or if he has simply seen a large fish to jump after. It's graceful, unusual, and calming to look at.

Here is another boat-port sort of picture. I love this one because of its focus both on a harbor on a very beautiful night. Harbors are something you don't often think about except in their usefulness. They are not often seen as a thing of beauty. I love the perspective, the blue tint, and that the stars are crisp and glorious with a low enough shutter speed or aperture to see them without washing out the boats and water. I am very interested in using natural light to recreate a scene as closely to what my eye sees so that I can experience a scene I like over and over again.

9/2/2010- Photograms, baby!

Patrick "Paddy" O'Rourke is a New Zealander who does drawings and then turns them into photograms. I don't understand how, but they are incredible! He says, "Cameraless and computerless I work across disciplines to produce pieces incorporating photogram, carbon paper, graphite and ink." The above is just incredibly detailed and beautiful in its negative look.

 This is a layered photogram in a light box, which has an incredible effect, bringing out the details and contrast of the black and white. I'm pretty sure the layers are still all his drawings. This is titled, "Helen," which I like, because it seems like he captured her a bit in the left and then used the rest of the space to bring in memories, objects, designs that he might link to Helen. It's a beautiful way to do a portrait. Below, see a layered photogram of his that uses his drawings and other media, like a photograph and a badge.