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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
New photos.
Strangely enough, I have posted some photographs to... Facebook. Seriously. Even though Facebook can't handle grayscale images, so they all looked ridiculous until I converted them to RGB and uploaded them again.
Softly Wander currently has just 9 sample images, but I plan to upload more. When you least expect me to. Hah!
(I am using the "public" link which is supposed to work outside of FB... Does it?)
I have quite a few things to say about Facebook, but right now I need to sleep.
Ooooh, sleep.
Labels: photography, web stuff
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:17 PM
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Heat-induced imagery
Image: salpiglossus at Filoli.
I took 244 pictures today that I was able to save, and about 6 that I wasn't. I had planned to take "a few" digital camera photographs at Filoli, and then many iPhone photographs for my photoblog at mobilelene.blogspot.com. There was a catch: I could "take" all the photos I wanted with my iPhone, but it wasn't saving them: when I looked at the Camera Roll, there were white squares where the photos were supposed to be: opening a white square made the Camera Roll close abruptly.
The iPhone is set up so that you can't freely transfer files back and forth from it easily, likely as a concession to various download-based services. (If you recall, Apple had difficulty finding a phone carrier, because nearly all carriers make too much money on ringtones and song downloads to permit Apple to let you load such things for FREE.) I had more than 1500 photos on the phone, and it made the camera slower than I wanted, so I used ImageCapture to remove the photos, and (apparently) some associated files. I did this last night; today, the camera couldn't remember how to save a photo.
The solution from that fabulous resource known as the Internet: restore the camera to its original "factory" settings; then take a new photo; THEN sync your phone with iTunes so that all of your backed-up personal stuff is returned. (Be sure you are photo syncing to a folder containing only photos you want on the phone.) Then all is back to normal.
Yes, this means I had to use a NORMAL digital camera at Filoli today. I had no self-restraint whatsoever during the time period before the heat overwhelmed me completely and I had to sit in the cafe, drinking iced red "tea" and eating strawberry shortcake while Steven observed at how pale I'd become.
I'm not good at dealing with heat. I'm looking over today's photos now, and I think that many of my plant abstracts are less abstract when I'm not overheating.Labels: photography, technology is my friend
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:33 PM
Sunday, June 08, 2008
I have a four-image portfolio up at Artists Wanted.
You can find me at http://www.artistwanted.org/aegraves. (Plural in the group name, singular in the website name.) Apparently, there is voting, so if you are inclined, you can "vote" on my portfolio.
Labels: photography, web stuff
posted by Arlene (Beth)12:03 PM
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
New work.
No, not a new job: new artwork! Specifically, cyanotype prints of succulents, one set of what will probably be a long, happy series. (Oh, don't sound so disappointed: you know how I (mis)manage my life: a sane new job near my place of residence is not on the horizon.)
Go to Succulents (Cyanotpes) on aegraves.com to see seven new prints.
(Yes, I know that the listing of all my work at aegraves.com is getting out of hand, and I'm working on some simplistic solutions even as we speak. Well, okay, not really. But I plan to test out a few new organizational schemes soon.)Labels: alternative process, photography, web stuff
posted by Arlene (Beth)7:00 AM
Sunday, May 04, 2008
I'm on the Winner's page at the UnScene Tour website!
See my name in lights at ONLINE :: UnScene Tour - Photography's Emerging Artists.Labels: photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:21 PM
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Jay signs on to the web.
Jay, who is a talented photographer who has resisted my half-hearted coercion to get a website, has returned from Thailand, and is posting images on the web for the first time. Visit Flickr: Photos & Video from Jay Kullman to see his images.Labels: photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)11:12 PM
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Photography portfolio updates!
I've been a busy girl this evening... And for the past several months, actually.
New galleries up at aegraves.com include:
Extraordinary Light: Lake Merced (Infrared)
Palace of Fine Arts (Cyanotypes)
Pumpkins (Ambrotypes: Wet Collodion on Black Glass)
and
Tea Set (Ferrotypes: Wet Collodion on Trophy Aluminum).
I had promised a big April update, and I do have additional recent work to post, but these galleries provide enough updates for one evening.Labels: alternative process, art, photography, web stuff
posted by Arlene (Beth)11:28 PM
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
2008 U.S. Alternative Process Traveling Portfolio: Now... Traveling.
Yes, it is on the move. I am again participating in the Traveling Portfolio project, in which those of us who work in antiquarian, antique, or alternative photographic processes ship a small collection of our work to each other in one large box or book, so that we can see and touch actual prints that we might otherwise only see in low resolution, two dimensional reproduction.
So what am I sharing with you? Low resolution, two dimensional web reproductions. :-) Yes yes, I know. If you live near me and want to see the prints live (especially the shiny ones, so you can see them without the reflections of the studio where these samples were photographed), let me know, and I'll invite you over when the portfolio arrives. Otherwise, you're out of luck unless you join the exchange next year.Labels: art, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:21 PM
UnScene San Francisco: first round of photos up!
Photos from the UnScene San Francisco show, taken by sponsor 944 Magazine (944.com), are up on their website here. It was quite an event!
I was so tired immediately after the show (and so busy trying not to worry about my mother's tumor news) that I didn't write much about it here at the time. Now that I have visual aids, I'll make a few comments.
The W Hotel was the venue sponsor, and they provided a lovely room with high ceilings, deep colors, and a view of Yerba Buena's buildings across the street. It was on the third floor, which was easily accessed from the main entrance atrium. There were two bars in the room: a no host bar for cocktails and a hosted bar for wine. Music drifted in from the DJ on the balcony below, and there was a view from the foyer of the lounge on the first floor, which was full of people posing, drinking, and watching other people posing.
Our presentation approach was very simple: we mounted our work to foam boards, and hung the prints without mats or frames on larger white boards with a single construction light shining down on the art. The boards looked dramatic in the relatively low ambient light. (This was great planning on the part of the UnScene Tour organizer, who know how to keep things simple and light for the best effect.)
It was glam. It was posh. It was much classier than my employer's holiday party!
The other artists had lovely prints up, all of which were mounted beautifully, giving me my first real case of 'mounting envy.' The work on display showed real variety between the artists. There were dreamy fogscapes, sharp-edged architectural abstracts, dusk photos of gritty urban scenes, serene night photos of neighborhoods, and my images of staid historic ships and the glowing foliage of the Japanese Tea Garden in infrared. It was fun to see such a range of work from a bunch of locals!
Pretty much anything I could say about winning the grand prize would sound like bragging, and I am a modest person when it comes to talking about my work, so I am struggling. But I can say that winning was completely and totally unexpected. There was a glossiness to the other pieces which was so seductive, and my work was exclusively matte-finish prints; there were deep, rich colors in the other work, while I was the only artist to only show monochrome prints exclusively... I had thought I was at a disadvantage. That made hearing my name called all the more surprising.
*
It was all the more special having 30 friends, relatives, and colleagues come out to the event to support me. I don't throw big fancy parties, and so being able to invite them to an event that I was sort of responsible for was a nice thing: it made me feel like I was giving back some of the social kindnesses that have been shown to me. And the enthusiastic support I received made me feel great.
*
Looking at the photos of myself at the event is a bit awkward. As the photographer teased at the time, I am not comfortable on the lens side of the camera. (To think I ever modeled, ever so briefly, at a hair salon in my college days...)
I dislike the way flash photography makes me look: it washes out the contours of my face and neck in a way that I'll someday be grateful for (it will hide certain sorts of wrinkles!), but which I don't enjoy now: natural light seems kinder, and allows me to reflect more color. Flash photos of me don't match my conception of how I look.
I don't exhibit a high level of bilateral symmetry, and am accustomed only to seeing myself in a mirror (where I've grown accustomed to the imbalance): photos show me right-way round, and everything seems to slope off in the wrong direction... Also, the gradual changes in my face don't match photos of myself that I like and think of as "recent," but (as I am learning) are really 5 or more years old.
O, vanity.
*
There will be more photos up on the UnScene Tour page in a week or so: I will post a link when the images are available.Labels: art, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:57 PM
Friday, March 21, 2008
Yes, I did win UnScene San Francisco!
I am thrilled, surprised, and very sleepy.
Special thanks to the people who came to the party to cheer me on: Marcelle, Deborah, Tony, Andy, Yuriko, Richard, Peter, Charles, Reggie, Athena, Josefina, Tom, Eva, Margot, Ollie, Michael, Ingrid, Cullen, Steve, Steven (who stayed up late the night before and made me those lovely business cards), Mom, Dad, Maria, Jennifer, Mark, Mark (2), David, Bill, Candyce, Gillian... And anyone I am forgetting because my allergies are acting up tonight. THANK YOU so much! It was great to have fans.
Thanks also to Julie, who organized everything and was very patient (and saved the day when my prints began to rain down while I was away at dinner), and all of the sponsors who made the evening so posh. Links to the sponsors can be found at aegraves.com here and at unscenetour.com here.Labels: photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:45 PM
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Un-Scene San Francisco Photography Tour
That show that I mentioned that I will be in? Here are the details.
WHAT: Join W San Francisco, the UnScene Tour and 944 Magazine and feast your lens on never before seen images of the City by the Bay, taken by local emerging artists at the UnScene San Francisco photography exhibit. Mix and Mingle with art lovers and take home a fav photo or two. One lucky photographer will also win the chance to be "seen" at the Jack Fischer Gallery in downtown SF. Zoom in on who will be the lucky winner!
WHEN: Wednesday, March 19, 2008, 7 - 9 PM
WHERE: W San Francisco - Great Room I, 3rd Floor
181 3rd Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
415 777 5300
RSVP: "RSVP WSF EVENTS AT WHOTELS DOT COM" (remove the spaces and quotation marks to decode)
(If you're e-mailing in an RSVP, please copy me. For those of you who don't want to give out your e-mail address to the hotel, let me know at my work address and I'll do one big group RSVP from the office.)Labels: art, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)5:57 PM
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Photoblog.
I always said I wouldn't start up a photoblog, because I have too much going on already. But now that I can take low-res images on my phone and post by simply e-mailing them to a blog from my phone, there's no real reason NOT to have one. mobilelene.blogspot.com is the beginning of another fun compulsion... Or the same compulsion with different tools. Or something along those lines.Labels: photography, web stuff
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:43 PM
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Rainy day fanaticism
Our first REAL winter storm in ages started slamming the SF Bay Area late this week, and I am enjoying it. The air smells good; the clouds are lovely and dramatic-looking; we've had thunder and pouring, pouring rain... The only sad thing is that we lost our twenty-foot lavatera, whose trunks twisted and split in the remarkable wind of the storm.
I'm hoping to gather the flowers from the toppled shrub and use them to make photograms tomorrow, if they haven't all wilted.
*
I've been completely obsessed with photographic printing, and have been using every spare moment to stand in my very cold garage workspace, testing out various combinations of printing times, new chemical washes, and other things that would bore you to tears if I were to write about them in detail.
(What was that? You're heartier than I give you credit for? Okay. How's this: I'm printing vandyke brown prints on Fabriano paper again, but I'm finding that my new technique (citric acid wash, 3% sodium thiosulfate fix, hypo clear wash, water rinse, and extremely weak selenium toning) is bleaching the highlights and overall depth out of my prints, even though the tonal relationships are otherwise... Don't slump over like that. Hey! Wake up! Stay with me! HEY!)
It's like that sort of panic I used to have on Friday nights, when I realized that I had less than 48 hours to myself, and I had to get all of the work I wanted to create out of that limited time period. I have been relentless. Tired, but also relentless. But it feels really satisfying. I feel like a person of substance again, and not just a commuter drone.
Anyway, I'm producing a lot of "new" work, most of which are prints of negatives I shot a long time ago but haven't ever printed, or haven't yet printed to my satisfaction. I am ready to show some of the new prints.
In addition to the two wet plate collodion on aluminum galleries I linked to previously at aegraves.com, I've posted two more: Signs of Chinatown (Cyanotype Prints), which I think I can say are some of the best cyanotypes I've yet printed, and Every-No Where: Mass Housing Part I, which is a combination of medium format color and black and white prints of large-scale, look-alike housing here in San Francisco.
Every-No Where was all shot at one site, but I am working at other locations around the City. San Francisco has a reputation for the variety of its architecture, but one of the odder things about that to me is the sameness of a very large percentage of the City's housing. I live in a house that was built in 1924, which once looked virtually identical to all but a handful of homes on my block. The homes have been modified over the years in various ways, but they were part of a project by a developer that used the same plan over and over... So the variety in my own neighborhood of the City is rather limited. You'll see examples of this in the future from me.
*
I recently realized how much time I spend cleaning house, and how much more art I could make if I used that time instead to print in my darkroom.
It's a very dangerous revelation to have.
*
I have a bit of food writing to do, but it will have to wait until I play with my prints a bit more.Labels: alternative process, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)7:20 PM
Monday, September 03, 2007
Fanaticism!
In my private journals, nearly all I write about is photography. My compulsion to write about food is taken care of here. I usually use personal journals to vent stray trivia about work, my physical imperfections, my relationships, and my dreams for the future, but photography has somehow bumped most of that off the pages. If anyone were interested in my personal life and got a hold of my diary over the past few years, there are long periods of time when they'd be able to learn very little about me and my daily habits, aside from what I've been trying out in my near-darkroom.
[Yet, I'm singing the Smith's song 'I'm so sorry' or at least a piece of it:"You had to sneak in to my room just to read my diary, it was just to see just to see, all the things you knew I'd written about you, oh so many illustrations..."]
I have many passions in life, but certainly the one that is most boring to read about, and yet which I write about relentlessly, is photography.
Oh, how I love photography.
Recently I've been working in three processes more than others: POP (printing out paper) printing, which involves a silver chloride (rather than silver bromide) specialty paper; vandyke brown printing, as revealed with several new prints in my recently updated gallery at alternativephotography.com, and wet plate collodion on polished aluminum (ferrotype or tintype). The photo accompanying this entry is an example of one of my tintypes, which is an approximately 4" x 5" metal plate with a delicate positive silver image on the dark polished side. The plates are extraordinarily labor intensive to produce - I make coat the plates by hand with a two-part emulsion, and then expose and process it while still wet - but there's something about having this enormous, grainless positive appear in the fixer that is just amazing.
I've been renting studio time, a large format camera, and chemical access at the extremely fabulous Rayko Photo Center (raykophoto.com) to do this, and it is completely addictive. (I hope to write more about that soon.)
My friend Jay happened to be at Rayko while I was renting studio time, and he watched me prepare, expose, and develop a plate. He quickly concluded that I was nuts, but he could tell that I was enjoying myself, which means that Jay is perceptive.
The happy news for me is that the session was relentlessly productive: I made 11 plates, and each one came out better than any of the plates I'd taken in the workshop weeks ago. There were two big differences: one was that I had completely reliable equipment, and so I didn't lose half my output to film holder problems, as I did during the workshop. The second is that organizer of the wet plate program there came up with an ingenious and well-tested rental lighting setup, which made all of my images come out as I'd hoped. I still have a lot of practicing to do, but I'm thrilled with the experiments so far.
I thought I had figured out the best way to make a POP print, but it turns out that modern photocopiers are much lamer than those I used in the past back in architecture school, and none of my tests this weekend with color copier negatives (which could achieve the midtones that the lame monochrome copiers could not) have lived up to my initial experiments. I'll have to try again, and get ready for another sunny weekend day to sunprint my images by hand.Labels: photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:27 PM
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Lomohome update. I added a few collections of "shots" to my Lomohome, mostly of plants or buildings containing plants.
There are a lot more images where those came from, but I'm going to update that site gradually.Labels: lomography, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:12 PM
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