Carrot Art and Life

Daucus carota, the common roadside weed we call Queen Anne's Lace, waves its four-feet stalks topped with palm-sized plates of tiny white flowers in late summer in Indiana.

The weed was introduced here from Europe. It is from this species belonging to the family Umbelliferae (umbel is the type of inflorescence shown by the wild carrot with short flower stalks of equal length like umbrella ribs) that our present-day kitchen carrot was bred.

The disks of white flowers invite photography. From above, from the side, close-up and from afar, the flowers offer endless possibilities for structural beauty. Here is another take on them.

Last night I visited several sites on smugmug.com and went to bed this morning feeling dejected. I've focused on model photograph since coming back from Italy in May and I've enjoyed shooting people and catching the many expressions on their faces and bodies. I just am not sure that I want to be exclusively a model photographer.

This morning, waking up after four hours sleep, I didn't get out of bed to the computer. I read about Dan Brown's first Robert Langdon adventure, Angels & Demons. Friends introduced me to the author last year before his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, was released as a movie starring Tom Hanks. The debate on the radio, Internet and TV was heated. I loved it. Brown combines elements from history, religion and art, the same topics that endlessly fascinate me. Words are another of my interests, older and I think stronger than images.

In the morning after I get dressed, before I tackle processing my photographs and building my website, I have to write to feel I have started the day. I am a man torn between two worlds. In fact I am a Dionysian devotee, forever being torn in a hundred pieces by my many interests. I stay with an interest long enough to know a little about it without really mastering it then fickle interest moves on. 

I'm like the umbelliferous carrot flower, hundreds of tiny flowerets in a dish, none of them taken by itself spectacular enough to invite closer inspection and only closer inspection shows their grand design and beauty.

Multiple Stories

ABC last night aired Diane Sawyer's interview with Randy Pausch, the charismatic computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who created a stir in September 2007 with The Last Lecture just months after he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Randy died Friday, July 24.

A man facing death has few reasons to pose. A poseur's games suddenly don't matter any more. All our life we build multi-story houses about ourselves. Facing death can bring us to a sudden stop. Randy was known to be forthright to the point of coming across  brash and insensitive. Randy told Diane his life motto: Tell the Truth All the Time. 

Harder even than telling the truth all the time is facing truths about ourselves.

This morning before I started writing I had to clear two piles of books that had accumulated on my desk. The piles were so tall I felt like a prisoner behind thick walls.

I looked around to see where I could move the books. Every available space was occupied. To move the books from the desk I had to sort through books on two other locations in the office. I bagged several books from the top of a bookcase, books about language and vocabulary. The Internet has made many reference books superfluous. That cleared the top of the bookcase so I could move one pile of books from the top of the credenza to the space they vacated. I couldn't clear enough space for the books on the desk so shoved several into a library storage box I stored under the desk. Whew!

Going through the books I was reminded of all the projects I had thought I would do. I saw my pattern clearly. Buying a book about an idea was again and again as far as I got with the idea. I've had tons of ideas! There were books on Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet program upgrades of which I have been buying since it was first offered in 1984 as Multiplan. The only use I've ever made of the program was as a database for my computer and Internet passwords and the serial numbers of equipment and software.

There were many other books on the piles, a dozen about Photoshop that I still have not learned enough to use other than creating the watermark I use on my digital photographs. There were dozens of books on film and digital filmmaking. I have not worked in digital video since I started photographing models. I do want to get back to videos but when? The books represent the many projects I want to accomplish and rightfully feel overwhelmed.

Years ago I became a devotee of Elaine St. James whose book on simplifying one's life became a bible to me. For a while I did apply what I learned from her but you would never know I was into simplifying my life when you walk into my house today. Coming up with goals is so much easier than following through.

Half a year into my yearlong sabbatical and what can I show for it? I have learned a lot about photography and creating websites using iWeb. I have shot models and discovered that photographing people is as much fun, maybe even more fun, than hearing people's stories of their lives when I did clinical work. There certainly are themes that run through my life. Doing a guilt trip on myself does not lead to anything productive. Seeing the patterns might help me restore sanity to my life.

Last night's show included Diane interviewing Randy's wife, Jai, who divulged how she was coping with her husband's illness and imminent death. She told Diane how she reminded herself over and over again. I have everything I need, I have everything I need. That's a mantra I should learn.

We don't have to keep building our multi-story house. Being truthful with ourselves we can restore ourselves to the ground floor. On ground level, we have everything we need.

The Pool

After going with Arron to John Robert Powers last Sunday, I felt a chapter closed for me.

Going was exciting. This was Arron's first interview with a professional model organization and it was mine, too. I could have gotten additional clients for my model photography but I didn't, which was the right decision. But I looked at the photos the other candidates were carrying. Arron's photos that I shot were better. He printed them from the download sites I had created for him and the prints were okay. These two items validated my efforts so far.

I finished shutting down my office in Broad Ripple yesterday. While at the office, one of the company staff approached wanting me to shoot her four-year-old son. I told her I'd do it. Slowly I am shooting a variety of models and putting together my portfolio. At this point, shooting models allows me to experiment with lighting as well as processing options. I don't believe that I'm ready to start marketing myself.

This morning I woke up feeling my energy refreshed. It felt as if the cloud in my mind had cleared. I had checked out stock photography while reading and reflecting upon the books and website of Rohn Engh. Stock photography was not for me. For the last three months I have been doing model photography. I'll continue shooting people. I enjoy working with models and capturing the emotions in their faces but this too is not the right fit for me either. I am still an actor in search of his play.

I went back to the pool this morning and shot some more photos that I want to put together with the shots I took of Arron and Scott for my first photo essay. Photo essays or editorial work is what appeals to me right now. But the original draw for getting into the imaging industry still smolders under all that I have learned photographing models, setting up a workflow for capturing and distributing images, and building my first professional website. I wanted some elemental thing that also engaged and excited me when I worked with clients in a clinical setting. I want work that would touch me as movies, visual art and literature has touched me. I look at the gorgeous images people create with their camera and I am awed but I am left with a feeling that something was missing in this for me.

Before getting out of bed this morning I read an article in the latest issue of Moviemaker magazine (Issue 76) about the 40th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Critics especially the heavyweights on the East Coast railed against the movie but the audience, especially the teenagers and those living on the West Coast adopted it as their own. The movie somehow found its place in the longings of an era of Americans and emblematized what they wanted from life and their vision of the future.

Maybe some part of me still harbors great expectations for me. Maybe quitting my daytime job for this ephemeral pursuit I am returning to the heyday of my youth when ambitions clustered and seemed possible. I feel I have not tapped my true potential and that even with the short time left to me there is still time to fulfill the promise of those early years. What exactly the promise is remains unclear.

While surfing my favorite sites this morning I came across smugmug.com, a website home for photographers with special sensitiveness to Mac users and Mac sensitivities. Joining this community might be the best way for me to join the Internet community. The company espouses values similar to those I hold. I don't have to spend the next three or four months mastering Flash but use their site instead to create a commercial website. I still want to learn CSS, HTML and Action Script. I like digital technology but I don't have to create my universe from scratch and all alone. I can ride on other people's coattails while I search for what it is that makes me tick. In life's pool of possibilities, where am I?

My concept for Duende Arts is continuing to take shape. 

Targeting the market of mobile devices was the theme of the last two NAB conferences I attended. Back home I became excited after shooting models that I focused the business on model shoots. 

On July 11, Apple released the 2.0 version of its iPhone OS, its new online hosting, and the App store. I was caught up in the problems caused by the switch from .mac to mobileme. I couldn't update my Apple-based website. I ended up starting with a new site from scratch which admittedly was a mixed blessing. The new website is better. I focused it on photography and eliminated my blogs that could still be accessed with a link on the Welcome Page. With the work I had to do rebuilding the site I didn't appreciate what Apple had done.

Tech gurus are hailing Apple's release of its new OS for the iPhone and iPod touch as a pivotal change in the market. Apple has opened the new system for third parties to develop software for these mobile devices. OS V2.0, unlike similar smart-device platforms like market leader, Blackberry's RIM, is actually a full-featured computer OS. The iPhone is a small computer in itself with full access to the Internet. With the App Store, Apple has turned the page. It has opened its software to third-party companies to develop programs for it. 

With access to the Internet, mobile device owners can access not only my public folder on iDisk but also the download galleries I make for each model or photo shoot subject. 

The other day, I was talking to the mother of one of my models. She had accidentally trashed the message I sent her through mobileme.com giving her access to her daughter's image download website. I located the portfolio on her Windows laptop. The photos were blurred and not sharp as they appear on my Mac monitors. I had my iPod Touch in the car but didn't think of showing her the images there. 

We are limited by shibboleths that no longer hold. I need to think about photography along with my other interests like videos, Apple and Adobe software so that I can create my market niche. Unlike many photographers I don't do weddings or other family events. I don't do corporate videos. At the outset I wanted to use the Internet as basis for creating media products, for displaying and for distributing them. I also have a long-standing interest in text products.

I have always described myself as an outsider. I don't join mainstream groups well so I need to create my own place in the Internet-driven, digital-media marketplace.

Launching myself into photography was not the reason I took this sabbatical from clinical work. My main interest was to develop creativity. I even say that in my mission statement.

Walk the path and you'll encounter companions with whom you can make new realities. I have to break with the shibboleth holding me to what has already been done. I need to stay creative while gaining focus. Taking time away from the daily grind is actually helpful. When I come back I can look at what I'm doing with refreshed eyes that I define my own unique vision.

Structure as Art

As I navigated the catwalk above Bally's workout floor this evening, my mind drifted to the business of photography.

I've mostly shot people since I came back from hiking in the Amalfi Coast. I have not even processed most of the photos I took on that trip. Shooting models became my focus.

I love capturing those fleeting emotions that people have on their faces. The models themselves are surprised at the varied expressions they show.

Before I started traveling and taking travel photos, before I started photographing models, in geology-unspectacular Indiana, I depended on flowers, trees and gardens for subjects. One of the few lenses I invested in after purchasing my Canon D20 was a macro lens which most of the time gathers dust in its leather case on my shelf. 

Yesterday morning, noticing the quality of the light in the garden I attached the macro lens and took pictures of what was blooming in the garden. The big show is over. Now individual plants come up with their show but not massed together as they were earlier in the season.

I've always loved Queen Anne's lace. I've allowed a plant to grow in the garden and every year it thanks me with three-foot high stalks topped by gorgeous lacy flowers. When magnified, the tiny individual flowers become visible. I have been photographing food. Now I want to re-explore macro photography, both topics I am told are not lucrative in an overcrowded field of stock photography. 

With the right light, flowers and other natural and man-made objects reveal their structure. Geometry is more than a science. It is a way of looking at lines, shapes and color just as one does with photography and videos. Colors are so dominant that they can ravish us into forgetting other elements of vision.

I have no shoots scheduled which should allow me time to finish the two last shoots I did. I also would like to go over my older photos and see what I have. Meanwhile, vacating my Broad Ripple office is coming along. I shall in effect be contracting my work space back to just my home. As I continue to shoot at home I am turning the whole house into a studio. After some necessary repairs I want to repaint the whole house with background and photo setups in mind.

There is so much more to learn. I have started blogging and enjoy learning about this now old technology. There are social networks, too, to explore. In creating my products I need to stay in touch with my other interests that combining them in various ways I can find my own unique niche in the universe.

Class and Classic

I should have all the Model Portfolios on the web site live by the end of the day so I can post the whole site to Duendearts.com tomorrow. I still have Joe's photo shoot to process this afternoon. I did finish Abby's photo shoot yesterday evening.

I probably won't have any Photo Essays on the website when I launch it tomorrow. These are for me the heart of what I want to do. I'll take my time designing these. I'll also start learning to create the website using Flash. I hope to know enough about Flash-based website in two months. Flash is central to my marketing plan that includes the deployment of Flash videos as well as photographic images.

I have not scheduled any more shoots but my mind is busy planning them. I want to shoot on the Indianapolis Art Museum grounds and at the White River Park downtown. The museum shoot should produce some classic shots against the classic background of the French-inspired Lilly mansion and the garden on the slope above the White River. The White River Park shoot will showcase downtown Indianapolis. With that shoot I shall be exploring other niches and markets.

I am also planning studio shoots with a more elaborate setup like pieces of cloth with which to drape the model, on the props and background. I continue to experiment with light.

Meanwhile I am shooting non-people images just for my own enjoyment. I like to photograph plates of food and flowers have always been a favorite subject matter. I delayed purchasing the D5 full-frame camera so the $300 instant-rebate offer is gone. I was not sure I wanted to get that camera which is over two years old but I do want to start shooting with full-frame CMOS that don't need the images adjusted by 1.6. I also want to shoot with more professional lenses with larger apertures.

Checking out the websites of other photographers makes me realize how the Internet is flooded with beautiful and beautifully photographed images. I am not too worried but must keep going in the direction I want to go for the career to start making me some income. While there are many great photos on the Internet, most of the photographers don't have the goals I have for these images.

Processing Abby's photos yesterday I was impressed by the patience and sensitivity of one so young. She is only 13. Shooting her certainly opened another avenue for me. Most of the images that I posted on her portfolio were taken outdoors, at the lake here and the lake at the Crossing. After shooting with just natural light for years I am rediscovering my love for the results.

There is definitely more that I want to learn about commercially productive photography. I continue to improve my photography technique while broadening the scope and depth of my options for images. While I am occasionally plagued by doubt I am mostly riding high on the excitement of what I am doing. I sense there is more at the edges of what I know waiting to be discovered. It's at the edge that we have the greatest possibility to grow.

Between the Old and the New

In the morning, while still in bed, I check my email and surf looking over photography and social network websites.

The past month I had been shooting with images of fashion spreads in American magazines in my mind's eye. The models are serious even when they're playing. The backgrounds are simple, usually white or gray. Few designers employ the exuberant, über romantic style I associate with European photographers.

I'm a student of Thoreau who wrote, "I require of every writer a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives.... for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me." I embarked in photography because I wanted to live as an artist, someone who viewed who looked for beauty on the canvas of his daily experience. After living till now analyzing and reasoning I wanted to shift what I valued and therefore paid attention to what appealed to the aesthetic sense.

My ideas are generations old. They are not bad. Many are reassuring, some even wise. But I am drawn especially in images or what the eyes consume to what is new, what people younger than me are constructing as their images of beauty. These are new ways of seeing things. This is why I wanted to try this new way of looking.

There are many photographers out there, many of them amateurs like me in the sense of not having earned money from their work, whose photographs just knock the socks off one. It's the colors they put in their images, the surprising juxtapositions, the humor and derring-do, almost disrespect for canons with which I grew up. This is exciting. Possibilities equal hopefulness. There are more things in life to know, Horatio.

In the brouhaha I want to improve my own sense of beauty and ultimately my love of life but I don't want to lose myself either or disrespect what I am. The new always excites but is not always better. Still I am learning to see in ways that feel new to me. Perhaps this is the fabled fountain of youth. As long as we see possibilities we can make part of ourselves we are not dead but alive in concert with everything else that changes and has consciousness it is changing. Maybe beauty is just another word for being alive.