Brooks Institute Update and Other Things...

The first semester is over. There was quite a bit of writing in this semester and I'm expecting more writing in the next. I'm now on a four week break and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I do have some images to post from this semester and will be putting those up in the next couple of days.

I'll be putting together a little lighting talk at the Lompoc Photographers Guild on the 15th of January. I'm so looking forward to it. It should be a lot of fun. It has to be an hour long, I'm going to shoot for about a 45 minute talk and demo with 15 minutes for questions. This hardly ever works out because people always want to know about lighting.

I have never done so much writing in my life as I have for this first semester of my MFA program. I know it's only going to get more involved. I'm actually looking forward to it. I've noticed that as I've been writing about art and creativity my own creative processes have changed and I think for the better.

How lignt can interact in an image.

Chris, our Photographic Theory instructor gave us a shooting assignment. We have to create five different images exploring the ways light can interact in an image. Here are my five:

Transmission

 

Reflection

 

Refraction

 

Absorption

 

Scatter

 

Time Changes Suck

The switch from Daylight Savings time to standard time has me a bit screwed up right now. My clock says 4:02 AM but my body is telling me it's 5:00 AM so I'm up. Figured I'd post what we did in class yesterday. Our Photo Theory class with Chris Broughton was interesting. We started covering color processes and color film. He gave us an interesting assignment. We have to photograph how light works. should be an interesting assignment. In Studio Critique class with Tim Bradley we took a look at our "Shoot how the camera sees" Photos. Everyone had excellent photos. Wish I could post them all so you could see them. There was a wide variety of things. Some of them beautiful and some disturbing but all of them were fantastic. Here are a few of the ones that I did.

Cyanotypes

As promised I have my cyanotype from class scanned. I was testing the paper as I was using inkjet matte paper and we weren't sure if it was going to work so we tried a couple of different papers on one exposure. The image is a photogram of a plant that is outside my apartment here in Lompoc. It has a red flower that looks like fiber optic strands coming out of it. I think both parts of the image came out rather well. I'm planning on making a digital negative and trying that next time I do this. If your interested there is plenty of information on the web for doing this and it's so easy I'm going to teach my seven year old how to do it.

Interesting assignments for this session. I have to photograph how the camera sees and for the one after I have to shoot perfect because of the flaw. It will be interesting to see what I can come up with. We did cyanotypes in one of my classes I'll post the one that I did as soon as I get my scanner unpacked.

One of my assignments this week was to write a letter to the editor explaining why photography is art. I had to use a picture of mine to defend what I put in the letter. Here is the picture that I used.

This image was taken on September 10, 2013 using my Nikon D3s with a 14mm lens. I did not crop the image but I did some dodging and burning mostly in the kelp, the foot prints and the waves.

Living In California

We've been here for almost a complete month. It took us three weeks to find an apartment. We've moved into a place in Lompoc which is a little under an hour drive from Santa Barbara. Lompoc has two claims to fame the federal penitentiary and Vandenberg AFB.
Vandenberg is kind of cool in that they launch rockets for NASA and other countries and companies space agencies. This past weekend they launched the Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. It went off at 9:00am and shook the hell out of the windows. My 7 year old and her friend were absolutely thrilled with it. Unfortunately no pictures from me. If I had known it was taking off I would have found a good vantage point and snapped a few. There is another launch scheduled in December. I'm going to try and get shots of that one if I don't have school.
Speeking of school, our instructors in the Brooks MFA program are no slouches when it comes to assigning reading homework. I've probably read over a hundred pages over the last three weeks for class and still have several more that I have to read for this weekend. It has been a little difficult though to find time to get my homework done while at the same time get settled into our apartment. I will be working very late on Wednesday and Friday trying to get my stuff finished up. I have two images that I have to get done and a couple of pages to write. I also have to draw a sketch for an image that will be due next class period after this weekend.
I will try to post the images that I'm working on here after they are graded with explanations of what the images are for and how they were shot and processed.
Well it's back to work for me. Until next time.

First week at Brooks

First week went rather well. I have a ton of reading to do for next week. Classes are set for every other weekend, eight hours on Saturday and another eight on Sunday.