A friend of mine, Ventura-based Denise Dewire, has posted some beautiful fall color images taken on a recent visit to Yosemite.
Denise and I met earlier this fall in another fall colors workshop in the eastern Sierra. We’re both Canon 5D Mark II shooters – and she makes some great images!
Be sure to also check out her portfolio on 500px!
Printed in Italy? Not what I might have expected. Maybe printed in Hong Kong, or China, or …? The wonderful new book about Ansel Adams by Andrea Stillman is – yep – printed in Italy. Published by long time Adams’ publisher Little, Brown – I wonder why it was “printed in Italy”? But, that’s just a curiosity.
The book itself is a delight. “Looking at Ansel Adams: The Photographs and the Man
Two years ago this month, my late friend Chris Gulker and I drove south from Menlo Park to take in a unique exhibition of Ansel Adams prints at the Monterey Museum of Art. It was a very special trip for the two of us – Chris was a very talented black and white photographer and he was an avid student of Adams’ work. I walked Chris through the exhibition in his wheel chair – taking it slow and listening to his commentary on each photograph along the way. He blogged about it.
Along the way, we met up with the owner of this exhibition’s “Museum Set” – Adams’ daughter Anne Adams Helms. She was spending a few hours at the museum and enjoyed talking about her Dad. Chris asked about the difference in the way Adams printed his images over the course of his lifetime – and Anne talked about how the prints evolved to be darker late in his life.
One of Chris’ favorite Adams’ images is perhaps his best known – Moonrise. In the book, Stillman tells the story of this image – illustrating the evolution of Adams’ prints as he darkened the image over the years. The print of Moonrise at the exhibition was one of the darker ones – the Museum Sets having been printed late in his life. Chris just loved it – perhaps his most favorite image.
I learned a lot from this trip to Monterey with Chris as we shared our feelings about the special black and white imagery of Ansel Adams. Stillman’s personal remembrances in her new book bring back those memories to me again. A very special work – highly recommended!
In today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, artist Idris Khan was featured. His multiple image black and white compositions of London are quite striking – with great depth. They capture your eye – and keep your eyes in the frame. Great work, indeed. Really great.
Khan’s images remind me of another of my favorite local artists – Pep Ventosa. Pep is another master of this kind of multiple image compositions – in color.
Both of these artists obviously spend a lot of time both working their subjects in the field and in Photoshop as they compose their art.
I love ’em both!
In my reading about the great American photographer Walker Evans, I stumbled across this quote from Evans in his advice to his photography students at Yale (as cited in Walker Evans at Work
“Work alone if you can. Girls are particularly distracting, and you want to concentrate; you *have* to. This is not anti-feminism; it is common sense. Companions you may be with, unless perfectly patient and slavish to your genius, are bored stiff with what you’re doing. This will make itself felt and ruin your concentrated, sustained purpose.”
It is so easy to get lost in yourself when shooting images – and the work almost demands it. Evans’ advice rings very true for me!
Loved this – from “Walker Evans at Work
“Evans’s lifelong habit was to make several versions of each picture, often with different lenses or cameras. The reasons for this practice have to do with the photographer’s many-leveled relationship to his world. A photographer responds to a world of things which he at once sees, experiences and understands. When he is faced with stimulating subject matter, his immediate task is to make what sense he can of the components of seeing – camera distance, perspective, framing, light and gesture, all of which may be telling him important, perhaps contradictory, things at the same time. In addition, he is bedeviled by connections his mind is making between what he sees and what he knows – what he has read and lived, pictures he has seen, how he was raised, and a thousand other things. To be a good artist means to devise a personal strategy for reconciling the elements of this rich assault.”
On my way home from the East Bay this afternoon, I stopped by the Oakland Museum of California – a wonderful museum that brings back lots of memories from the early days following its opening in 1969. The museum has almost completed a major renovation – with the new Art and History galleries now open. While visiting today, I explored the Art and History galleries along with viewing the final day showing of Richard Misrach’s photographs of the devasting aftermath of the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley fire.
Later this spring, the museum will be opening a new exhibition: The 1968 Exhibit – which I’m looking forward to seeing! I was at UC Berkeley in 1968 – and have many memories of that tumultuous year!
What drew me to make today’s stop at OMCA was following up on some of my Walker Evans explorations which reminded me to explore another great American photographer, Berkeley’s Dorothea Lange. As a contemporary of Walker Evans during the 30’s and 40’s, Lange “created an indelible record of everyday life in difficult times.” Lange gifted her personal archive to OMCA – some 25,000 negatives and 6,000 prints. Perhaps her most iconic image is Migrant Mother – shot in 1936 – shown at right.
Similar in approach to Evans, she documented the people of America in their daily routine. I found this comment about Lange’s approach in the book “Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography 1849-1950
If Lange had a guiding motto, it seemed to be a quote from Francis Bacon that appeared in her 1934 Christmas card and that hung over her darkroom doors: “The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusions, is in itself a nobler thing that a whole harvest of invention.”
Keep it simple – and direct.
In the Art Gallery, OMCA displays a very wide range of art from its collection – including several of Lange’s more famous prints in a separate alcove. I really enjoyed my tour of this large gallery and seeing a few of Lange’s prints. Also displayed were several Ansel Adams prints – including one from his early days when his images were purposely soft and painterly. Great stuff!
This afternoon I began exploring the images of American photographer Edward S. Curtis archived at the Library of Congress. You can learn more about him here.
There’s a treasure trove of public domain images in his collection at the Library of Congress – and I was looking for new subjects to experiment with some Photoshop post-processing techniques. So I picked a couple of his images and went to work.
The first is this image he titled “Kutenai Duck Hunter” – below is my processed version:
I ended up with fourteen or so layers in Photoshop making adjustments to this image. It was a fascinating experience as I tried to apply some of my recent learnings to this image!
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