Learning Photography

Posted on Posted in creativity, da net, film, overnight notes

Making a task hard so it turns into art. OR, the art of fooling yourself

First, let us begin with learning to draw. We begin with the circle. Don’t worry that you can’t draw a circle, no one can; however, you can make a dot. that is where we start.

Make a dot on the paper. See. Easy, wasn’t it. Tomorrow you will make another dot next to the first, just a little to one side and down. Each day continue, making one dot each day. By this time next year you will have made your first circle.

Repeat this for ten years, until you have ten circles. It took a long time. Was hard to do. Required great patience as well as dedication. You may now think of yourself as an artist.

This is absurd, but, it is what most of the weekenders think photography as art is. Long slow tedius. making the requirements of a picture fall second to the art of picturing.

You should also wrap this in phrases based upon: light, vision, craft and such. Of course, nothing that can be seen isn’t based upon those same words.

First Lessons in Color Photography

Posted on Posted in exs notebook, the LabTagged ,
  • it is an illusion. a trompe which becomes its versioned reality
  • it is based upon a standard observer and a standard scene. these provoke a normal or typical response
  • the standard observer/light can/does result in subject or scene failure of the technology. Film is less flexible, being designed for mass production processing. 
  • the making of supplies has always assumed many users, not great usage by small volume users.

Artist Life

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, minimum daily requirement

Reset the clocks. Run the short loop. Walk the long way back.

Breakfast is grits and sweet potato. Veg sausages and espresso

Off to the garden shop — bags of mulch, compost; no seeds. They’ve already come from online stores. Skip the starter plants. They always tempt, but they never grow as well as from seed, or direct planting in the yarden.

Put prints from yesterday into flatten press.

Into the darkroom. Re-print yesterday’s negatives using softer developer. Ilford Multigrade and 1+9. Simple, reliable. Spend time testing imagery not chemistry.

Prints looking good. Mix scones. Bake scones. Lunch. Rice and yogurt. Start new rice. Back to darkroom

Go to next negatives on list of ‘print for edit’ — always 8x10s. Keep process simple, repeatable. Expand other areas of praxis.

Prints washing. Read some. Avoid the dead-enders, the freezer geezers that dominate the Web Forums.

Set prints drying. Cut veg for dinner. Plot out midnight readings.

Seek out Winogrand Color book? Not published?

Oh, write this and post. Do more. Do more often.

art daily