Blue Giraffe

This semester I moved to a new studio, one that has windows. I was so excited to finally have natural light in my studio, so I brought in some plants to decorate my windowsill. I still felt like I needed more color, and was inspired by all the gold-leafed or painted animals I had seen on Pinterest. So, meet Gerald the blue giraffe!

Also, I have noticed many new followers in the past few weeks, and I would love to meet you all and hear how you found my blog! Welcome to the blog and I hope you enjoy!

Leaves

In my last post I mentioned that my work is now dealing with collections. I have just started with this process, and so have only been working with one collection so far. Every fall I have the tendency to pick up a few leaves that I find nice and pin them to my walls for a bit. The leaves actually sparked my first collection piece. I started by placing the leaves on my copy machine and making simple black and white photocopies I also scanned them to see what I thought of a digital, color image of the collection. I have over 200 leaves copied and I finally had to force myself to stop picking them up. Once I had a large number scanned I started to piece them into a large Photoshop file, which is what I am sharing with you all today.

 

Once I printed it out I realized that this is not the direction I want to go. The color and the format of the digital print are not doing what I want them to do, and so I will be leaving this behind for the time being at least. I debated sharing this here, but decided that I wanted this blog in part to be a place to show my progress and thought process on my work. I will be printing some copper plates this week and so will be sharing those with you as I work on them. Be on the lookout for another post soon!

Long Overdue Film

I haven’t been doing such a great job of keeping this place updated lately. Graduate school has kept me busy that is for sure. But I am in a blogging mood tonight and decided to share some images with you all (some long overdue ones). I also have plans for a few more posts that I will hopefully be able to get to in the coming days to update you all on how my graduate work is coming.

This post, however, is all about film. I recently got some rolls developed, some of which I had forgotten about since shooting them years ago. The first set, was from a trip to North Carolina that I shot with some very expired film. If I remember correctly the expiration date was the year I was born (1989), so that is why the grain is so intense on these images. They were shot on a 35mm Holga camera.

This second group is from about a year ago. I went exploring an abandoned farm with a fellow photographer and shot these on my Pentax K100 I believe.

These next images were shot this past spring on 120mm film with a standard Holga camera. Each image is from a different trip/mini adventure. The first and last are from two separate trips to Colorado, and the middle ones are from two different adventures outside of Manhattan, KS.

Last spring I also took a cartridge of polaroids that I never shared for some reason. Some are from Manhattan, some from Scott’s parents’ farm, and some from a climbing trip to Colorado.

And lastly, one from Scott’s parents’ farm that I shot with 120mm film in a large format camera.

 

Happy weekend everyone!

Catching Up…

I have a huge backlog of photographs sitting on my hard drive that I need to post. Since I have today off I figured it would be good to start catching up some. Brace yourself for completely random, unrelated images that span all the way back to April…

And expect a few more blog posts (with a little more cohesiveness to them) later today!

285/366

Confession time. I completely forgot to take a picture yesterday, so this is actually from a few days ago when I was trying out my Holga lens on my Nikon. I fell in love with the incredible depth I got in this shot, and the kind of dream like atmosphere. It is SOOC, with the exception of conversion from RAW.

187/366 – Hot Air

*Wednesday, July 11
Yesterday I worked a long day, and it was Chris’s last day. Needless to say I was not wanting to take a picture, and had no clue what to shoot. Until this hot air balloon almost took off our chimney. My polaroid was the closest camera to me, so I grabbed it and managed to get this one shot before it was down the street.

172/366 – Cupcake

84/366 – cuties

57/365 – Drip Drop

I was going to do a self-portrait tonight, but got a little bit lazy in terms of my picture. I am leaving for Minnesota in the morning, and I have been running around like crazy trying to get everything packed and get the house ready for me to be gone for over 3 weeks.

Also, I have some exciting news! I entered a contest through Photographer’s Forum Magazine a bit ago. There were over 14,000 photographs submitted, and the top 11% were selected as finalists. Well, I got a letter in the mail today informing me that I am a finalist! That means that my photograph will be published in their hardcover book Best of Photography 2011. I also make it to the final round of judging as a finalist, and I will find out August 15th if I place or get honorable mention. Such an exciting bit of news before I go home!

And, please remember to go vote for my portfolio and tell everyone that you know! You can vote once a day. I so appreciate each and every vote I can get, thank you for the support!

53/365 – Curves

I had no clue what to take a picture of today, until my friend dropped some stuff off at my house and commented on this metal piece. I debated for a while about making this black and white, but in the end decided to just go with color. I may post a black and white at some point though.

Please remember to go vote for my portfolio and tell everyone that you know! You can vote once a day. I so appreciate each and every vote I can get, thank you for the support!