Day after day I saw a new addition being built about two miles away from our house. The houses looked interesting, as much as a suburban tract house can. Finally a sign appeared showing an open house so I went to check it out.
The woman showing the house was tall and willowy with a decided stylish side to her. She showed me around and we got in a conversation about how she ended up selling real estate and her background as a model. We went out onto the little front porch and as we did so the light illuminated her face in a wonderful way. That clinched the deal for me and I asked her if she would be willing to let me take some photos of her. She agreed and that was that.
In the end, after many renditions and much more complicated collage efforts I kept coming back to the beautiful detail of her skin in that light. The color was fantastic but so was the texture all by itself so I landed on the monochrome/color diptych as a way of showing off both those elements.
I was at a conference in OKC that was rather uninteresting for part of it. The light was really quite good for being indoors and everyone was so still that I could resist setting my camera on my lap and pointing it in different directions. I didn’t look at the camera, just took photos randomly, sometimes zooming in, sometimes not. It wasn’t until I looked at the photos later that day that I saw what I had captured. This was one of the best of the lot.
I went into a jewelry store in Tulsa looking for something specific for my wife. I didn’t find it but had a great salesperson help me. She was informative and thoughtful. The whole front of the store was facing south with big windows and it was winter time so the sun was streaming in. It bounced off the floor and glass cases and landed on her in a wonderful way. I asked her if I could take some photos of her and she obliged me.
I did a collage and showed it to her a few days later. She was upset about how it looked, thinking I had made her look rather ugly. I didn’t think it did, but I didn’t post it out of respect for her discomfort. I did this one later, working with less manipulation and distortion and I think she was happier with it.
I love this piece because of how I got the hair and the line of her face to match up. She is the same top to bottom but then a second look obviously shows something isn’t as it should be. Just a bit of a skewed perspective on the portrait.
My wife and I chaperoned about 40 teenagers to Disney World in 2007. We went for a ‘Singabration’ (I started calling the participants ‘singabrats’ haha). The week was filled with images and memories and stimulation. Watching the kids sleeping on the bus on the way home from Disney World, I imagined what all the kids were dreaming of, what little flotsam and jetsam of memories were being glued together in their brains.
This image is a collage of 4 distinct photographs. I used an existing lamp in a foyer of a hotel in Luray, Virginia during the reception for my daughter’s wedding in October of 2006. I simply took off the lampshade to get the light I wanted. Two of the images are of the Model, a front face view and a 3/4 face view that I collaged together in Photoshop. At the same time I took those photos I took photos of her butterfly tattoo and her necklace, among other things. I later layered those onto the collage I had already created and slowly but surely melded them on top of the face image. It took a long time! Created using Photoshop CS3.
The Cake Seller – The Stranger Juxtaposition #7The cake seller at the outlet mall and the cake and the TV image of the flamenco dancer that I shot in the Bose store demo movie in the small dark theatre where they showed off their sound systems which I did not buy but I got a number of shots of the screen that I liked and then realized how the fit and imagined a story of love.
January 31, 2008
In the sunset district of San Francisco, October, 2007.
The gallery employee (I am imaging this but she probably isn’t, more likely a student or maybe a….no, I think I am right, a gallery something or other is likely) in the restaurant that I waited outside of while my wife went to the little girls room with the shoehorn (which wasn’t really in the restaurant, but a few doors down in the shoe store on a bench just sitting there by itself with a great reflection and I said it wrong, she didn’t go in the girl’s room with the shoehorn and the girls room did not have the shoehorn in it, just in case you got confused by my bad writing style) and the Avocados (which were in the market bin next to the tomatoes that were too red to put in the collage even though the photo had them in it and I liked how the red of the tomatoes brought out the red in the shoehorn, still it was too distracting) and the cleavage (which didn’t really belong to her, but to a woman on a bench in the bookstore at the magazine rack who I happened to walk by and noticed her necklace that was just a tad bit too far down her chest but it made me notice her) did it.
I saw her across the large field as I left work. she was a tiny dot of fun in a field of darkening ice at dusk. I walked across the field with my camera and cleats and told her it would be a shame to witness someone having that much fun and not get a record of it. She was happy and polite and filled with joy. It was in her head, as it can be with any of us. She made me smile.
Bruce Anderson was a fighter bomber pilot in WWII with the VSMC 243 Goldbricks, my father’s squadron. He was the flight officer, he got two distinguished flying crosses then, and another in Korea. He was very upset about the truce in Korea, we should have gone in and finished the job he thinks. Same with Vietnam. He lives in Florida with his wife of 60 years. His daughter came to the reunion from Utah, where she likes her Mormon neighbors.
