CalArti

Spring is really at hand – and there is no better way than to celebrate the change in the seasons than by getting out and enjoying some art. This year I’m participating in Battle Creek’s Spring Into the Arts art walk. I’ll have work hanging at two locations – the Happi Convenience Store and Barista Blues Cafe. Barista Blues is in its new location – right next to Happi’s in the ground floor of the 20 story Heritage Tower Building at 25 West Michigan Avenue.

The Art Walk runs from 5 – 9 on Friday, May 16, 2008. I’ll be there with lots of prints on the walls, along with bins full or matted prints, photo note cards, and copies of Imperfect Symmetry – the snow crystal book. Plus there are lots of other artists and events in the city that night. (Not to mention a whole lot of great food and drink.)

If you are local – stop on by. For the full scoop on the Art Walk check out the online brochure at http://www.downtownbattlecreek.com/pdfs/SpringintotheArts_08.pdf.

See you there!

Last week Pam and I spent 5 nights at the northern Michigan resort, Boyne Mountain. This is a ski, golf, and water park resort – and our unplanned trip in late April came at the time when most of these activities were down. All but the deepest snow on the ski slopes had melted, and the golf courses, historical museums, and other local attractions were all scheduled to open on the first Monday of May.

Well, it’s not like we ski or golf, anyhow…

We spent most of our time hiking in the various open public lands in the north country. We visited a few state parks – Young State Park just north of Boyne City, and Northport / Leelanau State Park on the Leelanau peninsula. But most of our time was spent exploring the Jordon River Valley, which we either accessed directly through seasonal roads in the surrounding state forest, or via the Deadman’s Hill Overlook or Warner Creek Trail.

Just driving 250 miles north, and getting closer to Lake Michigan, was like taking a time machine back a few weeks into the very early spring. The northern woods were full of Hepatica, which was blooming at its peak. Trout Lily carpeted most of the Jordon River Valley, and was just starting to open up at the end of our stay. Trillium were also abundant, although they were just beginning to bloom. The trees were just starting to bud and send out new leaves, which gave the forest a light and airy feel, with warm colors.

The Jordan River itself proved to be a great photographic subject. Not a large river, but crystal clear and full of little islands. The river is a great trout stream, and a state fish hatchery is located in the Jordan River Valley.

The early spring setting created some interesting light and color effects. The dried grass and leaves created a golden hue, offset by the pale greens of emerging tree leaves and the deep greens of the pines and arborvitae that dotted the landscape. Marsh Marigold bloomed along the river’s banks, and numerous logs extended out into the shallow water, making perfect platforms for getting out into the river for shots of the islands.

The spring landscape, sun dappled water, and grassy islets certainly made for some great subject matter.

The Skegemog Swamp Pathway was another easy walk. The trail follows an abandoned railroad bed into the swamp, ending at an elevated observation platform. The swamp itself was an interesting setting – a great combination of living and dead trees; water, mud, and vegetation. We only spent an hour or so on the trail, but it still provided some great photo opportunities.

Many more shots from this trip can be found in the Image Stream.

It looks like a late spring translates to be a short spring. Visiting wildflower patches a few days ago, I’m amazed at how quickly things have progressed. The hepatica is virtually gone – just a few sprigs of it here and there in shaded areas. Now Spring Beauty and Rue Anemone cover the forest floor. Trout Lily, Bloodroot, and Trillium are all peaking or near peak. It looks like things have quickly moved on to the later stages of activity – lining up with the calendar.

While the trees are just starting to green up, Blue Darner Dragonflies are already locally abundant – migrants from the south. I watched them depositing eggs in the shallow water of the vernal marsh in the Allegan Forest – getting ready for summers brood. Hopefully Blue Dashers and other spring dragons will be appearing soon!

More photos of assorted wildflowers can be found in the Image Stream.

Yesterday I extended my search for early spring wildflowers to the Allegan Forest. Although this is the largest tract of open land in south west Michigan, I haven’t had much luck spotting wildflowers there. Virtually all of the land has been farmed in the past – maybe 70 years ago or longer – and that disruption of the soil is enough to finish off many wildflower species.

However, last year I found a few fading hepatica on the south side of a steep bluff along the Kalamazoo River. I returned there this year hoping to find more wildflowers – and to my surprise found a thriving population of blue hepatica.

The bluff drops about 70 feet from its peak down to the river – as measured by a GPS unit. The slope is pretty steep, but an old road is cut into the side of the hill, leading down to a flat area near the water. Probably an old boat launch, it is now barricaded and hepatica is even springing up along it. The road provides easy access to the flowers on the steep hill.

I had a very pleasant morning there, shooting the wildflowers as numerous Mourning Cloak and Question Mark butterflies flitted around in the air. It’s great that spring is finally back!

Cold breezes drift around me as I stand in the bare woods. There are no leaves on the trees. The ground is a carpet of brown and gray leaves. The back into the woods was muddy and flooded.

It’s mid April and so far my trips into Michigan’s southwest corner – home to exquisite spring woodland wildflowers – have been fruitless. Today the sun shines, burning off the chill of a clear, cold night.

Heading towards the creek, signs of spring start to appear. Wild garlic pops up here and there, and soon I’m following a path with big patches of deep green leaves on both sides. Harbinger of Spring blooms here and there. Finally, the first few hepatica appear.

Spring may be late, but we’re early in the season. As the day warmed more and more hepatica opened. In a few days the forest floor will be carpeted with these dime sized blooms. So here is a first taste of spring wildflowers – more to come for sure!

More photos in the Image Stream.

Spring is hiding this April – lurking in the melting mounds of snow that shrink at the edges of parking ramps, under the brown grasses and leafless trees, in the cold rain that falls more often than not. Now wildflowers are blooming – yet. Few insects take to the air. A few green buds hint at what is coming.

Late last week, though, the sun shone brightly and temperatures rose enough to melt most of the remaining snow – except in the shaded places. I went to the Allegan Forest to see if I could coax out some glimmer of the hidden season with an infrared photography session. What better way to search for something hidden, than to look with invisible light? Or so goes my logic, or whatever.

Al least the melting snow let me get at areas that have been difficult to reach these last few months. First off was a visit to the vernal pond – more like a vernal marsh – off 48th street. Beginning in a few weeks and then for the rest of the summer this place will be full of all sorts of dragonflies. This is the time of year when the marsh is the most flooded – this shot below shows (in graphic infrared hues) the flooded out and trampled down grasses that will rise up 4 or 5 feet out of the marsh by late spring. By July or August I’ll be walking through the area shown here – the marsh will shrink down to just a small wet area (the heart of the marsh) by the end of the summer.

But surely dragonfly larva slink through the icy waters, even now, dreaming of the days when they will take to the air…

I also visited some areas north of the river – along the bluffs rising above the flooded flood plains below. In particular I explored a steep embankment off 125th street – which is a rutted two track at that point. The steep slope faces due south, and the first hepatica leaves, and even a few flower buds, were poking out of the dried leaves. The micro climate at this place makes it green up earlier than anywhere else that I visit, so in a week – maybe two – the hepatica should be abundant elsewhere.

Here’s another infrared shot from the same area – this one of a pine tree, somewhat close up, though not a close-up. Not much to say, but I like it.

All of these photos were taken with the Pentax *ist-D and an RM90 IR filter.

I also experimented with Rollie IR400 during this trip, shooting alternatively with an R72 IR filter, and a standard #25 red filter. The first time out with this film was not so successful – none of the shots with the R72 filter came out well, and the shots with the standard red fitler show little IR effect (though as a standard B&W film it looked fine.) The shots with the R72 filter were metered at ISO 25, and were bracketed one stop plus and minus. In hindsight, I realize that I should have metered at ISO 12 or even 6 – so I’ll be back to try again. I also underdeveloped the film – which did not help things.

Well – let’s hope I got all the mistakes out of the way on this first try. With 4 more rolls in the fridge, I’m eager to give this film another try.

A few months ago I had the privilege of being interviewed for an article in Encore Magazine – a publication dedicated to the people and happenings in the Kalamazoo area. The author, Patrice Mindock, did an outstanding job on the article. The magazine is hitting the streets right now, but you can click here to check out the online version (the article featuring yours truly starts on page 16.) For more about Encore Magazine, see www.encorekalamazoo.com.

The Signature Artists Cooperative Elements exhibit is now open!

The opening reception will be Sunaday afternoon - April 6, 2008, from 2 to 4 p.m at the Battle Creek Arts Center - 205 East Emmett Street, Battle Creek, MI 49017.

March is a funny month. The saying goes “in like a lion, out like a lamb” but in reality is more like “Surprise! It’s winter again!”

At least that is how it felt last week, when nearly a foots of sleety powdery snow fell on Good Friday. Followed, of course, by warmer weather, crocuses pushing up through the ground, and then more snow and sleet…

This was probably the last opportunity for snowflake photographs this season, so I gave it a whirl. Nothing but dusty bits of sleet and ice. Oh well – if you can’t be with what you want to photograph, you may as well photograph the thing you’re with (to mangle an old saying)…

Dusty bits of sleet and ice. In past years I’d have a shot of a bee or two by now. Well, that’ll come…

Last week Pam and I headed out on a little road trip, driving from Kalamazoo to Colorado with stops along the way. The purpose of the trip was to attend the opening of the Macroworld exhibit in Fort Collins – though in reality we really wanted to just get away from the cloudy snowy Michigan winter.

The drive through the Midwest was uneventful, but not boring. I love watching the landscape roll out around the car and the road – changing from woodland to prairie, rolling hills to flat plains, back to hills and then mountains.

The Marcoworld exhibit at the Center for Fine Art Photography was excellent. This was the first exhibit in their new space, and the gallery looked great. The gallery was spacious, the work was well presented, and above all the quality of every print in the show was outstanding. Many of the artists were present – and some even travelled farther than me to get there.

We decided to stay in Loveland, Colorado, since it was more or less midway between Fort Collins and Denver. On Saturday morning we just hopped onto Route 34 and made out way west, toward Estes Park. At the reception Friday evening, one of the local photographers urged us to get into the mountains before we left, and that seemed like the best way to get there.

The drive into Estes Park was great – winding through mountain valleys until reaching the high broad valley were the city of Estes Park is located. Once there we stopped at the visitor center, where we learned that Rocky Mountain National Park was more or less closed – you could enter, but the roads were closed off at the passes a few miles in. As an alternative, we decided to head out on the Route 7 scenic byway, and then link up to the Peak to Peak highway through the mountains.

The drive was excellent. I only pulled off once to take a few photographs – one shown here - but otherwise spent the time tolling around the mountain roads, hitting the occasional snow shower on the way. We reached the small town of Nederland, which was celebrating Frozen Dead Guy Days, and after that drove in fairly heavy traffic back to Boulder.

Sunday proved to be the most interesting day for photography. On Saturday evening we visited friends who live in the area, and they suggested the Garden of the Gods as a destination. So on Sunday morning we drove down to Colorado Springs to explore this location.

The Garden of the Gods is home to fascinating and huge rock formations. It’s a Colorado Springs city park, and was donated to the city in the 19th century. We arrived at the tail end of an overnight snow, with clouds still low in the air and a light snow on the ground. By mid afternoon the sky had cleared and the surprising warm March sun was shining in full glory. The park was pretty full with tourists and rock climbers, but it still offered some great photographic opportunities. I took lots of photos during the afternoon, and spent the next few nights in hotels on the road working the images in Photoshop.

So that is it – a couple of days of photography and then back on the road, finally arriving in a still snow covered Michigan – hopefully just a few weeks away from a long awaited spring.

As always – more images are in the Image Stream.

Despite record or near record snows here in west Michigan, this winter has been a poor one so far for snow flake photography. The bits of dust and sleet that have fallen by the foot is just not photogenic.

Monday night was typical. Another 3 to 4 inches of snow fell, but the temperatures rose to the mid thirties as it came down. It was far too warm for snow flake photos, and the flakes themselves were way too sleety.

So I was happily surprised Tuesday evening as the temperatures dropped and a gentle flurry of snow blew into the area. For almost an hour well formed flakes fell and the temperature hovered in the mid 20’s. I was able to snake what may be the only acceptable snow crystal photos of the this season – historically, after February the odds of getting some good shots drop off dramatically.

It’s been a slow winter so far. It has snowed like crazy here in west Michigan, but the snow has always been sleety, windblown, dry bits of dust – no fine individual crystals. The counties to the west of Kalamazoo have been hit with the most snow – and the Allegan Forest is now blanketed in white. There is at least 3 feet on the ground, and the small two tracks and seasonal roads that lead to the great places are impassable. I’ve tooled around on the main roads, but the landscapes haven’t come together.

So instead of taking new shots, I’ve been re-working old ones. The Signature Artist Cooperative has a group show coming up, and the theme is simply “The Elements.” So I’ve been readdressing this theme, and here are four new digital abstractions addressing the elements as understood by the ancients - Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

Each of these images started out as a digital photo. But I decided to pull out the plugs and use some of the digital manipulation techniques I’ve been experimenting with these last few weeks. Here’s a run down of the images and techniques used to make them.

Click on the images below for slightly larger images.

Earth. This is the most representational of the images. It started with a shot of leaves decaying in my bird bath. Correcting for the glare of the water created an usual tonal quality for the source image. I ran the source image through an old, 16 bit graphics program, which pixilated and distorted the image. (See the prior post on digital abstractions for more on this.) Unlike the other three images in this series, there was little layering in Photoshop, except for tonal corrections and adjustments. I spent a lot of time drawing on the image, using the dodge and burn tools, to selectively enhance specific details in the image. This image, more than any of the others, looses a lot in small web size, since the pixilation is condensed down and blurred together.

Air. The source photo for this was posted here in May, 2006 – it was a light bulb that had blown out, leaving a layer of soot inside the bulb. The image was inverted and the color tone was adjusted to the blue hue shown here. As with Earth, I did a lot of “painting” with the dodge and burn tools. In particular, I made adjustments to individual channels, bringing out some reddish tones and suppressing some of the flare in the corners.

Fire. This began as a controlled motion blurred shot of a trail running through cool green trees. After inversion, color adjustments, and some work with the sharpening filters to bring out the charcoal like textures in the shadows, I over layered some purely digital color patterns to bring out more orange tones. This image started out way too magenta , and as I worked with it I realized that fire is more orange and yellow than blazing red.

Water. This was the last of the images to be completed. It started with a reflection of the sky in Lake Michigan. That image was turned upside down, which distorted the perspective. A couple of grayscale digital gradients and texture layers were laid over that. Initially the color was too blue – too much like Air – so I swapped the blue and green channels to get the aqua green tone shown here.

You never know if you really like an image until you’ve looked at it for a while – but for now AI’m happy with these four images, interpreting the theme of The Elements.

Prints of these images will be displayed at the Signature Artist Cooperative Exhibition entitled “The Elements.” The Exhibit will be at the Art Center of Battle Creek, 256 Emmett Street, Battle Creek, MI 49017. The exhibit will run from April 2-26, 2008.

I’m always looking for new venues to exhibit photos, and earlier this week I hung 19 insect and wildflower shots in the HAPPI Convenience Store in downtown Battle Creek – my first ever C-Store show

When I first wandered into the HAPPI store, I expected to see a big guy behind the counter who would introduce himself as Happi – but I was in for a surprise. Instead, it turned out that HAPPI stands for Habitat For Animals, Plants, and People, Inc. HAPPI is a non-profit organization working to restore a population of Wild Lupine and Karner Blue butterflies in Calhoun County, Michigan. Proceeds from the store go to support HAPPI’s wildlife preservation projects.

So it looks like my photos and note cards landed in a nice spot! For more about HAPPI check out their website – www.thehappi.org.

And in honor of HAPPI’s current project, here are photos of a Karner Blue and Wild Lupine - shot in the Allegan forest, which still hosts a wild population.

When making photographs there is an undeniable desire to take control of every aspect of the process. Digital photography has enabled us to control our work with mathematical precision – heck, since a digital photo is, in essence, a mathematical table, it’s chid’s play to add here, subtract there, averge across this range or that…

At some point I find myself yearning for just a bit of randomness to creep into the process. Maybe that’s why I keep playing with film – no matter how carefully you work, there’s no way to precisely control each and every step – how much did that stock solution oxidize since it was mixed? Just how did the solution flow in that last tank inversion? Just how old is this film and did it change in the last few hours, sitting in my warm pocket?

The quest for the infusion of randomness is, for me, a major allure of toy and junk cameras. Come on – it’s all random when you can’t control exposure or focus! No need for subtlety here…

The quest for randomness has sent me looking into many peculiar places – but here is one that is perhaps the strangest of them all: my own computer.

Of course, computers and their software, soulless things that they are, are incapable of truly random actions. They can emulate randomness by tapping into tables of pseudo-random numbers, but that’s it. Pseudo-random means that the lists of figures were once, indeed, random, but have since been frozen in fixed sequence and by that are now locked in relationship with each other, and are therefore not random. Though they are probably arbitrary.

So how can you get randomness out of one of these bit boxes? Well, there’s always software malfunctions…

I recently discovered the wonderful world of software emulators. DOSBOX is a favorite – fire it on top of WindowsXP or Vista, and it does a great job of emulating MS DOS from days gone by. I even unearthed my old Windows 3.1 disks, and installed it in the DOSBOX session. “Wow,” I thought, “I can finally get Kai’s Power Tools 2.0 back up and running…” and so that lead to installing Micrographix and the Kai’s Plug Ins.

And that’s when randomness took over – seems that Micrographix doesn’t know what to do with a 16 bit TIFF, and Kai’s has a hard time with files beyond a certain size. But it’s what Micrographix does with those 16 bit files that’s really interesting. It seems to dither them, fold them, crop them, chop them, and otherwise mess them up. So I immediately started throwing all sorts of photos at it, just to see what will happen…

Well, I like the effect. Pictures of trees seem to work the best – lots of trees, that look good when layed on top of each other. As with a lot of this stuff, a little goes a long way, and after looking at the lot of them for a while only a few remain interesting. But – here’s another interesting trick to play around with.

Good news came my way yesterday, with the annoucement of the juror’s selections for Center For Fine Art Photography’s street photography exhibit. This is on the heels of having a couple works selected into the Center’s Macroworld exhibit.

The image that was accepted into the exhibit is “On Patrol” shot at Millennium Park in the fall of 2006. That was my last serious trip to Chicago for some street shooting . I keep meaning to head back for some more, but the few trips I’ve taken have been devoted to other things.

Well – everything in due time. At at least for now, this shot gets its day.