August 14, 2013 Smoke Farm - The Builders Dinner tableau

This is a tableau that I created in InDesign from Richard Levenson's polaroids. The portraits are from the 2013 Smoke Farm Builders Dinner.

Water clowns

As a kid, I always loved the water clown games at the boardwalk on the Jersey shore. This photo was taken at the Puyallup Fair last weekend (a far cry from the Atlantic Ocean). I've applied some filters to it to give it that vintage look (OMG, does that mean anything from my childhood is vintage? I know you can find the fashions from the 70s in vintage shops, so I guess that makes me vintage as well.)

Do you feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?

Homage of sorts to William Henry Fox Talbot

A while back I took one of my old cameras, a Kodak duoflex and attached a "shooting chute" of sorts. The idea is that you use an old camera and shoot a digital image through the lens, so you're getting a picture that doesn't look like what you would normally get from a digital camera (or from the original, film camera either). The set up looks like this:

It's pretty ugly and wonky to shoot through. I had originally made it a pinhole camera by removing the lower lens, which is why it looks more like an "unoflex"than a duoflex.

Anyhow, I shot some photos through this contraption, using the Canon G9. Here is an example of one of the shots:

I decided that this reminded me a bit of a William Henry Fox Talbot photograph. This one:

"The Open Door" - William Henry Fox Talbot, 1844

Honestly, it's just that both photographs have a lone broom as the subject that makes the association for me. I decided to try to imitate the tonal qualities of the Talbot original. Here is the result:

"The Neglected Deck" - Leslie Levenson, 2013

Way more greenish than the original. But it's fun to try to mimic photos. I'm always amazed at how I overestimate my own skills when I try to do something like this. I know soooo little. It's good to keep trying though.

Puyallup Fair 2013

I took this photo at one of the 4H events last Sunday morning. My way of approaching the fair is to go early in the morning, when it first opens and leave within about 2 hours. The perfect arrival and departure times for a person who wants to be where crowds show up but who hates the crowds.

4H Angus Cow and Calf Pairs Judging

Fresh art

I've recently committed to doing at least one hour of art every day. I try to give myself a list of the projects I'm working on and my next actions so I can just start when it's time. One of my projects is putting together a collection of 100 digital prints. The goal is to print the digital images and have them in a physical collection ready to show when necessary. This has forced me to troll through my Lightroom catalog to look for images that go together or that I want to manipulate in Photoshop.

Here is an example of some sort of tree seed/pod that I photographed a while back. I made some preliminary adjustments in Lightroom and then moved to Photoshop and played around with a variety of plug-in filters I have. I'm pretty pleased, though I think I'd like to see some sort of texture over the top of the image.