bmattock
Veteran
back alley said:
That's very different!
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
New thread for Bill's problems to keep Joe's thread on topic :)
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That's very different!
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
S
Socke
Guest
Since we had some reference to something somewhat SciFi, I'd like to hear your poetry if it has interesting rythmic devces which counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying vogonity of your life.
kmack
do your job, then let go
bmattock said:
Man --- I like that.
Makes me think of Weegee's Stuff. F8 and be there. Time to buy a police scanner and do some ambulance chasing.
There is so much banality and ugliness around us, Instead of tring to find the beautiful embrace the ugly and banal. Pick up some roadkill, slap it on a weber grill and shoot it.
A trip to the local dump to shoot rats and some pictures...
Time to get ugly.
S
Socke
Guest
Kevin, have you read Pedro Juan Gutierrez? I read the Havanna Trilogy, El Rey de la Havanna and Animal Tropical before I visited Cuba and I visited some of the places from the books.
http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y01/mar01/19e15.htm
And Islington, but that's something completly different.
Photography inspired by fiction sounds interesting, could be a nice combination of street- architecture- and landscape photography where you go looking for scenes and locations which fit the image you have from a book you read.
http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y01/mar01/19e15.htm
And Islington, but that's something completly different.
Photography inspired by fiction sounds interesting, could be a nice combination of street- architecture- and landscape photography where you go looking for scenes and locations which fit the image you have from a book you read.
bcs89
Contented Oly Owner
bmattock said:
Bill, if you could find a way to meld your skill as a photographer with your sense of humor you would not need wait till death for fame.
PeterL
--
I bought my first RF in february, shot some nice stuff, tried an experiment, didn't work out, I got really mad. But then, while sorting the scans of my photos, I renamed my "bad" folder into "less good". The bad ones are still sorted in there, but they're not staring at me anymore. I can focus on the other ones now. Simple and shallow, but it works for me.
Peter.
Peter.
kmack
do your job, then let go
Socke said:
No, I had never heard of him before, but I'll put it on my reading list.
The "Scenes from Fiction" theme sounds interesting. Lots of good fiction coming out of Washington DC area these days. 😀
bmattock
Veteran
PeterL said:
Peter, I appreciate your advice, but I don't think it will work for me. I can't go on and shoot "other ones" when I have no idea what I want to take photographs of, or how I want to depict whatever scene I eventually find - assuming I do find it. I don't think 'getting back on the horse' is going to help me in this case - I don't want to take the same old photos, I don't like what I was doing. Doing more of it is hardly likely to help me.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
Toby
On the alert
bmattock said:
Bill having looked at your infrared shots please permit me to give a small critique of them. I liked the technique but I don't think they say anything in particular about you and your wife and pets. The technique certainly is edgy and suggests certain things to me - alienation, solitude, a sort of disconnectedness maybe even a certain supernatural element. In effect you have produced a very good test for a technique but nothing more. The challenge is to find a subject to which you can apply this technique and make the pictures express what you feel about the subject. For example what about using this technique to shoot psychics or clairvoyants? maybe a group of people who have gone through some kind of shared trauma -maybe losing a loved one or surviving cancer. Imagine blurred portraits in infrared of cancer patients who should be dead and you make them look like ghosts, that could really work, in fact I might go and do it myself if you don't.....
back alley
IMAGES
I want to take photographs like Bukowski wrote. Fast, angry, flowing, common and dark. Real 'belly-of-the-beast' type stuff. But I just don't know how to do that.
can that be done in the carolina's??
can that be done in the carolina's??
bmattock
Veteran
Toby said:
I appreciate the critique very much. It really was in the nature of an experiment at the time - I had just discovered that my Pentax *ist DS could do infrared with an infrared filter, so I bought one and was trying it out - trying to find appropriate subjects and experimenting with exposure to see what was needed to get different effects. I found that I liked it very much - it was a kinda-sorta thing - and I was thinking of Meatyard at the time, so I had that in my mind when I took the photos.
I like your ideas for continuing to work in this vein very much, and it might be quite interesting. I have been thinking of approaching a local retirement home to see if they would let me provide free portraits for their residents who wanted them - to increase my experience doing portraiture and to experiment with different styles, while providing a service that some seniors and their families might find acceptable. I had not thought of trying it with infrared.
My biggest concern with infrared is that it may be 'gimmicky'. Fun for awhile, but gets old quickly. I don't think I'd want to try to make a career of it.
However, the 'tone' of those photographs is kind of what I'm after - if I can do that with normal B&W, and then, as you say, give it a real subject rather than just random shots, then I might be closer to what I think I'm looking for.
You've given me a lot of food for thought - thanks! And feel free to do it yourself, I hold no patents, and would love to see someone else's take on it!
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
bmattock
Veteran
back alley said:
Well, technically, Bukowski dealt strictly with L.A., where he was raised and lived most of his life. And NC ain't LA!
But I think the concepts he dealt with translate into any locale if you know how to look for them (which I may not). And don't forget, I'm on I-95 and next to the Amtrak station. Easy access to NYC, DC, Boston, Philly, Richmond, etc. Even Vermont.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
Trius
Waiting on Maitani
Bill, you likely know this, but Meatyard grew up just down the road from you in Illinois. So the "southerness" in his photography was a result of him moving to Kentucky when he was an adult. Sorta parallel, eh?bmattock said:
BTW, my dad was a classmate of Meatyard at NCHS.
Earl
PeterL
--
bmattock said:
I didn't know if it would help, so I just posted.
bmattock said:
You're right in your observation that your problem is different from mine. Something inside of me seems to know where it's heading. I want to do people photography, but I'm too shy to stick my camera into faces. So first I started taking pictures of buildings with the occasional hip shot of a person. It was fun for a bit, because I tried to look at things differently: not just to look at the horizontal plane as we usually do, but look up and down as well. Not just to look at the buildings, but between them as well. Ignored places, negative spaces and such things. But frustration came back and I now know I must face my own shortcomings again and dive into the crowds. Maybe I'll be thinking of selling all my gear and burning all my pictures in a few years, too. But in the meantime, I think I know where to go, which is different from your situation. Maybe what I tried first with my RF helps you, if not, our situations are probably too different.
In any case, good luck and try to enjoy whatever you do.
Peter.
bmattock
Veteran
Trius said:
Yes, Meatyard was from Normal - ironic, eh? I was born in Galesburg, but raised in various small towns around the Peoria-Pekin area. Not far from Normal. I used to say that I wasn't 'normal', but I could see it on a clear day.
I also find myself attracted to the 'Southerness' of William Christenberry, and his mentor, Walker Evans.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
bmattock
Veteran
PeterL said:
And I'm glad you did, so thanks!
I had that problem too - there are even some old threads around here about it. Not anymore. Now I fire away with wild abandon right in people's faces - I just keep telling myself that I'm 'at work'. Being there on 'official business' is a great sop - you rationalize to yourself that normally, you'd never do this, but hey, it's your job. Everybody has to suck it up and do their job, right? Suddenly it gets much easier.
Well, that's what worked for me, anyway. I found that people will actually cooperate with you - or get out of your way - if you're 'doing your job'. I've been deep in composition mode - framing a shot from across a road. Then I look up and find traffic stopped in both directions - people waiting for me to take my shot; never honking or saying a word. Wowzer.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
amateriat
We're all light!
Goodbye all you punksPherdinand said:
Stay young and stay high
Just hand me my checkbook
And I'll crawl off to die
(Thank you, Pete Townshend)
We do the work we feel the need to do, and keep doing it, whether it gets recognized in the moment or not (even though, let's face it, we'd rather that somebody takes notice). The art/craft, technical fascination (more or less in equal parts then) of photography almost literally saved my sanity in my teens, so there'll be no snide remarks from me about how therapeutic the medium is to many. But it's driven me to do more, to the point of my once selling off all my gear and vowing not to take another picture until I had edited all the work I'd done up to then ("then" being around 1990-91). Didn't touch a camera for the better part of two years, save for a trip to France in fall of '92 when, in a somewhat desperate fit, I borrowed the Nikon 35AF I bought my mother for her birthday several years back (and which she rarely used). That trip with that little camera got the image hunger going again (especially since I was forced to work within, then craftily stretch beyond, the p/s Nikon's limitations), and I was cobbling together a camera system soon after my return.
No images were burned, buried or otherwise mutilated in this process, including the (as-yet unedited) stinkers. The editing job didn't quite get finished. But, camera in hand, I was even more jazzed than when I got started with this craziness in my mid-teens. It still feels that way now.
How does this feeling keep going? I'm not entirely sure. I had something of a sea-change about a bunch of things in my life at the time I got back in the game, and made a series of radical changes in a short period of time, a few of which seemed just short of death-defying at the time (but weren't really...funny thing, hindsight). My photography was just the outermost manifestation of all the other stuff going on. Maybe it was the shaking-up of a so many things that realigned my sense of creative purpose. Maybe it was a matter of getting my groove back (or finding a groove I never had). Now, the only time "never" comes up regarding my photography, among other matters in life, is in the form of a quiet and very personal affirmation. Never say die. Never give up. Never say never again. And grab that camera like it's the last thing I'll ever do, but in the spirit of absolute fun, whether for love or lucre.
- Barrett
back alley
IMAGES
i've had the misfortune to live in 2 different houses that had their basements flood, big time.
prints were destroyed, books of notes and writings and negs too.
some of the negs i saved but i was too depressed to do the work to save them all.
now i pack everything in rubbermaid totes and if flooded again, i think at worst they will float away.
i just started over.
big time cleansing/metamorphosis.
and less to carry forward.
prints were destroyed, books of notes and writings and negs too.
some of the negs i saved but i was too depressed to do the work to save them all.
now i pack everything in rubbermaid totes and if flooded again, i think at worst they will float away.
i just started over.
big time cleansing/metamorphosis.
and less to carry forward.
bmattock
Veteran
Joe,
I have no basement - the ground is too wet here. Crawlspace only. However, I'm in FEMA zone X - it has never flooded on my block in recorded history. Doesn't mean it can't - I have national flood insurance anyway. But we get hurricanes - that's the major worry.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
I have no basement - the ground is too wet here. Crawlspace only. However, I'm in FEMA zone X - it has never flooded on my block in recorded history. Doesn't mean it can't - I have national flood insurance anyway. But we get hurricanes - that's the major worry.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
back alley
IMAGES
i guess the point is/was that sometimes it's good to shed the skin and start growing another.
losing that stuff was hard at first but almost liberating in the end.
i don't feel so attached to anything anymore.
losing that stuff was hard at first but almost liberating in the end.
i don't feel so attached to anything anymore.