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.

Explorations

So last Friday night I decided to explore the city with my friend Brianna and we went on a long walk to the wharf and around some of the surrounding areas. So here are some of the weird little things we ran into. I wish there was a funny story that came a long with this but since we were walking around around 11:30 p.m. till about 2 a.m. not many of the crazy homeless people were out or any of the normal crazy people. We did run into a few drunks but beyond that nothing too crazy. After a long day of disappointment from some normal work prospects this walk really cheered me up and brought me back to being in my "A Game" if you will on my job hunt. I feel fresh again, confident and pretty excited that this time I will be getting a job and one I will be happy to have.

Some interesting facts about the images though, since Simon and Lewis from the Yogscast are in San Francisco's Bay Area for the Battlefield 3 lan party the first image I am pretty sure is the aircraft carrier that they are on.  We also past a protest going on still for Occupy San Francisco. Which I was surprised that they would be protesting to practically no one considering the time. Then I saw these wonderful bread animals that smelled wonderful and I wanted to eat them all. I also walked through Little Italy and North Beach and I want to visit both of the places more.

Sutro Baths

    So last Friday my class went to the Sutro Bath's for a small class field trip. Which the area was amazing to see in the morning in comparison to what I normally see on a Friday morning ( which is normally crazy people and street garbage). Anyway the area was beautiful, I got there around 8:30 with a couple of my classmates and we enjoyed the beauty of the area. Honestly it was a really cool place and the first time I was at the beach or at the ocean since I have been in the city. I am hoping to visit the ocean areas a bit more since I moved down here and never have had the luxury of having an ocean near me.


    It was pretty cool seeing the Cliffhouse and close by was a giant camera obscura. It wasn't open when I got there but it does open up at ten in the morning if you are in the area. Overall it was a nice trip and these are some of the photos I took while I was there. It was fun taking seascapes since I never really had the opportunity to shoot them before and I really want to do a modeling shoot up here at some point but as for now I am really enjoying exploring San Francisco.

     I am thinking I might start doing a weekly travel thing soon in San Francisco where I take public transit to different areas and explore around and taking photos for a couple of hours. I will have to see how my money situation pans out for that but I would love to make this a reality instead of an idea.
    
    Anyway for my next assignment in PH100 I need to do a reshoot of the secret assignment. I can shoot either both images or just one but I need two prints from the sutro baths and from the reshoot as well.

Secret Assignment

So my recent assignment for class was a themed around "secrets" so we wrote a bunch of stuff on paper and turned it in and there were a lot of things about not having money or being poor but a couple caught my attention that I had to do. The first being " I like to dress like a crow and yell at people at 4 am out of taxi cabs". I thought woah this is great but because of some class limitations I wouldn't be able to do a direct translation so I did dress like a crow and cut out some of the rest of it. The second secret that caught my attention was a person apparently wants to be a cannibal. Or at least try human flesh in the class, not sure if that one is a blatant lie or if it is true but the second image is a take on cannibalism. Hopefully my allusion in the image comes across well but I know it will make people think and I feel it is pretty smart in a couple of ways. I won't go into too much detail on it but if you want please leave a comment about what you think it is alluding to.

Casual Portraits

So I had my studio lights up today to do a little bit of re-shooting for the Sensuality assignment which more images will appear from that soon. Right after that small amount of images that were taken for the re-shoot I decided to do a bit of casual portraits of her. That weren't of trying to chow down food as grossly as possibly.

Keeping with my class standards that I am going to try to keep from now on I will be using square format as I am quite fond of it. With this as a constant practice I hope to become quite comfortable with the square format. Anyway this is Mahkayla, she is my wonderful new friend in San Francisco, she has never appeared on the blog until now but you will end up seeing more of her in the future.

So this is just a general portrait study for the square format. Since it is digital it isn't considered medium format but I will be shooting more 120mm film once I get a way to scan the shots down here. Hopefully in the near future I will have the equipment.