Category: Photography

Slight of Hand

The Blue Egg

There’s a good reason why single frames captured from a movie are called stills. The movie moves, while the still… well… keeps still.  It is a moment paused for all eternity so that we may go back to it again and again, examining every detail as if searching for the answer to an unasked question.  But what happens when we subvert the still image and transform it into something more than what it represents on its own? How does the narrative change?

Recently I’ve been experimenting with animation for two of my projects, Mixed States, and Project Sage Nu. While I have experience with video and Final Cut editing software, I also find simple flip books intriguing—maybe because there is an element of mystery to them. A similar effect sometimes happens while browsing through your own photos on the computer—suddenly the people in a series of photographs taken within seconds of each other start to move. I love it when that happens, which is how I became interested in the mechanics of GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format).

Today my goal was to learn how to make GIFs from scratch in Photoshop on my desktop instead of using apps on the iPad (see my last post, There’s an App for That). SUCCESS!!! I am officially one step closer to realizing a particular animation I envision for Projet Sage Nu. The next stage will be to incorporate recorded audio. Boy, this is exciting stuff!!

Thanks for dropping by, and please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment section below. Do you think the GIF above fits with my PSN project, or does it have an entirely different narrative of its own? Is this the beginning of a third project? Hell, why not! 🙂

There’s an App for That

Mixed States

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yessss!!! The Mixed States Project has successfully crossed over to multimedia status with my first working GIF!! Last week I spilled about twenty hours into trying to create this type of animation in Keynote, but when exported as a movie all variable customs timings were gone and it moved about as fast as a nervous slug. My next step was going to be to recreate the animation in Final Cut (as a video), or learn how to create a GIF in Photoshop, but last night while researching something else I stumbled upon the solution to my technical woes. I couldn’t believe it!!! When they say, “There’s an app for that,” they really aren’t kidding! The animation you see above took less than five minutes to make! I’m in media heaven!

As a guy who always had the latest photo and movie equipment in the 50s and early 60s, my dad would have loved this!! Here’s to keeping the geek gene alive!!

 

Beyond the Grave

Mixed States Series: Impression

You didn’t know
I would pull you
from the grave
and hold you so close,
but neither did I…
and now here you are
your blood in my veins
a face in the mirror
that is not me,
but us—
a father
a daughter
a mysterious fusion
forged ever so lovingly
because I still believe in you.

Imagine the place
where miracles are born
of hearts and desires
and the alchemy of the impossible
is made tangible to the soul.

The more I work on the Mixed States project, the more I feel connected to my father, who was lost to me in a fatal car accident when I was only five years old. After his passing I was not permitted to grieve, and for fifty years it was drilled into my head that he was nothing but an asshole. This was difficult for me to reconcile because I was his only daughter— daddy’s little girl—and in 1963 he was frozen forever in my mind as a god on a pedestal. A wise person recently suggested that [in order to resolve conflicting stories and feelings] I needed to learn who my father really was—not the god, not the supposed asshole—but the human being inside the man.

What I’ve learned so far is that he was very generous, affectionate, a great storyteller, and a gifted artist. He liked to travel and read, and always kept a dictionary beside his bed. He loved new gadgets and cameras, and his boundless passion for knowledge required a serious investment—a twenty-four volume, leather-bound, hardcover set of the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1962). I just know my dad would have loved today’s gadgets, Google, and especially the work that I do! I’d like to think that he would have been proud of me.

The Mixed States project is turning out to be much more than I had anticipated. Today I ran the first generation double-exposures through additional processing, which has transformed the images even further. Unexpectedly, it gave the feeling that I was melding my father even deeper into myself, thus the Beyond the Grave idea and the poem above. Although this journey is intensely personal, I can only hope that my work resonates with some of you out there. ❤