Tuesday 28 August 2012
Sunday 26 August 2012
Kids.
Sitting on a park bench with my kids is usually an activity I have to force myself to do before I slowly get used to the situation. The kids run around and do daring things on climbing frames and swings.
Then it is snack time. Usually we have big sticky cookies and mineral water. Yesterday however we had croissants.
They broke open the croissants to discover the usual spaces and and holes in the bread.
The interesting thing for me was listening to their conversation. First they speculated about what could fill up the spaces. Chocolate kicked off the discussion, followed by other foodstuffs. Eventually they hit upon elephants.
The just four year old said the elephant would need to be very small to fit inside even the biggest space inside the croissant. She was clearly visualising and performing measuring activities in her mind and with her fingers.
By contrast the nearly seven year old was a lot more adventurous with his language and declared that you could fit a full sized elephant inside one of the spaces. Two different ages. Two different ways of dealing with ideas. Clearly the younger was more visual. The older more abstract because of his dexterity with words. I shall listen to them more carefully in future.
Then it is snack time. Usually we have big sticky cookies and mineral water. Yesterday however we had croissants.
They broke open the croissants to discover the usual spaces and and holes in the bread.
The interesting thing for me was listening to their conversation. First they speculated about what could fill up the spaces. Chocolate kicked off the discussion, followed by other foodstuffs. Eventually they hit upon elephants.
The just four year old said the elephant would need to be very small to fit inside even the biggest space inside the croissant. She was clearly visualising and performing measuring activities in her mind and with her fingers.
By contrast the nearly seven year old was a lot more adventurous with his language and declared that you could fit a full sized elephant inside one of the spaces. Two different ages. Two different ways of dealing with ideas. Clearly the younger was more visual. The older more abstract because of his dexterity with words. I shall listen to them more carefully in future.
Skin of my Teeth
I can't see how the newer images based on tattoo imagery will work out. They are kind of decorative and a bit too similar to their source. The trick lies in trying to get right the relationship between the creased up surfaces, the images selected and depth of field as well as other factors such as lighting. It is a fairly dodgy process for me. I only discovered RAW the other day, which I have to say does make life a lot easier. The misses far outnumber the hits, if such things exist can be said to exist yet. Nevertheless it is good to have a couple of firmed up strands of work to pursue.In theory any technical issues could be cleared up reasonably quickly I suppose. I have never trained as a photographer and I have only ever bought second hand
equipment. But it is beginning to come together. Slowly.
The other vital component is a sense of cropping and isolation of fragment image.
I was rather shocked yesterday when I discovered the images I was hoping to come across in my publications trawl couldn't be found. I was looking for full page faces to manipulate.
Looking around for a newer camera body, time to pass on the older one to my son. It is a question of pixels, I simply do not enough of the damned things to make decent sized prints. So, it's off to Campkins in Rose Crescent, Cambridge.
The experience of buying pricey bits of camera goes a bit like this: first find a nearby pub and contemplate saying goodbye to a whole chunk of cash. Go to the usual suspects to look for what I need. Pay special attention to Jessop's and engage sales staff with questions. Allow sales staff to practice their selling technique on me while I attempt my interested face.
Leave Jessop's and go to pub. While in the pub it dawns on me to go to Campkins and ask if they have second hand versions of the stuff I saw in Jessop's.
I buy what I need and hand over card and marvel at the amount of money parted with. Reeling with shock I leave the shop. Then I visit the pub once again to recover from the stress and read any instructions or technical details.
Technical details are my nightmare , not my joy. I can never follow instructions either.
I thought about the notion that the past and the future are illusions created by the mind, and so in some way the need to create art must be related to the need to place temporal markers, to provide evidence of existence.
The late Chris Marker is the guy to look at for the mysteries of memory, Jette being a masterpiece.
Chris Marker is also , I would assume, one of the most talked about artists in art schools, an artist's artist as it were. The thing about Jette is that one remebers it as a movie, but actually there are no moving images, just a series of stills that blend into each other. Then there is the final eye movement which comes as a bit of a jolt. The point is I feel, that the work of art known as Jette, exists in the mind as a memory in the same way as a conventional work consisting of moving imagery.
Perhaps we are not good at remembering sustained sequences of motion. We remember snapshots of reality.
equipment. But it is beginning to come together. Slowly.
The other vital component is a sense of cropping and isolation of fragment image.
I was rather shocked yesterday when I discovered the images I was hoping to come across in my publications trawl couldn't be found. I was looking for full page faces to manipulate.
Looking around for a newer camera body, time to pass on the older one to my son. It is a question of pixels, I simply do not enough of the damned things to make decent sized prints. So, it's off to Campkins in Rose Crescent, Cambridge.
The experience of buying pricey bits of camera goes a bit like this: first find a nearby pub and contemplate saying goodbye to a whole chunk of cash. Go to the usual suspects to look for what I need. Pay special attention to Jessop's and engage sales staff with questions. Allow sales staff to practice their selling technique on me while I attempt my interested face.
Leave Jessop's and go to pub. While in the pub it dawns on me to go to Campkins and ask if they have second hand versions of the stuff I saw in Jessop's.
I buy what I need and hand over card and marvel at the amount of money parted with. Reeling with shock I leave the shop. Then I visit the pub once again to recover from the stress and read any instructions or technical details.
Technical details are my nightmare , not my joy. I can never follow instructions either.
I thought about the notion that the past and the future are illusions created by the mind, and so in some way the need to create art must be related to the need to place temporal markers, to provide evidence of existence.
The late Chris Marker is the guy to look at for the mysteries of memory, Jette being a masterpiece.
Chris Marker is also , I would assume, one of the most talked about artists in art schools, an artist's artist as it were. The thing about Jette is that one remebers it as a movie, but actually there are no moving images, just a series of stills that blend into each other. Then there is the final eye movement which comes as a bit of a jolt. The point is I feel, that the work of art known as Jette, exists in the mind as a memory in the same way as a conventional work consisting of moving imagery.
Perhaps we are not good at remembering sustained sequences of motion. We remember snapshots of reality.
Saturday 18 August 2012
Tuesday 14 August 2012
Monday 13 August 2012
Thursday 2 August 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)