I’m so gonna be there in just one more day. Wow! Mind. Boggling.
Amazing, stunning, profound long exposure night photo of Singapore by Martin Stavars and found on Behance.
Used under an attribution Creative Commons license.
Thanks to @Photojojo on Twitter for the tip on the link.
Since this week’s Theme Thursday is the word organize, and since this blogger is anything but organized, I present a few photos for my entry into this week’s game.
Here’s a few more beauty shots of the fresh veggies on display in my cafeteria at work.
Who knew a simple, well organized pile of veg could look so darn enticing!
Not me.
Lovely, prickly artichokes (a personal fave)
Wait, I thought all carrots were those perfect small baby variety?
Leeky!
Photos by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2012, and subject to the Creative Commons license on the far right column of this page. Taken with an iPhone4s and the Hipstamatic app.
Yesterday I wrote about my mind bending, artifying, very inspiring trip to the museum. To prove I’m no snobby snobberson, let me tell you about the other thing I did this weekend.
Roller Derby.
Yeah. I know! Roller Derby!!
To be precise, I took in an event featuring the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls, a flat track league comprised of five teams.
On this night, the match was the San Francisco ShEvil Dead versus the Berkeley Resistance.
The event went down at the Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason in San Francisco.
Tamales were served.
It was AWESOME!
Of course I toted along my camera gear so I could catch all the action.
Indoors, crap florescent light, and people moving very fast.
My exposure triangle collapsed under its own weight.
I don’t know much about derby, but what I know is this: there is one lady designated as the jammer. She is the only one who can put points on the board. Her goal is to lap the opposing team. Her teammates assist by keeping the opposing team from blocking her progress and they also help try to hold back the opposing jammer.
It’s a lot of knees and elbows and flying females.
In other words: AWESOME!
You know who the jammer is by the star on her helmet.
Like this:
The jammer for San Francisco goes by the name Trixie Pixie. She must be about 90 pounds soaking wet. There would be a big clump of women duking it out, and then *boop* Trixie would pop out from the mass and go flying around the track.
By the end of the night she was my favorite player by far as the ShEvil Dead soundly beat the Resistance.
I came home with about 150 pretty useless photos. That blurry, noisy, streaky photo above is among the best of what I could get.
It may not look like much to you, but to me it’s a happy reminder of AWESOME!
Take a look at this photo. It’s not my photo. I came across it yesterday and I kind of liked it.
It’s got that color saturation and green tinge that you see in a lot of these new square format apps for the iPhone and Android (my personal favorite is Hipstamatic).
Actually, I like this photo a lot. But I didn’t heart it on Instagram. I didn’t like it on Facebook. I didn’t re-Tweet it either.
Because this photo was found inside a frame and mounted to a wall at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
This photo is part of their Walker Evans show.
This weekend, my photography group took a field trip to check out the exhibit. Going in, I knew very little about Walker Evans other than he had captured a lot of powerful black and white images from the Depression. I purposefully didn’t study up before my trip because I wanted to learn about the photographer through his photos.
Well. Knock me over. I was really, seriously and deeply educated by the time all was said and done.
First of all, Walker was a writer, and then moved into photography. He did both for most of his life. So take that you scallywags who say an artist should pick a medium and not dabble. Feh! Also, I really came to appreciate Walker’s sense of irony. You have to get up close and look around the frame of his photos to find it, but it’s always in there.
That said, the part of the exhibit that gave me the “holy crap!” moment of connection was at the very end when I saw the photos tucked away on the back wall.
It seems that in his early seventies, Walker Evans was left tired and uninspired and found himself unwilling or perhaps unable to create.
And then he got himself a Polaroid SX-70 camera and an unlimited supply of film.
“I bought that thing as a toy, and I took it as a kind of challenge,” Evans explained. “It was this gadget and I decided that I might be able to do something serious with it. So I got to work to try to prove that. I think I’ve done something with it.”
As I stood there looking at the photos, I was at first jealous. Jealous of that “unlimited supply” of Polaroid film. I am completely devoted to the Polaroid camera and used several different versions growing up and well into adulthood. I shot Polaroid until the film was no longer available.
Thanks to the Impossible Project, it’s still possible to buy Polaroid film, but at almost $24 a pack, that easy carefree snap-whatever-you-feel-like and just buy another pack mentality has to be reined in.
So I stood there feeling jealous about having all that free film on hand.
And then…my hands came up and framed either side of my whaaaat? face as I realized…
I have access to an instant camera and unlimited film. But in a different format. Sames tools, different age.
I have Hipstamatic on my iPhone. And Instagram. And a bunch of other toy camera apps.
All of these beautiful color saturated photos. They can still be made! I can still snap with reckless abandon! Oh dear god I have this gadget and I might actually be able to do something serious with it.
Oh my goodness. Oh. My. Goodness!
This realization left me dazed and confused and happy. So happy.
And inspired.
Top photo, “Untitled, 1974 Unique Polaroid” by Walker Evans and used here under Fair Use.
Quote from The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.
Bottom photo, “Power” Copyright 2012 Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license found in the far right column of this page. Taken with Hipstamatic app for iPhone.
From Wikipedia: “Rust is a general term for describing iron oxides….the term is applied to red oxides, formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water or air moisture. There are also other forms of rust, such as the result of the reaction of iron and chloride in an environment deprived of oxygen…”
Yup. A little metal. A little salt air.
Reaction.
Photographic magic.
Copyright 2010, Karen Fayeth
Today’s Theme Thursday is: Reaction.
Photo subject to the Creative Commons license in the right column of this page.