Hiking in Maxwell Falls

More experimenting in nature with a camera.

Fashion City Part 2...Hidden Bonus Track

Of course there's a hidden bonus track! Love the look here. Statuesque and haunting. I tamed down the play of color a bit from this.

Fashion City Part 1

It wasn't all car wrecks and broken glass. We had some fun with fashion, too. Sometimes its good to get out and push yourself from what you normally do and try something different. More from this series coming soon!

Parkscapes

Goletaville Day 15 Part 2- A Brief Period of Blue

Goletaville-Day 15 Part 1...and the Best Thing I Read about Photography Today

From an interview conducted by photographer Todd Hido on the influence of Larry Sultan:

"One thing he helped me articulate was that it wasn't my job to make total sense of my images, but to simply 'charge the air, so that meaning could occur.'"

I like it when people say things like that. "Charge the air"! Indeed.

Goletaville-Day 14

Day 14 was a gray and foggy morning, see bottom picture. Truth be told this is what Santa Barbara/Goleta looks like most times in the summer, but it makes for a beautiful soft light and there are still images to be found.

The Return of Goletaville-Day 11 Revisited

I'm never going to get caught up if I keep revisiting the days I've already posted! I was reviewing some past shoots and I liked these images, too, so I thought I would put them out there. All total there were 20-something days I shot for the Goleta Project. There's a long ways to go yet, but we got nothing but time!

Charlene and Me-The Green Portraits

I'm not sure what my fascination with green and discolored images is lately. I suppose it had to happen at some point and that point is now.

In Cars

And Gary Numan's influence rears its ugly head.

Downtown Loveland and The Start of an Old Artist Statement

The other night I found an artist statement that I had started a while ago. I hardly even remember writing it. My first response was, "where'd this come from?"

[All true art contains the element of death. By death I don't mean a literal death, but a conscious awareness of one's existence. The feeling of a heightened sense of awareness to your environment like the feeling soon after the death of a close loved one, when you see reality as it is and you know, or you think you know, its motivations. I want to boil that feeling down to its essence to make it a dot, a spec, a period with the density of a black hole. The problem is the period becomes smoke and the smoke is impermanent. And that's the great tragic comedy of it all. The smoke can't be nailed down or made into a period. It can't be grasped. Yet, it is a truth experienced. It is evident in the clouds and the side glances of strangers. It can be an honesty so painful it gets hidden. Buried deep down in an anonymous field at midnight somewhere in one of the Dakotas. The contradictory notion of simultaneously existing yet trying to deny one's existence.]

Well, it's a start.

Dreams and Mongrels

these mongrels have no proof
though they may convince you with their forceful stares
and their longish teeth
that could easily tear through clothes
and pinch the skin
but their teeth have spikes
and the spikes have spurs
and the spurs won't allow them to swallow

so hold steady

there is still gasoline in the ice chest
and these shark infested waters
will soon be under the sticky pavement
of white light
and blue sky
and a warm hearted open sun
who in all his millions of dreams
has yet to dream up his own death

New Lights, Rembrandt, and Transfiguring Grammar

I've been testing out my new lighting rig, which apparently is a good time for more self-portraits. (What do you want, I'm the only one here! Except for the cat and I'm not getting the cat to do anything.) So I figured, if you're self-portraiting at some point you've got to Rembrandt. And then I figured, if you're writing at some point you've got to use a noun as a verb. And that's when it occurred to me, might as well do it all here at once.