Monday, October 27, 2008

Projects I'm Thinking about Doing

This kind of picture is fish in a barrel. Finding odd stuff like this is never boring, but the trick is how to incorporate pictures like this into an interesting project. On the other hand, the pictures below easily fall into a project that I'm thinking about doing--pictures of what I'm reading, while I'm reading it. I'm trying to take the name of this blog seriously. These are projects that may stay unfinished. Or not.


Walking around, Thnking about a Project


Most of the work I do involves a lot of labor, either in photoshop or preparing collages and sculptural things to photograph. Somehow, I like the way it feels to work on a single image for a while, from hours to days or weeks. I also like walking around, noticing things like a normal photographer. Here are a couple of recent pictures. I'm pretty sure the drawing on the tree is of Barack Obama, judging from the other chalk drawings on the sidewalk (that I didn't photograph). I'm hoping these walk-arounds congeal into a project somehow.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Trinity Church

This picture only took about five minutes and fifteen exposures (versus hundreds and hours of standing there). They are tourists who came to Copley Square in Boston to seen Trinity Church. There were three groups of them, and I think each of them appears about three times.

Rain

Here's the latest composite picture in my Color People series. Most of the people here are friends of my 16-year-old daughter. They are really nice kids, and when they congregate, they tend to troop in and out restlessly. Especially pleasing to me in this picture is that, in addition to doubling and tripling most of the figures, my subjects include a pair of identical twins.

It's funny. This picture reminds me of what childhood is like. It's interesting to me to note that it's a photo cliche, of course, to represent childhood vision as blurry by way of a pinhole or plastic camera images. I guess I'm a little susceptible to the cliche, because it's the shiny streets and the blurring here that remind me of how I saw. But also how most things blended together except what was important, for example, my mother. Everything else seemed like a confusing swirl.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Odd People and Attractive People in the same 45 minutes


These two pictures are composites made from the same group of over a hundred pictures I took over about 45 minutes in front of the Old State House in Boston. The top picture is a compilation of odd-looking people who passed in front of me and my tripod. The bottom picture is of good-looking people who walked by.