I submitted six images to PhotoSlam, one of the events of FotoWeekDC 2013, and have been accepted! PhotoSlam is like a poetry slam, but with photos. Photographers put their work up on a projector screen, and the audience votes. PhotoSlam is curated, so it’s not just show up with your thumb drive and take a turn – you have to submit your five piece portfolio in advance, plus a single “best-of” image. The prize is a show of your work at PhotoWorks next fall. PhotoSlam will be held at Busboys and Poets, 14th and V Streets NW on Sunday, November 10. The show starts at 8pm, but get there early as the room fills FAST (it is recommended that you be in line at 7:30). There is a requested $15 donation at the door. Please come out and support me if you can make it, I’d love to see you all there. And if you do come, please let me know! For those who can’t make it, I’ll be showing work from the DC at Night series that’s (still!) up on the wall at Mad Momo’s Restaurant.
Nellies Sports Bar, From 9th StreetCrane, Traffic, 14th Street, DuskLe DiplomateNational Portrait Gallery, TwilightCavalier Liquor
And the “best of” single image that I’m submitting is:
I was out walking around in the late afternoon and found these. I like the simple graphic compositions they inspired, combined with the long shadows being cast. They’re remnants of the old industrial component of the neighborhood that is quickly being usurped by gentrification.
Air Conditioner Cage, V StreetGas Meter, Red Wall, V Street
I happened upon this scene on my walk home from work the other day. I’ve developed a thing for photographing bikes and other means of transport, thanks to seeing the bikeshare stations all over and watching people riding them. I like the multiple layers happening in the scene with the contents of the gallery merging with the scene behind. The bike is still the main emphasis, but you have the cars, the pedestrian, the interior volume of the gallery with art on the walls, and then the fractional self-portrait of me on the right side (mostly just camera bag in the reflection, but I’m still in the picture).
Hipster on his cellphoneMan with boxes
These two were just practice shots, really, trying to get better at people photography on the street. They’re part of the mood of 14th Street, though- emblematic of the energy of the place.
Apologies all for the long pause from my last posting – I just needed a little break, and to recharge my creative juices after getting the show up on the wall. Perhaps this weekend I’ll post the pictures from the opening reception.
Anyway, here’s some stuff I shot last weekend and earlier this week. I lucked into a modest stash of Konica Infrared film, which hasn’t been made in probably 8-10 years. The stuff I have is older than that. I needed to find out how well it had kept in the meantime – IR films in general seem to age much faster than regular b/w film, and for all I knew, the IR-sensitizing dyes had faded and it would be just another slow b/w emulsion with tons of base fog, but grainy from the degradation (I shot some Kodak HIE 35mm that was from the last batch they did, and it had degraded to horribly foggy and grainy, despite the fact that it was only perhaps 4-5 years out of date). The results are in – while they do have noticeable base fog, the negatives are still quite fine-grained and do exhibit the infrared effect nicely, with very little overall degradation.
Here are results from two rolls worth, shot on a lunchtime walkabout near my office, and on an early saturday morning excursion to Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.
Capital Bikeshare – Konica InfraredNew York Avenue Baptist – Konica Infrared
The infrared effect is somewhat subtle in these first two – the foliage is white, but the sky is not particularly black or contrasty. The red bikeshare bikes though are much lighter than they appear on regular b/w or color film. Also the wheel guards on the back wheels are completely translucent, but in real life they are dark smoked and/or black plastic.
The Rollei is a perfect camera for Infrared photography because you can focus and compose your images with the unfiltered viewing lens, so you don’t have to keep taking the filter on and off (the strong infrared filters like the Hoya RM72 I used are anywhere from nearly to completely opaque to the visible spectrum, making it very difficult at best to operate the camera with the filter installed on a single lens reflex camera).
Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens is a 37 acre plot on the east/south bank of the Anacostia River which runs through Washington DC. Owned and operated by the US Park Service, it is one of the hidden gems of Washington DC. The neighborhood around it is still quite rough, which deters casual visitors not familiar with the area. I went looking for the giant lily pads they usually have, but they were nowhere to be found. One of the park rangers informed me that they had to skip the Victoria Lily pads this year due to budget cuts – they normally import them from the Amazon fresh each year.
Truth be told, I’m a bit of an anxious street photographer: I’m not terribly good at asking total strangers to pose for me. So I’m getting started as an exercise by setting a new rule: if you see me out and ask me about my Rollei, you have to pose for me. We’ve already broken the ice by talking about the camera, so now we’re not total strangers anymore. This is the very first in that series. These two guys saw me out with the camera, and started asking about it. They even asked me to photograph them, which made it easier. The black guy was interesting; even though he was smoking, he asked if he should get rid of his cigarette for the photo. I told him to keep it.
Just four random shots from around the neighborhood. These first three are small local businesses managing to hang on in the face of growing gentrification.
EJ’s Hair Designs
I don’t know what’s going on with EJ’s. Every time I walk past (which may be heavily influenced by when I’m going by – weekday evenings and/or weekends) it appears closed. I know the sign says “open” in the door, but you tell me what closed miniblinds means… I love the sign on the door (which is probably too small to read in the JPEG version of this shot): “We love children. However, insurance regulations do not allow children in the shop unless they are receiving services. Thank you, The Management”.
Claws N’ PawsArthur’s Grocery
A sign of the times. General hipsterization plus the general trend of people being so absorbed by their mobile devices that they do stupid stuff like walk into traffic has inspired these signs spray-painted at the crosswalks of a number of intersections in the Upper 11th Trend Strip (don’t know what else to call it- North-East Columbia Heights Business District? NoECoHiBD? …that stretch of 11th where all the new restaurants have proliferated amidst old-time bodegas and coin laundries? How about just Hipster Velcro? (can’t call it a hipster magnet because that would imply something about hipsters that’s just not true. Velcro sounds about right because it sticks well to things like scruffy beards and ironic flannel). Of course, it NEEDS to be painted on the sidewalk, for it to stand a chance of registering with the phone-focused.
Here are two images of the same scene, one in color, one in black and white. I’m sharing them together to demonstrate how the change from one to the other totally changes the way we feel about the image.
First, the black and white:
Black Boy, Garuda, B/W
Notice the visual emphasis – how the tones draw your eye to specific parts of the scene. What do you find yourself looking at, and relating to? What compels you? What emotions does this evoke?
Now the color:
Black Boy, Garuda, Color
This has a very different balance. The colors change the emotional timbre of the image, as well as the focus point for the viewer, even though both photos were taken from essentially the same vantage point. I think it’s fair to say that in the black and white version, your eye and attention keep coming back to the boy. The image has a more stark, somber feel to it whereas the color image is much more lively, and balanced – it’s easier to view both sides equally. To be entirely fair, some of the impact of the black and white version is due to the way in which it was exposed and processed. This version is fairly high contrast, which makes the dark areas very rich and the whites very pure white. Were it done differently, there would be a greater balance between the boy and the garuda in terms of tones, and it would have a different resonance.
After a LOONG weekend of playing with my printer to get it to cooperate (running out of four different inks @ $60/cartridge, figuring out how to solve problems with head strikes on my prints, running out of paper at $115/box thanks to the aforementioned ink shortages and head strikes), I now have my show completely printed. Eight prints are already framed and ready to go, the remaining 12 are going to be framed tomorrow, and the show hung on Tuesday after work. I’ve done shows before, and of course it’s always hard work, but this is the biggest show I’ve done in terms of volume. Even my biggest past Artomatic was probably 12 prints. I’m very psyched about the show. Here’s a recap for those who can’t make it to the opening (REMINDER: August 2, 7-10 PM, Mad Momos Restaurant, 3605 14th Street NW, Washington DC). This exhibit pays tribute to the parts of Washington I pass through on a regular if not daily basis. I want to show what this town looks like to a resident, as well as showing it in an unfamiliar way even to those folks who do see these things all the time. As I mentioned in my blurb about the reception, I love the way color distorts and transforms at night because we no longer have a single, unidirectional light source of uniform color and quality. I’ve started these photos with late evening/sunset/twilight and progress into deep night to capture the feeling of that time of day. I hope these photos express that sense of drawn out time and transformed space, be it through blurred motion or the interplay of lights.
Crane, Traffic, 14th Street, DuskNellies Sports Bar, From 9th StreetGhibellinaLe DiplomatePan Lourdes, in colorCavalier LiquorU Street EveningNational Portrait Gallery, TwilightPearl Dive Oyster Palace, Vespa, 14th Street14th & Rhode Island Avenue, MoonBarrel House LiquorsStudio Theater, from P StreetStudio Theater, from 14th StreetUnder the Whitehurst FreewayKennedy Center, Potomac River, NightWater Street, GeorgetownWashington Harbor, Cherry Blossoms, TaxiCyclist returning his Bikeshare, National Portrait Gallery, SunsetU Street Platform, Oncoming TrainSteps, National Portrait Gallery
If any of you have ever produced a photography exhibit, or any other art exhibit for that matter, you’ll have an understanding of just how complicated an effort this is. I’m lucky in that I am able to do my promotional work online for the most part (this blog, email blasts, internet forums, etc), and I already have promotional postcards printed from the last time I exhibited some of this work. It would not surprise me if I did a truly serious accounting of what it cost to put this show up on the wall and the bill came in somewhere north of $2500. I know the framing bill alone is in the region of $1100-$1200. Postcards? about $200 for good quality printing from Modern Postcard. Paper and ink? $300. And that’s just the obvious, not counting the two years it took to shoot the images, the film and processing, the editing process, the dinner bribe for my friend who helped with the editing, and all the hardware and software (21.5″ iMac, Epson V750 scanner, Epson 3880 printer, Photoshop CS5, SilverFast AI 8, Gretag-Macbeth EyeOne calibration software and hockey-puck). To say nothing of 20 years of accumulated experience required to produce images like these.
I’m having an opening reception for my exhibit, “The Colors of Night” on Friday, August 2, from 7-10pm at Mad Momos Restaurant, 3605 14th Street NW. The exhibit runs from August 2 to the end of October.
From the Mad Momos invite:
Mad Momos is proud to present photographs by DC area photographer, Scott Davis. Please join us for the opening reception to enjoy the photos, meet the photogrpaher and sip on complimentary California Champagne.
What is the color of night? It is indigo, it is fluorescent cyan, it is neon reds, yellows and blues. It is sodium-vapor pink, and glowing incandescent orange. It is all of the above, filled in with the colors of your imagination. It is the color of time slowed down, motion blurred, things and people half-seen through their background, perceptions distorted.
Le Diplomate
I have been shooting a lot of night-time work both in black-and-white and color, for several years now. Photographing long exposures at night gives you a creative freedom to accept serendipitous happenstance in your work that you would reject if caught in 1/60th of a second. Blurred motion becomes a good thing. People become icons. Cars are ghostly, their tail lights and headlights reduced to abstractions and records of things that were, like handwriting on paper. Colors become incredibly rich and even more important, since sometimes it is only by color that you can define and understand an object. The mixed lighting you find in a photograph of a night scene changes our perception of mood in a way you aren’t aware of when you are there – your brain color-corrects light sources automatically so things look “right”, but capturing them on film, which can only record what’s actually there without interpretation, reminds us that we do in a manner of fashion walk through the world with rose-colored glasses.
There are some really great flower beds at Glen Echo, and the US Park Service does a terrific job of maintaining them. While waiting around for my student to arrive, I wandered about and took some close-up shots of the cone flowers and Black-Eyed Susans.
Cone FlowersBee, Cone FlowerBee, Cone Flowers
These were all shot with my regular 50mm f1.4 lens on my Canon 5D, not a special macro lens. I’m impressed with the close-focus capability, considering it ISN’T a macro lens. But I would love to try one of the L-series tele-macros for doing insects and the like. Bees get rather skittish, as do butterflies.
Cone Flower, BacklitBlack-Eyed Susans
Zooming out, metaphorically speaking, here are some shots of the buildings around Glen Echo, which you’ve seen variations of before here on my blog.
The light was changing as my student and I were out for him to take photos with his 8×10 to use as practice negatives for platinum/palladium printing. While he was shooting his 8×10, I had the Canon with me and caught the Popcorn sign and the reflections on the windows of the carousel as the light was dropping and the neon came on.
Glen Echo Bridge, Evening
The bridge that leads over the stream to the parking lot had beautiful slanting sidelight on it, and framed these two people perfectly, casting long shadows.
Glen Echo Sign, From the Parking LotGlen Echo Sign, Moon
This is what I saw on my way out, after class was all done and I was walking back to the car. The Glen Echo sign is particularly magnificent and at the same time haunting after dark, because of the emptiness, especially on a weeknight.
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