Dead Kitty

Mr. and Mrs. Claus' cat.

Also, we were playing The Nutcracker Suite the whole time, and there's just something a little creepy about the march of the sugar plum fairies.

Mrs. Claus

This weekend M and I discovered the joy and wonder of two things: decorating a Christmas tree and Crayola Model Magic modeling clay. We spent the entire day yesterday sculpting and painting ornaments for the tree.

ink on paper

The letterpress side of the studio.

I haven't posted in a long time, which at this point is actually a good thing, because it means I have been very, very, very busy. A lot, of course, has happened while I have been busy not posting, but you probably know that already.

I started a new job in February, which means my weekends are now more concentrated than they once were, but also means that I actually have weekends instead of days where all my friends are off work but I am trying to finish some freelance thing or another before Monday. My weekends, so far, have been spent mostly here at the studio, alternating between fighting the endless war against dust and actually printing things. As I type this, somebody is sanding marble outside. I didn't even know you could sand marble. But there you go.

The majority of my letterpress work as of late has been in the form of business and calling cards for friends and associates. I've been enjoying these immensely, mostly because the design of each has been a wonderful collaboration, and the end results have been worth the effort (and cost!).

The Vandercook, ready to print.

A few weeks ago I did a lovely set of business cards as a trade with my friend Nicky, who is a massage therapist, and have been reaping the benefits of Thai massage ever since. My friend Heather has offered me a stay in her flat in Paris in exchange for the ones I did for her. The latest set was for my dear friend ms. meriko, who was also a pleasure to work with; this time, I had my camera with me and decided to take some pictures of the process.

Every project I do is custom designed for the person who requests it. First we figure out together what will appear on the card and exchange some general ideas about how it will look and what it will convey. Then I get to work finding the paper stock, typefaces and any illustrations we'll use. In this case, meriko already had a beautiful pen and ink illustration of a pomegranate drawn for her by the immensely talented Tammy Stellanova. I converted the bitmap of the scanned drawing to an eps and cleaned it up in Illustrator, so it would scale properly to any size. We emailed PDFs back and forth a few times and eventually settled on a design that worked. Once meriko approved of the final design, I made separate files for each color and emailed off the files to the platemaker. I actually do have a few fonts of lead type, but in this case it was better to use photopolymer plates, especially since everything had to be proofed long-distance (meriko lives in San Francisco).

Ink mixing table

With polymer plates, the platemaker creates a photonegative and uses it to expose a sheet of light-sensitive plastic polymer, which leaves the image as raised plastic on a thin steel backing. I then attach it to a magnetized ceramic base, which I put on the bed of my Vandercook 4 press and lock it into place using little mechanical wonders called quoins (or if I'm using a platen press like my Chandler & Price Pilot, I lock it into what's called a chase). The joy of the polymer plates is if something comes out crooked or just a little bit out of place, I can easily pry the thing off and snap it back on in the correct position.

Then comes the ink. As printing ink comes in one pound cans, it's pretty much impossible for me to buy ink in every possible color I want, so I mix them myself. If you're a designer, you probably have a Pantone book and are accustomed to picking colors out of it. I do this too, but then I have to look at the little formulas next to the colors, which tell me how to mix that color out of the standard colors I have. I take an ink spatula and take a little dab out of one can, and a little dab out of another, and a big dab out of another, and then I smash them around on a glass plate until they look about right. There are all kinds of "rules" about mixing ink by weighing each color out on a scale or whatever, but I just eyeball it and then test it by rolling some ink on a piece of wood type and stamping it onto a piece of paper to see how it looks.

Operating the press

Once I've got the ink color how I want it, it's time for makeready, which means, well, everything you have to do to make the press ready to print. I take the spatula and smudge some ink onto the powered metal rollers, and add it until it makes the proper velvety swishswish sound as the rollers turn. The metal rollers automatically spread the ink evenly across the rubber rollers below them. The rubber rollers in turn spread ink across the top of the polymer plate as I operate the press, and, on my Vandercook at least, the paper is attached around a cylinder which rolls over the polymer plate, pressing the ink into the paper.

Sheet on press, ready for a second color.

Then I adjust the packing, which is the material (in this case, paper) that goes under the actual piece of paper being printed upon, so that there is just the right amount of impression when it rolls over the polymer plate. Real letterpress printers, that is, the old men like the ones who operated this press at the Danish newspaper in its previous life, say the impression is perfect when the letters are nice and crisp and you can't see that it's been pressed into the paper at all. All those men are turning in their graves as I add packing to the cylinder in order to get a deeper impression.

After I've finished with makeready, it's time to start printing. I set meriko's cards up to print six at a time. I learned this the hard way after realizing just how much my arm hurt after cranking the press back and forth 250 times the first time I decided to make calling cards for someone.

The finished sheet.

I put an 8.5x11" sheet of paper into the grippers on the cylinder, run it through once, then turn it around to print the same thing on the other half of the page. This is called a work-and-turn for, I think, obvious reasons. Twice through the press and I have twelve cards, complete with registration and crop marks. Much happier. Once I have enough sheets with the first color, I clean off the press with a horribly toxic solvent (which I think the old pressmen would approve of) and re-ink with the next color and do it all again.

When I've finished all the sheets with the second color, I'm done printing and clean off the rollers one more time with the horribly toxic solvent and wipe everything down with an oily rag to keep it all from rusting. I let the ink dry overnight, and then I stack all the printed sheets up, and hopefully I've lined everything up right, because I'm about to use my scary stack paper cutter to chop everything into proper 2 inch by 3 1/2 inch rectangles. In the end, I've got a few hundred calling cards for ms. meriko, and I keep a few for myself and wrap the rest in brown paper and bubble wrap and overnight mail them at the post office.

Then I go ask Nicky for a massage, because all that cranking the cylinder back and forth does a number on my arm after a while.

looking back

2004 was a hard year for me financially, emotionally, creatively. There were some incredibly wonderful points too, mostly in the first part of the year: getting married to my best friend and love of my life, graduating from Art Center (and Carla Barr's senior working photographer class), an amazing roadtrip to Austin, many visits with friends in San Francisco, so many meals shared with good friends and family. The last half of 2004, however, was a different story entirely. What goes up inevitably must come down, and sometimes it comes down with a force you can't predict.

Since my graduation and wedding, I feel like I've been cut loose without an anchor. After four years of hard work, structure and drive to get to a goal (and doing pretty well at it), suddenly I'm back to where I was before I started school, vaguely uncomfortable with my surroundings and with no real picture of the future. I'm just not sure where to go from here. I think I know where I want to go, it's just that getting there seems to be a minefield of negative bank balances, family emergencies, broken equipment and contracts falling through. Every time I feel like I've gotten started, a new project is just coming together, plans are in place, I've made progress - everything falls apart. I've spent so much energy trying to be a good grand-daughter, supportive wife, responsible landlord - all very rewarding and necessary things to be - but at the end of the day, I have nothing left for myself, or my art.

Without the structure of school, the stability of predictable income, student loan checks or a regular job, it's been easy to lose motivation or direction. I feel like I'm constantly second-guessing myself, unable to focus enough on any one thing because I simply have too many things that need my attention. My creative output, like the content of this blog, has plummeted. My day-to-day existence has more and more resembled bailing water from a sinking liferaft. I keep finding myself late at night, mentally exhausted, staring zombie-like into the laptop screen, spending hours reading news, blogs, anything but what I should be doing. The inertia is tremendous - this is something I've learned this year. It is easy to keep going and hard to stop when you are motivated and busy. It is equally as difficult to start again when you are interrupted. I have to-do lists and goals written over every one of my notebooks and journals and appointment books, and they seem to keep getting longer. None of the big things ever seem to get checked off. I'm not sure if I'm afraid to start or afraid to finish.

I made a resolution a few years ago not to make any more New Year's resolutions. You can't decide to stop or start doing something based on an arbitrary date and expect it to stick, especially if you're not ready. But this year I feel like change from the past is inevitable. I have to change. I will either get better at managing the unpredictable in my life and make some progress toward making my life creatively fulfilling, or I will fall apart.

The New Year is a time of new beginnings, of starting over - and I am hoping that 2005 will be a good year for me. I hope, too, that 2005 will be a good year for you.

on hiatus

As you might have noticed, eighth term at Art Center is kicking my ass.

Good news is, I bought a Vandercook 4 Proof Press which once printed a Danish language newspaper somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, I am frantically putting together my portfolio but it looks to be going somewhere, and I'm almost kinda but not quite done with getting my promo pieces together. All this is good. I think. I might actually be able to start working for real again in another month or two.

Bad news is, even though I'm doing lots and lots and lots of work, I completely lack the time to post it (or any of the remainder of my roadtrip, not that you're still interested at this late date). If I did have the time to post, that would mean I'm procrastinating. Just like I am now. Because I don't want to do my taxes or finish my portfolio or finish writing my paper on the Maysles Brothers' Grey Gardens for my history of documentary film class. And that would be bad. All-nighters need to be reserved for screaming epithets at the Epson printer for doing something weird to the colors on my promo piece, not resizing photos to fit into a blog entry that about 4 people actually read.

So anyway. This blog is going on hiatus until I have lots of free time, which likely won't be until after this is all over, if ever. Then I'll probably be moving far, far away - and if I do, I won't really be an Angeleno anymore.

So this blog is sputtering out, like all the others I've linked to - it seems like everybody I know has lost the desire, or time, or whatever it took to keep a blog going after a year or so. I still check them religiously but they're unfailingly blank and the css has broken and lo and behold, when I went and looked at it for the first time in a month today, mine went and did the same thing. Well, except for that random post about some girl's toe I made long ago that has turned into a message board/support group for people with strangely shaped thumbs. I guess I owe it to them to keep this live, if inactive. Where else would they find a place to vent their frustrations about their mutant digits?

So anyway. Farewell, maybe for now, maybe for always. If you happen to be in Pasadena, come to the Grad Show at Art Center on April 23 and you can see what I've been working on, printed big and on a wall and everything. With a DJ and booze and food from Ciudad and drunk art school girls.

The End.

road trip: the salton sea

We left Santa Barbara late at night, stopping long enough in LA to pick up some necessities at my house, and hightailed it to Palm Springs in order to avoid my highly contagious housemate who'd just gotten back from China with some sort of evil Chinese flu. We ended up staying in Indian Wells, actually, but what's the difference -- it's all the same contiguous expanse of perfectly manicured golf course lawn anyway.

Salton Sea Shoreline, Bombay Beach.

The next morning, we got up at dawn and started down Highway 111 South toward the Salton Sea. I wanted to show M the northeastern shore, which is a barren, scrubby landscape dotted with abandoned 1950s-era speculative real estate and dilapidated trailer communities. M had never been there, and I haven't been in almost 3 years.

If you haven't been to the Salton Sea before, or you didn't know it existed, you're not alone. At 376 square miles, it's the largest (and most polluted) body of water in California, a major bird refuge, and the lowest populated area in the world (it's over 220 feet below sea level), but it's rarely visited or discussed, despite being a strange magnet for photographers. The sea was created in 1905 when an accidental diversion of the Colorado River near Yuma, Arizona flooded the Salton Basin in the desert of southeastern California. Like the Great Salt Lake, it has no outlet, and is slightly saltier than the Pacific Ocean.

The 'sand' - fish bones.

Because the artificial inland sea had no natural stock of fish, tilapia, mullet, and several other varieties were introduced and thrived, making the sea a draw for fishermen. In the 1950s, much of the land around the Salton Sea was purchased by speculative real estate investors, who developed motels, marinas and RV parks along the beach and then advertised plots of land for sale along California's sunny inland "Riviera". People bought in, and you can find postcards of people sailing, fishing and playing in the water in booming resort towns like Mecca, Salton City and Bombay Beach. Over time, agricultural pollutants, evaporation and highly toxic ectoparasites caused huge fish and bird die-offs -- as many as 640 dead birds a day -- and made the water and the fish something to avoid. In the summer, the Sea stinks of rotting fish and fertilizer, and when you walk along the shore at Bombay Beach, it only takes a moment to realize that the sand isn't sand at all, but millions of vertebrae, ribs and the occasional whole, dried, very very dead fish.

The most photographed abandoned trailer in the world, Bombay Beach.

Predictably, the investors went bankrupt, the motels and marinas were abandoned, and all that's left of Bombay Beach is a scattered community of trailer homes with for sale signs on them, shacks with broken windows that nevertheless look like they might be occupied, and an abandoned block of houses and trailers that flooded many years ago. That one flooded block next to the abandoned marina is the second-most photographed location at the Salton Sea. I'll get to the most popular one in a bit.

Pearl Stewart's filthy lies, Bombay Beach

Despite its near-invisibility even to Californians, there is a great deal of information about the Salton Sea on the web. Kim Stringfellow has an excellent photo essay on the Salton Sea, and it has its own website courtesy of the state of California's Salton Sea Authority if you'd like to know more about its history or delicate, threatened ecosystem.

jessica foster confections

About a year ago, my dear friend Jess started experimenting with making truffles. She took her first batches, made with fresh organic cream and dark chocolate, and started adding some offbeat flavorings to them. During her shift at Elsie's, she'd bring in the odd batch of rose petal, lavender, chai, or green tea truffles, which she'd give out while she was working behind the bar. Everybody who tried them was instantly hooked. Lots of us asked if she would be interested in selling them. For a while, she shrugged it off and insisted it was a hobby. After a few months of getting hounded by bar patrons with chocolate cravings, she realized that she really had something. I cornered her and insisted on at least designing a logo and some business cards for her. A couple weeks ago, she made batches of every flavor and asked me to come over and photograph them. It was fun. I don't think I've ever eaten so much amazing chocolate in my life. (It was hot! They were melting! Somebody had to eat them!)

Now she's selling her truffles all over the central coast, at coffee houses and bars, as wedding favors and banquet desserts. She also now has assortment boxes so you can try them too. You can get more information about her chocolates (and see more of my photographs) on her website. Order some. They taste even better than they look.

cartes postales

I think I finally mailed off the last of the long-promised postcards. There were probably about 30 or so in all. I'm not sure if everybody got theirs - I'm especially curious about the one with a pelican on it that went all the way to Australia and was never heard from again.

I didn't get a chance to scan more than a handful. I'm kicking myself for that, because there were a lot more interesting ones than those that ended up on the scanner. I'm also sad to say, after all that time scrounging swap meets and flea markets and my grandma's trash can, I haven't done much else with my giant bag of collage materials since I sent off all the postcards. I think I'm good at finding neat paper, but not so good at putting it to use. Now that we actually have a table in the house, I might get inspired to do something a little bigger than four by six inches. Maybe.

pardon the dust

I was so tired of the standard Movable Type template I was ready to kill myself.

Now I am so tired of wrestling with CSS I'm even more ready to kill myself. If you got here from an archive page or an individual entry, it looks like ca-ca right now and for that my sincerest apologies. You didn't wanna read that old junk anyway, didja?

So, I'm throwing in some table tags (I know! copout!) and some photos I took yesterday (reload! reload! look ma! javascript!) up at Mount Wilson and later while hanging out of the side of Jack's 914 while he drove me from Pasadena to San Gabriel to downtown LA and back at 1am. I almost lost my camera once or twice on the 110 going around those turns. Probably almost lost my arm too.

Most cities are more beautiful at night, but with Los Angeles I think it's particularly striking.

postcards

More media experimentation lately - I'm still peeling gel medium off my hands, and the kitchen is covered in a fine layer of paper dust from last night's sanding experiment.

If you'd like a one-of-a-kind mixed-media postcard, drop me a line with your address. I'll try to scan in the best ones and post later.

more flowers

More of my mixed-media project.

I went to the little nursery on Lincoln last week. The heat was pretty devastating to the guy's flowers, so he just gave me whatever I wanted for a dollar each, since he was going to get all new ones anyway. So I went a little nuts and picked up a miniature rose and what I think might be either a chrysanthemum or a marigold. Or are marigolds chrysanthemums? Anyone know? No label, and I forgot to ask. Also in the pipeline are some lovely daisies, a coneflower and an orchid. I just have to get this design project out of the way first.

What summer break?

digital pinhole

I love my Canon 10d. Someday when they make cheap 20 megapixel cameras I will hate it, but for now, it is all I'm shooting with.

I only have 1 lens for my camera, a cheap Sigma zoom lens, but yesterday I made another one with a generic $2 camera body cap, a few pieces of gaffer tape, and a brass shim with a hole poked in it. Well, I guess it's not a real lens, but it has increased my camera's repertoire a bit. I spent all afternoon taking digital pinhole camera photographs.

The wonderful thing about pinhole optics is that there is no focal plane or depth of field. No matter how close or how far away an object is, it is always equally in focus - there's no "falloff" of focus, as there is with glass lenses. Since the hole I used was relatively big (the diameter of a sewing needle), and sharpness is related to the size of the pinhole, the images my camera takes are all in focus, yet nothing is sharp.

The pinhole is big enough that on a sunny day (or if I let my eyes adjust) I can actually see through the pinhole lens so I can tell what I'm taking a picture of. All my film-based pinhole cameras rely on luck and Polaroid film to know what you're taking a picture of. The long exposure and small amount of light coming through make for an interesting film-grainy texture and desaturated colors. It really looks more like film than film does sometimes.

See if you can guess what this is without looking at the filename.

patriotism

Every time my dad calls me the conversation starts with him asking me "So what do you think about the war now?"

Apparently we've won and the Iraqis are acting like the French being liberated from the Germans (I think this might be ironic, I'm not sure) and for about five and a half more minutes they are happy to have our nice soldiers there waving our big American flags around. I'm still not clear on the September 11th Pentagon flag over Saddam's head thing, but I'm sure it'll be cleared up once the history books get written.

So, anyway, I used my non-photographic skills and made a flag.

Are we feeling patriotic yet? No? Maybe you need the desktop version.

saint john

Johnny Kimble is the patron saint of chain-smoking, cocky house DJs, hung-over Saturday morning kitchen help, and two-pills-to-pass-out insomniacs. Light a candle for Saint Johnny. Pray for guidance on attracting madly adoring throngs of women and advice on the art of getting people who don't dance moving on the dance floor. Pray for matching beats after 10 beers and a tryst in the storage closet between records. Maybe you will reach Enlightenment. Maybe you will wake up under a stranger's couch with a very large Englishman. Either way, you'll have a good story. He always did.

fallen angel

A few years ago I made something of a hobby of doing goth-style portraits of all my friends. Some of them inevitably came out cheesy, but those that didn't? I treasure them. I did at least one or two a month for most of the time I lived in Seattle, and made little postcard-sized prints which I mailed to friends. Bug is the curator of most of my prints from that era, which were rescued from a gallery owner in Vancouver when I failed to collect them after they'd been shown for a month or two. It is my only work to date that's gotten any fine art showing, and my infant career as a fine artist was doing pretty well before I left Seattle, excepting the fact I never actually sold anything. I still haven't sold anything.

Anyway.

There was one print that was almost good, except for this pesky problem of a horribly inadequate prop. Justin (who is way too cool to have a home page) posed for me as a fallen angel, but the wings I had were just too silly. I spent most of last night scanning feathers to correct the problem. I'm still working on it.

outdated self portraits

All the self-portraits I have on this website are horribly out-of-date. I built this site originally in 1995 or so, featuring low-res webcam captures I took of myself at age 19 playing dress-up in my room in Santa Cruz. It hasn't changed much since, except for the addition of the weblog. The majority of this site was written in BBedit, on a Mac LC with 16 whopping megs of RAM, in 256 colors, for Netscape 1.1. Everything but this weblog is still perfectly viewable with that same setup. Nothing has changed at all.

The thing is, I've changed a lot. I don't look anything like those pictures anymore. In fact, I probably didn't even look like that then. Not long after I took them, this socially-awkward English bloke named Maynard, a coworker of mine at Apple, came up to me in the hallway outside my office.

"I've seen your website."

"Yeah?"

"You don't look anything like that."

Those are the only words I ever exchanged with Maynard.

Now I have shorter hair, glasses, probably a lot more wrinkles on my forehead. Certainly my life is different than it used to be. In real life, I definitely get a lot fewer random anonymous marriage proposals and creepy "will you be my special internet friend" emails. My goth phase is probably permanently over. I have not been seen wearing a Death t-shirt, Doc Martens, or excessive amounts of black eyeliner since I was old enough to drink. (boo.)

In the spirit of perpetuating this "kia" internet persona thing, however, I thought I'd pitch in a few more completely outdated self portraits. I was digging through some old negs this weekend in the hopes of finding some usable compositing fodder and found a sheet of 35mm black and white negs that I never printed.

So. here's me at age 23, next to what appears to be a pile of laundry in my apartment in Seattle, with different hair and different glasses, and clothes I'm not sure I'd normally admit I ever wore.

God, I was angsty.

i am a camera

Finally, an actual assignment to show. My food shots so far this term are all in limbo until my instructor returns them and I get 'em scanned. In the meantime, another digital illustration inspired by a line in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories:

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

I had to shoot it with that crappy Nikon 990 again, since the rest of my department appears to have discovered the Canon D60 - it seems to be altogether unavailable these days. I actually worked on this a bit with a Wacom tablet at school. I liked it so much, I ordered one. Trying to do retouching and compositing work with a mouse now feels like painting with a bar of soap. I think I won't be going back.

sleeeeeeeeeeeep

I'm so tired. Last night Michael and I polished off a bottle of cheap merlot and abused my scanner. My new desktop picture is red wine in plastic wrap.

I think I'm experiencing school re-entry stress. I woke up every 10 minutes last night remembering some piece of email I need to send, some meeting I need to go to (remind me to check my head before volunteering for student government again), some piece of an assignment I need to finish.. I finally fell asleep at half past four and now I'm up again, feeling really, really crusty.

Which is too bad, because I have three meetings and a class to attend.

Cringe.

end of the term

One more week and this term at Art Center is over. I finally got a full night's sleep after a week of all-nighters in the garage shooting my finals. They've all been turned in, some better than others, but they're done. Now I'm going to sleep all weekend and not take any pictures.

For my still life class final project, I did some photo illustrations of articles in personal finance magazines. It's more challenging than I thought it would be to come up with anything interesting to illustrate such dry articles as "Repairing Your Nest Egg" or "Stock Scandals Ruining Your Portfolio?"

Proposals are now being taken for where I should go on my 4 week break.

cataloging

I spent all day yesterday trapped in a crowded photo studio shooting yet more oh-so-exciting product, this time a catalog spread for Crate and Barrel. My teacher claims he can shoot six or so setups in a day (in fact he is currently shooting the Crate and Barrel catalog), so he had us do a six shot spread in one day. Thing is, he has stylists and assistants and lunch delivery. I have... me. After three hours, I still didn't have my first shot (I quickly learned to be less picky). After 6 hours, I was calling Michael begging him to come play photo assistant (he couldn't). After 10, my feet had fallen asleep and my back was hurting (it still is). At 13, I was using the vodka pictured in the photo above to bribe the guys who run the photo stages at school to keep it open just 10 more minutes (they did). I started setting up at nine in the morning and finished breaking down (both the set and the nervous variety) at quarter after ten (at night). A good portion of that time was spent... ironing tablecloths.

Anyway, I learned I can shoot a lot faster than I thought I could (I did 8 setups in all, 6 plus a couple variations). I also shot this with HMI, which is a daylight balanced continuous light source they use in movies a lot. It was pretty spiffy.

Wish me luck when I attempt to return $400 worth of product to Crate and Barrel tomorrow.

I'll spare you the other shots. They're really (yawn) cataloguey.

I'm not claesz

I finally got to use the 8x10 view camera. Much has been made of the amazing quality of the 8x10 and how fantastic it is and the transparency, oooh the detail...

To that I say whatthehellever. I can't see the whole frame at once on this beast, film costs 10 bucks a sheet, and I don't even want to talk about Polaroids. I didn't use any Polaroids, I didn't even want to think about that kind of money. I'm happy to stick with my 4x5, thanks.

My mom, strangely enough, really likes the Dutch still life I shot as an 8x10 transparency. She said it made her want to cry it was so great. I'm not sure what to make of this, since she's never really said much more than "hmm" while looking at anything I show her. All I know is this shot made me want to cry too, but only because I was so frustrated with the camera.

object of desire

You may recall a couple weeks back I was bitching about a perfume bottle from hell. I finally got around to scanning it - it's actually a cologne bottle. There are more white cards and silver cards and black cards propped up around this thing than you will ever know, and each of them was accidentally knocked over at least twice during the shoot.

I also felt guilty going to Nordstrom to buy and return this. They're so nice and helpful and let me "sample" about 12 different bottles before I settled on this one, knowing that even though it smells lovely I can't afford to keep it. Returning stuff to a big bin at the return counter at Target where I have to take a number and stand in line to talk to a cracked-out bored employee who couldn't care less is one thing, but returning a $60 bottle of cologne to a nice man in a suit who thanked me and offered me even more free samples made me feel kinda weird.

So yeah, help me redeem my karma, go buy something at Nordies.

johan the mad poet

Johan the Mad Poet is a Santa Barbara icon. He's likely to be found just about anywhere you can find beer or coffee, holding his big journal and extemporaneously reciting spoken-word poems to anyone who will listen. He is, indeed, a little bit mad, but mostly he's just a person who manages to make his art a daily ritual, and that's something I've always appreciated.

He let me take his picture a few weeks back. Now I have photographic evidence of divine inspiration. If only I had the poem that resulted.

my kid is cuter than your kid

Ok, so it's not my kid. It's my boyfriend's little brother's kid. She's getting big really fast and is running around and talking now, so I did some more baby pictures for them.

I wouldn't normally try to shoot a 16-month-old with a 4x5, but she was such a ham I couldn't resist. It didn't hurt to have 5 family members standing behind me making funny faces, waving toys and promising happy food-things like "baba" and "peetah" and "nanah" if she would just stand still long enough for me to focus.

I did some backup shots with the little plastic Diana knockoff just in case.

She is really really cute though. (She's holding the Polaroids there, refusing to hand them back to me until I let her click the shutter release on the Crown Graphic again. It makes a big click. When asked, she correctly identified the baby in the pictures as "The Baby". I think I'm in love.) Even her drool is cute. A consummate model, she happily accepted payment for her services in the form of Lego Duplo bricks instead of cash and promptly passed out. What a sport.

canon I love you please send me a d60

We just got a new Canon D60 at school. I'm not supposed to use it because I'm not in the special digital photography class, but no way am I wasting 14 weeks on something I learned by reading a manual in an hour. So I uh "borrowed" it.

And I love it. I don't just love it, I WANT ONE. It was so easy. I can use it with strobe. I can use it like a real camera. My only complaint is the LCD display makes it hard to tell if my exposure's off depending on which way I tilt the thing, but that's what Photoshop is for, right? It was also great being able to go directly to compositing without having to retouch out all the dust and scratches and little hairs I invariably pick up from scanning film. Did I mention I love this camera?

Anyway. I had another photo-illustration assignment - "Why Businesses Fail". Lots of sinking ship/drowning businessman images for that one. I figured why not point out the fact that all these CEOs have just been going for the proverbial carrot - the perks, artificially inflated stock, creative accounting - without looking at the overall health of the company (or the law).

So, here he is. A businessman with blinders on. Shot digitally - five different images composited together so I didn't actually have to be handy and make person-sized horse blinders. Digital is a boon for people like me who aren't any good at actually making things. Also a boon for people like me whose student loan money is running out - I didn't have to pay for any film.

don't read this if you're hungry

Back in food photography land again. This time a "food/travel" article - pick a restaurant, come back with a two page spread.

M and I went to Andersen's Danish Bakery on State Street in Santa Barbara, a popular breakfast destination for tourists. M went to high school with Charlotte, the younger Andersen, who is quite possibly the nicest waitress of all time. Anyway, a dear teacher once told me that if you're going to shoot food without a stylist, do dessert, so that's what we did. We asked Charlotte to bring us some good looking pastries and then proceeded to photograph and then eat about two week's worth of calories. It was really hard to get a roll of shots off before attacking everything with a fork, especially when I was holding my Hasselblad upside down, which made the image upside down and backwards.

So. Don't look at this if you're hungry. Better not look at this either.

Oh my god that place is good. The Danish meatballs are to die for, too. Better than my Danish grandma used to make, even.

dancing with fire

I'm now doing a series of portraits of a fire dancing troupe called Saturnalia, starting with the same setup I used on the Burning Man photos. In fact, these kids were at Burning Man, I just couldn't convince them to walk the half mile to our camp on the edge of the playa to get their pictures taken.

I met them through my friend Lou, who caught the fire bug at Burning Man a few years back and founded the troupe shortly thereafter. Michael did music for a short video I did called "Fire Dancer" and Lou did the fire performance. It's about a 5MB Quicktime, you can watch it.

Tonight I'm going to attempt to get pictures of them actually involving fire, but for now you're gonna have to be happy with the daytime version.

self portraits

I'm being forced against my better judgement to take an "alternative portraiture" class at school, which mostly annoys me because I don't see how it's useful to teach "alternative" portraiture without first having a class on what is "mainstream" portraiture. But hey. I don't make the rules, I just pay the tuition.

So this teacher likes to start out the class with self portraits. I had him once before and he had everybody do a nude self portrait. It was interesting seeing all my classmates' solutions for either exaggerating or hiding their genitalia, but it resulted in a lot of really, really bad lighting. Mine was less traumatic than expected, but I'm not uploading it. There are really quite enough asses on the internet already.

This time was thankfully not a nude self-portrait, but rather an interpretive self-portrait, both of myself and of an inanimate object that I feel represents me. This is me. These are my glasses.

Yes, I'm that geek kid you beat on in elementary school. Yes, that's a Merck index (the same one in which I actually went through and underlined all the interesting chemicals back when I did that sort of thing), and yes, I took the picture without my glasses on. And no, I don't know how I managed to get anything in focus without my glasses on.

showing potential

I'm taking yet another class from Ann Cutting, one of my favorite photographers even before I started at Art Center. I sent her fan mail once. Well, twice, actually. She's one of those people who just seems effortlessly creative, all the time. She snaps a picture and it comes out art. She's also wicked smart. And really really nice. I hope she doesn't read this, I'll get embarrassed. Anyway.

She gives some one word assignments, mostly because it seems like a lot of editorial and stock uses need metaphorical images to represent a relatively simple concept in a new way. Last term I agonized through "connection" and came out with some plug people. This time, it's "potential". Does this say potential to you?

I shot this digital, like the last one, and I have to say, the Nikon 990/995 sucks. The camera probably has the worst UI of anything I've ever used, and really bad gradient banding I fought with (mostly unsuccessfully, as you can probably tell). I spent a lot of time adding noise and switching back and forth into LAB color mode. Not happy. I also had to reshoot the whole thing because I couldn't tell on the tiny LCD back if anything was in focus. It wasn't. Michael was a very, very patient head. I still like the fact I could shoot it and then open it on my computer 5 minutes later, but I am fantasizing about the day that we are suddenly presented with digital cameras that pop out 80MB files and act just like regular cameras. Using that Nikon gives me the same feeling I had futzing with my Apple II. It's so cool, but I know there's gotta be something better coming really soon. I just hope it'll be less than $20k.

get lost!

On the day after the burn at Burning Man this year, as a gift to everybody who hadn't left yet, I whipped out my trusty old Crown Graphic press camera and took a 4x5 Polaroid of each member of our camp so everybody could have a picture of what they looked like after a week (or more) in the desert. I finally got around to scanning the Polaroid Type 55 negatives that didn't get torn, crumpled or scratched beyond recognition on the way back from Burning Man. So, if any of you don't see your picture, you got a one of a kind print! Maybe it'll uh, be worth something someday.

So take a look at 18 happy campers from Get Lost! (who, for the most part, look surprisingly fresh and clean for having spent a week with no running water).

burning baby dolls

Today I woke up, took a shower, and took a blowtorch to a plastic baby doll. Sometimes art school is fun.

I want a digital camera

I borrowed a little Nikon 990 from school to see what I could do with it. I can't say this is the model for me, but it's furthered my resolve that someday I want to work all digital. It was so cool to just shoot something set up on my kitchen table and plug it in and have it on my computer and in Photoshop within a couple minutes. No scanning, no cloning out dust particles, no paying for film! I can use one sheet of film when I output it on the laser film recorder later. I always print on actual photographic paper if I can help it, since the Epson prints look great for about a week, but within a month or two they've faded. I don't want to know what they'll look like in 5 years.

I tried doing something digitally that I just wasn't pulling off photographically. Maybe it works, maybe not, but it sure was spiffy making pictures in Photoshop. I feel more like an illustrator than a photographer today.

So. An electric bride and groom in color and black and white.

I'll spare you all the extension cord porn I made later.

giant insects

My box o' bugs arrived from insect-sale.com last week, so I celebrated by, you know, taking pictures of some of them. (Thanks again, Rob, for the recommendation!) Today I scanned the 4x5" transparencies I shot and made giant 40x30" prints on the giant Epson printer in the digital lab. My favorites were a Malaysian wasp and a (I think) Thai cicada. Since the structure of the insect body is more visible from the outside, I think they're incredibly interesting to look at. Exoskeletons look so much more mechanical than bones, particularly when they're on such an enormous scale.

The prints came out gorgeous - you can see every detail. Seeing them in little 400 pixel boxes really doesn't do them justice so I'm tacking on some larger ones, which, while also completely inadequate, might make entertaining desktop wallpaper.

Wasp (1024x768)
Cicada (1024x768)

martha stewart die die die

Hungry? How about a nice big ice cream sundae? No? Want some birthday cake instead?

I shot a lot of really disgusting food last weekend. Thank you, Daniel Bremmer, for making me a part of your sick advertising assignment. That, and not saying anything when I put the Le Tigre CD on repeat for 4 hours.

If you had told me two years ago that I'd be spending my Fridays making ice cream out of mashed potatoes and chopping fish in half with a really obscenely dull knife thus spewing blood and fish intestine all over the sink, sending all vegetarians in the immediate vicinity running for the bathroom, hands clasped over their mouths, well, I think I'd say something like this: "ha ha ha, you are surely joking, I only do portraiture!"

Maybe I should go back to doing portraiture. That, or invest in a food stylist.

burning man

Certain people are trying to convince me that I want to go to Burning Man this year.

Now, I've been before, several times, starting back in the olden days before all this business about streets and security and two hundred dollar tickets. For fear of sounding like one of those feebs who goes on about how Burning Man was so much better before, I'll stop there. Burning Man wasn't better before, only different, and much, much smaller. I think anyone who hasn't been yet, and has even a little teeny artistic freak side in them, should go. Really. There's nothing like it.

In previous years I took a lot of pictures, some of which are still languishing in a hidden directory on my other website. The last time I went I found myself not taking pictures of anything, despite my bag full of film and two cameras. I just didn't feel into it. It felt like I'd had enough, that I'd been there, done that. I didn't like that feeling. With my Burning Man experiences, the pattern goes like this. One year, I love it, I can't believe how great it is, I'm blown away by all the cool installations and I'm suddenly riding around on a giant nebulous entity wearing a glow in the dark tutu giving earth-goddess blessings to people and howling at the moon. The next year, something hits me wrong - either the weather sucks, or I get sick, or I end up sleeping through the whole thing. I think I slept through the entirety of Burning Man 2000. At least, I slept when I wasn't freezing to death or getting rained on. I then vow to never go to Burning Man again. After all, I could really use that couple grand that always seems to get blown on glow sticks and shade structures, no matter how many times I swear I'm going to just cut down on costs and re-use everything from last time.

But this year, a lot of people are going who I really want to see - now that my friends are spread all over the country, Burning Man might be the only time I see them all in one place. Even though I literally am down to my last few hundred bucks, I'm finding myself fantasizing about that week in the desert. I can't even afford the ticket. It was one thing when I had that kushy dotcom job to come back to, but now that I'm doing freelance work here and there just to baaarely cover the costs of going to my ridiculously overpriced school it seems like such a completely absurd proposition.

What do I do?

ophelia redux

After spending all day yesterday working on promo materials for Rey, I got back to the homework thing, staying up til 4 this morning to crank out yet another CD cover, this one based on the type exercise I did a couple weeks back. It turned into a hypothetical promotional CD to be sold at performances of a not-quite-existent Shakespeare Festival in Santa Cruz - one color CD sleeves are cheaper to produce than those glossy jewel cases with 4-color inserts. I think the legibility's better but it still appears to be mostly unreadable. My housemate Jack gave up after offering up "Make Octopus" as the first two words. Can you read it?

weekend cliffs notes

I got a haircut. I went to the wedding of my best friend from when I was 7. I visited my grandma. I designed the world's fastest demo cd cover and the world's second fastest show flyer. I sat in weekend traffic. Twice. I looked at a whole lot of pixel art. I used fonts I never thought I'd use. I spent a lot of time looking at Soviet constructivist art and movie posters by the Stenberg Brothers. I got a big fat package from Canada courtesy of AdBusters. I didn't do my homework.

watercolor polaroids

After my not-terribly-successful studio shoot on Saturday, I ditched town again for Santa Barbara (sensing a trend?) and went down to Leadbetter beach with Say to do some random Polaroid and pinhole camera experimenting. I got weird armpit sunburns from the spots I missed when dousing myself with sunscreen, I got hit by a wave while taking a picture of some kids in a rubber boat with my Crown Graphic, and got more sand in my tripod than I'd like to think about, but it was a very good lesson in kamikaze on-location Polaroid image transfers. I discovered that Polaroid Type 59 does weird peely things in the darker areas when you try to transfer it to Epson inkjet paper, and no, soaking the paper in sea water first doesn't help. I also learned that Polaroid Pro 100 is vastly underrated. I didn't ever get a decent transfer, but I kinda like what I ended up with anyway. They look kind of like weird little watercolors.

Incidentally, it was also graduation weekend at UCSB. You could almost feel the tension watching all the recent grads waiting for their parents to get tired and go back to the hotel so they could go out and get drunk and party like UCSB students.

tahhhr-zhaayyy

I must go to Target at least twice a week. It is my store of choice for cheap props to shoot, mostly because of their incredibly lenient return policy. This is also why I love Home Depot. Buy something, shoot it, take it back the next day. Free rental! Everybody else is pushing around carts full of baby diapers and lawn furniture and here I am, a total freak, my arms full of X-O cheetos and a selection of bright orange plastic dishware. The checkout lady did a double take. "You like orange, huh?"

Corn was yellow. I returned the plates today. Next monochromatic shot is orange. I've got red already, I did a shot of apples in my garage (you can see the reflection of my backyard). I accidentally - or maybe out of total laziness - left them out there and now they are like giant apple raisin things. It's hot out there.

eight tracks and corn

Today I was in the studio most of the afternoon doing the shots for the Staring Back CD booklet. Lacking any vaguely retro sci-fi futuristic weaponry, Mike presented me with... a vaguely retro sci-fi 8-track tape player. In retribution for picking an object that was not only white, but also black, shiny and dirty, and therefore a nightmare to photograph, I made him carry all my c-stands.

I also got around to scanning those corn on the cob shots from Saturday. It's not often I get ideas for shots while actually eating the prop.

eclipse of the sun

Oh yeah. There was an eclipse today. I forgot about it until I went outside and everything looked really... dark. So after staring at the sun (and showing the neighbors) through a couple of sheets of horribly overexposed negative film, I went back inside to grab a camera and take a picture.

The only camera I had handy is this weird old scientific camera I found that has 8 lenses with shutters coupled to a time release, so each shutter fires in sequence. It has a knob to adjust the timing, and a shutter release, and that's it. It had a slot at the back with an old Polaroid 500 4x5 film back, which was discontinued in the early 60's, so I think the thing is pretty old. I pried out the 500 back and put in a modern one, but I've never been able to get a decent exposure out of it since the aperture holes are too small and the shutter speed is so fast. But lo and behold it took an incredibly tiny but clear eclipse picture. I stuck it on the fridge.

my love letter to the pacific

I've been doing an ongoing project, an experiment in lo-fi photography, using a bunch of old plastic Diana knockoff cameras. I've been going back to the beaches I used to frequent as a kid and photographing beach scenes on black and white film, and then making paper negatives out of them on color photo paper in order to colorize them. It takes a lot of work but I really like the process. Of course whenever I show them to anyone the first thing they ask is if I did it on the computer.

This whole thing started out as sort of an excuse to go to the beach every weekend, but now It's becoming a sick addiction. This is not helped by the fact that I can't seem to make my little plastic cameras last more than 10 rolls. Camera #1 (Diana) melted (unfortunate dashboard incident). Cameras #2 (Windsor) and #3 (Dories) died via broken shutter spring. Camera #4 (Stellar) suffered from inexplicable film-mangling behavior. #5, another Diana, seems to be holding up decently, however.

I now have an entire pile of plastic 120 roll film cameras in the kitchen (don't ask) in various states of rust and/or notworkingness, and I've sworn myself off eBay until I can figure out why, exactly, I felt the need to buy not one but two Lomo Lubitels.

I don't know, though, maybe it paid off.

cut and paste

I spent most of today sitting on my bed going through my giant bin full of magazine clippings. I'm a completely compulsive cut-and-paster. I gave myself a blister with the scissors. If you know me, you probably also know those ubiquitous black hardbound sketchbooks, which are always pooched out with pasted-in pages and all my polaroids and idea sketches.

People don't let me get near their magazines. I show no mercy. Your Communication Arts photo annual? Oops! But I really liked that picture! The second page of that really great story in this month's Esquire? It's a ragged edge where I ripped out the page because there was a cool photo illustration on the other side. I mean it. I'm dangerous. Give me your magazines.

I was digging through old sketchbooks trying to find ideas for a shoot this week and found a page of pictures I'd pasted in by a very talented artist/photographer named Kim Stringfellow. So I looked up her website and spent a really, really long time looking at it tonight. I like to pretend sometimes that I could possibly be that good.

A good part of her website is devoted to an ongoing project about the Salton Sea. I love the Salton Sea. I find it bizarre that even Californians, even people who live an hour away from it, have only heard of it because it's a bad Val Kilmer movie.

I went there on a sort of photo field trip in the early spring of 2001. I took pictures of a feed processing plant in Calipatria at night. Usually people freak out when you drive up at random and say "Hey, can I take pictures here?" but the three guys who were working there were completely enthusiastic about having a couple of random people take pictures of their job site at eleven o'clock at night. We set up our cameras and they brought us cokes and told us in broken English about the heat and their families in Mexico, and all the trains that come in stacked with corn, which gets roasted and mashed and piled into 20 foot high mounds of processed cattle feed. They seemed genuinely excited and proud that we were taking interest in this feed plant where they worked. I would be too, I wouldn't last two hours shoveling mashed corn in 120 degree heat.

waking ophelia

So I'm taking this type class from Jerome Curchod at Art Center - he used to work for Raygun and now he's the art director for Lotus Magazine.

Let's just say his thing is totally different typography than what I do. I am queen of readable whitespace, he's all about deconstructing. So I figured what the hell, I'll try it. We did some dadaist free associating and came up with some sentences, which we then illustrated with random shapes and then tried to come up with the closest analogue with type.

Here's mine.

I, uh, don't think it came out readable.