L A R R Y B L A C K W O O D
P H O T O G R A P H Y
NEWSLETTER
November 2008
IN THIS ISSUE:
Sometime in the last month, my website traffic hit a milestone: 100,000 page hits since its creation. That's actually very small potatoes in the world of the internet, but it's still a milestone for me. It is interesting to see where visitors to my website come from. I've had visitors from all over the world. They find out about my website in a variety of ways, from magazines I publish in, other people's blogs or websites who mention my site, and from searching for various topics using search engines. I'm surprised at how many people end up on my site after searching for information on pictorialism, a subject I wrote a small essay on (which can be found here). If you're a subscriber to my Picture of the Day, then you are a regular contributor to the total hits on the site. Why do web site hits matter? I'm not sure except that it's nice to know that people are looking at my work. And of course it is a form of advertising, although it has yet to result in a large number of sales for me.
If you are wondering how I know all that information about where people come from who visit my web site, it is from the web site statistics that can be obtained by the owner of any website. These statistics show the city a viewer is located in, the referring web page (if any), the number of different pages viewed, and other similar information. There is of course no information on the identity of the person viewing the web page, although I can sometimes infer who's been looking at my web site simply by the city the hit came from.
Black and White Spider Awards
My photograph Balcony Seats recently received an Honorable Mention in the 4th Annual Black and White Spider Awards, an international competition that recognizes excellence in black and white photography. Thousands of images from 62 countries were entered in the contest. The winning photographs were selected by a judging panel from the international photography community, including Sotheby's, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Fratelli Alianari Museum in Florence, Italy.
I took Balcony Seats a few years ago while I was in New York City on business. The photo was taken looking out my hotel window overlooking Times Square.
Balcony Seats
Recent and Current Exhibitions
A few months ago, I had a photograph, The Reach, accepted into the Sweat Pea Juried Art Show in Bozeman. The show hung in the Bozeman Public Library in July and August.The Reach was taken on the Potomac River, in Great Falls Park near Washington, DC.
The Reach
Currently I am one of four artists featured in a show titled Winter Grace at Jens Gallery and Design in Billings MT. The show features selected photographs from my collection of winter scenes (such as Footprints, shown below) along with drawings, art glass and jewelry, all selected to reflect the sense of grace and delicacy than winter scenes can produce.
Footprints
Elevations Exhibition Update
In the last newsletter, I announced that my exhibition of grain elevator photographs entitled Elevations will be shown at the Wichita Art Museum in Wichita, KS from February to July of 2009. My hope was to make it a traveling exhibition, i.e., I wanted to find other venues for the show after it ends in Wichita. Thanks to an enthusiastic referral by a friend and fellow photographer, this effort is moving forward nicely. I am pleased to announce that the exhibition will move from Wichita to Abilene, TX where it will hang at The Center for Contemporary Arts during August and September.
I am still shopping around for other venues for this show. If you know of a local museum or art center in your area that might have an interest in this exhibit, please let me know and I will forward information about the exhibit to them. The importance of referrals for obtaining exhibitions can't be understated, so if you have connections with someone specific at a facility an introduction and referral to them would be very much appreciated.
On a related item, I have received a small Opportunity Grant from the Montana Arts Council to help with a portion of the expenses of putting together the Elevations exhibit. It might be surprising to know that exhibitions like this one rarely generate income greater than the costs of creating them. They really are labors of love, so this kind of help from state art agencies is of great value to artists.
For several years I have been sharing some of my photographs of rivers with American Rivers in Washington DC. American Rivers is the only national organization solely dedicated to protecting and promoting rivers as valuable assets that are vital to our health, safety, and quality of life. I have donated greeting cards for their use as well as matted prints for gifts to those who put American Rivers in their estate plans or make other major contributions. For the coming year, some of my photos will appear on greeting cards available for purchase in their on-line store. One will also appear in their 2009 calendar. I receive no remuneration for my contributions; I do it because I think the cause of protecting rivers is important. If you are not a member of American Rivers, I encourage you to consider joining. Please check out their web site where you can find a record of their accomplishments and their ongoing efforts.
At art shows, folks looking at my photos often make the comment "You get around a lot don't you?" Perhaps you have thought the same thing if you are a follower of my Picture of the Day (POTD) web pages and have seen the variety of places I have posted photos from. I never really thought I traveled that much and never stopped to consider the geographic spread of the photos I've taken. But, thanks to my brother Randy, I have a bit of a visual reminder of where I have been. Randy put together a Google map of the world that pins my POTDs to the locations they were taken. He only included the photos over a three or four month time period earlier this year, so it is only a small sample. But it does give some idea of the ground I have covered. You can see the map here. Click your mouse on any of the "map pins" on the map and it will show you the associated POTD. I tried to convince Randy he had to update this map with all the POTDs as they are posted, but he apparently has better things to do. Too bad the process can't be automated.
For this newsletter's special print offer, I have chosen a photo taken just recently titled Sylvan Grove. This photo, taken at a tree farm in central Oregon, generated a number of positive comments when I posted it as a picture of the day. I print this photo with a slight warm tint, as well as a soft focus effect to add a bit of an ethereal look.
As before, for this newsletter special, I am offering a 9"x 13" print of this image, matted to 16"x20". This size mat fits standard frames available just about anywhere that sells frames (in the U.S. anyway) so no custom framing is required. I normally sell this size print for $85 at art fairs and $95 including shipping on my website. For this newsletter special, the price is $50, including shipping to anywhere in the continental U.S. (Shipping outside the U.S. will require adding the actual cost of shipping to the $50 price.)
If you are interested in this print, please contact me by email at:larry@larryblackwood.com. I will get back to you to arrange payment and shipping. Please respond by December 15, the cutoff date for this offer. All print orders will be processed and shipped the third week of December, if not earlier. They probably will not arrive before Christmas however. If that is important to you, contact me as soon as possible and I'll see if I can get one out to you earlier.
Sylvan Grove
The Making of Sylvan Grove
I've been asked to explain what goes into taking a digital photograph from the camera and producing the final image that I print or post on the web. So I thought I would go through a quick non-technical tour of the steps I went through in Photoshop to create Sylvan Grove. First, here is the photo directly from the camera, with no changes applied:
There is not much color to be appreciated in this image, so it is a perfect candidate for black and white. I use a black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop to do black and white conversions. This process allows a wide range of fine tuning of the image in the conversion to black and white--the level of gray represented by any individual color can be adjusted separately in the conversion to create different effects in the result. In this case, I used a fairly standard, automatic conversion to produce the following version of image:
This version of the black and white image is too dark for my taste, so I applied an adjustment to lighten things up. At the same time, I applied a bit of a blur to get the ethereal effect:
This version of the image is light enough, but the tonal range is rather flat, with too few dark tones, so I apply a contrast adjustment:
The contrast adjustment produced some nice dark tones, but some areas are now too dark. To lighten up only certain areas in the dark tones I first created an adjustment that lightens the whole image. Then I covered that adjustment with a black mask that totally hides the effects. Then I "painted" on the black mask with different intensities of white, essentially creating holes in the mask that allowed the lightening adjustment to show through only in the places where I wanted it to. The more intense the white paint used, the greater the effect that is allowed to show through the mask. You can see those adjustments most in the road and on the tree trunks in the image:
To create the final image, I sharpened the detail so that the tree bark and other areas show more clearly. Then I added a slight reddish yellow tint:
There were actually a number of additional small steps involved in the creation of this image that I have not shown here. But this gives a good idea of what was involved. This is a fairly typical example of how I go from a raw image to the final product. Sometimes the process takes only a few minutes, sometimes it takes hours.
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