Mastodon State Park

I found this guy near Imperial, MO

a garden of pixels

garden of the gods

Today, I went to "Garden of the Gods" recreational area in southeastern Illinois. I was shocked to find topography unlike anywhere else in the entire state. These are a few day-of-the-shoot shots that I made with my camera phone. I becoming quite fond of what it does. It's not sharp. The color is wack. It's simultaneously under and over exposed. But it's fast and I can put it directly above my 4x5 lens. something happened to the last shot... looks like the photoshop monster is coming back...

near Herod and Equality, Illinois.

oops.

Thomas Ruff

So today I read this article about Thomas Ruff and his project where he pixelates images. A little ways down the author asks why no one else has made "work dealing with the technological impact of digitisation on photography." Ruff says: "there are so many interesting photographers, but why don't they think about the structure of photography? They're young, they're curious, but they're not interested. So I had to do this work because no one else would."

Well, this inspired me. I've let the "pixel destruction" project get a little dusty and haven't really been working on it for the past 8 months. I think I'll start it back up again. I need to narrow down the scope of the project though, specifically what images I choose to "destroy" or appropriate. I've been using images important to the history of photography so far but I am definitely a landscape photographer and would like to somehow integrate or extend this from my previous bodies of work...


Ruff's images are mostly landscapes. He explains "the jpegs are divided into three or four categories: the one I started with was ‘catastrophes created by man,’ then ‘catastrophes created by nature.’ Then I added another category that included examples of nature coming back or conquering man-made creations."

I've thought about using images from my previous bodies of work and sending them through my machine to see what happens. I think this could be productive or at least put to good use images that would otherwise not be seen. I think the concept could also stem from the previous projects in that the images would have some element of Romance or Exploration- exploring the boundaries of what we've already discovered or alluding to what we might discover next... but then- it just becomes pixel garbage :)

New Project in SPE

This is my new video piece that will be in the Society for Photographic Education video show that will be here. I'm pretty psyched about it. If you're in Dallas on Saturday, the 28th come on down and see it! it runs from 8-9pm and midnight-1am.

winter trip

I've been in TN shooting for the past week. I spent the weekend in Nashville and have since been in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The scenery and weather have been great, much warmer than Chicago... I got a great rental car with a mad discount and have discovered the wonders of Sirius satellite radio. New pics will be up asap. Hopefully a new and improved home website will be following...

pixel degradation

These are from a side project I've been working on in a class I'm taking with Brian Ulrich entitled "The Medium is the Message". The class' focus is really about everything within photography that can't be printed on paper, specifically, working within a digital medium. It may not be a side project for very long though... people seem to like them.