More from Day 9

These are images I took before the clouds moved in. Here you can see the pier from where I took the shots in my last post.

Goletaville-Day 9

I was shooting the clear sun-filled sky at the Goleta beach and pier when these clouds came sweeping in. Pretty amazing how the environment can change so quickly. I'd been wanting to get some seascapes just like this for some time. Glad I was there that morning.

It should be noted that these images are an homage to Hiroshi Sugimoto and his series on seascapes, which can be seen here and many other places on the web. I highly recommend checking out all his work. This exercise was not about originality, but about emulating someone and something I admire so that hopefully somehow the experience would improve my work. Sugimoto creates his images using an 8x10 view camera, which means his negatives are 8x10inches big. Compare that to the roughly 1 inch 35mm neg! That also means his images contain a lot more visual information and subtlety. He also captures his images using long exposures. I did my the "lazy" way. I used a digital SLR and utilized camera movement to get my images. However, if these images were any bigger the quality would start to fall apart and you could see just how dusty my sensor is! His can be printed large and beautiful and they are real art, I'm still just practicing.

Goletaville-Day 8

This project is turning out to be a bigger monster than I expected. I'm 3 weeks into it and it feels like it's just getting started. It's turned into something completely different, and all in ways beyond what I could have hoped for. I'm not sure where this project is going, all I know is that I want to keep doing it. By now, the inmates are definitely running the asylum.

As always, more from the day can be seen here.

Goletaville-Day 7

So backtracking a bit, Day 4 was about Color; Day 5 pt.1 was about trying some new things breaking out of the mold; pt 2 was a combination of several past experiments of line, abstraction, light vs. dark, composition, and reflections, with a splash of color; Day 6 was about applying those same elements, along with more emphasis on light quality, to a new location while attempting to get more of a sense of place; and now Day 7 was about bringing it back down to communicating a mood. So I turned back to the clouds, another common subject of mine...and the ground...and the darkness. Once again, the thumbnails tend to fall a bit darker, so please click on them to see them closer to how they are intended, if you are so inclined.

Goletaville-Day 6

Some say God is in the details and others say the devil is in the details. Whichever it is, at this rate this could take a while...

Goletaville-Day 5 pt.2

This is a building I drive by all the time. It is part of the "industrial complex" part of town. Got to give it up to the architect, he definitely new what he was doing utilizing the shadows from the nearly constant sun here. Just amazing lines and reflections and reflections of lines.

Goletaville-Day 5 pt.1

On the heels of the inspiring words of Mr. Callahan and other Abstract Photographers of the same period, such as Aaron Siskind, day 5 results in an explosion of new found images. 2 locations and 2 parts for this day's ramble about. Another photographer of this era to check out is Frederick Sommer, he is perhaps my favorite.

For this part I decided to switch things up a bit and play around with the square format. I think I could do a whole series on just the ground of parking lots. There's so many abstract compositions that can be made from each one of them.