Strolling Through the City

So recently I went on a stroll with Mahkayla, Brianna and her new pup Huey. I did these while working on my other series of vortographs which is still in progress of being completed. Progress of being completed of course go along with my final grade, and not with my whole process of making vortographs. I do want to try out making a new style of optic for the vorotgraphs in the near future, but right now I need to stick with the formula I have now and carry on like a boss. Hopefully I will be able to have some pretty stellar finished optics by the time I am done with this vortograph series.

Since I am going to continue making the vortographs I figured I might as well draw up plans and get a finished final blueprint for them. I have a couple of ideas on how to draw them up since I took some engineering classes back in highschool but most of my plans look like a scribbles of a mad man. It is kind of entertaining to make them out. I don't want to post them online unfortunately but if everything goes well there is a possibility something might pop up for the first tool I used in the future.

Not that I am trying to hide how I make my images from my readers, I just would like to keep my test items a bit secluded. If everyone knows how to make them, then they won't be as magical and surreal. Sure the images look like they could be double, triple, or quad exposures but that is part of the fun.

32nd Annual College and Highschool Photo Contest

 So this is my third time going into the Photographer Forum's photography contest. Hopefully all my work in vortographs will help me reach a position other than finalist this time. Time will tell though, I am looking forward to it.

My last blog post about the contest gained a lot of attention with little input on opinions to the images. I am curious on what everyone likes and dislikes about my photos and I encourage my readers to put out their own input as viewers of my work. I would love to hear opinions about how everything has been done, positive or otherwise.

I hope one of these will be a winning entry this time in the contest though! Wish me luck!

ETD BlackOUT

 So last night was the first time I went to a San Francisco rave/club event and the lucky event was ETD Blackout. All of my images are posted on Plurlife. I did want to show three of some of my favorite images from the night and I did get to talk to a lot of neat people. I met Ross.fm who is had a killer set and Mars again. The last time I talked to him was at Mary X-Mas in July back in Phoenix.  Overall it was a pretty awesome night.

I did walk to the venue which was pretty awesome. It was about a mile walk in the rain to get to the venue and when leaving I was in the Muni underground. The Muni underground always is really creepy at night with the lack of people and all the windy tunnels. It always reminds me of monster movies or some kind of zombie attack.

Anyway ETD Blackout was a raging good time.

Vortographs the Third

     Well I sort of lied to you guys, my faithful readers. This entry will also be about my exploration in Vortographs. I am beginning to really love shooting like this and all of the editing you will see on the blog has been done in camera raw so nothing crazy. The infrared tutorial will happen this month. Probably this weekend but the next few entries will be on Vorotgraphs.


     Now some of you might wonder who invented the Vortograph? Well that is Alvin Langdon Coburn he did the series for about a year and some tried to replicate his style and his equipment used to make the images. Now I have an item I used that has a similar effect, but it isn't the same. It isn't suppose to be the same though, it is suppose to give me the abstracted qualities, but that is it. It does just that, and I am thankful when I took the leap into doing this project everything has been running smoothly with it.

   That being said I have tons of these images now. Between school and work I don't have a lot of time to study it a lot then work on it in bursts like I used to study things so now my study on Vortographs will hopefully extend into years. I would love to surpass Alvin Coburn in understanding how they work and in getting new and more exciting images from my riggings.

   All the images from my second post about Vortographs onwards are stuff I am working into a photoset and hopefully will be on another website that will be linked to after it is finished. It is going to be about abstracted details of San Francisco. The title is still in progress but it is going to focus on shape and color more than anything else. The Vortographs can alter the shapes and the reality around us. In a way it feels very cubist as a form of photography.



 

Vortographs Continued

The first attempted at seeing if the vortograph optic I made work is here. Now that I have a working optic I took it out on a walk from the Ferry building in San Francisco to my apartment a little over a mile or so away. So these images are for my final in PH100 none of these are finalized yet for the final product but they might be used in the project. These vortographs are a lot better than the first couple I did out front of my apartment window.

Now that should have been a given that the images would be better considering more effort had been put into making them but the first images were proof of concept that the optic worked!

So these are apart of a larger project called Details of the City. There will be a lot more images eventually because this is just the start of the entire project. This project will look at some of the details in a lot of the buildings and possibly streets of San Francisco. It all depends on how it plays out but there will be more things to come dealing with the project and some other projects.

Coming up will be some editing tutorials. Hopefully the next entry will be the Infrared tutorial.