i have the urge to change things up - there's a new calendar in my presence, yes, but i've been itching to condense my title bar to this log. i'm not going to marry what's currently up there - rather like to keep things evolving. the photo seen at my space here for about three months just happened to be one of my better photos from the years' crop and seemed enticing to me to load it at the top as i began my postings. now i want to tighten up but not without authoring a proper send off for the original title. first, "menthe de ravitailleur" is what babelfish translates "muthership mint" to in french. i took a french course in high school but like all subjects learned in those days, i retained little of the information - i can pick out good french wine and read subtitles to french flicks quickly but have to rely to the internet robots to give me script. now, i'll just stick to english, or american, or texan damnit! hey, about the photo - i am asked what is it quite often. honestly can't tell. can you? does anyone out there have an insight of these funny little pods?
i speculated that these were a fungi of some sort. i found them outside a house a used to live at, usually hanging down and commonly around this spider, on the porch surfaces and the spider's web as well. i could reason that these little pods could be spider eggs when i found another bundle, months later...
these appear wilted and exploded, leading me to think something hatched from them. these where found in a different location but same locale as the first set.
i haven't come across these little buggers in a while but am always on the watch - most likely, i won't see much life like this again until spring, just a few cold months away.
as any of the twelve people who frequent my blog should have come to understand, shooting my digital camera with a macro lens is my most recent photographic obsession. i can't think of using the digital for any other use. the instant gratification of the playback makes these troublesome photos easy to assess on shoot rather than killing 36 exposures and 8 hours of opportunity as i would with film. i still love using film - mainly in 4x5 and 120 in their black and white formats - no digital creation can produce the quality of a perfect silver gelatin print. i went through art school in a constant battle against the digital medium of photography and enjoyed a broad sampling of traditional processes. now that i've been out of academia's umbrella of opportunity, i've had to cheapen my thrills and thus have been stuck with my digital camera. over the past year, my darkroom has been mostly nonexistent and i've been especially reliant on my digital as a means to produce art. the macro lenses first came to my practice for a series i titled Astrowhirl - all of these photos were shot under low light as i used the light source as a compositional element much of the time and thus had to use long exposures. most recently, i've brought in the use of synced flash strobes to the macro lenses' scope. the light plays directly and intensely and a faster shutter can sneak up on these often lively critters.
above: not so lively is a spider tangled in webbing - i'm curious if the spider was another's dinner or if smaller arachnids have used the corpse as an anchor for their own webs. below: unhatched spider eggs found in same closet contents as spider above was found.
above: a juvenile dragonfly - a very active and difficult subject to photograph. i snapped some photos that better detailed a complete wing and even some head shots but this particular composition impressed me. below: breaking away from the macro cycle are two photos from a condo balcony on the east beach of galveston, texas
no matter how cliche, sometimes the morning scene from these tall and poisonous structures can't be resisted. i was particularly intrigued by the line of ships that stretched across the horizon, unmoving, until 36 hours after these photos were taken. i don't know if it's normal protocol for ocean liners to puff away forever just to get into port, but it turns out this was the same day of the buggy petroleum leak.
to polish off this little year-in-photo expose i seemed to have set myself up with, i give you my oldest photo of the the lot here. my friend here was found, limp and dead, outside a studio space i rented to the tune of F8TL studios - i spent a short session with the dead lizard and developed the photo below.
i consider it my stand-alone favorite photo of the past orbit. i lovingly deemed the gecko my mascot of F8TL studios which fatally ended in the next 2 weeks when some shotty pluming busted during a hard winter freeze. i've kept it's dried remains, by accident, now some 11 months later. it's a totem, i guess, something delicate and sentimental amoungst the burdensome mountain of darkroom supplies and segmented picture frames. the photo itself is something of an accident also. when i shot the reptile, i was failing to find a good composition and lighting. i walked away for awhile, leaving the gecko resting on it's side. when i returned, i found the gecko turned onto it's backside with the evening sunlight coming through one of the three useless windows in the place.
well, that's enough of me today, peace - kevo
by kevin walsh, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment