I took my car to get it washed, it’s a great country place where you sit down at a picnic table under a tree while a crew of four people do a mini-detailing on your car. Only $18, and the car is spotless.

While waiting, I noticed the sign in a window across from me “Special Tuesday Ladies Day”. I aimed the iPhone there, pretending to read email, and waited. Finally one of the detailers moved to stand right next to the sign for about 5 seconds, but I was ready and got off this shot.

A few enhancements to bring out the highlights, lowered the contrast because it was bright sun, and cropped it. I would be happier if the exposure was sharper, but I’m happy to have gotten the pic at all. She looks so sad, waiting for one more car to come out of that bay, that she will dry and buff by hand, cars she will never be able to afford. Covered in grime that will stick to her all day and follow her home at night. But she smiled at every customer, and actually did not seem to resent us at all, which made me feel less guilty for having a better job than her.

Tempered glass is so lovely when it shatters.  When it stays in one piece like this.  I posted another version of this about a month ago, with a face peering through, but I might like the unaltered version even better.

Broken glass almost always gives you an opportunity to take a great picture.  The edges of the glass and the way it catches the light are always interesting.  Avoiding injury is paramount, but the sheer randomness of glass is fascinating.

A story from an art history class in college:  can’t remember who the artist was, but he had made some fabulous painting which was being shipped to the US for exhibition.  To protect its fragile nature, it was packed between 2 huge thick panes of tempered glass (like above).  When the crate was being unloaded at the dock, it fell off the crane and the crate was damaged.  The artist was summoned immediately and was present when the crate was opened to check for damage.  Sure enough, the glass protecting the painting had shattered into intricate patterns all over the painting.  The artist began to weep copiously and when he could finally speak, he gasped out “I always felt the work was incomplete — now it is perfect”.

Sometimes a little randomness is just what we need to make everything fall into place.

It’s not stained glass.  It’s not fabric.  Believe it or not, this is the swiss chard pic I posted about a week ago, superimposed over a background pic of tree lichen.  I used a tonal mask on the chard to leave behind the outlines of the stems while bleeding off most of the color. I have to admit, this absolutely blew me away.  I can’t stop looking at the details, it just looks amazing.

I rarely work in color, or that used to be true.  When I shot film, it was always black and white.  Everyone sees different things in art; for me, I see form and structure and graphic elements and color is often a distraction.  For some reason though, when editing on the iPhone, color is just another element to work with.  And since my object in creating pictures is to stretch myself creatively, sooner or later I was going to have to tackle this sacred cow and work with color.

You just don’t know what you can do until you try it.  I’ll say it once more: taking bad pictures is a good thing.  If you aren’t taking bad pictures, it’s because you aren’t trying anything new.

One of my rare photos that was not taken with the iPhone.  I used my Nikon D70 and shot the sandy ocean floor through the water on a sunny day at Plum Island.  There was no retouching needed, the sky was reflected on the sand through the rippling of the water surface.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

The String Peddlers at Southern Village.  People sprawl all over the lawn but some reason nobody was up near the front, so I had 20 feet of empty space behind me when I went to the front and had to lie down on the ground to get this shot.  To make it look acceptable, I stuffed a few bills in the can while I was down there.

The things we do for art.

Without Grunge.

At the barn dance I talked about in a previous post, at breaktime for the Doc Branch band, a couple of the grandkids stepped up with banjos and a guitar and played us a couple of songs.  The boy in the front got drafted by the older boy next to him and he said “but I can’t play the banjo” and the other boy said “of course you can, just get up here”.  So he did, and by gosh it turns out he could play just fine.

The grunge version.  This one has a vintage feel which goes well with the hay bales and general atmosphere.

Abstractions can be artificially made, like the stuff I do with Decim8, or they can be truly “reflective” of reality, like here.  I come back to this point again and again: photography is about what the artist sees.  Sometimes I see things that don’t exist YET, until I create the picture I want, and sometimes, I NOTICE something and take the picture.

Some people say about my photos: you do so much editing, it’s not the same picture any more. And sometimes it’s true that I edit, a LOT.  But iPhoneography particularly, and digital photography in general, is a new and different art.  It’s just not the same as film photography, where there was an expectation that what you saw was exactly what existed when the picture was taken.

Just to prove a point, I present this picture, which is UNEDITED (except for a minor crop), UNENHANCED, and has NO EFFECTS added.  NONE.  This is 100% how it appeared in the camera when I snapped the picture.

It’s the bottom of my coffee cup, still shiny with my afternoon caffeine.  Some light was shining into the cup, which I held up in my hand and took the picture.  THAT’S IT.

Pretend that your eye is a camera.  Look for effects made just by light shining on things.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Anyone who has known me longer than a week or two has seen me heads-down scribbling in my moleskine.  I draw in them, write in them, plan my day, work through gnarly computer problems in my head, jot down ideas for blogging or writing or recipes, prod myself to do things like baking bread or cleaning the house or lifting weights, obsess over what kind of pen I’m using and does the ink dry fast enough, deliberate about whether or not to read the current book group selection, speculate about politics.  Typical stuff for a moleskine fanatic.

I got obsessed with moleskines about 7 years ago when I read an article about them in the Boston Globe; execs talking about how they used a moleskine instead of a PDA.  Well, nobody uses PDAs any more because they have smartphones, but when I read this article, on a Sunday morning, I leapt into the air, got dressed quickly and headed to my nearest Charette to buy some of these amazing notebooks which had clearly altered the course of history as the choice of Ernest Hemingway, Bruce Chatwin,  etc etc.  The minute you have one in your hand, ideas pour out of you.  You can’t stop writing.  You can’t leave the house without one of these.  You keep it next to the bed at night.

I take a moleskine backpacking, which will probably leave it soggy (but they dry out).  I have carried them until they shred (a little duct tape sets things right). One time I got rear-ended by a jerk in a pickup and whipped out my moleskine to write down his info; he of course did not have such a thing and had to stop screaming at me to humbly ask for a page so he could write down mine.  I handed him my Lamy and snapped “be careful with that, it’s a fountain pen”.  Oh the things we come up with to say when we’re under pressure!  It succeeded in shutting him up though, who would mess with a lady who writes with a fountain pen, in a little Italian hand-sewn notebook?

A guitar in a stage stand on a stone patio at Southern Village.  The play of light on the stone was fantastic and I couldn’t resist playing it up.

A little saturation and some grunging is all I did.  Cropping.  While I was sitting listening to the music and this concert, I felt devoid of creativity but set a goal of getting one shot to use, just one, it didn’t have to be good, but I have to get one image a day posted.

It truly is not the most important thing for me to create good images.  But I have to identify somehow with what I produce; the puppies-and-kittens thing is just not my vision of the world.  Any images I create must be what I feel about the world around me.  And it has to be fun.  And as usual, when I made this silent commitment to myself, I was able to start taking picture after picture, sometimes forgetting that there was a concert going on right in front of me with some of my favorite songs being sung.  Rock me mama like a wagon wheel, rock me mama any way you feel …

What a day.  It’s Monday, so of course my brain feels like a plate of Welsh rarebit.  And I’m not even Welsh.  Anyway, I was staying up late at night, running some really boring performance tests and decided to do that exercise I do to stimulate my creativity:  for the next 10 minutes, work on an image, and at the end of 10 minutes, whatever it looks like is the pic of the day.

So it’s an hour later.  I did a box of eggs that looked like a mountain range, some Decim8tions, and a bunch of other stuff that even I couldn’t stand to look at.  So finally just took an image of, I think, Pixie Geldoff, by snapping a pic in Vogue, and then decimating it.  Since she’s wearing an Andy Warhol t-shirt, I thought this was appropriate.  The six frames should be different colors, but 10 minutes have been over for a looooooong time, so this is today’s offering.