Volunteer photography

PICT0148.JPG, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I can't count the things I learn volunteering, but volunteer photographing gets me ACCESS, yes.

Doughrety arc

Doughrety arc, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

How much work do I have to put into something before I can earn the right to say "Yes it is overexposed, that is on purpose?"

View of rail bridge through trees

View of rail bridge through trees, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

The idea of the golden hour is making me neurotic, it's making me go out into the cold just because it's dawn or dusk, and the feeling of how fleeting these brief windows of good light are is making me take the same pictures over and over, incrementally adding techniques, capturing other fleeting things, like trains or ice floes. Looking back, I think I've missed a lot just trying to get the light just right over the hills, but I still haven't gotten it, so I'm back out there again.

Three four leaf clovers

Three four leaf clovers, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Sometimes the subject is cooler than the picture despite all my efforts.
There are three four leaf clovers in this picture. I tried capturing them in various ways, but there's only so much to be done. One of them is in poor shape.

Couple of people in front of library

Couple of people in front of library, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Photography is tricky, in that just about everything that's undesirable is also desired deeply by a whole market of people. Graininess is a good example. Of course this image here doesn't have the clarity you want from a picture of a couple, you'd prefer to have them isolated. But the glowy dark grain itself isn't the barrier to this.

Fog mist and snow

PICT1457, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

The world seems bigger when you can't see as far. I guess the change makes me conscious of depth.
Recently a haze came over downtown that covered the tops of the tallest buildings. It made them look like skyscrapers, like in that cloud they ust kept going and going.
If this picture were pink I'd like it better.

Windown in St. Paul's Lowertown

Windown in St. Paul's Lowertown, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

This is an old picture, but I don't think it's quite right to imagine that any capture of my past could be necessarily re-done better just because I know my Aperture from my ISO now.
My friends say that it's all about your eye and perspective. I still want a new lens, however.

Rail Bridge 15 on Pickerel Lake

Rail Bridge 15 on Pickerel Lake, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

When I try to make a composite panorama, I don't look at what I am photographing in a very artistic way after I've decided what field of view I want to capture, I mostly think about if I've adequately covered that area of view yet. As a result, when I see the photos large, I am often surprised.
That's the benefit of just clicking, clicking clicking.
There is of course a benefit to setting up each shot carefully, but without manual focus there's only so much of that to be done.

type

PICT0133.JPG, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

It's not the camera, it's the photographer.
However. Doing close up macro stuff, it's the focusing that makes the shot, and with a point and shoot, the focus is all out of your hands, and very touchy. So largely it's luck, or a willingness to hold up a little camera to its subject and take the photo over and over.

sepia cat

sepia cat, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Digital StillCamera photo, no filters, just brownish lighting and brownish subjects.
To me this looks pretty slick, but it is a pet photo. I am not ashamed that I like my pet photos. Okay, maybe a little.

Monarch egg

PICT0011, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I'm jealous of extreme macro photography, but even just what a standard point-and-shoot can capture can be evocative.
Moreso when I actually explain what you are meant to see, in this instance.

Peep-eye rose

PICT0005, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Taken with a five dollar apartment door peephole lens fitted over my point and shoot's normal lens. I have misplaced or lost the apparatus, but there's obviously plenty of motivation for me to find it! Look how blurry, distorted, even discolored the background is! This is glass, but they sell Holga macro lenses for pretty cheap on ebay.

Bright Chicago

DSC_0392, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Hello!
Recently ebay has taught me that people DO want to throw me a little change (as in money) for a few pictures of mine, and I appreciate this!
I certainly don't want to discourage this!
Now, I don't want to sell all of my artwork in multiples and cheaply, which is to say, some work I'd prefer to just sell once for a higher price.
But I can definitely get behind selling certain pieces multiple times for a very low price.
It encourages me to try and make more than one kind of photo, and it gives me a reason to look through all my old stuff!
So. At this time I'm offering that you can purchase, for personal use, any picture featured on this blog for whatever price you feel appropriate.
Simply paypal thelotusduck@gmail.com and note what picture you'd like to have in a digital copy.
If you're not a paypal person, we will have to work out some different commission basis.

Remember skills?

Wastemold removed, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I'm focusing (and I'm applying the word very loosely) somewhat away from sculpture, but making a waste mold and bust was one of the most cool things ever, and I'm positive (no pun intended) that it wouldn't take nearly as long as it did. When I made the original positive, I spent two days putting in details that were not going to come through in the mold and cast process. I also made the waste mold ridiculously thick, which made it tough to get off and contributed to me chipping right through the nose I made. Knowing this, I'm somewhat less likely to make those particular time consuming mistakes, so I can say that if I got some clay I could make another bust far more easily than I did this one, and hey, with 2D art the gallery expects you to provide a frame, but with sculpture, they don't expect you to buy a pedestal, right? You just give them the art, so that seems far cheaper, as gallery expenses go, and what's stopping me from building the original out of play-dough? Oh, nevermind, playdough is far more expensive than clay.

Goals

worm's eye view of cat, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Although dumping massive amounts of data on Flickr in and of itself accomplishes nothing, knowing that I want to save more this month than I had been saving over the past two years makes me feel, I don't know, photographer-y.
I bought a little three dollar tripod, so now I can stabilize my shots without calling up a deep stillness while lying on the ground (see above) or having a box upon which to put the camera.
I know this is a slow escalation of equipment, where I eventually become one of those people with a lensbaby, just trying to think of tiny things to shoot, but I'm fairly safe for now, as I barely use the stuff currently available to me, to say nothing of what I could get on ebay.

Impressing myself (and nobody else)

Bee Martyr, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I'm in an awkward phase where I have a chunk of stuff that I've spent a lot of time and drive space on, and I mostly want to make more and learn more, but this would probably also be a good stage to show off, to get some kind of real feedback on what I've done so far. I had a picture in our little art crawl, so that's one thing, but I've got a bunch of stuff that I like, at least, so that's about the place where people are supposed to say hey, hang this shit up in your grocery store.

I have no real idea of how to do macro photography, I use those automatic digital cameras a lot, so figuring things out is often just an unintelligent screaming conversation. I just pointed the camera and took picture after picture at different zooms until one turned out where you can see the bee and the camera promptly died for want of batteries.

Many this way pass

PICT1458, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I spend a lot of time photographing the highbridge, because I am still mostly an incidental photographer, and I cross the bridge on foot somewhat often. It's probably the biggest structure near my house, or the nearest big structure to my house.
I think about how rusted it gets and how quickly--the rust from the railings pours down over the structural elements, which is, as I understand it, not such a great thing. I wish kids or advertisers or someone with the time energy and resources to repaint the thing more often, would. A while back there was an initiative to put weird, confusing artistic signs around neighborhoods because studies showed people drove slower, if not more attentively, where art was present.
At the very least, someone should write "This too shall pass" on the other side of the railing, as it's a somewhat popular suicide destination in the Twin Cities.

Old things

Chuck, illustrated by Uncle Arnie, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

The idea of an image *belonging* to me in any sense appeals to my senseless photo greed.
Certain two dimensional Prentice family artifacts belong to me and about 7 other people, so I have a continuing interest in preserving them, at least digitally. Things in the public domain belong to everyone, and therefore everyone, although someone has already scanned Moses King's Handbook of the United States (http://books.google.com/books?id=3FE6AAAAMAAJ although perhaps their scans of the smaller images leave something wanting...), and I gave away that old music book, so I don't think I have any original editions of public domain material not freely available elsewhere. But, naturally I have as much right to public domain material that I find online as I do for
something I rescue from the trash and scan myself.
I want to photograph every antique thing, but I don't yet know what the tips and tricks are for shooting small.

What was lost

CIMG0611, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

None of the computers at my immediate disposal have a good relationship with CDs.
So it took me actually finding CDs around and remembering to take them out to the studio to find out that a lot of stuff I'd written off as lost is readily at my disposal.
I've been making fake double exposures, and I'm really loving how I've saved so many redundant or shitty pictures, because trying to make a photo accidental can only go so far, large stacks of photos that are almost good in places but are still kind of pedestrian are exactly what is needed to fake an accidental double exposure, but still get a result that has good definition in places.
There is much to do.

Holgafied--Artificial and very artificial

moon and church, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I am carefully making the appearance of accidents.
This picture has a very different kind of wandering viewfinder--taking each small picture in a panorama obscures how the final product will look. The perspective seems as though it was shot through some special lens because all of the objects sort of lean in towards the nodal point (the camera.)

Shitty photo, revisited

PICT1406, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Making the fake lomo thing happen is a lot of fun for me. Maybe this style appeals to so many photographers and wannabes because they get a sympathetic masochistic thrill when everything you can plan for has gone wrong in a photo. But when just one thing or two is wrong with a photo, it's not miraculous, it's just the usual, so we delete it or set it aside, without the notion that it could be pink and green and flying through an aquarium, beautiful or terrible or both.

Quality V. Density of pixels

Melody, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

This was shot with the old Gateway digital camera. The over exposure is interesting, I think, but the image is no good for blowing up, really. There are many situations similar to this one, where I like the capture in every way except that the fidelity is not where I want it. So I choose one of the correct answers, and forget about it. The other digital answer is the vexel, with curves and gradients making a labor intensive photorealistic illustration. However, I have been so loathe to use the pen tool, that I never realized that my home Photoshop Elements does not have it.
So I've decided that the "path selection" tool is close enough to the pen tool, although easiest of all would be to just project this image on a big piece of paper and splat ink in the appropriate areas.

Hip junk

clutter, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

If there's anything I seek in life, it's more junk.
Maybe deep down I want a career, but on a day to day basis, I spend a lot of time thinking about things, in my relationships, I spend a lot of time talking about things.
My love of food is largely my love of cooking, which really comes back to thrift store junk: pasta crimping wheels, cast iron pans and kettles, relics from things people used to care about.
Miniatures are one way to have hundreds of design and retro household items while only owning one full size house, then there's digital junk, like the fake flashes and lenses to collect on the iphone hipstamatic, or gui skins, or in-game items.
And photographs.

The Weather

PICT1444, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

With Photography, every day is a unique and perhaps irreplaceable opportunity. It won't be as clear tommorow, it won't be as beautifully hazy by noon, soon there won't be another opportunity for winter photography when the snow melts, but it needs to be warm enough for a digital camera to work. It forces me to place myself in time and space.

Fake lomo temptations

skyride cars, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

We recently shot a roll of film at a class with a pinhole camera, which requires a little guesswork with regard to the viewfinder. I shot the rest of the roll after class and got it developed.
The whole roll had someone's vacation pictures on it, with some interesting results, but now I have some interest in getting similar results without the crushing heartbreak.
And I have, of late, become interested in finding some use for my very large collection of pictures that have some quality that I like.

Arisaema triphyllum

CIMG0586, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

For a brief while, we could blame every smell in the kitchen on this fly pollinated plant, which is understandably not a common ornamental. Probably only one strange smell originated from the plant. We do not know how it got there, but seeds, you know? They get around. It's a deep forest plant, which makes it strange that it probably got inside the house due to an industrial mistake at a garden center.

Snapshot v. Good Photo: Cathead series

Cathead series, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

This is from a "photo shoot" at Lisa's house. I use quotation marks because everything was staged for the camera, but the backgrounds were not really considered, hallways, tables and televisions.
I don't know whether I am penalizing myself for not being more spontaneous, or for not being more carefully staged.
This is another shot by my now-and-then functional gateway camera, so some amount of my thought was devoted to keeping the thing on for 10 seconds at a time.

That serendipitous find: decapitated lawn ornament

decapitated dog statue, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

This was in the days of my Gateway camera, the last days.
You had to press on the bottom door just hard enough, otherwise it would think it didn't have a card. It took pretty shitty pictures, also, I might have taken ten pictures of this sad little scene and this is the only one that turned out. But my concern for max megapixel definition is probably a bit silly most of the time, most things are more tastefully printed at under a square foot.
There was a big storm the day before this happened, but now that I think of it, someone probably kicked the statue or hit it with something big, as it appears to be concrete and nothing else in the yard seems broken.
The next day, the statue was gone.

Never lose a good photo (if someone could have died.)

nofatestairs, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

How, oh how did I lose the large file for this photo. Probably because I burned it to a CD and they are easily scratched and broken.
This stairway design is gone with the remodel. When I was in high school, more people would just do photo shoots with me: They would do cool or dangerous things and I would mostly fail to capture them. Actually my brother was probably the only one to intentionally do something dangerous, like stand on the lip above a doorway in a fencing mask and goggles.

New Christian Hymn and Tune Book

CIMG0498, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

One of many things I rescued from the Half Priced Books dumpster, a book of music from the 19th century. I started scanning it, but got distracted. The sheet music is also on my Picasa web album.
Instead I gave this to a pretty girl to destroy for chine collet in a printmaking class (since it'd lasted more than 100 years already I'd safely say it was archival) and I left the rest of the book to the next class to use.
The instructors were a little troubled, as I used to be (and still am sometimes) thinking it belongs in a library or a museum. I explained to them that I got it in a heap of similarly aged books out of a dumpster, as I assume I will probably get another, or probably could get another, similar copyright free music book.

Good photo/bad photo

PICT1443, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

As I'm learning new tricks with the camera I'm also learning to even more appreciate photos that still look spontaneous, that look like they could be a handheld shot without any photoshop.
This is a borderline one. The bridge always looks like this.
I try not to be super depressed like, but sometimes "what's it all for?" is a question well worth asking, and well worth making up answers.

My "gothy texture" phase

PICT1439, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I've never been the photoshop wizard I'd sometimes prepare to be.
This is a rotting plant for overlaying on a pretty model's face to make it dark and serious or something.
There's a purpose and a place for everything, right? Maybe.

Electrical line bundles trimmed

CIMG0211, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

This picture doesn't get across the enormity of the situation. This is from a trip to the Philippines. Telephone poles had huge bundles with lots of cut lines hanging from them.
I took this picture when a bunch of people with ladders were trimming the disconnected lines, I suppose they were working for the government there? But they were just letting the cut lines fall into traffic.
And how were these workers involved with the creation of these tangled bundles of wires in the first place?

Cat loves sculpture

CIMG0533, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I wish I had taken more pictures of this thing. Or did more to rust proof it.
I put up about five pictures of my cat scratching at this thing in a heap of mail.
Thinking about what I'm to submit to Foot in the door 4 this week, and looking at this, I wonder what I'm really good at, or what I should be.

I'm a photographer now?

In January I made myself a goal of maxing out my submission limit to Flickr. I did it, but I had to try. I've always had more pictures than I seem to be able to use or keep track of, so why not? In the last couple of days of the month, I was able to put up a few more pictures and round out 100mb.
It's February 2nd, and I've met my monthly goal a little bit quicker this time. I tossed up a cat show, and I'm done.
So am I going to get a Pro account?
Fuck no!
I'm just going to blog all the pictures that I think I'll want to remember later, so I can see them after flickr hides the old ones from the search engine.