Sky landscape actions

More photos from my first roll of film from the Lomography Actioncamera, this time mostly landscapes. Although this camera isn't the best for landscapes for a variety of reasons, sometimes you just have to go with what you have and this camera's been in my bag most consistently the last few weeks. What's interesting is how similar some of the landscapes look over the space of a second, while others I have to wonder if the variation is mostly due to slight difference in lens placement for each 1/4 of the photo or just slight changes over time. Part of why I love giant open spaces at times is that although there's so much going on and things constantly changing, when you get back far enough and adjust your perspective, it's so much calmer for the most part (outside of major events) and often the most obvious changes are how the light constantly shifts. I need a lack of overwhelming details sometimes.

I don't always give the view of the mountains from my company's office the credit it deserves....

DogFluff Action

I don't really recall seeing dogs tied up in front of stores where I grew up in Texas. On the other hand, here in Los Angeles people are well known for integrating their dogs into their daily city lives and leaving your dog tied up outside is definitely a "thing" (I know it is other places re: the Portlandia sketch)... Some of these unsupervised dogs are aggressive towards any random people while others are happy to meet any new people and say hi. Some seem distressed to be away from their owners while others seem glad to have a chance to rest and chill alone. Over the years of shooting photos while walking around Los Angeles, I've enjoyed trying to capture these guys in photos in whatever states.

Just this evening while running an errand, I got to visit with a little brown Chihuahua type guy who was super friendly and came running over to me as soon as I said hi, eager for ear scratches and general love. I'm currently in one of the longest periods of my life that I've gone without a pet (3 months already!) and I suppose I treasure these little moments of connecting with random animal friends more than normal.

A couple weeks ago while coming home from the farmers market, I spotted this little fluffy guy tied up to a parking meter....I'm looking forward to shooting these dogs and other city animals with the actionsampler as I think this camera can give a little more life to these guys!

Actionsampler samples!

A few weeks ago I picked up a Lomography ActionSampler camera. This cheap camera has 4 separate lenses (Lomography also makes other models with multiple lenses) that expose 1/4 of a negative with a slight delay between each firing. The result is a tiny 4 scene movie or in the case of more stationary scenes, 4 slightly different perspectives (this lecture by David Hockey on perspective is interesting in light of this camera!), on a single negative.  These are the first few photos from the first roll. Just like most camera, it does seem to have a learning curve in terms of light/film needed as well as what sorts of situations "work" with the camera. I think this is the first camera I've  used that doesn't really have a viewfinder at all... instead it just has a tiny plastic frame that flips up to let you better guess what's going to happen.... the joys of lomography!

driving on the 101 towards Hollywood

seasons actually do exist in Los Angeles!

while driving in Silver Lake we saw this guy jamming down the street in a bike-like area in his wheelchair! WHaaaaaAAA! The real crazy part though was watching him just go straight through a red light (I guess his wheelchair didn't have brakes to handle his speed?) and all of the cars with the green light having to stop. At least he's rare enough to catch attention, but I was a bit scared for him considering he didn't have lights or a super reflective wheelchair.

Magazine Graffiti Women

Last year when I first participated in the 29 Faces challenge, I experimented with a different technique for each face and stumbled on the idea of painting on magazine pages. I hadn't played with this idea at all until this past week when I hit a roadblock, unable to get into any art in particular when I decided it was time to do something more "mindless" and decided to paint on some magazine pages.

I lovvvvvvve the eye and nose on this one

 and a couple of short time-lapse process videos of the purple and pink faces. Each one compresses about 45 min to ~1 min:

Although, as before, I kinda view this as cheating, I still think it's a good and interesting technique to use, especially to just experiment with getting the "feel" of painting a properly proportioned face in different positions. Plus, once you slap down the first layer of paint, you're kinda on your own in terms of going forward with shading and fixing your slopped paint slapping. I like the result and I'll probably go to this and maybe even try it out with my own photos at some point....

Oral Expulsion

One of the things that I love about collage is that anything is fair game. Pictures? Random sheets of paper? Candy wrappers? Tickets, scraps, little handouts, bits of left over art projects? They can all be fodder for new ideas, juxtaposed or cut down and manipulated into deformed versions of their former selves. I learned this years ago when I first started making collages and I would just make piles of cut outs and other random things and purposely toss them onto my table. I'd shuffle them around and some days some combinations would appear and I would run with it.... Now that I have too many hobbies to count, I still do this, although things have changed a little. I have a large journal that I've using to clean off painty things... a dirty brayer, a paint smeared stencil & whatever other junk I decided to press onto the Gelli plate. And these painted pages sometimes sit for a while before things click to make the whole. This past weekend I opened one of these pages and got to town. This was the result.

It's funny though because once I looked at it for a while, I realized this was likely at least partially inspired by sources of collage material that I sometimes ignore... because not all collage materials come in the physical sense.. instead some comes from a more mental place and I realized that unconsciously, I was inspired by a recent blog post from a friend about one of her experiences with San Pedro while in Peru and specifically her experiencing her ego as a little rodent......