iphone photography ~ Lori Pond

While at Fotofest I met a wonderful photographer, Lori Pond, who was showing some of her iphone photographs. I did not see anyone else (in the 4th session) showing work created with the iphone. Many of us carry around iphones but few have been as creative as Lori. Along with the images, Lori has generously shared how she created each image.

Enjoy!



Steps: This image was made at the Self-Realization Fellowship Center in Encinitas, California. Founder Paramahansa Yogananda built a pool overlooking the ocean that he used for his daily exercise. After his death, the pool was drained. I used the Plastic Bullet app for light streaking and moody color palette.



Lights: I was eating dinner outside in Encinitas, California on a balmy night last summer. I looked up and saw these lights and wanted to remember the experience. I used Plastic Bullet for the color streaking, star filter look, and saturation.



L1: At an artist walk years ago, I bought a beautiful ivory carving of a woman's hand, complete with carved mehndi designs on the back of the hand. It was made into a necklace, and I loved wearing it. One day the little finger broke off at the first joint, so it felt weird to wear the necklace after that. So, I kept it in front of my computer with the palm up. I decided to make a kind of still life self-portrait out of it, so I put an L Scrabble tile in its palm, then photographed that with the iPhone. I made another image of my arm with the iPhone. I blended the two images together to make my self-portrait. I used the app Big Lens to create the special effects around the sides of the image.



Ironing: This is a view of my laundry room, which I've seen thousands of times since I moved into my current house in 1994. It never occurred to me until I was carrying my iPhone everywhere to make an image of of this room. I think I make a lot more varied images now, because I DO carry my iPhone everywhere. An oft-repeated saying goes something like this: "The best camera is the one you have with you."
The vignette comes from Big Lens, which also provided the Lomo filter, bringing a 70s look to the image.



Canelo: This is Bill Steen's backyard in Canelo, Arizona. He builds straw bale housing and holds workshops on how to build them. I was taken by the light at dusk on his property. Everything turned gold. I used Vintage Scene to put some texture into the image, and Photoforge to enhance texture/contrast/brightness of varying parts of the image.



El Profeta: While in Mexico for Dan's workshop last December, I noticed while driving around the state of Sonora that there were a ton of roadside shrines. Shrines to family members who had died in traffic accidents, shrines to the Virgen de Guadalupe, you name it. I started to look out for them, as some of them are quite striking. I used Big Lens to create selective blurring in the image, and King Camera to create the texture overlay.



Watch Out For Clouds: I saw this fisheye mirror on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, where I work on the "Conan" show. These mirrors aid the many truck drivers who deliver sets, lighting, wardrobe etc. to various parts of the lot. (There are many narrow alleyways and vision is very obscured.) I was walking by this mirror at lunch one day, and saw the reflection of the sky in it. Since I had my trusty iPhone, I couldn't pass up this photo op! I used Photoforge to emphasize brightness in certain areas of the image, and to create a vignette around the edges.



Underwater: This is my most recent image, using the front camera to take a self-portrait. I had just downloaded an app called Power Cam, which I used to create the texture on my skin and take away color. I also used Power Cam to create the water ripple effect over the face. Power Cam actually plays this water ripple effect almost like a movie, and you simply stop the movie when enough ripple has accumulated. I've worked in TV graphics for 25 years, so to see this on my PHONE just blows me away. It used to take a whole room of computer equipment to make something like this happen!



Self Portrait: With the Slow Shutter app, I can create light trails with my iPhone. For this image, I layered an in-focus exposure over an exposure using Slow Shutter to create my hand movement. I also used Dramatic B&W to de-saturate and grunge up the image a little.



Pogo: I recently collaborated with abstract painter Barbara Nathanson on a piece called "Nothing in the Entire Universe is Hidden." It was shown in January as part of exhibit "VS." at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles. One day, while standing in her studio, I glanced down and saw her 14-year-old dog peacefully napping. I used Photoforge to create the bicolor wash over the image, and Pic Grunger for the texture/frame.



Overhead: When I flew to Mexico last December on my way to an iPhone Artistry workshop with Dan Burkholder, I went crazy making images of my view outside the plane's window. I used Photoforge to enhance the contrast of the image and to put a bicolor wash over the image.

So impressive! If anyone has favorite iphone pix you would like to share, I would be happy to post. Thanks, Lori, for your inspiration!

Zelda Zinn ~ Natural Selection

I have always loved fabric. I love running my hand over fabric. I love photographing fabric (as in my Visitations series). I was a quilter for many years. So when I saw the work of Zelda Zinn at Fotofest, I knew I liked her work immediately. The images felt familiar yet mysterious, photographic yet like charcoal drawings.





In Zelda's words...

Natural Selection

"This body of images came about during an artist’s residency in New Mexico. I thought I would be looking at the effects of natural forces on the land: geology, erosion, and mud. In the mountains the clouds were always changing, and I ended up spending a lot of time staring at the sky. It was the greatest never-ending movie. Every time I looked up, there was a new formation of clouds. I was amazed by the endless variety of shapes that were formed. They were so ethereal, yet so suggestive.





I started by trying to catalog the constant parade that I saw. It occurred to me that the shapes were the result of unseen forces acting on elements in nature. The clouds were the result of wind moving a collection of water droplets floating on air. As I thought about the water droplets, I saw them as collections of molecules. This led me to think about how nature is organized, and how patterns are the visual manifestations of the way nature works: its underlying structure. Hidden beneath everything is this invisible framework. If you think about it, it’s pretty magical, even though it can be explained through biology or physics.






I make pictures from bits and pieces of everyday things: cloth, paper, wool. I work with these materials until they make some kind of visual sense. I find myself drawn to shapes that are suggestive of other things, images we may recognize from our visual memories. My constructions are not so much pictures “of” things, but rather meant to evoke things. Often the elements suggested are drawn from nature: sky, earth, water, and the animal kingdom. I enjoy the challenge of alluding to other things through such limited means. Light is a key ingredient in these compositions, as is tone and line. I think of them as drawings made with a camera. Providing so little tangible information thorough depth, detail, or tonal variation, they tug at the seams of what a photograph is. They hold our attention through their power of suggestion and their purely visual appeal.

Fotofest follow up ~ Erika Diettes

I am back from Houston, where the Fotofest venue started in 1986. The festival was cofounded by Wendy Watress and Fred Baldwin, photojournalists who have changed the photographic world with their vision. There are now numerous spin offs of the festival of light, a collaboration involving twenty-three photography festivals from over 20 countries around the world. And there are numerous festivals in the US too, Photolucida, PhotoNola, Santa Fe Review, and Filter Photo (Chicago's own).

One of the many benefits of having participated was seeing some really great work. I thought I would share the work of a few artists. I only saw a very small sampling of what was there as my visit was short. What I did see was truly inspiring.

Erika Diettes is a photographer from Columbia. I had a brochure of her work in my packet but it came to life in the installation she did at the Trinity Episcopal Church. It was deeply moving and something I will never forget.



The following description of the exhibit is drawn from a report in the Columbian newspaper El Tiempo by reporter Melissa Serrato Ramírez, who wrote about the exhibit last year when it was installed at its permanent home, the Museum of St. Clair’s Church in Bogotá:

"Erika Diettes’s show, Sudarios, depicts twenty women witnesses to violence of the "disappered" in Columbia. Diettes realized that the sorrow of these women was so intense that there was always a moment in which they closed their eyes. “It was a gesture that demonstrated that still, and probably forever, they would live closed within the world of their sorrow.” This is the moment that she captured on film."





"Sudarios, or “Shrouds,” is a term which also alludes to the artist’s desire, impossible to fulfill, of covering and wiping the sorrow away from the faces of all of those women. "Although at times I think that they don’t need that,” she says. “After looking at them for so long, I discovered that in the midst of their sorrow, I can see a certain resignation.” In deciding how to mount the photos in this show, Diettes decided not to print them on paper, but rather on a delicate silk and cotton blend fabric, black and white, and in large format, to hang in the Museum of St. Clair’s Church in Bogotá, a space that used to be a women’s convent and in which, in an interior of stunning gold leaf, a number of images of saints and martyrs from the colonial era are displayed. In that venue they are left to hang from loose, almost invisible threads; they hang loose, the bottom unattached and moved by ambient air, which gives them an ethereal character."



“Although to a much lesser degree than these women, we’ve all experienced moments of such strong sorrow that gives us a feeling of such fragility that it feels as if our body leaves the earth, leaving behind only the weight of what can’t be undone,” she comments. Diettes opted to leave them like this because she wanted to show how Columbia is inhabited by ghosts, or souls in pain, as “violence leaves people in an intermediate state, unable to ever trust in anything ever again.”

Creative Collaboration ~ Remix #2

Round 2 of the creative collaboration ~ remix. For those new to this project, I have offered out a photograph to be reinterpreted and reprocessed in any way. It has been amazing to see the creative sparks fly.


A little background on the image.... the Red Chair file is a photograph of a very special space where the creative muses visit ALOT. It is the living room of the Ragdale house where many accomplished writers, poets, composers and visual artists share their work, so it is not surprising that wonderful compositions grew out of this digital file. (You might consider applying for a residency by checking it out HERE).

I am so appreciative to your participation, either as a creator or a viewer, because you need both in the art world.

So...feast your eyes!

Again, the work is in chronological order.

original file

Fran Forman "The Elephant Not in the Room"

Barry Hughes

Michael Werner

Joyce Westrop

Tyler Hewitt (Tyler shares his creative process on his blog)

Jane Fulton Alt

Ray Carns

Panos Lambrou

Yvette Meltzer

On Inspiration ~ Excerpt from Wislawa Szymborska’s Nobel Lecture December 7, 1996

"I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself. When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know." ….. This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended."

NEXT

I have decided to continue this project monthly. I will be posting a new file at the beginning of each month. Feel free to jump in whenever the spirit moves you! If you are reading this and are not a photographer, feel free to work with the file in whatever manner you see fit...a haiku, prose, paint, collage...use your imagination to take the image to a new place.

The next image I am offering out was photographed in Mexico. I fell in love with the walls and was deeply moved by the space. Let your mind and heart wander. Be open. You never know where or when the inspiration will arrive at your doorstep, but I know it will arrive if you are paying attention.



Just email me at photos@janefultonalt.com and I will send a larger file to you! Return your remix by the end of April in a file size of 72 dpi, the longest side at 1000 pixels along with your website and I will post in the beginning of May. Please keep in mind that this is just for FUN! Keep your judging mind to a minimum and just let your imagination wander. Experiment, explore, expand. Approach it with what you know you love and see what unfolds.

Happy Spring!

The Business of Photography

Having your work seen is as important as creating it. Fotofest (in Houston) is the "mother" of all reviews and where it all started.


As I am posting from my iPhone, I will keep this short.

I plan on posting on the second creative collaboration next Wednesday. Stay tuned!

Wabi Sabi

Never heard of it? Neither had I until my good friend and mentor, Dick Olderman, told me about it and then sent me a book, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. I read it a few months ago and did not understand it. It is a Japanese aesthetic associated with the tea ceremony.

Burn No. 98 ~ Floating Ash

I reread the book last week and was totally mesmerized by it as I felt that it resonated with much of what I am doing these days.

Burn No. 33

Burn No. 71

I would like to share an excerpt from the book that might give some insights...

"The Wabi-Sabi Universe

Metaphysical Basis
- Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness

Spiritual Values
- Truth comes from the observation of nature
-"Greatness" exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details
-Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness

State of Mind
- Acceptance of the inevitable
-Appreciation of the cosmic order

Moral Precepts
-Get rid of all that is unnecessary
-Focus on the intrinsic and ignore material hierarchy

Material Qualities
-the suggestion of natural process
-Irregular
-Intimate
-Unpretentious
-Earthly
-Murky
-Simple

Burn No. 96

Maybe I have piqued your interest? If so, have fun learning more about it.

Musings

These photos were taken this season from the Burn. I have been working on this project for 5 years. It seems like each season offers its own challenges. I am finding it physically very taxing and often, after 2 hours in the field I feel like a wilted flower. I am not sure where I am heading with the work but I suppose that will become clear over time.

I found myself playing with The Red Chair image (from the current creative collaboration project) and enjoyed the process of letting things surface without much thought. My creativity slid by my conscious mind which was such a gift. John Loori, the author of The Zen of Creativity writes about this state...

"In no mind there is no intent. The activity, whatever it may be, is not forced or strained. The art just slips through the intellectual filters, without conscious effort and without planning. In the instant there is intent there is expectation. Expectation is deadly because it disconnects us from reality. When we get ahead of ourselves, we leave the moment. No mind is living in the moment, without preoccupation or projection….hesitancy or deliberation will show in our art when we leave the moment."