gulls. where else? beach 4

Fujifilm X Pro 1 at the beach...3

Fujifilm X Pro-1 at the beach part 2

I've been waiting for soft green light on the beach.  This was close but not totally soft and tended towards blue.  

Still, I like the images.

Blasting away at the beach with the Fujifilm X pro 1

I like to use one lens at a time when I shoot.  I get my head into the moment and need to be focused on the big picture or the detail.  

For the big picture, I use the 18mm fuji lens which is 28mm on the old 35 mm camera format.

I see pattern and tone that way.

Some people say this lens is a little soft around the edges, but my copy is very nice and renders like a dream of drawing.

Apples with the Fujifilm X Pro 1

Here are two images lit with a Bowens strobe and soft box and the X Pro 1.  The first shot with the 60mm lens and the second is shot with the 35mm lens.

I was trying for dark, moody and slightly out of focus.

I've done a lot of shooting at f11 and really wanted to play with shallow depth of field.

I went to see Wally Keeler at the Human Bean

I went over to see my friend Wally Keeler's art and it was truly unique and interesting.  Wally is a poet and has created a series of idea montages featuring images and words hung like photos.  I liked it.

It was also an opportunity to be inspired and snap a few frames.  The colour in the cafe is quite hot, as you can see.  Great stuff!

Streeters for features

I've done some street shooting recently and hope to do more.  I'm exploring and trying to understand one significant school of modern photography.

There is an entire world of post-pop colour photography started by William Eggleston and continued by young people today.  It often features mundane subject matter, the colour is usually jarring, and the beauty of the picture comes to you slowly, like Avro Part music.  It can easily be confused with bad home photos or bad tourist shots, but it runs deeper.

I've been familiar with this genre for decades, but never really got it, hence the effort to undersatand by doing.  Here are a few attempts.

 

Utterly subjective, I know

I continue to explore the idea of white.  My neo-baroque postings explored the Caravaggio-like light, or rather shade, of the colourful image against a dark background.  Such images can be mysterious and hold a lot of power.

I find the white background totally different.  It feels modern and abstract, in a way.

It is a totally different photographic experience for me.  Such mental stretching is probably a good thing.

NOTE to photographers: The other thing I have found is that the Fujifilm X Pro-1 camera renders files in a way that is much more in keeping with my vision than the traditional dslr cameras. I'm not sure if it is the way the sensor array captures or the lens renders.  But it is markedly different from Canon and Nikon and even Sony full frame cameras.  There actually is a film-like aura about the files that gives a subtly intuitive veracity.  Utterly subjective, I know.

Turner sky part two

Yesterday I posted the cyanotype monochrome version of the sky.  This is the colour version.  I'm not sure which I prefer.

Turneresque cloud formations in the sky

There have been some Turneresque cloud formations in the sky.  I grabbed one yesterday and was pleased at the way it developed.

New Darwinian summer frieze

I'm evolving this idea.  These days it's all evolution.  Evolve.  Evolve.  Evolve.  I expect to see Darwin come out of my bathroom any day now.......sans beard and hair.....looking for a cameras to get in on the action.

Don't monkey with me, Darwin!

He crept quietly around back

I noticed I could occasionally find an interesting angle if I moved 'round to the back of the still life and shot it from a high angle into the light.  With transparent subjects like flowers and round objects like mangoes, it often works.

As touched as possible, as personal as possible

Ive been trying some new ideas for composition; trying to simplify where I can.  Sometimes one gets out on a limb of the unknown, which is where I feel I am now.

Over the long weekend, guests brought some wine, one bottle of which was a beautiful black  with a red seal.  I painted up two bottles to look like it.  I could have used the actual bottle,  but I wanted the Morandi paint job to add human effort to the still life: I wanted these to be as touched and modified as possible to keep them as personal as possible.

Man whacked away at mango still

I have whacked away at the mango still lifes in spite of the bone challenge.  Ironically, I prefer the work I'm doing on the side with the mangoes to the bones.

It seems a diversion can foster creativity.  Don't look now but....

As if I didn't have enough to challenge me, I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion.  Not for the faint of heart.

If you take the plunge, it turns your laptop or desk top into an i pad interface.  Plunge best taken with internal wifi connection.

Who likes designer bones?

I took a page out of Giorgio Morandi's book and painted the bones.  I may not have the colours right.

In fact, the whole bone thing may not be working.  I wonder if the ancient Britons painted stone henge five thousand years ago?

My mangoes are now officially rotting.  They aren't going to wait for me to get the bone idea right.  The studio smells like a garbage can.

Quick, open the window.  Glad it's summer.

The more I see Gauguin....

The more I photograph these mangoes, the more I understand Gauguin and see his work in this fruit.

They could have instructed him on his unequalled use of red, orange and green in his painting.

Nobody was more mango than Gauguin.

Cezanne had the "couleur juste", Van Gogh the brilliance, but Gauguin could school them all on pure colour harmony.

Pears mangoes encore.....

The mangoes have proved to be excellent companions with all my old faithful nature morte participants: pears, oranges, the painted neo-morandi ceramics.  This is much to my delight.

Oddly, I find that after a lifetime of seeing in black and white, these days I'm seeing almost entirely in colour.  I think it started when I had a surprisingly strong emotional experience in front of the Rembrandt paintings in Amsterdam earlier this year.

I don't know what it means or if it makes a difference.  But I used to prefer black and white photography for my photos and now it is colour.  It surprises me greatly but I have to just go with it, I think.

Here is another in the ongoing colour series.

Picasso said of good work at 50

I have moved to different fruit and varied the composition with this still life series.  One of the challenges is to make a new picture and not repeat.

Picasso said that anyone can produce good work when 25 years old; the trick is to still produce good work at 50.

These still lives are tending more towards the stacked themes of Cezanne and less of Morandi.  When the bones are dried out, I will return to trying the more formal and linear two-dimensional challenges set by Morandi.

Pears are Cezanne too

I read that Cezanne took so long to paint a still life that the fruit was rotting by the time he finished.  Who knows: maybe that's how he invented the multiple angled cubism that Picasso speaks of.  The fruit turned as Cezanne painted it! LOL.  But Cezanne could paint peaches.  His colours just sing.

Here is my idea of singing, sensual peaches. I used strong soft box side light to create lots of darks and I left the colours saturated from the Fujifilm X Pro 1 file, just as they came out of the camer in jpeg on the "S" setting.  I softened it a bit in LightRoom 4.

So as the bones dry, we have more mangoes

I set the bones aside for the moment and decided to shoot some still lives inspired by Cezanne; that is to say, on a tilted table top.

Cezanne made a habit of covering a table in a floral rug, jugs, bowls and fruit, and taking a high perspective.  It resulted in a kind of abstract design in which table edges sometimes misaligned and rules of perspective were distorted just north of Cubism.

It's amazing what a difference looking from eye level versus from above can make.