Newsletter Feb 2009

Last month the Exit Gallery at Montana State University hosted a show of my old amusement park photos called Ghosts and Empties. The Exit Gallery is a nice little gallery located in the student union on the MSU campus with shows arranged and managed by Stacey Ray, the ASMSU Arts and Exhibits Coordinator. Stacey put on a very nice reception for the exhibit January 23rd that included food and even live music.

If you follow my Picture of the Day web page, you may remember the Ghosts and Empties series from when I posted it late last summer. I have also since included them as one of my main web photo galleries with a short introduction which you can view by clicking here. Finally I created this YouTube video of the photos complete with a Janis Joplin soundtrack:

The exhibit Winter Grace at Jens Gallery and Design in Billings MT featuring a collection of my photographs of winter themes ends this month.

The Elevations exhibition of my grain elevator photographs opened at the Wichita Art Museum on February 8th. I'm anxious to get back to Kansas to see how it looks. I've never seen all 50 of the photos hanging together at one time since it is way too big a collection to hang anywhere in my house.

The season for outdoor art shows and fairs is rapidly approaching. I have been busy submitting work to be juried for various shows. With the economy the way it is everything points to a tough year for art show sales, but I intend to participate fully and see what happens. I'm trying to keep the distance I travel to shows down this year but will travel further in some cases where I can combine the trip with visits with friends and family or for places I just enjoy visiting. I won't have a finalized schedule for a couple of months, but I do have the first show scheduled. It is the Art Fair at Laumeier which will be held at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri May 8-10.

I recently finished a new a portfolio of images titled Bare Trees: A Collection of Visual Short Stories. This project resulted from a number of years wandering around taking photographs of trees, lots of them. In reviewing my collection I noticed most of the images did not depict any foliage or at least did not emphasize it. I had a lot of trees in winter, a lot of trees burned in forest fires, as well as images of just bare branches, stumps, roots, knots, etc.

The decision to concentrate on these features was not a conscious one, but one that is persistent and obvious throughout my years of photographing trees. I decided I would leave the meaning of my photographing just bare trees up to the psychologists, but that I wanted to put them together in a meaningful collection. There are so many in the collection that imposing a structure on the portfolio seemed necessary in order to help guide viewers through the work and to give them natural stopping points to avoid fatigue from trying to digest everything in one sitting.

I wanted to have each smaller group of images hold together by themselves according to a specific theme, but also to relate in a natural way to the other images in the complete bare trees portfolio. At first I thought of treating them as chapters in a book. But even though related by the common theme of bare trees, they seemed to be separate stories rather than continued chapters in a book. That led to the idea of presenting the smaller groupings as a collection of visual short stories. The result was nine distinct but related collections of images.

I spent a lot of time working on titles for each short story as a means of introducing the general theme or idea behind the grouping. Carrying that idea a bit further led to writing a short introduction to each story to further verbalize what I see as the main themes and motivation for the imagery presented. These introductions are my own prose sometimes combined with quotes from other sources.

A sample title page from one of the nine visual short stories in the Bare Trees portfolio appears below. I plan to post the entire portfolio on my web site sometime soon.

For this newsletter's special print offer, I have chosen one titled Eve's Reach. Eve's Reach is one of the best selling images at my summer art shows. It is also one of the most fun images to display at the art shows because it really draws interesting stares and reactions from people walking by. For the story behind this image, see the next section below.

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 $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. The cutoff date for this offer is March 15th. If you order the print before March 1st, I will print and ship it by March 11th. If you order it after March 1st, I will likely not be able to get it shipped until the first week of April since I will be traveling the last three weeks in March.

I call this photo Eve's Reach because, to me, it looks like a nude woman reaching up into the branches of a tree. I imagined it to be Eve reaching up to pluck the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. It is actually a photo of an unusual tree that I took just off of Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janiero when I was there on a business trip three years ago. (I know, a tough job, but someone's got to do it.)

When I took the first photo of the tree, the shutter speed was 6/10s of a second. Since I was shooting handheld, it resulted in the blurred image shown on the left below. Realizing this, I adjusted the camera and took a second shoot at a faster shutter speed, producing the image on the right below.

When I got home and reviewed these images on the computer, I very nearly deleted the blurry image when I noticed how the reddish color in combination with the smoothing caused by the blur made the tree trunk look like skin. Looking at it further it seemed like I was looking at the shoulder and elbow of an arm reaching above a partially obscured nude torso. In addition the shaggy bark hanging down looked like a woman's long hair. That was when I got the notion of Eve reaching for the apple and decided not to delete the image and instead work with it to better bring out what I was imagining.

The colors in the original blurred image looked a little weak, so the first step was to darken and saturate the colors. (For those of you familiar with Photoshop terms, I did this by duplicating the background layer and changing the blend mode to multiply.) I also added some additional blur to the image to further smooth the texture of the skin-like bark. This adjustment was applied globally, producing the result on the left below.

The colors in the globally adjusted image are more saturated like I wanted them in this version, but the effect was actually too strong for my tastes, especially in the darker areas of the image, where the subtle variations in the hair-like shaggy bark were completely lost. So I lighted the photo a small amount overall and selectively applied even more lightening effect in the upper right part of the image. This gives the final result shown on the right below.

This example shows how both broad major adjustments and small localized adjustments to a photo are used to produce the best possible final result. Or at least the best representation of the ideas in the mind of the photographer!