Just an Old Image I Dug Up

Well, it's been over a week since I last posted anything up here. I've meant all week to take my brothers digital camera with me to work to get quick results with the construction photographs I've been taking, but I always forget to either ask permission, or bring it along. So I'll just have to wait another day or two to get any of those photographs posted (I still have to take my slides in to get them processed, and I'm only half way through my current roll). I have been shooting almost every day this week for that project. It seems like every time I turn around I see a little grouping of shapes and angles or curves that catches my eye.
I the meantime, here's a photograph I made in Island Park earlier this summer:

Construction Photographs

Today I started on a new project. The other day, while I was at work, I thought I needed to start making a few photographs of the houses I am framing. The past few days I have been starting to see neat little geometric patterns in the walls and floors and scraps and hoses that lay all over the work area. So today, during my lunch break I got out my camera and started shooting away. I ended up making about thirteen or fourteen images, all on slide film, so it'll be a while before I get the slides back and posted, but I really had fun this afternoon letting loose and making images of something that I don't normally photograph. I can't wait to get the slides back

Fire Pits

Hmm...It's been a week since my last post. I got a new job framing houses, so I'm pretty beat at the end of the day, and I guess posting to this thing got a little ignored.
Anyway, on the the photography stuff: I was going through all of my images that I have scanned a little while ago and found this photograph:It was taken about a year and a half ago at Beaverdick Park, before I even came up the idea of the Fire Pits project, so I guess this one was really the first image made of a fire pit. At least one that didn't have a fire burning in it at the time the exposure was made. I have a few such images that I made last summer and the summer before when I worked at a scout camp in Island Park, Idaho. I'll do some more searching and try to dig those ones up and get them posted. They are part of another project I'm working on, of the scout camp. That area of Island Park is more home to me and my brothers than our house is, and for the past three years I've been trying to get images made of the camp property. So far I have a measly dozen or so negatives. I know, a VERY poor amount to show for "working" on the project for three years. Every summer I tell myself I'll get a whole slew of images together, but it never happens. I come up with excellent excuses to not go up and make photographs, but truth is I'm lazy. I guess it's time to get my butt in gear and get serious about some of these things.

Parks Project Ideas

Monday night some guys from NASA came up to the Idaho Falls Museum to present an award to Nitrocision. My father works there, and the company fabricates liquid nitrogen cutters that can be used in many different applications. Some applications include removing the surfaces off of aircraft carrier decks before they are resurfaced, and removing the insulation material out of the housings for the rockets that propel the solid rocket boosters away from the space shuttle, which is why NASA came up. There has been a space and aeronautical exhibit at the museum and it was pretty cool. But there is a part of the museum that is dedicated exclusively to Idaho's history. There was a book set out full of old photographs of Idaho Falls, and I was thumbing through it and came across some old photographs of Tauphaus Park (a park that I photographed a few times already for my project, and still need to photograph more) dated from the 1950's and earlier. There was even an aerial photograph. The park looks almost nothing like what it looks like today. There was a big dirt race track where horse and car races and rodeos were held, and the only things that survived (atleast what I could easily identify from the photographs) were the Lilac Circle and a waterfall along the Idaho Canal. The rest has been altered significantly.
Looking at these photographs sparked another idea. I want to start contacting the city officials, who ever I would talk to, and ask if I can get some of these old photographs to include in the project. I've been wanting to contact the Parks and Recreation Departments and see if I can get copies of the original designs for these parks (if there are any; some parks I realize probably weren't "designed" by a landscape architect) to include in the project. I think it would be beneficial, at the very least to me, to have these resources, and, if and/or when I show these again, it would be beneficial to the viewer to see a sort of "history" of these parks.

Park Photographs

I got Photoshop CS 2 today, and it is one slick program. There have been a few improvements that make working with photographs a lot easier (at least for me). It kind of got me excited about fixing all the scans of all my photograms, so I spent a good amount of time doing that today. I also came across some photographs of some parks up in Seattle.

This one is the Rhododendron Glen at the Arboretum
Me and my brother went out to Discovery Park one day, and as we were getting in the car, I thought I heard some running water. I poked my head through the bushes and found this:

Another one from the Arboretum. I could have spent weeks at this place.
I want to include these photographs in my parks project, but haven't quite figured out a way to make them fit in. Maybe just getting more images from similar places will help. If not, I'll just have to come up with a new project...or make this current parks project have a couple of facets, i.e., the City Park, the Arboretum, the Nature Park, etc... I'll just have to keep thinking about it. And shooting.

Grad School

While this post won't really cover anything really new or exciting with my ongoing or potential projects, I have some good news.
Yesterday I called Craig Law from Utah State and asked about taking graduate classes as a non-matriculated grad student, as he said I could a few months ago. So I called him asking if the offer was still on the table, and he said it was, and come January, I'll most likely be down in Logan goin to school again! I guess Craig had a hard time convincing Sarah (who is now no longer teaching there) and the graduate student acceptance committee that I should be accepted. The reason why, and I quote directly from Craig, is "your slides were bad." Talk about a crushing and humbling comment, and one that will make you seriously consider how thorough you are about what you do. And make you kick yourself for trying to fudge something that perhaps you know shouldn't be included.

More Ideas

I just got back from camping in Star Valley with a friend's church activity, and like all my camping trips (and road trips), I got some thinking done.
I left on thursday, and at Swan Valley I followed an old dirt road that follows the South Fork of the Snake River all the way up to Palisades Reservoir. I found plenty of fire pits to photograph, and came up with some ideas about the project. Up until now, much of the photographs that I have made have been pretty romanticized. I think that for some of the images, it is appropriate, while others probably shouldn't be romanitcized. It really depends on the environment where the fire pit is located, but til thursday, I hadn't really taken that into consideration. One thought I had about fires and fire pits (and this is where the surrounding environment comes into play) is that fire can be destructive, and yet, it can also be relaxing. I recall many camping trips, and many nights when I worked up at scout camp when we would have a fire burning, and how much of a stress reliever it was. On the other hand, if not given the proper respect, and especially in this area, fire can be a very dangerous thing. So where am I going with this? I guess my point (at the risk of sounding a bit redundant) is that I finally realized that this project will require special attention to other details such as quality of light, etc..., whereas with the parks project, I didn't have to worry about that--or maybe I did need to and didn't, or I did worry about it, and didn't really realize it. Either way, I think overall, the parks project has been successfull.
Another thought that I had is that it's hard to make a large number of images of something so specific as a fire pit, and have them all look interesting, and have a good variety of images in compisition especially. I remember during a critique for my BFA class Darren more or less warned me of something that had started happening (and still occurs at times, unfortunately). He warned me of becoming too formulaic in my work (i.e., with compositition). I had found a composition that worked well, and was using that same basic composition in many images. As I was setting up for the first photograph of the fire pits I made on thursday, the composition started looking exactly like the one that I have posted below. So, I forced myself change the composition. The two still probably will end up looking a little similar, but as I said before, it's a little difficult keeping a good variety in this project as far as where I decide to put a small circle of stones in the image area.
I also went into Jackson Hole, Wyoming on thursday and went to a couple of art and photo galleries. There is a new photo gallery there called the Oswald Gallery. There were several orginals by Ansel Adams, Edward Curtis, Henri Cartier Bresson, Paul Capinigro, Yousef Karsh, Hiroshe Watanabe, and many others of my favorite photographers. It was incredible (as it always is) to see the originals. They have so much more depth and richness and allure to them. While I was in an artist's watercolor gallery, I realized that I don't have to confine myself to oils for the experimentation with the photograms that I have been doing (sometimes I can be a little...closed-minded about things). Hopefully I can finish the current painting soon so I can experiment with watercolor, acrylics, or pastels. I might even get some clay or something and try mixing some 3D artwork into it. I'll just have to see what I have the time and patience for.

Photograms and Painting

Last week I began experimenting with incorporating/mixing painting into the photograms that I have been doing. So far I don't really have much to show other than a canvas painted with just one color. The plan was (and maybe still is) to take the photogram, and make a painting of it, but I'm not sure how enthused about it I am now. Maybe I just need to stick with it and complete the painting before I make a final decision. After all, I have put only one hour of work into the painting so far.
I also have been making a few more color photographs than I usually do. I've really been trying to push myself and try to get some more diversity into my photography. I love black and white, but I want and need to become more proficient in working with color.

New Project and More Photograms

In April this year, my photo teacher from college, Darren Clark, and two friends Jon Long and Theo Hatch and I all went to a stretch of the North Fork of the Snake River near St. Anthony, Idaho. I had no idea what I was going to photograph or how I was going to do it. As Darren parked his car, a fire pit in the middle of the road caught my eye. I had to make a photograph. After that, an idea for a new project occured to me: fire pits. Since then, I have been photographing various fire pits and fire rings made by campers and partiers where ever I find them. Locations range from established fire rings in state funded and maintained campgrounds to rings made out in the middle of nowhere.
The image below (although not the first) was made during our trip to the North Fork.

And, here are more photograms that I have finally tweaked in photoshop. The two on the top were very short exposures: 4 minutes for the top, and 30 seconds for the bottom. Then the third was about an 8 hour exposure (these things really try my patience).



Parks Project in Color

These photographs are some that I made in Portland this March when I was there for this years' Society for Photographic Education National Conference. I have been trying to incorporate color into my current project of photographing public parks (click here to see the current body of work). I am still debating whether or not the project needs color photographs. I guess more color images are needed to really make the decision though.

New Work

For the past five months, I have been experimenting with alternative ways of making photographs and art. These alternative methods include pinhole photographs, historical processes, and cameraless imagery, such as photograms. I have also been contemplating incorporating other media into my images, which can include painting, digital manipulation, collage, etc...