Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

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.

Yesterday I learned that two pieces I had submitted to the Carnegie Center for the Arts 2008 Regional Juried Arts Competition were accepted by the jurors. Based out of Three Rivers, Michigan, the Carnegie Center sponsors this competition for artists living in Southwest Michigan and Northern Indiana. It’s open to works in all media, and when I stopped by last Saturday to drop off my entries, the Center was full of artists carting in work for consideration.

These folks really work fast, and the pieces will be hung for the show opening next week – the Opening Reception is January 20, 2008, from 2 – 4 p.m. Just two weeks from the initial drop off time to hanging the show!

The two pieces of mine the were accepted are “Forest Impressions” and “Yellow Legged Meadowhawk,” shown here. The latter was prepared as half of a diptych, setting an immature blue dasher from early spring against the late season Autumn Meadowhawk (the new name for these guys.) It stands alone well – for this print I added the scientific name, date the photo was shot, and also made some digital enhancements inspired by 19th century natural history lithographs.

The exhibit runs from January 20 – March 4, 2008. More info can be found at the Carnegie Center’s website at www.trcarnegie.com .

January finds me working on prints…

To be frank, I’d rather spend my time taking more photos. Second choice would be making photos in Photoshop, third choice is matting, framing, prepping, printing… But if you get to your third choice, things are looking pretty good.

A few weeks ago good news came from the Center for Fine Art Photography – two of the images I submitted for the Marcoworld exhibit were accepted. (You can see all selected images here.)

So, I pulled a couple of good prints, filled out the paper work, wrote up an artist statement, and got things ship shape to send off. The electronic stuff has already gone out, the physical stuff will be on its way shortly.

I’m also prepping for a re-vamped Snowcrystals! Exhibit at the Kalamazoo Nature Center this month. I’ll be hanging the show on Monday – most of the images have been on display locally for the last year, but by October all the sheep had come home and were sitting quietly in the basement, packed up in big Rubber Maid totes.

I pulled 5 new images for the show, cutting out the three weakest of the prior exhibit and replacing them with the new work, plus adding two shots. Somehow I’m counting only 48 images total in the exhibit – I thought it was 50 – but that’s fine. The snow crystals as 12 x 12 prints really are pleasant to see, if I say so myself.

In addition to the CFAP and Nature Center exhibits, tomorrow I’ll be dropping off three prints to a local juried show – if you don’t hear about it again, that means nothing was accepted. :|

A few other shows pique my interest, and fates willing more announcements may be in store. But back to Macro World – I’ll think I’ll head out to Colorado for the opening reception at the Center for Fine Art Photography. Up till now Waterloo Iowa is the furthest west I’ve been, so I should get that a ways while time permits.

Let’s start 2008 off on the right foot – and here in Kalamazoo, that would be a foot of snow!

New Year’s eve brought the onset of a heavy, driving, wet snow. It looked great on the tree branches and power lines, but the temps hovered around the freezing point, too warm for snow flake photographs, even in the open and unheated garage.

A steady snow fell through New Year’s Day – but still it was too warm with the air temp just at the freezing point.

Finally, at about 10 p.m. the temps dropped just a few degrees. The wind picked up and a near white out snow started. The temps stayed down for a few hours, and while the snow wasn’t ideal – still too effervescent – but good enough to work out a few shots.

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