a Photo Blog, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to dear dirty New York
Two more snow images, another lesson in exposure. These were converted to B&W using Fujifilm’s ACROS film curve in Capture One. You can see that they’re not as cool as the last image. They’re also a bit gray – brightening anymore was creating hot spots. The better solution would have been to set the correct exposure in the camera, not afterwards.
Also in Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, a look at the bench in photography, how it’s been used by different photographers and how their images can be seen to play off one another. Of course, the benches under discussion were occupied by people (like the ones below I took in the early 1970s). This bird bespattered bench was in an odd, out-of-the way spot where it’s hard to imagine anyone stopping.
Almost 100 years ago, Alfred Stieglitz famously published a series of photographs called “Equivalents” of clouds. I never quite got them. Walker Evans said of them, “Oh my God. Clouds?” according to Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment. He describes them as not being meant to document the sky at the time Stieglitz photographed them but, rather, they were equivalents of Stieglitz’s interior state. Dyer contrasts this with Richard Misrach’s Non-Equivalents, which specifically do document the state of the sky. Many others have riffed on the Equivalents, including Vik Muniz. So, I’ve never quite gotten pictures of clouds. Then on a 5-mile walk, under a cloud-laden, leaden sky, I saw these skies like Bob Ross was showing you how to paint the sky with a big soft brush and I thought they were imminently photograph-able. You be the judge.
So progress continues on the projects and I hope to have some work to show here soon. In the meantime, there’s no harm in continuing to document my peregrinations around Farnham and the occasional foray further afield. But I think we’ll start up with just 1 post a day, rather than the 3 I’ve been managing for the last 10 years or so…
I was struck by the light shining through my recycling bin-liner.
Galleries and museums, because of their preference for white walls and a kind of deluxe starkness, often provide geometric black and white still life opportunities. I’ve often photographed corners, nooks, and chairs in such places.
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