How Do I Love Thee 4 - Modeling

A.) I like to take digital pictures and eventually turn one of them into a real work of art. Not that digital photography is not an art form, but I jet prefer to try and emulate my photographs in paint, or color pencil. When I travel, I take my camera with me and I snap away the different things I see. I can take tons of photographs that have little differences, but I can see what they are. I use these pictures as mini-thumbnail models for a finished product.

B.) For this project, I chose to post some of my pictures I took of the lighthouse in Holland, MI. We went there on a weekend trip and, as the day was starting to wind down, we went to the beach. We walked all over the pier and sand as I waited for the sun to set closer to the horizon. I took some clear shots of “Big Red” and horsed around with the different settings my camera offers. Here are some of the pictures I took that day:

C.) I took all of those pictures and looked them over very carefully. I really liked this one:

So, I grabbed a canvas off the shelf and my painting tools and started to create some art. This is what I eventually came up with:

The original photograph looks great (self-opinion). The painting looks real good considering I do not paint very often (again...biased opinion). But, the picture of my painting does not do the artwork justice either. One thing I do not like about digital photography is that you lose a bit of originality with every generation and you are seeing the 5th version of this: my experience, my picture, my painting and my picture of my painting...computer version.

The Big Picture - 20 November 2010

Before I became a teacher, I used to work as a machinist for sixteen years. I built robot parts and, eventually, built the robots themselves. When looking at a blueprint, you need to be able to visualize the drawing in 3-Axis’s: X (left to right), Y (front to back) and Z (top to bottom). Seeing the piece in your mind before you started working the material helped you in creating the part.

Digital photography takes a 3-D object and turns it into a 2-D view. You will lose all of the dimensions and correlation/relationships to other items/subjects in the photograph and, unless you rebuild the scene, another viewer cannot get a real feel for what you experienced. We can look at the images the Hubble Telescope has been able to produce as an example. Can you really tell that certain stars, or celestial, entities are light-years apart in the photographs? You might be able to see the gaseous surroundings of a nebula, but do they have any texture to them? How about heat? Do they smell like anything we have ever experienced?

Digital photography can also be used to make space “seem” real too. Chapter 12 talks about modeling, something that has been used in photographic and cinema for decades. As we tried in one of our assignments, we played with the sun and moon, using them as toys or props for our pictures. We cannot really catch the sun or moon, but with careful placement of a hand, or prop, we can make it look like we hold the solar system in the palm of our hands. The same can be done with a toy car. Stand far enough behind a Matchbox ’57 Chevy and it will look like you own the hot rod. With simple personnel placement, I could look like I was able to slam-dunk a basketball over Michael Jordan’s head.

Modeling, Dimensional Thinking and Digital Photography can also be used to help a project too. Scale models of a skyscraper can be built long before the real building. A simple photograph would show some of the characteristics and features of the façade and, with careful placement of a light source, how the structure will affect neighboring entities. If building “A” is built on block “M,” what will it do to the park down the street? Will it kill off all the trees by blocking the sunlight? Will building “A” make buildings “C, D and E” too dark during peak hours of business? These are some of the ways you can use Modeling, Dimensional Thinking and Digital Photography to help us make a better world.

Veja Du - 6

Hi everybody! Check out my Veja Du - 6 at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SifQ5AtzMuI&feature=youtube_gdata 

I know it is not still photography, but I made you all a claymation video to watch. If you prefer the still photography version...here ya go!!

TODAY ON CRIBS - THE PILLSBURY DOUGHBOY

Hello Everybody...he-hee!!

IN THE KITCHEN:

Do you want some breakfast? I can make some toast...he-hee!

2 MINUTES LATER:

I made you a hearty Pillsbury breakfast. It has eggs, bacon some Pillsbury bread and a banana...he-hee!

3 MORE MINUTES LATER:

Or, if you prefer, I made you some lunch. It has spaghetti, peas and a Pillsbury Crescent Roll...he-hee!

IN THE HALLWAY:

Some families put up pictures. Mine has built a shrine to me. I'm all over the place...he-hee!

See...I'm everywhere man...he-hee!

BACK IN THE KITCHEN:

It's good to be me!! Now, if you will excuse me, the "Fan Club" and I need some alone time...he-hee! Hey baby...that tickles!!!

CREDITS: 

THE PILLSBURY DOUGHBOY - HIMSELF

ALL THE WOMEN REMAIN ANONYMOUS

Veja Du - 5

I chose to be my dog for a day. He lives SUCH a pampered life!!!

He eats:

He drinks:

He stares longingly at his momma:

He lays in the living room (these two terrorize him):

This is what a big, spoiled baby looks like:

Ah! To be a dog!!!!

The Big Picture - 6 November 2010

I love to take digital photographs. One of my favorite subjects is sports art; baseball to be exact. If I ever get a chance to visit another city, I usually make sure that I can get tickets to the local baseball team and we watch a game. I have played the game for 39 years as a catcher and my wife has learned to ignore me, because I sit in the stands and call out the pitches before the catcher sends signals to his pitcher. I take my camera to the game and I wander around the stadium taking the general sightseeing pictures (broadcast booth, playing field, statues, monuments, etc.) then I go back to my seat and start to zoom in on the players.

Chapter 9 in “Sparks of Genius” talks about “Body Thinking,” or the training of our bodies to perform a physical function over and over, until our body does the movement without even thinking. Chapter 10 talks about “Empathizing,” or mentally placing yourself in another’s position. You may act like that entity, or you may emulate their physical traits. My dad tried to teach me how to pitch by making me watch Detroit Tiger baseball games on the television and try to throw a ball like the pitchers did. It never worked. I was taught how to throw a baseball like a catcher and still do after all these years.

As I said, I have been a catcher for 39 years and that is a lot of squatting when you add it all up. I was taught “how” by a snakeskin, steel tip cowboy boot wearing coach. He used to stand behind me during practice and kick my left buttock every time I did something that he did not like. I hated that stupid metal tip, but it sure made me “body think” my way into being a better catcher. Now I am old in baseball years and I can watch a player’s muscular performance, seeing if they deserved a boot to the butt, or freedom from pain. I take pictures of the players too and I can critique them later.

My boys like to play baseball and I coached their teams for years. There were times I wanted to buy a pair of steel tipped, snakeskin boots, but I prefer to stay out of jail. I taught my players “Body Thinking” through repetition, not pain. I took photographs during games and used them to demonstrate/illustrate where they were not playing correctly. It worked well, but not perfectly. I would tease them as well, by picking one or two idiosyncrasies of their behavior and imitate them during practice. One player had a mental/superstitious issue with making a cross on the plate before each at-bat. I am not sure if he knew this, but we all had a good laugh when I asked the team who I was and walked into the batter’s box, making a crucifix symbol with my bat. It was fair turn-around when my kids finally noticed that I never walked in front of an umpire. Even if he were standing up against the fence, I would politely excuse myself and walk behind him as I went up to bat. I really wished somebody took some pictures of me doing that, because I am not that superstitious and it would have been funny to see.

How Do I Love Thee 3 - Abstracting As Poetry

DIGITAL HAIKU

Once I took pictures

Then they made me “boil it down”

Now they call it art

Digital photography is a fun subject. There are so many different avenues to express yourself it becomes endless. I started to play with paint.net and it gave me the ability to boil down some of my artwork. Now people look at my photographs and consider them a whole different art form.

The Big Picture - 22 October 2010

Being an artist, you might think I would be able to perform abstract art. It is just not so with me. Abstract art is very loose and representational, about as polar opposite in artistic styles from my personal, heavily controlled, pencil renderings. Pablo Picasso is not my favorite artist, but I do know about his work; I even have a Picasso Lithograph in my house, but the cubism/surrealism/abstract movements are just not what I like to look at.

In art, in order to abstract an object, you need to over-simplify it down to the bare essentials. Shape, color and size mean nothing. Proportions are not held and realism is completely lost. In a digital photography world, how do you abstract an item without computer programs? You can take all the pictures you want and, unless your camera has special settings, you are reliant upon those programs…and then you need the knowledge of those programs in order to make them work properly.

Analogizing, or representational replacement, in photography can be interpretive. I like to take pictures of lighthouses. If any of those photographs hold any artistic “specialties” (composition, color, shading, etc.), I might even paint the picture. Then, I had a professor at The University of Michigan ask me what my obsession with the phallic symbol was all about. I wondered what he was talking about and asked him why he said such and he responded with some Freudian quote about all things being psychologically connected to sex. I had never thought about lighthouses in that manner, I just liked taking pictures of them. Now that professor has semi-ruined the subject matter for me and every time I snap a photo of a lighthouse I get a mental image of a penis…and that is just wrong.

On pages 154 and 155 of “Sparks of Genius” they talk about M.C. Escher’s tessellations. I have always been fascinated with Escher’s work. He was of a different mindset. A digital photography lesson about M.C. Escher could contain an observance of positive and negative shapes that blend together to form a composition. The question is, where would you find anything pre-prepared for you to just take a picture of, without it already being somebody else’s artwork? You would have to look for individual parts that, put together, would make up the whole. In the end, it would be a rewarding assignment, but one that is very hard to achieve.

I do not alter my digital photographs very much. I take my pictures, upload them into my computer and sift through them when I get time. In other words, I have thousands of pictures just sitting in electronic limbo, waiting for me to retire, so I can actually work on them. It would take me some time to open up my mind and turn my pictures into anything abstract, or representational. I like to keep things as close to realistic as possible. This does not mean that other people cannot enjoy those styles of art; in fact many do. It is just not my style.