Tilted Ash

I've been working primarily with coal ash for most of this year.

The bulk of the work has been photography, but I surprised myself by finishing with a sculpture.

(I recommend clicking the links & seeing the larger photos)



Details:

Focal Stacking

I'm surprised at how easy it is to combine multiple macro photos with different focal lengths in CS6:

Select the layers then
Edit->Auto Align Layers
Edit->Auto Blend Layers

Pretty quick, even with D800 images.


Here's the results



From these inputs

Small Sculpture

I've been trying to understand leather a bit.

This is the first piece in a while that I'm happy with (for scale, the knife is 7 inches long)




Update: 2 June 2014: I took another set with different lighting on a steel background. I lie these better, but thought I'd keep both up.

"seeing through"

On a recent trip to Osaka, I challenged myself with trying to see (and photograph) things in a way that's new for me.

I came up with what I'm calling "seeing through" in which foreground objects are blurred to the point of translucency. It was cherry blossom season in Osaka, and cherry blossoms lend themselves well to the technique.

Here's the originals

and after a bit of Tiffen processing.

Revisiting Governor's Island Photos 2/2

More of the same set

Revisiting Governor's Island Photos 1/2

New monitor, some new ways of looking at/processing the shots

The previous four were deaccessioned dresses, this is a deaccessioned parasol

Richard Serra in Chelsea

Saw his show in Chelsea a few weeks ago.

He's partially moved from curves to works consisting of large steel slabs.


The first piece has slabs 9" thick, ~ 10 ft high

The first shot inadequately shows the scale

As usual I'm most interested in the details, e.g., where the slabs "touch"

The other pice consisted of four steel blocks (the blur on the left is an adult, just to get a sense of scale).

Again, I was drawn to the detailed textures (damage?)