spanish folk crafts book

spanish folk crafts book
Originally uploaded by baking with medusa

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Two Thousand and Ten

What's going on these days in the world of photography. I have hit a big batch of fixer. Nothing I've done lately has that spark, that energy, that sense of wonder. Perhaps, I need to revaluate my work.

An Early Spring Flying Letter

An Early Spring Flying Letter
Originally uploaded by magic fly paula

Magic Fly Paula

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Making the Old New Again

The one aspect of making imagery I have enjoyed the most lately is drawing on the thirty or so years of photographs that I've already taken. So often now the images I work with are derived from photographs exposed 10, 20, or 30 years ago. These images lie boxes as an original negative, color slide or print waiting for me to dust them off (literally sometimes)and remake them.


Many of these images never did justice to their original conception and failed as formal artistic statements. Such images are waiting to be reclaimed, mixed with other equally failed misfires into a final idea that allows their intrinsic beauty to be finally realized.

I shoot more new images today that ever before, but often edit more. Digital makes for more shots, shots that I would have never taken in the days of $10 a roll Kodachrome. Digital does help with one thing, however, that use to haunt me, looking for images that are substantive in the brain, but never actually were snapped.



The primary problem with taking so many pictures becomes one of finding what you are looking for when you need it. Shakespeare said it best:"You can't see the forest for the trees." If the experienced could offer one piece of advice to the young it would be this: "Take a few minutes to organize and annotate your images as you make them. In the days of roll film and prints, it was harder to lose things. Today with digital, if you fail to create order you will have no idea what, when, where, or how as your hairline gradually climbs your head like the tide on a twilight beach,"

The bounty of the past awaits those that stick with it, but remember sometimes finding where you have been is more difficult that those first steps.

November 2005

I've drifted, as I have a penchant for, away from image making. My cameras left in their cases to hibernate. But the stirings are returning as they so often do. In fact, I spent a little time last weekend working some scanned elements into a few finished pieces that can be seen on my my still under-construction photoblog at: http://shadowmold.my-expressions.com/index.html. Many of these images are ones that have in the front drawer of my brain for many years coupled with a few recently aquired images to form these recent efforts.

Shadowmold Hiatus Continues

While school starts up there has not been the time needed to work on my Photoblog. I continuing shooting but have don very little lately with the move to expressions. I hope to have a little time after labor day to get back to completeing the transfer to Expressions and begin adding new images to the site.

Uploading Images to Flickr

I've been uploading large numbers of images to Flickr and organizing them into sets. Approximately 850 images online at the present.

New Shadowmold at Expressions

I've finally began retooling the Shadowmold Photo Blog on the Expressions Photoblogging Service. I'm twecing the template and adding images as I go. I've decided to dispense with dated entries and simply number them, arranging the archives or galleries by catagories. So far I like the look. Basic but intuitive.

Continuing Through Boxes

I spent the better part of yesterday going through and re boxing most of my media collection. I managed to find find another box of slides that had no been placed in pages. After the disaster of last week, I'm making progress this week at last. Much is in disarray, but I'm managiong to separate the "wheat" from the "chaff". I ventured out Monday and took some photos. Nothing extraordinary. A sample is in my photo stream at Flicker. I have my spade at ready for more.

Working on New Photoblog:Visiblenarrative

I have been playing with a redesign while I contemplate moving away from blogger. Using the scanned negatives I've been working on I am slowly trying out various ideas. More Later.

Flatbed Scans of Old Negatives

Title: Graduating Twins with Brother and Mother.

I am spending a good deal of my time this summer going through and organizing boxes and boxes of photographs and ephemera I have produced and collected over the last thirty years. I have come across a box of black and white negatives I produced in the early 1970s and am experimenting with scanning these negatives on a flatbed scanner.

Title: Abandoned Family Pickup.

Employing Photoshop, I've been making adjustments to render a decent print. I discovered with my first few negatives that the process of scanning tends to create artifacts that were not in the original photographs. Surface scratches, dust and blemishes become an intrinisic part of the image.

Title: Monument To The Domestic Life

The images above are representational of the group. Look at all the images in my photo set "Negatives" at Flickr.

The People in CJL's Photographs

Throughout Lauglin's span of photographic worlds people playing themselves or symbolic figures abound. Who were these people? I've working on a list.

• Monita Gerson
• Beatrice Prendergast
• Cecilia Stewart
• Elaine Duke
• Weeks Hall
• Dora Harrison
• Elizabeth Heintzen
• Louise McIntosh
• Nan Byrne
• Gloria Simon
• Elise Whitney
• Dick Lyon
• Mary Joel Weil
• Roland Duvernet
• Sandy Engels
• Edgar Bley


More will follow.

Important Addresses and Locations in CJL Life and Photographs

• 720 General Pershing Street - CJL lived here as a child for some 20 years. This house (the rear) was the subject of CJL first photograph. His father died in this house on October 20, 1918.
• 627 Decatur Street

• Metarie Cemetary.
• Audubon Park.
• Greenwood Cemetary.
• Live Oak Plantation.
• Girod Street Cemetary. (No longer extant) The Super Dome is built on this site. Link.
• Acme Marble Works
• The corner of St. Peter and Royal
• Lafayette Cemetary
• St. Roch Cemetary

More to follow.

Clarence John Laughlin's Photo Groups

Louisana photographer CJL classified his photographs into catagories or groups.

Group A: Still Lifes
Group B: Marine Forms
Group C: Tree Forms
Group D: Early Industrialism
Group E: Metal Magic
Group F: Glass Magic
Group G: Fantasy in old New Orleans
Group H: Lost New Orleans
Group I: Satires
Group J: Images of the Lost
Group K: Visual Poems
Group L: Poems of the Interior World
Group M: The Louisana Plantations
Group N:Forms of Today
Group O: Color Experiments
Group P: Rock Forms
Group Q: New Anatomies
Group R: Sculpture Seen Anew
Group S: The Magic of the Object
Group T: The Mystery of Space
Group U: American Victorian Architecture
Group V: Vintage Prints
Group W: Fantasy in Europe



Read more about Clarence John Laughlin here

Template Modifications

Looking at blogs really illustrated Marshall McLuhan's
notion that "the medium is the message". That is to say, with so many people using the Blogger default templates, a sameness begins to invade all these self-expressions. Double takes are common. Question Marks jump into to your head. Have I been here before? This all seems familar. Maybe its just the fact that we all share a common culture, a common bias. Or perhaps, we need to change the color of the font we are using.

Experiment! Look at the template. Learn your way around CSS. Try things. Modify and preview. If the change stinks change it back. One big area that helps is to create a banner in Photoshop and replace the text box generated by the default template.

Make it really your own. Sometimes a little change works wonders.

Flickr

I began implementing Flickr ito my workflow recently and I am amazed at the possibilities it presents. So much of the image work is made automatic by the simple act of uploading to your Flickr photostream. The best by product is the back up of full size images. This gives you another safety net when working with your images. I have not explored all the features yet, but so far I'm pleased and impressed. I upgraded to a Pro account as soon as I realized the utility of this dynamic service.

WAO Part 3: Numbering

With the coming of digital I needed a system that came me more that a simple roll number. In fact, digital all but eliminates rolls. I decided a some point to retain the metaphor of the "roll" but changed the name to "set". Today everytime I download a batch of pictures, I designate that as a set. Sometimes a set contains 12 images, sometimes 1200. I use the following number system now to get a handle on the image.

0501A.DM_0001

The first two digits "05" is the year. ie. 2005
The next two digits "01" is the annual serial number ie. "01" The first set of 2005
The fifth digit "A" is an extra number for future needs. A=Means that the roll number is correct. X=Means that I'm not sure if the roll number is correct. Given the inconsistent numbering of some of my original media, I must rely on a guess. The "X" means that I should check these images.
Period. (Divides the set number)
The seventh digit is an alpha chracter that indicated the medium of the original image. With scanning I need a way to know where the original image came from. I have a list of these designators. "D" means digital original. "T" means color slide.
The eight digit indicates the original capture device. "M" means Canon 300D. I have designator for each of the cameras I have used over the years.
The last 4 digits are arbitrary. The camera provides this number when I shoot digital. When I scan, the scanner serializes the images as they are scanned. When I'm scanning prints I add the number. I make no attempt to serialize this number to the actual slide or negative.

WAO Part 2 Old Skool New Skool

Many of us didn't begin taking photographs yesterday with the advent of digital cameras. We began with silver and film and chemicals in darkrooms. Many of us with 30+ years of files realize that having a system to find what we have taken in the past. Unfortunately, many of us do not have everything cataloged or in containers that preserve the materials. During a good deal of the time I have photographed regularly, color slides in there nice oblong boxes provided a place to put the rolls as they came back from the processors. (Kodachrome was always sent out and required 2 weeks or more to return) I began early, classiffying my rolls with a simple system. I numbered each roll 7501 with the first two digits designating the year and the seconf two digits indicating the number of that roll in that year chronologically. When I got my first "real" computer in 1985, I set up a database of "Roll Records" that recorded important information about the roll. At some point I moved all these slides into cardboard boxes that held about 4-6 rolls. I used empty slide mounts to keep them separated. I used a rubber stamp to put a roll number on each slide mount. Over the years, I experimented with adding two more digits to identify individual slides. These attempts were short lived. I felt that if I could maintain the roll and its general contents that would be all I really needed. I was shooting any where from 1 rolls to 60 rolls per year as my picture taking waned or was temporaryally replaced with a different form (video, polaroid).

Workflow Annotation Organizing:WAO Part 1

Creating thousands of images each month requires a system of organization to insure that the image you need can be rescued from the mountain of boxes and discs. In the next few posts I'll discuss what I do.

Shadowmold Still Changing.

I intended to reintroduce www.shadowmold.org on May 1st. but my continuous changes to the formatting may delay that or not. I've finally arrived at a page arrangement that I like and I am busy making the necessary changes. One of the limitations of Blogger is that any notes added must precede or follow the image. hat is Blogger does not provide another field to place this information. Though I like the Image data and believe it important to the picture, I've decided to place that information in the comment, now powered by Haloscan. It makes for a less cluttered layout which I believe showcases the images more effectively. However the cahanges require deletions of the text of some 130 plus posts and the creation of a similar number of comments. Also I've relocated the Title in the menu banner and moved my tool links to the bottom of the page,

The next step will be to revise the Archives, Thumbs and About pages. Another weekend consumed. So much for actually photographing something!

Testing Haloscan Comments and Trackback

I'm implementing the Haloscan service on my blogs. The price is certainly right and they offer a better format than Blogger's built in comment system.

Hacking the Bogger Navbar

If you have been wanting to eliminate the Blogger Navbar along the top of your blog check the article at http://www.bloggertemplates.com

Our Metaphors Have Become Our Reality

In the March issue of ZoneZero, editor Pedro Meyer points up something that I've been thinking about for sometime now. Namely, that our day to day reality is so contrived, so much that reality is now the novelty. Click on the link to read Pedro Meyer's editorial at ZoneZero.

For the Record

My media filies are in disarray. That is to say, I'm generally know what my collection contains and I have a general idea where they are, but if I go looking for a specific image or video or film, I'd have to wade through a tidal pool of artifacts. I'm really not a slob. Over the years I've made a point to number and organize things as they were created. Somewhat. Time, however, agregates the tiny into the monumental.
Lossing interest or something else snares your passion for a time and things pile up. That was the condition of my collections last year about this same time. Since then, I've made some decisions about how and what to organize. All my color slides and those of my father and grandmother are now in slide pages in archivical boxes. I know that they are sequenced chronologically.

My methodolgy has been to work on one area and then move onto the next step. Lately I've began scanning many of the slides before I know where they are. Time of course is the enemy, too much of it and not enough of it.

The photoblog has brought order and focus to the entire project and to my life somewhat.

Update.Beginning

When I thought about creating a text based blog to accompany my photoblog SHADOWMOLD, I knew that I would want to comment about my own photography as well as the work of others when the site began getting a following. I thought I use this first post to talk about what I'm up to and what my goals are for the site.

Shadowmold is moving along quite nicely, though at present I'm using blogger rather than the ubiqutous Movable Type. Why? Movable Type requires computer expertise, I don't at present possess and wonder if I in fact need to possess. Software has a way of superceding develper tools and becoming end user friendly. I want to do what I do rather quickly and don't want the learning curve.

I may change my mind tomorrow.

All planned parts of Shadowmold are up and working with the exception of the galleries and thumbnail views. I'm not pleased with the formatting in Blogger's comment system, but I may find a way around that as I have the one-picture-at-a-time-limitation.

Right now I'm interested in getting a platform for the pictures working to enable contact with other photographers.