Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Etched Bottles done

Really got into this project.  I think because the bottles were so beautiful.  There's a two step beautiful thing going on here.  One, the label was designed for the original purpose of usually paper on the bottle.  The labels are small pieces of art by themselves.  Secondly though is taking that original design and reconfiguring it for the etching purpose.

You have the original and then you another person reinterpreting them for a different medium.

The other reason that got me going on this was these needed to be lit like you were lighting for film.  So often today the care and craft of photography can be sublimated down a bit because you've got all the post production processes that can be brought into it now.
It's not that I didn't use a lot of Photoshop on these...I did.  But it was used in a manner true to the photography, to the original exposure(s).

I thought for sure these bottles must have been laser etched; they are just so exact.  I had completed the whole job, delivered it and only then did I go to company's website and watched a video on the process.  Not laser at all but sandblasted by hand.  One bottle at a time...crazy cool.

Thirteen bottles... both as a full bottle shot and a more expressive close-up.  Loved the whole job.

The company.....Etched Images

A few bottles



Friday, December 6, 2013

Exposure

Signed on with the these beta folks down the street from me.  Exposure.  It's a new site for photographers where you can see your photos big...just like chip manufacturers told us we could.  Just starting to put up photos on it....less words, more wow!

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

It's all about the shadows

A real sweet job walked into the studio the other day.

It's a wine bottle job but these bottles are mit out wine.  These bottles come from a company in Napa that etches the wine label into the glass.  Beautiful gorgeous intaglio engraving renderings of the label.

They're not cheap, I would assume, so these are done on large bottles that will be filled with the wineries top o the line stuff or be empty and presented as marketing.  You've seen them as you walk into a nice restaurant with 6 and 9 liter presentation bottles displayed somewhere.

I'll post up some examples after the Photoshop work is done.



Lots of C-Stands, flags, reflectors.



Thursday, October 17, 2013

My friend Carol

Assisting.

There are two ways, at least back in the day there was, two ways of getting into what I do.  One is pretend you know what you're doing and say you're a photographer.  The other way is to assist for one who is.

I went to school for photography and then assisted for five years Alan Krosnick.  Alan, I owe more than I can write.  He was my finishing school, my real life photography teacher, my mentor.  Best of the best. Finest of the finest.

This, though is not about Alan, but obliquely about Carol.  Carol was assisting a food stylist when I was assisting Alan.  We've known each other since then...probably 1983-ish.

Alan was cool in that he gave me unlimited amount of film and paid for processing for me to work on my own stuff.  At $10-12 bucks a pop for 8x10 Polaroid and probably the same for film and processing that was quite the gift.  Carol and I still laugh about our first "test" shot together as assistants.  It was some cake with a slice out it.  8x10 of course because that's what real photographers shot and presented in their portfolios.  Embarrassing really on both of our accounts.  Won't bad mouth her cake here but my lighting was atrocious as well as the whole "idea" of the shot.  At least when we saw the film we both knew it.  That's a plus.

But we persevered.  I flew the nest at some point and Carol did as well.  We've been working together ever since.

OK,  gotten off track here.  Gesture.  Gesture is wine club only label for J Lohr.  Something they bottle only for guests of the winery or for the wine clubbers.  Good wine, really good wine.  New releases they send me and tell me shoot something pretty.  I love jobs like this.  Almost play really in that everything is left to me....props, styling, feel, light, composition. But it's funny because even though no direction is given in the back of my mind I'm always filtering things through the "commercial" side of thought.  Can't be too wild, too out there. Gotta keep in mind what these photos are for, they're for general publications, general uses.  Simple really, the bottle is hero.

Carol.  Carol has an outdoor photo set all ready to go. She lives up in Sebastopol on a farm-ette... gardens, weathered out buildings, weathered tables and chairs, blackberries and redwoods, lavender and roses.  Bees.

And imperfect pears like these.

Spent a half day up at her place shooting a half dozen beauty shots for Gesture.

Monday, September 30, 2013

The Beer is Back!

Here's what we know so far.

Shot a variety of photos for a launch of some new beer.  Glasses of the beer, single cans, cans together dry, cans together with some pizazz.  They were session beers, a beer loosely defined as lower in alcohol content. Targeting the active lifestyle, great taste but not so much of the giddy-up so you can still go about your business without the buzz.

I waited until the beer got on the market to put anything up here.

I heard (or maybe misheard) the beer wasn't happening and chose not to show any pics of it.

I now know that wasn't correct.  An email just came it saying it's still a go.
See the original little teaser post here.

Mavericks...as the surfing community knows, is home to some of the biggest waves in the world and they hold a surfing contest once a year if the conditions are right.  Half Moon Bay, California.  If the waves aren't big enough, they bag it for the year.  Contestants are given like 24 hours to arrive from all over the world when the word is given.

And it's also a beer!


Sunday, September 29, 2013

di Paolo

It's done and it's good.  Bottled the nocino I started back in June.  Read all about it here.  I made two different batches.  One with vodka, the other with Everclear.  With the vodka batch I added some charred American Oak the last 50 days.  I think it really mellowed it out.  I still prefer the Everclear batch though, it's clearer and more focused.

Already planning next year's.  Going bigger and trying some different spices/recipes.





Friday, August 30, 2013

Ed




This is my first attempt at doing photos that move.  I can't really claim too much of this as it's 99.9% of Henry's doing.  He did everything..the filming, the interview, the editing, the mixing, etc, etc except for me shooting a tiny bit of the B roll.

But what small amount of shooting I did do, got me all worked up for this new to me medium.  I'm now thinking in photographs that start and stop.  I've crewed on big TV commercials as a grip, I've been hired as talent in TV commercials as "Master Pourer of  All Things Liquids" but I've never shot anything with a video camera.

Praise be to Henry for allowing me to do this with him.

Henry, is a story teller, a video story teller and over a drink or two he convinced me it's time to wade into the water.  And Ed is the first little pond of water that we're doing together.  We've got plans for a series of interesting people in our lives.  Friends of mine, friends of his...each slightly one way off of center.


This, by the way, is a vid Henry did of me and my liquor cabinet last year....Liquor Cabinet


Monday, August 19, 2013

All Things Must Pass



For 16 years now this has been the view out my door.

This past Friday, a drilling crew came into the parking lot to drill for soil samples.  The first concrete evidence that our little compound of warehouses are being leveled in order to build million dollar condos for the technonistas.

We've all been waiting for it.  We've been holding warehouse water cooler conversations now for a couple years relaying the small amount of knowledge or the occasional rumor we've heard.

When I moved in, this was a little bit of the Wild West.  That street in the photo had nothing but beaters and dilapidated motor homes on it.  People lived in them, made fires at night in 55 gallon cans, argued with each other.  Dogs barked.  Occasional gunshots.  The Hells Angel's clubhouse is down the street.
It was just me and them and I liked it that way.

Even native San Franciscans would say "You live where?"

But the Dogpatch got discovered.  The New York Times wrote about us.  Said it was the forgotten district of SF where the artists and writers live. It's the sunniest area in San Francisco.  It's right by the bay with old buildings left over from when San Francisco was a working port.  Five minutes by bike to "civilization." Now the Dogpatch is the new boom town, within the boom town.

And with discovery comes bars with cocktails that cost $12, artisan ice cream, a french butcher, and of course restaurants, lots of people and more and more crime.

Gone are the homeless, the seclusion, the grit and grime.  No more dive bars where workers coming off shift from the dry docks can put back a couple before heading home.

And so us warehouse types will move on.  Probably mosey down the road aways to the next part of town that will be discovered by the masses when they've been told it's a cool area.

Do you hear that sound?
It's the sound of inevitability, Mr Anderson.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Ashes on Granite

Starting to dry out some fresh food at sea level so I can eat it at 12,000 feet.  Annie picked these from her garden late yesterday, these and with the other vegetables from her garden and along with fruit, I'll dehydrate. I'll get some meat from my favorite carnicería in the Mission District and turn it into jerky.  Rice and granola and I'm good to go.

Got a good sharp knife.

I'm heading up to the Sierra.  Always late in season, always after most everybody else has gone away, always with the hope of running into some weather.  A snow would be nice or a big windstorm, or hail.  Something.

In 1971 I hitchhiked from Montana to go skiing at Mammoth.  Down 395.  The most gorgeous road in the world I think.  I've been coming back here since then.

Got an area all picked out. Nobody will be there, it's out of eyesight.  No trail to it, only a steep and awkward scramble up a watershed to the prettiest little granite filled basin you've ever seen.

Every time I come back from one of these solo trips I have my daughter come over and I tell her I've found the spot I want my ashes to be scattered when the time comes.   I point to the area on the topo, she takes a picture of it on her phone.

She understands.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Throwing away the topo

I like to get as high as I can as fast as I can....when I backpack in the Sierra Nevada Mts.  So for me I always enter on the East side of the range.  The trails start high and gain altitude quickly.  I try to stay above timberline as much as possible.  It feels better to me.  You can metaphorically throw away the topographic map and use your eye to pick a route or a destination that seems interesting.

This project here and here is suddenly above tree line and no longer do maps work where I'm standing. It's freestyle from here on out.
Stay tuned.



Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The Dove Tail Joint

Years ago, just when the coffee shop thing was beginning to explode I got a phone call from a friend.  He asked me if I wanted to invest in a coffee shop.  You know the type by now...the comfortable couches, the funky decor, the nice music playing, the hand poured coffee, the food, etc.

I said sure.

There were four investors in total and we were looking at a beautiful location on the corner of Telegraph Ave in Berkeley for it.  Lots of windows, an upstairs, outside sitting as well.  It would be perfect.

One of the early meetings was to come up with a name.  One of the names I came into the meeting with was "The Dovetail Joint".  The other three liked it initially as they were thinking Berkeley, dove, peace and love.  They were discussing it and I said "Actually I was thinking we could tie in the dovetail woodworking joint into the decor and look at this sketch I did of a logo with it".  They looked at me very puzzled.  It turns out they were completely clueless to the dovetail joint being used to hold pieces of wood together.

I was absolutely dumbfounded.  The dovetail is so old in human history I just figured it was in our DNA by now and everyone would automatically know about it.

Nope.  They had never heard of it.  It predates written history.  It's held together every important and unimportant thing since the beginning.  You see it everywhere and yet to them it was the tail of a dove.

Ultimately the name was struck down.  Too druggy they thought, too dive-y.  Not going to tell you the name we (they) picked as it bored me to tears it was so pedestrian.

Past week or so I've been cutting I don't know how many dovetails for drawers for a cabinet I'm making. Using a combination of cutting them by hand and a bit of routing.  Normally I would use the WoodRat to cut them as they make the most hand cut looking dovetails out there by far but I wanted to keep up the hand skills so decided to do them that way.  The WoodRat can cut them with 1 to 9 slope which is unheard of in the machine world.

But these took awhile.  Just now starting to glue them together.  I'll post up finished pics.
Edit. Here's a look at the next phase of this which looks like will take a long long time to complete.




Monday, July 1, 2013

My friend Bill

I had just moved from Vernon, British Columbia in 1979 to go to a commercial photography school in Santa Barbara, Ca and I found a part time job at the White Company.  This was a construction company that was a bit different than most.  The owner mostly hired college kids with no skills and taught them what they needed.  Some of the more skilled jobs though he hired people who knew what they were doing.  I was one of those having done house construction in Montana, Colorado and Canada for almost ten years at the point.  It was called the White Company because the owner, Rick, just loved to buy tools and when he did, he spray painted them all white.

Rick had just landed a big contract to rehab a 25 room mansion in Montecito that had been gutted by fire.  I showed up on my first day and he put me to demo a kitchen, I think as a test, and he drove away.  I was the only person on site.  A few hours later, with me kicking ass to prove my mettle, he shows back up with another person....Bill.  Rick goes in to see what sort of progress I had made and I said to Bill, "Does this company take coffee breaks"?  And Bill, in his slight cowboy accent said "Haven't seen one yet".  I like Bill immediately.

We became best friends on the job and as Bill was also going to the same photography school as I, we had a lot in common through that as well.  We ended up forming a little construction company ourselves during the school years to help with the money.

It turns out we both move to the San Francisco area after school and continued our friendship although he lives on the other side of the bay and over the other side of the Oakland Hills.

I've been wanting to make nocino for awhile and thought this was the year to do it.  If you're not familiar with nocino, it's an Italian invention of steeping green walnuts in alcohol and with the addition of some sugar turns into a nice little digestif.  But that's the thing, the walnuts need to be in the green stage and so it's a narrow window of opportunity that comes around once a year.  I had been pestering Bill about getting me some walnuts as he had grown up on farms and his mother still had some trees left on the family farm.  Starting in mid May I was either emailing or calling him and he would call his mother and she would report back.

Well, they're here.  At least in Hollister, California they are.  It seems Hollister comes later than the rest of California because they are already past green stage elsewhere.  Bill happened to be down in Hollister and picked me a couple hundred of them.

Quartered with a bit of lemon zest and put to rest for the next 40-45 days.


And since I promised you an update on the last beer shoot....The beer I shot was going to be marketed and targeted to the active lifestyle.  Their labels had images of bicyclists, rock climbers and the like.  Low alcohol but still the taste of a craft brewed beer.  Unfortunately it didn't work for them and they folded.  End of story.


Monday, June 17, 2013

Church

You got your good book, the choir singing, the shafts of morning light coming through the high windows as you make your way down the darkened aisle looking for just the right row of pews to spend your time at church.

Each pew has an ancient script scrawled upon tattered and stapled pieces of paper.  4/4 S&B S Map Rough Sawn,  12/4 VGDF,  5/4 S4S QS WO.  The pews go on, each requiring me to pause a bit to translate...4/4 is an inch thick, S&B is Select and Better, S Map means Soft Maple and Rough Sawn means how it comes from the saw mill.

Every time I go to a real lumberyard I feel like I'm going to spend time in a holy place.  There's a quietness to them even though the forklift choir may be singing it's beep beep backup music.  I think the heavy amount of dead trees that make up the place sucks up the noise.  The flap/slap of the occasional person flipping boards over to look at them a reminder that you are not alone, others share your same beliefs.

I bring my sketch book as I ponder the wood.  The measurements of course are important but also the drawings give things to think about as I look at grain patterns or how woods may look next to one another.  You flip and look, you pull it out, maybe stand it up, stand back and feel.  Put it back, flip some more.  Maybe you move onto a new pew.  Maybe what you're looking for is not a figured exotic but a domestic quiet Vertical Grain Douglas Fir.  You can't go in with a closed mind.




I don't use CAD when I'm designing something although I know CAD.  I find it to be clumsy and anti fluid.  It's so much easier to just to let your hand to quickly sketch something and move onto to another thought.   And even though I sketch out things on paper, they are always just that, a sketch.  I change things constantly as I'm making something, sometimes in the middle of a cut.

I'm circling back to a personal project I started last year.  And even though I've done some drawings of it most of the designing I draw in my head.  It's much faster that way, I can create 3D renderings in my mind in seconds and do fly overs or twist it around as I look at it from different viewpoints.

Yesterday afternoon we went to see a documentary centered around the human construct of the concept of time.  A beautiful film on all levels and it was during the film that I thought I should do a huge change in this personal project so when I got back I started to sketch out this new direction.  Got into bed and spent a bunch of time constructing 3D renderings of different ideas.

In the morning sometime I awoke from a dream.  I was the new Pope and I was also making a chair for the Pope at the same time.  I was showing a prototype of the front of the chair to some random Vatican clerk, it really was nice, some sort of squat cabriole leg arrangement and I was telling him how I was going to incorporate a series of curves of changing radii on the real chair.  In the dream I used the phrase "a disintegrating series of curves"...I have no idea what that means though.   Upon awakening I started to think about that and drew a new leg design in my head.  It might change but for now that's the plan. A Pope dream leg.

Phase one of this project is here.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Jockey Box Cover

This brewery emailed me and asked if I could made some jockey box covers for them.  Huh?  Yes, that's what I said too.  Apparently a jockey box is an ice cooler with taps on the outside and a bunch of coiled pipes that keg beer runs through.  Fill the cooler up with ice and as the beer travels from the keg and round and round the coils inside the box it comes out real cold like.

Jockey Box

The breweries take these to outside events or tastings and as every good marketing person knows you don't want your product coming out of some crappy looking dirty cooler.

The jockey box covers I made are essentially a three sided hinged front with a top that sits on top.  As I was talking with the brewery client I said I should inlay their logo on the front.  I was going to use some heavily figured maple for the inlay, their logo is one large breaking wave with a half moon in the background.  Just as I was about to start the inlay I decided to call down there once more to make sure they were good with the concept.  During the call it all changed to me pounding their logo into a sheet of copper instead.  I ended up sinking the copper below the surface and filling it with self leveling epoxy to keep the copper out of harms way.

Simple project, simple photos.  These were taken on my bench and I got rid of the background to make them more legible.

Buy here



Saturday, May 25, 2013

Look at Me, Daddy

I don't know if they had a confab about this or not but it seemed a part of my parent's manifesto was to give their children complete freedom to grow up.  They did little finger wagging or rules or sit down talks with us. That's not to say they didn't provide us with a moral compass, quite the opposite, they had strong beliefs and ethics that they modeled constantly for us.

I loved being able to do what I wanted, go where I wanted to go and think what I wanted to think.  So when I had my children I took the same stance.  I think I gave them a strong foundation but did not impose my will or control on them.

When Taylor was sixteen she wanted to move out of the warehouse and across the bay to live in Berkeley...with one of her friends in her parent's house.  I said sure if that's what you want to do.  When Taylor graduated from Berkeley High she got accepted to a University and I moved her in but after three days she said it wasn't for her.  She wanted to take some time away from school, get a job, make some money, have some fun.  I was ok with that, I thought it was a good idea.

She took a year or so off and one day she tells me her and her two friends are going to move down to Santa Barbara and go to school.   I thought it was  great idea.  She didn't have money or a means to it and I didn't give her any. They wanted to live in IV.  Probably the most outlandish little party town you can even imagine.  IV 

She did it up big down there.

After a couple years there she moves back to the bay to finish up here.

Today she graduated....on her own with no financial support from me...and no debt period.  And while since moving out we have talked on the phone several times a day and while I offer my thoughts and feelings on her decisions I try not to force her in any way.  It's her life to live, not mine.

Tonight we're going to dinner and I'm bringing one of my good wines.  It's vintage year is the year she was born...1987.



Thursday, May 2, 2013

Out the Door with the Window

Finally getting around to taking a few photos of this.  Antique Korean window was wanting to be adapted to become a table.
Took a couple design elements from the window to incorporate into the base.  The window had had angles planed into the outside face of it which I used in a less steep form for the legs.  Through mortise and tenon used like the window and of course the egg crate slats.

Ebonized walnut.  Flat finish.

Shown without the glass.

This will be out the door by the weekend when they come and pick it up.

Since it was such a simple design and execution just a few photos here.


Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Brown Beverage with Bubbles

Did a shoot for a new beer coming to market soon.  Can't say what, who, when at this point but they have a interesting target market laid out.  When the cone of silence has been lifted I'll let you in on more details.

Stout bubbles.

Monday, April 15, 2013

My Friend Henry

Actually has very little to do with Henry.  One of the good things about becoming friends with Henry (and Laurine) is that he comes strapped with a large circle of his interesting friends.  To know Henry is to know and like his friends.

By the second or third meeting, I'm down with Leah and Frank.  Leah is a metal sculptor.  She makes big things, she makes small things.  She makes beautiful things.  With her hands.  The moment I saw one of her jewelry pieces I knew what I wanted to do with it from a photography thing.
Just holding this in your hands feels so good.  The weight of it is really comforting and the chain mail always fills up any hollow of your hand.  Almost like what water does when being contained by a vessel.

Called up an old friend that I first met while photographing her for a now defunct large format design magazine...Necie.  She supplied the beautiful skin and curves for this.

Yesterday, Sunday, we started taking some photos of the piece on Necie.  Unfortunately as the world turns, I only had a couple hours to work with it.  Plans are already in the works for round two but as for right now the jewelry piece is in a show....so round two will have to wait.

Necie has had breast cancer and wanted not to try and hide the scar but to feature it if we could.

Not quite done processing what I shot yesterday but put the ones I have done in here

Leah's website


Tuesday, April 2, 2013

My friend John

You don't meet too many people like John.  You think you have him pegged when you find out he's got a PhD in artificial intelligence and he has a job at NASA shooting rockets to the moon.  You're thinking if you've first met him at a convention mixer you'd end up talking about the minutia of the moon's gravity map (by the way, the moon's gravity map is still not well known according to John).

Nope.

You'd more likely to spend your time talking about Russian film directors or modern dance or the impact of bebop jazz influences on Jack Kerouac.  Maybe you two would talk about poetry or painting or another dozen topics that John throughly understands.

John has a bar nickname as well.  TequilaJohn is how I first came to know him.  It was rumored he had a PhD in tequila or he was a Demigod in tequila (both are available here by the way)  He does know his way around the blanco, the reposado, the añeho.  Anyhow, I really like John and have spent many an hour talking about everything under the sun as well as playing music together.  Lately sometimes we get together to do tiny tastings of a concentrated area or type.
I had emailed him about some special Fino Sherry that the Spanish Table was importing.  This is a Fino that Gonzalez Byass makes from a tiny amount of barrels that they keep separate from the rest of their production.
Instead of fortifying to 17% to kill off the flor, this Fino they let sit until sugars are consumed naturally.
There are only 120 bottles being imported in four age levels.
We decide to buy a bottle and split the cost and taste it while we snack on almonds and spanish olives, talk and listen to good music.  I'm thinking Manitas de Plata would right.  Maybe Astor Piazzola in a mixed metaphor type of way.

It's a beautiful label and the color within just sings when held to the sunlight.  Looks good in the dark too.



The Trajectory of Random

Know how knowing the less about something leads to experiencing it more?

Imagine never hearing about the Grand Canyon and one day you're driving down a random dirt road in the South West and you come upon it.  Or imagine studying the Grand Canyon, reading up on it, looking at pictures of it, watching movies, talking to people who have been there and then going to see it for the first time.

Which way would stagger you backwards?  Which way would lead to a sublime spiritual satori?

Friday morning found Annie and I in Calistoga.  After a hot tub, coffee and muffin, we get on the road to Headsburg. Picking up a car full of wine from a storage unit.  It's Jack and Michelle's wine, I don't know how many cases they made that year but we have 8 of them in the car at this point.

We're heading back now the way we came. Back through Anderson Valley, hitting and taking that 90 degree onto 128 and then through Knight's Valley before dropping down into Napa Valley.  Somewhere along the way we are going to stop to taste some wine.  We don't know where yet.  But it's going to be somewhere random and somewhere with no previous knowledge of it.  I want to taste something in one of the two valleys before Napa Valley.  I don't want to go to some winery I've worked for or tasted at before.  The big names are off the list too.  The Wisteria is in bloom, we've talked about it driving up...just how special Wisteria is, the smell, the hanging visuals, how it's real early this year.  Annie decides we stop at the first winery we see that has Wisteria somehow connected to it.  We pass a winery that was named something like Stuhlhiemer and I say "Ok, no winery with the word Stool associated it".  Annie spots a winery with another name that had body functions tied to it....no wineries with anything remotely body function like.

We're seeing nothing so far that fits the criteria....Wisteria, no stool and no other body functions. Thinking maybe we need to broaden the search words.   We're through Anderson Valley and just about to drop down out of Knight's Valley.  And I mean right before, there it is a winery sign with Wisteria in bloom around it.  Brake, a U turn and down the road, park and walk into a mobile bottling operation going on, music blaring, fork lifts, all hands on deck people.  We walked completely around the place looking for the tasting entrance until a worker directs us into the stainless tank area.

Instead of the de rigueur counter with pourers behind and tasters in front, there's a ten foot picnic table.  A big group of people are sitting and tasting.  There's room for us. $15 gets you 9 pretty healthy pours, a bit of pound cake with a wine sauce and a whole plate of salumi and pane.  This is way tasting should be done, something that many wineries have lost in their rush to "a wine experience".  We meet the others.  A couple from Florida with two of their grown children and their young kids.  There are two winery dogs that meander around us, waiting for just the right time to snatch that bit of pound cake off the table.  Forklifts are picking up pallets 15 feet away.  The wine on the whole is pretty good.  Right away Annie has decided she's getting some of the first wine of the taste.  It's a Rosé of all things!
The last little bit of surprise is the walk into the caves to taste one last wine.  All their barrels are stored in the tunnels they dug into the hillside behind the winery.  That's not that unusual but inside these caves were alcoves with a couple dozen at least marble busts of random people.  Ronald Reagan, a Pope, Gandhi, a lot of Italians, Einstein.

Annie buys her three bottles of Fiore Rosa D'Amore. It was such an enchanted little place made better by not knowing nothing.  Maybe not staggering backward nor sublimely satori Grand Canyon-ish but it was something.

We have to stop at one more winery, I have to pick something up from a past photo shoot.  This one requires an intercom to the winery to let you in the gates and a voice that tells you which "level" you've been assigned to and where to park your car.



Thursday, March 14, 2013

Leaf on a Stream

Day started out going one way.
It changed direction as days seem to do.

Instead of finishing up a shooting thing, I sharpen some chisels.
Hopefully starting on the base for an antique Korean window tomorrow.  They want the window to become one of those low tables in front of the couch and in front of the TV.  A coffee table I guess.

The metal slurry that comes off the chisel and waterstone make patterns.   Heaven and Earth, mist, edges of cliffs, rolling hills, streams, lakes, mountain tops....sharp but soft at the same time.

I've been doing a couple series of photographs of the stones and the metal filings over the years.  Today I photographed the stones that happened from 5 chisels from 7/16" to 1".  I skipped the 7/8 for some reason.  5 photos of the stones for 5 chisels.
You can see some from a few years ago here.  Same stone but looking a bit different now from the wear.





Thursday, February 7, 2013

MU TOO



  "Navel Gazing, Previsioning Blogs"
Self portrait... Polaroid circa 1999.



Besides MU standing for Maker Unknown, mu is also a buddhist thought/word/concept.

A few years ago a client/friend gently pushed me into terra incognita. I spent a couple years traveling through this strange landscape trying to develop a new language for myself.  She wanted me to apply for an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

She took me and another friend, Tony, to a talk there about the program and to listen as current residents of the center talked about their work.  At the end Tony and I looked at each other and coined the phrase “We got nuthin' ”, meaning our commercial art world couldn’t communicate with the art art world.  After making the commitment to her to apply I set out trying to make the leap from one side of the land over to the next.

The next couple years found me along California beaches right around sunrise shooting things.  I love the almost un light at that time, it’s very non directional….shadow-less.  What I was shooting at that time wasn’t about the light, it revolved around other things.

One morning along Moss Beach I watched a solitary pelican forever floating inches away from the leading edge of a wave.  It glided without flapping his wings for hundreds of yards.  I guess the wind coming off the wave was enough for flight.  It was tripping me out and I started to think about the necessary stages in evolution to go from single cell amoeba to a hollow bone large creature capable of gracefully moving above the water.

The Buddhist say once the mind has a thought it will immediately have the opposite thought.  It’s the whole duality of the universe thing they’re speaking about here.
And so my mind flipped and I thought “no way this is evolution, there’s got to be a god making all of this happen”.

My mind flips again…”Nope, no god, that is uber silly to think Paul, ain’t no thing upstairs designing this.  The design is flawed and an all mighty god could not  design a flawed system.  It’s evolution.”
I’m standing there flipping my mind back and forth.  The pelican is gone now.

I have a un-fall to my knees epiphany….who the hell cares if there is a god or not. Not important at all.  The world that is before us is the world that is before us.  It’s not important how it got here, when it got here, why it got here.  There is no answer.

This is MU.

I went back to the morning's shooting.  The gist of what I was doing this morning was to photograph things that were tossed upon the beach by the ocean. In this post I talked about how arriving at a finished photograph with clients is painfully slow.   I again wanted to counteract this so I would pick up the wave thrown things and arrange them once, without thinking.   How they came to rest is how I photographed them. I wanted to make the temporal separation from the ocean to my background as fluid as possible.  I wanted to be rid of the analyzing mind in the composition and use rather the part of the mind that "knows."  See, pick up, place down. 

This is MU


My application to the Artist-in-Residence program was denied.

This is MU.


Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Bumping Against the Paradigm

I've been making a BUY page on the website the past couple days and remembered a long forgotten project.

Those of you in the studio still life area know what I talking about.  This notion of creativity in commercial photography is a bit convoluted.  Very rarely is one allowed complete control of anything, it normally is a long drawn out affair of agency meetings, presentation to clients, often focus groups are used even before the job walks into the studio.  Once the job begins, it's a day long effort of almost imperceptible movement toward the final photograph.  You'll shoot a shot and everybody rushes to the monitor to study it and make a judgement on what should be done next...move the glass an 1/8" to the right, rotate the cheese counterclockwise a quarter of an inch, increase the fill another third of a stop.

This can go on all day.

Often tweezers are used.

Folds of a napkin are picked at ad infinitum.

Grains of rice are moved individually.

The business of studio still life photography is a group effort and more often than not done through consensus of the group.  It's not some artist photographer that shoots what he or she wants, slaps it on the desk of the art director along with the invoice and walks out.

Until recently I shot the catalogs for a major flower and plant nursery that is located south of San Francisco in the small fishing town of Half Moon Bay.  (An aside.  Read the fascinating account of 100 ft. Wednesday here.  The day of 100 ft waves in Half Moon Bay).   It was mind numbing work really.  Day after day of shooting flowers and plants.  Sure, they were drop dead gorgeous world class best damn flowers in the whole nursery, and I love beautiful things as much as the next person but still...mind numbing in it's repetitive nature.  Went on for weeks at a time.

One year at the beginning of the catalog I wanted to do a project to fight the man so to speak.  I got up each day before dawn to make the drive down the coast and shoot something for myself before the catalog shoot began.  I actively shot against all the rules.
I shot all on polaroid, never metered anything, would purposely overexpose or underexpose by many stops, I placed the focus to force the viewer places they didn't want to go. Uncomfortable framing, weird subject matter. I would see, shoot, pull the polaroid, place the polaroid in a pocket and walk away.  The polaroids would be processing for hours sometimes instead of the 90 seconds that Polaroid said to do.

There was no second guessing and no fussing.  And the most beautiful thing about polaroid is it is the finished art work...and they're not sharp, and the colors are muted mushy muddy cool.

Later in the day I would gather everybody in the studio around as I opened the polaroids.  I'd pick one out, cut a mat and put it on the wall.  By the end of the shoot I had some 70 expressive tiny little jewels.



Sunday, January 6, 2013

MU


The very last thing I do before letting a courier bag out of my hands is burn my brand into the top.

MU

It’s a process.  I clean up the shop first, I ready the bag and where the brand will be, start the fire and heat up the U, make sure there’s some music going on, pick up the U with a piece of leather wrapped around the end of the hot metal.  And without mind the U is pushed into the leather, picked up, moved over and pushed down again, the U is flipped upside down, moved over and pushed down for the final time.

I do the branding at the end to make the searing of the leather the final act. Once you place the hot U on the leather you are committed, there’s no turning back, there’s no fixing, there’s nothing to hide behind anymore.  Different amount of heat and time and pressure create their own indelible signatures. Each is unique, each is never perfect. 

Like all things made by hand the branding shows the strengths and the weaknesses of the maker.  The personality is revealed.  Where is attention placed, where is it not?  Is uniformity a virtue or a failing?  Which mistakes are fixed, which are allowed?  Is the idea more important or the execution of that idea?  One focused strike at the center or tiny blows from the perimeter inward?

The MU is Me. 

I burn it in and walk away from it.




By happenstance I came upon this as I was writing the blog entry.  Beautiful