Photos can be boring and complex at the same time. The trick is figuring out how to affect others into thinking about certain ones as the latter. I might dismiss an image and skip through it for reasons that are completely unrelated to the reason it fascinated someone else. Different ideas are for different people novel or cliche. That's why it is scary to look into a photograph for too long. You begin to get a warped sense of its importance and relevance. For example, the first image in the set (about 400 photos that evening) was picked because it had a decently interesting subject, a pretty color palette, and some background figures that struck me as "interesting enough" as well. It made the cut, but my decision was split second and hopefully matches the mindset of the average information starved peruser. It's funny, though, how big of a story can be created with the long look applied.
If we elevate it from being more than just another random party moment caught digitally, the photo can be seen as a psychological triad. The dancer caught in a prayer is clearly the subject, with alternate selves that depict not devils and angels on either shoulder, but an angel in the center stuck between the devil and the apathetic hedonist. I like how the prayer posture is similar to the moment before a diver hits water, only the splash will happen in one of two heavens above. One is a void of exploration and cold science and the other is fluffy, pink, and filled with pleasure. But both are barred, caged, and restricted (or do the walls keep the heavenly in?). One of the symbols most visually packed with information is the eye simply based on its directionality. The triad is engulfed in an odd lover's triangle. The hedonist looks randomly about; the devout peers inward; the devil maintains a pretense of ignorance. They seem to be looking at no one in particular yet are all aware of each other. The symbolism with the wrist bands and admittance - about who has paid to be there - can bring about other complex themes.
Some photographs are easier to do this to than others. And most seem to be trying not hard enough at all. But I recommend a deep look at images every now and then because it is always surprising what tasty treats they can be, even the most banal. Here's fifty from my third involvement with Zeus's warehouse, on the New Years night of 2009.
The nightlife implies a shadow world, which is why artists like Frank Miller strike chords with the bleak contrast of black and white. What is hidden in the black - and burnt out in the white - reveals the key component of the night: ambiguity. Just as photography mimics the brain's system of memory, shadows and quick bits of detail hone in to represent memories of the night. Technically speaking, this is why most flash photography fails. It reveals too much and by doing so constructs a distorted image and warped perception of the experience. It would be like using an X-ray camera to photograph a football game (although other, deeper truths may be revealed in that project). Attention to all details might portray the world of the autistic whose tragedy lies in not being able to simplify the grass into the concept "lawn" and succumbs to the overwhelming visual onslaught of every blade. It does not connect with the more common mental habit of simplification, erasure, and categorization.
One of my struggles is to try and represent the little bit of detail that can turn a swirling scene into a slight articulation of the removal of ambiguity and to expose a few of the multiple readings possible in the instant that light flicks out and breathes meaning onto objects. The teeter-totter lies between the one side that looks like a beginning art student's third roll of film that elevates their psyche into a sad delusion of the artistic, hazy, dark, subdued and meaningless abstractionism, and the blown out crystal clarity and pock-marked boredom that happens once said person buys a flash. Sometimes I tip to one side and others to the other. The perfection in the middle is rare. This time I think I tipped to the side of the tipped to the side, hazy, out-of-focus, noisy, and artsy-freaking-fartsy.
I'm back to the 40d since my 5dmarkii was yanked (maybe I'll post more about this if I can get out of my depressed funk) and therefore I am back to fighting an enemy I had pushed into the corner a bit: noise. Of course, even with superior sensors, noise is always an element when trying to get the most out of every photon. By bumping up the ISO, the sensor starts to get much less choosy about what counts as a triggering, data filled pulse. I really hate noise. I'm attempting to do some batch noise reduction on the photos from the white party. Getting the process down has thrown me into the funky world of learning the different kinds of noise. There is luminance noise as well as chroma noise. It makes sense that there could be two types of errors because we perceive light both in the type of color of light (chroma) as well as its brightness and intensity (luminance). Chroma noise doesn't seem to be much of a problem, but in the dark depths of the nightlife life, luminance is hell to counter. I didn't dare shoot over an iso of 500. High sensitivity and big sensors seems to be the best way to be able to achieve any kind of decent depth of field, but those toys are so many paychecks away. Anyway, I batched some noise ninjitsu into these files, so I hope and pray they don't look too processed. Here are photos of the 9th annual white party at the Depot:
And the party continued at Zeus's urban temple. I got my second wind at about 8:00 in the morning as I realized it was bright outside and danced myself sweaty silly! Such a good night/morning!
The struggle to gain control over darkish environments is an obsession and a curse. Initially I thought that the most important aspect in order to push the edges of light was to get lenses with very wide maximum apertures. I ditched zooms because their limit (something to do with the space needed for zoom mechanisms) was f2.8. I transitioned to lenses which which could push 1.4 and above. This helped for two reasons. The first is the obvious: the bigger the aperture, the more light can hit the camera's sensor and thus, the brighter the possible exposure in a given lighting scenario. Secondly, the big hole aids in another perilous aspect of low light shooting: focusing. Getting a good focus in low lighting situations is what I spend most of my time gritting my teeth over. Having a wide aperture lens can help you achieve focuses easier(regardless of the F-stop you may happen to be shooting at,) because the aperture only tightens when the shutter is pressed. It's at its widest when focusing.
Now, there's a big downside to shooting wide open. The depth of field is hair-width thin at f1.4 or f1.2. So, while it's a bit easier to focus, shooting moving subjects can get incredibly frustrating because anything that takes a subject closer or further from the focal plane will ruin your conceptualized focus. This causes the amount of blurry, unusable photos to skyrocket.
The next solution is to bring your own lights. I, for a while, started collecting party lights and bringing them to locations simply for the fact that I could get more usable photos (while "elevating the party to another level," too). It's a gonzo journalistic approach and one that I don't mind, but requires a lot more energy investment, variety, and perhaps even permission. So, the next stage was to bring my own strobes and place them in strategic mounts to fill the scenes with drama. The advantages are that you can stop the aperture down to something more flexible like f4.0 or whatever and then use shutter dragging techniques to get a decent mix of ambient and sharp lighting. However, doing remote flashes (or even on-camera flashes) has the potential to completely change the way a scene is viewed, which destroys the images as seen in the natural setting - which might be what the photo hunt was all about. Flooding a dimly lit area with a flash of light will make everything bright. If you were impressed by the light wafting down to hit someone's cheekbone as they walk through a doorway, the results of using strobe will probably fail. One solution is to use lights on 90 degree angles in order to just catch the rims of faces, which should preserve a lot of a scene's original color and chiaroscuro but add that little hint of focus and sharpness. It's an alright technique but it means constant manipulation of the lighting direction and placement as photo goals are met (or fail).
Of course, these techniques only push the limits; they do not announce victory over them. Recently I realized that the true power lays not in the lens's aperture or personal light strobes, but in the sensor's sensitivity. ISO. With an ISO that was, say, ten times more sensitive without noise, most of the lighting limits would go away. Of course, physical limits (ie. the limits of the laws of physics) seem to be maxing out, although hopefully new technologies will continue to whittle away at the noise inherent in high-ISO captures. There is kind of a "high ISO war" going on between Nikon and Canon at the moment, and although it leads to huge increases, each technological revolution only helps gain a stop or two. Significant, but more is desired so quickly. The other way is via higher megapixels, because if you can keep noise ratios the same while the megapixel value increases, noise becomes smaller and less noticeable.
So those are some initial and general thoughts on pushing the darkness away from the successful images. I have more that I'd like to go into soon, but I'll leave it at that for now. If anyone has any low-lighting shooting tips, I would really appreciate them.
Superheroes - those masked and caped social outcasts who live in schizophrenic fantasy worlds of daisies, chainsaws, and narcissism are now mainstream. Batman: The Dark Knight represents a geek's wet dream: the object of their introverted/egocentric adolescent infatuation - the comic book - became animated, got a television series, began launching piss-poor action movies by real people - some of who were 'actually hot,' and became "good." For the first time ever, girls started appearing at comic book conventions. Even though the girls were paid to be there, the superhero has finally been deemed worthy as a worship object. To help people know how to behave, injected into the Dark Knight's plotline were obsessive fans who dressed like Batman, too. It was comic book culture's ploy to model a mainstream reality that worships them. Has it permeated to the inner bimbo? Has the superhero really a fashion icon that influences trends like Hollywood stars, Michelle Obama, and ANCO? If so, comic books have transcended the shunned corner of the nerd to the level of Greek mythology. They are the stories told over an over. Have they become our myths? Is youtube the new 'word of mouth'?
Peek inside the photos to the Hero Lounge. I first heard about this place through Joe Frank, who would watch, absentmindedly, as a McGuyveresque action star planned and executed dashing escapes on the television. He identified with the character on the screen. He wanted him. He looked for him. He found him, at the Hero Lounge. They, in the natural but exciting and brand-new way, became lovers. They honey-mooned, crooned and looked at each other in amazement and awe. But enchantment dissipates and soon indifference and boredom began to permeate. The aura of celebrity chain-whipped knuckles. There they are.
It was the castle to withstand wind we built in the desert to celebrate entry and exit into life. The wind roared endlessly all day, and I only felt peace for a few minutes as I woke up slowly. Then the eggy sun heated that air up again and the air whirred as it was beaten by the photon blender. You can only capture the visual aspects of wind when it hits things and makes them defy gravity. Photographs can't capture the sound or the motion. Last time I was in this desert, it did this:
and threatened to carry off stages. But the castle held. Only the flags on top and streamers behind revealed the torrential quantities of air tearing past.
For those confused by the photos, I'll give a more descriptive, informative summary. The event was instigated by the death of someone who has been actively involved in the burn community and who did not want the grimness of a funeral to see him go but rather a celebration. That's why the military made an appearance. The flag ceremony was actually quite moving - I was emotionally affected throughout but when Hope was given the flag, she let out a scream of joy and celebration, the crowd followed suit, and then: music began, thumping away into the desert air.
What struck me about this event was how metaphorical the castle became. It was a representation of the life of the individual. It was created out of donated wood, brought together with the energy of volunteers, yet was something no one could predict. There were no images or blueprints drawn. It was made from casual, natural inspiration. It became bigger than itself, was celebrated, and music played throughout it. But the most crucial and emotional aspect was that it was taken away from all the celebrators before we were ready for it. People wanted to continue playing on the castle, listening to music and bands playing from it, yet it was taken before its time. We watched it burn magnificently, felt its warmth, but there was something tragic. As the coals began to burn low, we were all aware not of the castle, but the lack of the castle. It allowed us to all feel a sense of group loss. We all experienced the vibrancy and then the void.
Uncle Uncanny's music festival was small enough that you could get around to see everything, but big enough that doing so was more than likely to cause exhaustion, fatigue, and loss of sleep. With larger events you just have to give up and acknowledge that there are more experience available than obtainable, but with this you could perhaps get close. We arrived just after a torrential downpour had made mini-flash floods sweep across the place, but because of the dark and the absorbent desert sand we couldn't see a sign of it. So the earth felt alien and unexplainable to tip-toe across, non-solid and squishy under foot. Music, shadow dancing, and sleep commenced.
Inspired by the wondrous Circus Pandemonium, I set up a trapeze and then proceeded to just about break my neck. After blacking out, waking up, letting the blood dry, and then running into the sunset with my camera in hand, I ended up at a sweat lodge. And this is where my story really begins. I've been to quite a few lodges before and they have usually been free, creative places to express and explore and get to a point where you almost pass out. I love the sounds you can make inside them when you can get everything out of your nose and throat and just have these resonant open air canals. Sometimes there is a bit of mysticism and oddness, but I usually ignore that.
China Blue resident Starman was running the sweat, and to begin he asked if anyone had a song to share or something to say. I was there in part because I wanted to meditate on my neck injury, give it some rest, and "cleanse," so I said that. The person to my right, in a beautiful Irish accent, said that he wanted the lodge experience to help think about how to better know when to assist other people and when to keep silent and stay back, for their own spiritual or experiential growth. I agreed in my mind that this was a challenging boundary to figure out. It butts the ego itself against the instinct to baby others against letting them figure out everything on their own. I felt satisfied that I was in good company.
And then the weirdness began. I wanted to open the conversation up to allow for responses to people's statements. I did not want the dialogue to simply be people on their own soapboxes, so I began talking about how I hoped it would be an environment where people could respond to what others said. The Irishman's response was something like this: criticizing other people meant that you did not accept what they had to say, which meant that you had your own worldview you wanted to spread in the world; the critique of others was the reason why there was so much violence, bloodshed, and war in the world.
I was stunned. I'd always thought that wars are only fought because people do not ask enough questions. The leaders and those in power very love this mindset. People with weak foundations are afraid of being questioned. And then we heard about how the universe was split into two genders, male and female. And then we hear about how humans are beings of light, made of photons. It's ridiculous. You won't find a physicist alive that would agree with that. Regarding gender, it's more social than anything else - and a recent one. To be even looser and say that the universe is divided into sexes - male and female - is just as silly. These are categories based our own view and the fact that most can be easily put into on or another box. It's comes down to one having a large reproductive cell and the other having a smaller one. For much longer than sexual specialization has been going on, life has continued through asexual means. There are all sorts of sexes in the natural world. We shouldn't believe these silly sorts of analyses simply because they make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Never let the aura of a situation stop you from calling bullshit!
The care and time that so many people put into costumes is a little bit overwhelming. I mean, you hear about a jellyfish themed party, but you don't expect to see people dressed up as them everywhere! I counted at least five people who had modified tentacles on decorated umbrellas. How compete? I, myself, stole Jen's newly-minted jellyish shirt and so I felt I'd approximated at least the texture and colors of the jellyfish. But it was so little compared! I think one of the best quotes I heard was from someone commenting on her friend's excuse for not coming: "I'll have to take forever to get ready!" The response was, "You don't even know what it means to get ready for a party. I've been working all week just to get ready!" Additionally, the place was adorned and decorated with jellyfish of all sizes. A geodome was jellyfish themed, the dj booth was a mobile jellyfish that could drive, they decorated the walls, and little blinking baby jellyfish were on fingers all around.
Oh the jellyfish! They are my second favorite marine invertebrate (next to the wondrous octopus, although the mantis shrimp and the sea cucumber are pretty captivating, too). I've always wanted one for a pet. Just look at these gorgeous things.
For more information about the mobile jellyfish from the year 12000, check the group's website.
Here's a small set from the latest Easy Street fiasco. This one included water in liquid form, indoors, which seemed to quickly turn to steam. Still at 5:00 in the AM the place was sweltering. Humidity just makes raw heat feel oppressive. It's the inverse of sitting in the sun's chromosphere, over one million degrees centigrade, hotter than the surface, but not enough particles to pick up the heat and even feel. Yeah, so it was like the inverse of that.
I wasn't there for very long - I had a trip to the black hole (in white canyon, southern Utah) the next morning even though thunderstorms were making that trip dangerous and uncertain.
Combustion needs only oxygen and triple digit degrees. I've never seen a fire as big as the effigy of Ganesh, and yet, I ended up running straight for it. Those flames had to hit over one hundred feet in the air. I mean, look at those little people. Now, look deeper. I had some of my flash equipment clamped onto that little pile of palettes which were perhaps some 35 feet away from that mighty proboscid.
Now, look deeper into that mesmerism. I had flash equipment clamped onto that little pile of palettes. They were perhaps some 35 feet away from that mighty, wooden proboscid. The flames spread exponentially with my worry, the crowd backed up further and further, and then someone exclaimed, "Oh my! The palettes are starting to smoke!" If wood was smoldering, what would it be doing to beloved plastic? I darted desperately to the safety team, who said no way they were going in there but I could certainly run for it if I wanted to. And that's why I ended up tearing straight towards the blazing, face-searing, air-blasting inferno. I tugged the palette, trying to dislodge it. I slipped in the mud, feeling the fool in front of hundreds of onlookees. With the heat overwhelming me, I attempted a few seconds of relief by ducking low behind the small wooden barrier. The realization sunk in as to why the choice to jump from burning skyscrapers was so preferable. With morbid, frantic thoughts licking my brain, eadrenaline kicked in and all my body focused on ripping that little wooden square out from amongst its smoldering friends and across the soggy dirt back to where the fire controllers awaited me with Mai Tai's. I was slightly in shock after that experience and put the dripping plastic that used to be my pocketwizard in my car. All desire to shoot photographs dropped away. That may explain the lack thereof.
I thought it was the end of the world, or at least the end of the day. Calvin and Hobbes made an interesting impression on me: I wanted to doze away in a soft bed. That's no party attitude! Buuut, my bed has been underwater for the last two weeks, only saturday was it laid horizontal again, and I've missed it. So, my exhausted body thought the world was going to be over and I was almost glad it would be, until I stepped into the reality of the Apocalypse! It awoke me. There was so much energy that I didn't even think of hitting the sleeping bag until 7:00. What amazing installations, lighting, music, and people. And oh Stosh, thank you for light-proofing your little dungeony room. I had no idea it was 2 in the PM until I opened my eyes and yawned.
It's a great place to be, or a great life to live, where the combustions of many materials illuminate the shadows of the earth . We'd call that nighttime, but laser beams, burning ethanol, and the LEDs of St. Nick find it a time to compete with the sun whose back is turned. We have become connoisseur's of the commodification of light. It is delicious and we would pay and give and pray and sacrifice and war for it. The laser beam, especially, is an intense, vibrant, interactive lover. I have always loved it adored it worshiped it but it needs atmosphere to really rouse its romance. It ripens under cigarette smoke and synthetic fog. It bounces off your sweat. It rewards and allows the eyes to feast on the sensuousness of photon fillet. I wish to write to orchestrate an ode, but that would foretell an end. Ew. There is no end to that perfect laser beam. It goes on forever. It is starlight under a perfect snoot, an emerald or ruby roscolor strip between. And to frame this paradise in the oscillating, mortal night - hydro carbons burn like sugar, dancing among undulating flesh.
I just got back from a very relaxing weekend near (and on) the Green River in southern Utah. It's definitely hard to think the experience could be surpassed. I only wish my photographs could give it any justice. A big thank you to SLC's AMO tribe.
