This is the first re-edit of an old photo of the day that I’ve posted, but I wanted to enter this one in a contest, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. Not a lot to say about this one, other than the fact that there was a lot going on with this boy back when the photo was taken, which I feel is strongly suggested by this image.
A different edit of this image was originally posted as my photo of the day on March 25, 2011.
The plan for this year is to pretty much enter everything… Submit, submit, submit!
In California, I had some issues with one of my email accounts, so I am slogging through three months of old email this morning, and I found two opportunities that I am very interested in.
Of course, I am too busy to actually read all the details right now, and with Snip.it dead, I guess I am stuck posting them here for review later…
While working on this year’s One Day video, I started thinking it would be very nice to start working on some real music videos. Look what washed up this morning… Perfect?
I’ll look into this more later to make sure, but I think I found my next project.
Dead Can Dance want you to make the music video for their song Children of the Sun off Anastasis their first studio album in 16 years.
They have left the brief wide open feel free to be creative in your interpretation!
Deadline for submissions is 4 March 2013, 23:59 GMT time.
I have looked into this one less, but just off the cuff it looks like something else that is a good match for the type of work I am wanting to focus on right now, playing with abstract-ish images in a more calculated, planned way…
We've all had the experience of looking at a photograph and not being able to decipher it right away. We ask ourselves "What am I looking at?" Photographer and collector Allan Chasanoff became a connoisseur of this interval of confusion before the image resolves. He found a visceral pleasure in confronting an image that refused to make visual sense, delighting in its resistance and delighting again when that resistance was overcome - a delicious tension and release.
"To be hit by a dislocation transcends the visual alone, and there is a momentary visceral response. It stuns me. It interrupts the stare and startles me. Thus, a major part of my effort in collecting pictures was to find those that did that. The photograph, the genre, the history and the aura of the picture are secondary to this shock. That is why I collected so-called straight images, for a dislocation in the usual." - Allan Chasanoff
Mr. Chasanoff spent nearly 20 years collecting more than 1,200 of photographs, many of which embodied this optical problem in photography ("the Optical"), and donated that collection to Yale University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Now he has agreed to jury for Blue Sky a show of your (single-exposure, non-photoshop, "straight") photographs that resist immediate visual deciphering.
Allan Chasanoff relishes pictures that puzzle him, and he wants others to enjoy these surprises. He built his collection of 20th-century photographs by questioning what occurs when the camera “captures” the real world but the resulting image creates confusion rather than clarity, challenging photography's reputation as a dependable document. In 1991, the New York-based collector donated nearly 1,000 works to the MFAH by photographers ranging from Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, and Joel Peter Witkin to relatively unknown artists.
Dead Can Dance: Children of the Sun - Lyrics
Children of the Sun is the album’s 'welcome to the show'. The lyric addresses human evolution and how our genetic code is infused with ancient memory, right up to the present, celebrating nature – the Woodstock generation’s legacy.
…
We are ancient, as ancient as the sun We came from the ocean, once our ancestral home So that one day we could all return To our birthright, the great celestial dome
We are the children of the sun Our journey's just begun Sunflowers in our hair We are the children of the sun There's room for everyone Sunflowers in our hair
Throughout the ages of iron, bronze and stone We marvelled at the night sky and what may lie beyond We Burned offerings to the elemental ones made sacrifices for beauty, peace and love
We are the children of the sun Our kingdom will come Sunflowers in our hair We are the children of the sun Our carnival's begun Our songs will fill the air
And you know it's time To look for reasons why Just reach up and Touch the sky To the heavens we'll ascend
We are the children of the sun Our journey has begun
All the older children come out at night Anaemic, soulless, great hunger in their eyes Unaware of the beauty that sleeps tonight And All the queen's horses and all the king's men Will never put these children back together again
Almost ready...: This one is more about just driving some traffic towards my pictures. Still, it would be nice to have your vote. (13,880 file views for my pictures on Photobucket since March. A shame that I really don't like that place much.)http://photobucket.com/ibeatyou?entry=1822226
Recent Photobucket results. These come up a little different, I score a little higher, on this page than on the contest pages, but I am not sure why.
Just some notes on the number of entries:
1 Day Time Lapse (Seattle): 16th out of 115 entries. There were some really good ones in this challenge.
1 Day Time Lapse (Holding Still): 22nd out of 115. I am actually surprised by how well this one did for being a small, quiet photo, so to speak.
Pic From Your Neighborhood: 51st out of 232 entries. This was disappointing to me, I really thought it would do better.
Spring Forward: The final results are still being calculated, but it looks like I came in 149th out of 1343 entries. I would have liked to have seen this one do a little better, but this seemed like a more serious competition and there were some really good pictures in this one. Also, the editing on this picture is a little off. I've had earlier versions that I liked a bit better where the color of the sky was a little darker and bluer, making the whole picture feel a bit more, I don't know, solid? Sometimes re-inventing the wheel isn't worth it.
I think I've had posts or comments on the other pictures here, so I'll end this post with thanking everyone who has voted on these pictures one last time! I really appreciate it!
I also chose it because it looks better in small form than it does in large form.
As I was posting the photo above and glancing through some of the other entries, I remembered this one and decided that it should be today's entry for obvious reasons...
This one is a scan of an old photo I took for my 8th Grade photography class back in 1987.
Anyway, I decided to leave both in there. It is allowed and I've seen people enter a whole bunch, four or five, into these things. They are both such different types of images that it will be interesting to see which finished ahead of the other.
Another daily challenge on Photobucket... "Pic From Your Neighborhood." Went with a picture of my neighborhood from above... Posted under the title "Neighborhood Sunbeams."
This challenge is the first one in a while that is actually interesting. Of course, I live a little to the left in this shot, but I went with a more interesting shot rather than specific accuracy.
Looking at the pictures posted so far this morning, there are some really nice ones. I'd be happy with a top ten finish in this one. Right now I am in 4th place, but I just posted a few minutes ago, so it is really too early to tell.
The second photo in this post is more my neighborhood than the one I entered, right between Powell and Grant Buttes but, really, I figure pretty much all of East County is my stomping ground.
I am definitely happy with a top 25 finish, especially in this competition. I say that not because of the quality of the photographs entered, but because of the contest itself. The theme was "1 Day Nostalgia" and the way most people approached this was to enter old snapshots that brought back memories, not to enter "good" photographs. I am not saying this to be bitchy, there were a lot of good pictures that finished a lot lower than mine, which I think is a shame; some that I liked better than mine. However, I think an issue with my entry is that it did not entirely fit the theme. I went with an image that brought to my mind the idea of nostalgia, though it was not one that made me specifically nostalgic - it had nothing to do with my personal past.
One of the things I am discovering about Photobucket's little competitions, especially the daily ones, is that they are not really geared towards photographers. They offer contests like show a picture of "you" playing video games, and today's daily challenge is about pictures of "you" sitting at a table with friends and family. These contests are geared towards funky, entertaining snapshots, not towards serious photography. Which is fun and fine, but not really what I am interested in and I probably won't be entering a lot of them. For example, in today's challenge, I just really don't take that type of picture and, if I was in the picture, then it wouldn't even by my photograph in the first place.
Other challenges on the site, like the two spring ones, are geared towards some more "artistic" photography, and those are the ones which interest me the most. In both of the spring ones, from what I've seen of the other entries so far, I'd be more than happy to finish in the top 25. In some of the challenges on sites built around more serious/artistic photography, I'd be happy to finish in the top 50 out of a thousand plus entries (like the spring challenges).
But I am sure that I'll still enter these on days where the theme fits my work and I have a picture ready that fits it. Why not? It is just for fun after all!
I suppose Photobucket is moving ahead on my list of possible new photography homes... But some of the other sites I am looking at? I'd be happy to be in the top ten on something like this.
