Playin’ Down at the Georgia Boy Cafe

Late fall, early winter, into the holiday season, cooler weather, rains and snows — all that: the very best time for playing and listening to music.

I haven’t wanted to link the avocations, enthusiasms, and vocations, but it should be no secret that I’ve been playing music since I was a little iddle boy and never quite quit playing out — just coming close for ten years while dancing evenings at the Cancun Cantina in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Now moved to Hagerstown on the eastern edge of the state’s panhandle, I’ve gotten into music circles and open mics, and lately: a gig!

I don’t think the meaning of “a gig” changes all that much on the way past 16 to an equally perturbing 60 (wait: I’m not THAT close to that, yet, but four years close — that’s hard to believe).

Musicians know this: you’re as likely to feel as proud of whatever the bar hands you — and whether or not the room was empty or packed — as you have ever felt about earning a buck at anything else.

True?

Good. We understand one another.

Thanks to the two guys who just happened to walk into a restaurant mid-evening and find a guy with a “beautiful voice” playing guitar on a bar stool, a treat, I hope.

And thanks to music buddies David Dishneau and Joe Kuhna — pretty good players and singers themselves — for coming out after an evening jam session for drinks, good sound, and, so I also hope, good company.

Venue: Georgia Boy Cafe, 325 Virginia Avenue, Hagerstown, Maryland. Next appearance: Tuesday, December 13, 2011, from around 7 p.m. to somewhere between 10 and 11, weather (ice free) conditions willing for me and Mustang.

Black Box — All That Glitters

Mikasa Vase

 Fenton Green “Vasoline” Glass Slipper

 Tashira Shoten Teapot

 Turtle Riding Imp

 Noritake Teacup

 ”Nebula” Paperweight by Glass Eye Works of Seattle

 Lucite Paperweight With Gulls

 Obsideon Stone Earring

 

Victorian Amber Crystal Doorknob

 Handblown Inkwell

For some time now, I’ve enjoyed working with one lamp, usually with a “snoot” on it, and a black velvet pad inside what the industry calls a “light tent”.  A circular polarizing filter on the lens cuts and controls reflections, as does the geometrical relationship betweeen light source, object, and camera, and the rest involves a reasonable positioning of the object, choice of exposure, and judicious post-processing.

Lighting: Alien Bees B800 with 10-percent grid or snoot plus, here and there, a sheet of diffusion paper. 

Camera: Nikon D2x with either a 60mm f/2.8 Nikkor or an old 35-105mm f/3.3-4.5 AF Nikkor.  Both lenses feature strong “macro” capabilities.

Surfaces: black velvet mat and plexiglass.

The winter has brought me a neighbor who collects and trades through the local and national auction markets.  Some things he keeps and some he sells, but whether to the box or curio cabinet, one may appreciate both the artistry and craft involved in the creation of exquisite objects and observe–much harder to see–the love of the tangible that quietly sustains markets for them. 

Every Day An Adventure

Barn visible off of Longmeadow Road on the parcel south of The Good Shepherd Ministries, Jan. 2, 2010.

As I feel I should, I’m picking up the pace on shooting, in general, and getting out in the surrounding rural landscape, in particular, and following up with greater involvement in tonal iteration and in computer-generated illustration.

I’ve fiddled with the above in color too:

My photographs have a sound architecture and Nikon-driven veracity as regards the representation of the real.  However, one wants to push at the interior seams of the digital envelope, punching up the impact on the way and, sigh, struggling to avoid just that touch too much of magenta.

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First Day 2010 – Leitersburg Vicinity

I’ll have to return and check the street signs, but this is certainly farmland at dusk in the Leitersburg vicinity north of Hagerstown, Maryland (Jan. 1, 2010).

Taken at about the same time but in the opposite direction, there are some enjoyable ways of going about a “day into night” transition with a digital file.  So done. 

Among resolutions this year is that to delve more deeply into Photoshop-based retouching and illustration.

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The Park in Winter

Location: Pangborn Park, Hagerstown, Maryland, December 30, 2009.

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Distractions o’ the Season

 
This is looking a tough winter, expensive for heating, not too thrilling for the Mustang.  It may nonetheless have its charms, chief among them the same icy weather and snow that transforms the landscape and lends charm to the season for those who have put in somewhere and find kitchen, library, and livingroom, which here features for a home theater a very good HDTV with 7.1 surround sound,  quite cozy. 

I’ve had other and more adventurous seasons, but with less opportunity for fine art photography.  The photograph above: three minutes, if that, with the Avon Lady decorating the door of a home in full Christmas Season swing. 

 This year? 

I don’t know where I may go or when, but I know (when the roads are clear), I may drive at will and put in too on some Main Street with a decent restaurant or several. 

Before I get back to that feckless wunderlust, however, it seems I, in keeping with other men in their mid-50′s, must do something about my “fitness level”, which across three years of sitting on my butt at this computer, enough so to bill myself a bona fide “mouse potato”, has aged me far into my early 70′s. 

Fortunately, here in the 50′s such disasters may be reversed. 

Whether before or with the photography–nothing like long walks in the countryside for health–it looks like I will be walking, jogging, running, and bicycling (but not this year cross-country skiing) to throw into reverse the ravages of an overwhelmingly sedentary lifestyle.

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Sunset to Dusk On the Feathered Edge of the Park

Above: the last of a sunset licking a home on the eastern edge of Fairgrounds Park, Hagerstown, Maryland.

I’ll return to Antietam soon but find even short walks around the familiar spaces healthful.  Between the home computing center, library, and theater, there’s no end to staying in unless one creates it, day be day, in activity away from the absorption of media.

I Really Do Shoot Weddings

Flash on a bracket for the festive moments; big lights for portraits and groups: everything works!

Jack of all trades and master of some, I work at many things across the course of a week.  In fact, narrowing scope, approaching activities with more programmatic discipline, and scheduling for preparation and performance have become both business and life themes. 

Some wonderful things, especially in the guitar-and-voice beg to be sustained, and doing so takes some energy and costs some time, but whether for my health or for audience, I (and it) find the practice worth it. 

Other activities, starting with my life as a voracious reader and still effusive writer, need their nourishment too; in addition, I’ve gone film crazy with my Netflix account, and that enthusiasm needs its little bit of space as well as blending with everything else.

Of my three diverging areas of art, photography naturally integrates with the now souped up and computerized quarters of the visual arts: design, graphic art, illustration, and layout.  Over the summer, I upgraded my software capability from Adobe’s “Web Basic CS3″, which provided for photography and web work, to the firm’s ”Design Suite CS4″, which pairs the former webcentric publishing tools with several industry-strandard print publishing applications, including InDesign and Illustrator.  Each week, or several times a week, I will simply tackle something new in the programs with which I’ve been least familiar (but I’ll be holding off on Flash for a while longer) and slip related services on to the Communicating Arts menu as I become more experienced, competent, and confident

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Antietam Battlefield – Fall 2009

Antietam NBP: path looking toward Roulette Farm buildings.

 

Of my three primary arts, photography was to have provided relief from the other two: music and writing.  As a hobby, it was to have given me something to do outdoors, away from piano, apart from books.  Over the years, and perhaps in the inexorable workings of things, photography, the hobby, has become an avocation and profession, and the money, if it’s to be made, may come from shooting weddings and commissions for commercial work.  However, I’ve had print sales over the years, and so it too has become something of a studio art: one moves the pixels around at a desktop.

Thank goodness, however, that one cannot get really nice “pixels” by looking at a computer monitor.

It’s good to get out!

Antietam is just 25 minutes from my door and affords much opportunity for landscape photograhy.  Of course, it offers not only unique values for informing each picture, for when you look over pictures from Antietam, you are looking into one of history’s great theaters of contemporary values, politics, and warfare, but it fits with my weekly comments at Oppenheim Arts & Letters on conflict, despotism, and, I suppose, one might call the new thing “Jewish Universalism”. 

Antietam tells of a turn for the better in the implementation of the founding ideals of the United States and the launch of their expression into international politics.  One might say the South took some convincing that it had lost the Civil War, but it acknowledged that possibility at Antietam.  If the analogy holds, other battles being waged today would seem headed toward a similar outcome.

The battlefield today has a reputation as the best preserved of such landscapes in the United States, and I believe it.  Although in my walks, I’ve learned where the Port-a-Potties are stored and come across leaseholders minding their fields, one may in many parts experience and look out across a still completely rural landscape: farms, fields, simple single-lane blacktops, fire roads (by width), and trails.

Many have described the park as “tranquil” but some, myself included, continue to find it brooding and haunted.

Life stopped altogether for a little more than 3,000 souls (in round figures) at Antietam on September 17, 1862 (more were to die shortly afterward of their wounds, and experts have extrapolated additional figures for that).   As a commemorative park, elements of the landscape, from Dunker Church to Mumma Farm and elsewhere have been reconstructed with the intent to hold still that day in time, so as one walks its lanes and trails today, that walk may be the same as another soul experienced it some 147 years ago.

Antietam NBP: Bloody Lane from Observation Tower, Fall 2009.

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Into the Suite

Source Medium: digital photograph (RAW) processed through Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS4.

Call this the first post for Communicating Arts — The Journal as it is exactly that, and I hope many more will follow.

Journal function: to advertise, market, and track the firm’s professional capabilities, development, experience, and philosophy.

Professional service providers in mid-life arrive armed with what they know and busy with what they’re learning.  The Communicating Arts capabilities associated with editorial services have been nothing short of outstanding; those involving straightforward photography: solid.  As the enterprise forges ahead, however, it has the opportunity to improve the blend of the two core business talents–editorial and photography services–with target print and web publishing products intended for advertising, marketing, public relations, and sales.  Whether it will build creative services demand for itself may be a question mark today: as many artists do, I spend a great deal of time engaged in artistic and intellectual pursuits that afford fit and freedom within the contemporary academic and fine arts environments.

In brief: I am not the Main Street photographer.

I am more accurately “writer as entertainer” and photographer as “artist, director, and producer”–perhaps “traveler” should fit in there as well even though I’ve been logging more Windows time over the past year or two than days out in the community or cruising the highways and walking back roads and fields, which I would love to do, intend to do–that and perhaps rediscovering the look of farm life and rural living.

In fact, if you, my reader, know anyone who owns a farm and would care to host an entertaining guest, well just let me know: I enjoy driving, and if there’s photography to be done and music to be made at the destination, all the better!

Above: the photograph cum painterly artifact represents a first departure from photography’s “fidelity to the real”, the essence of the art’s 20th Century “Golden Age” and what has been until now the predominant expectation about what a photograph should look like. 

These days, a recording made with light may be processed to look more real than real or unlike anything resembling the object of initial interest.  Cultural and social contexts will continue to bind the manner in which an image may be treated, but the technology itself no longer constrains a picture to coming out “looking like a photograph”.  The desktop tools, here Adobe’s Design Suite, pull initial recorded content toward treatment as base material for design and illustration.

My response to all that: whatever my other interests, the day has come to become more involved in the Adobe line of design and media-creating products, and so I have entered that learning process.  Programs at my fingertips (among others): Dreamweaver (web design); Flash; Illustrator; InDesign (print publication layout); Photoshop CS4.

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