The Camera Collection

Cannon TX, a classic film camera.

Sometimes when I have not much else to do I will set up a table top studio and photograph various objects I have laying around. This is one part busy work and one part practice. Also, it gives me examples of what you might call “useful photos,” as in photos other people or businesses might pay me to take for them. Normally I wouldn’t put anything that, well, uninteresting on a public forum, but recently I’ve been photographing my camera collection and I really like how some of them have come out. I have more “artful” photos that I’ll be posting soon, but there is still some more work that needs to be done on them.

So for now here are a few of my favorite things…

The Pentax Auto 110, probably the most adorable camera I own.

This kit came to me in just about mint condition, complete with film and the instruction manual. The camera is about as long as the width of my palm, and I can easily hide it in my hand.  I feel like a spy whenever I use it, though I can’t bring myself to carry the camera bag with me when I go out.

Nikon N80, my workhorse 35mm film camera.

My Nikon N80 is my most traveled camera; I’ve taken it with me around the US, through Europe and to Tanzania. This is the camera that did the lion’s share of my work in grad school, and it shot my thesis project. Even though my D5000 has become my camera of choice these days, the N80 holds a special place in my memory. Whenever I go to do a shoot that is in any way important, I keep this camera nearby with a few rolls of film at the ready, just in case.

The Fuji Film 400ix Zoom, and all for only 2 dollars!

I picked this camera up at tag sale a couple of years ago, I think it may have been my aunt’s tag sale, and I’m not even sure I actually paid the  two dollars. There are so many of these great little cameras floating around tag sales and swap meets for almost no money. I love that they are simple, rarely need their batteries to be replaced, and can fit in my pocket easily. I’ll often use a camera like this if I want to shoot in a place where an SLR would be cumbersome for me to carry, like a concert or a night out on the town.

The Holga 120 Flash, it's bad and I love it.

What I like about Holgas, of which I have 3 different models, is their simplicity. I love my Nikon D5000 and all the wonderful things it can do, but honestly I don’t really know all the wonderful things it can do. I’d say I understand only about half of its total functions, and even then I’m often looking things up. That’s never an issue with a Holga. This flash unit has a total of 6 features that can be adjusted, two of which are the shutter release and the film advance. There is not much to think about, which leaves more time to think about what you’re photographing.

That’s about all the cameras I can find at the moment, I’m not entirely sure where the rest are. I often stumble across cameras I’ve put in various pockets of jackets and travel bags where they were stored for some trip or adventure. I should really keep better track of them all, but I suppose thats one reason I have so many, so that I can always find at least one.

-Allen

Several Quick Updates.

I don’t much like putting things up in such a hodgepodge way, but there are several things that I’ve done over the past few months that I need to get out of the way before moving on to more in-depth topics. These don’t really need their own post each, but are worth mentioning. So in no particular order…

I have joined Flickr and begun uploading photos there. I’ll use it as a place to put up a lot of work that is both older and ongoing. There will defiantly be more to see there than here on the blog. Click here to check it out, http://www.flickr.com/photos/allenfmbaird/, or click on the link to the right of the blog. I encourage you leave comments on my photos.

If you are on Facebook you can you can like the page that I have made for my art and various artistic endeavors. Click here to check it out, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Art-by-Allen-Baird/207021972666464, or on the link on the right side of the blog. This is a good place to leave me messages since I check Facebook daily.

That painting project I started a couple of months ago, well it’s on hold. There are two reasons why it’s on hold; firstly because I am not a very good painter, which I should have thought more about before starting such a project, and secondly, because during a recent cleaning and organization session I misplaced most of my painting supplies. I’m sure that someday in the not too distant future I’ll stumble upon my paints and will pick them up and finish the project. Mostly sure. Probably.

And now, because I don’t like to put up a post without posting any pictures, here are some of my newest photos from a project I have just recently started. And just so you know, you can click on each image to see it in a larger size.

I like the way the pictures sort of dissolve into the night.

Lancaster is much more interesting photographically, to me at least, at night.

I am taking a series of night shots of Lancaster where I for the most part exclude cars and people. This project is new, so I don’t know exactly where it is going. I take my camera and turn it up to 11 (by which I mean ISO 3200) and walk the streets of Lancaster looking for interesting lighting and scenes. I try to exclude cars basically because I don’t like they way they look in the images. They seem to be out of place, they smooth curved lines, and they are never a good place compositionally. That’s not to say I would never use a picture with a car, but they usually contrast in a bad way with the buildings. I am keeping an eye out for a car that would be a good subject in and of itself. As for people, I do like them in some pictures, but for the most part the slow shutter speeds I’m using preclude figures. They mostly just turn into blurs, which although interesting sometimes hasn’t produced anything cool so far in these pictures.

This project has the advantage of my being able to do it right now, unlike so many of my older projects and other ideas that require much more in the way of time and resources. I expect I’ll be able to keep photographing until the snow piles up in a month or two.

Allen

Painting 1, Landscape

Having declared publicly that I would do this, I suppose it’s only fair that I actually try. I decided to keep my first painting simple, basing it on a photo I took several years ago (I’ll show the photo when it’s done).

And so, with $47.28 of supplies assembled, I began.

This may actually be a bad idea.

It’s a simple landscape with a good rule of thirds thing going on. This is where I left of at the 30 minute mark, I wanted to let the paint dry before I continued. I’ll finish the second 30 minutes of painting when I get a chance soon.

I kind of like this better in the picture than in real life.

I like the colors over all, but there needs to be more details in the foreground, and I’m not exactly sure how to go about painting those details. The grass needs to be more yellowish, and the clouds are a little too simple for my tastes. I’m about 75% confident that I can “finish” this painting in the remaining 30 minutes I have.

I think for my next painting I’ll do a still life, some apples or some such thing. People like that I think.

-Allen

Allen’s B.S. Painting Project

This is the first installment in a series of post’s that I will be doing over the next month or so about a new project I have come up with. I have decided to do a series of paintings as an experiment, and will post updates as I go. I don’t have much photo related news just now, so this will help me keep my head in the game, so to speak, when it comes to art. Before I get to the experiment it self, some back story;

Last week I was in the craft store looking to buy a frame for one of my silkscreen prints. As usual, there was a woman already at the custom framing counter weighing her options as to which particular shade of beige mat she wanted. Knowing from previous experience that this would take at least 45 minutes to resolve I gave the store clerk the secret art person hand signal for, “I’ll be back in a little while,” and walked away. (If you don’t know the secret art person, or SAP, hand signals, then I am not at liberty to inform you. Sorry.)

Typically there isn’t much beyond framing in the craft store that I have much use for, but now that there was time to kill I began wondering around to see what there was to see. I remember when we were little my cousin Kelly used to mispronounce the word “craft” in craft store as “crap,” and mostly she’s not wrong. There were lots of fake flowers, fake snowflakes, and fake pumpkins, no matter what season your in you can find a fake version of whatever real thing is right outside of your door. I spent almost a whole minute trying to decide which themed bird house I would buy if I were so inclined (rocket ship), and then wondered for a while which of the dozens of puzzles I would have the least chance of successfully completing (101 Dalmatians). Then I came to the painting supplies.

I was meandering the section and it made me think of some of the paintings I had seen recently in galleries. One in particular was stuck in my memory, a swirly abstract brownish thing that I instantly disliked. Normally I’d forget such a painting, but what made me remember it was that next to it on the wall was a small sticker with the price “$200.00″, and next to that was an even smaller sticker saying “sold.” Suddenly, as I stood before stacks of canvas’, I thought, “I could paint that.” Which was followed quickly by, “I could paint that…,” and an interesting idea was born.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has seen a painting and thought “I could paint that.” or, “My child could paint that.” So I have decided to put this to the test and see if in fact I can paint “that.” I will attempt to to make paintings that are quick and involve “little” effort and attempt to sell them. In doing this I do not intend to demean serious painters, whom I have a great respect for, and who’s work I could not hope to imitate. I am only testing the idea that a lot of paintings seen in galleries are not as impressive as we would sometimes think.

Now a challenge (or experiment) like this needs some ground rules:

• I will not spend more than $50.00 on this project in total.
• With the supplies that $50.00 buys I will make at least 4 paintings.
• I will not spend more than one hour actually painting each piece, not including prep time.
• I will price the work before I begin painting, based on the size of the canvas, not the outcome of the work.
• I will attempt to have the paintings shown and sold.

Now I’m not intending to make “bad” paintings, just “quick” paintings. I am really excited to try this. I painted some when I was younger, and did badly in a painting class when I was an undergrad. I’ll have to post a picture of some old paintings so that no one thinks that I’m secretly a master painter. It’s been years since I tried painting, and who knows, maybe this will be something that I keep up even after this experiment is over.

-Allen

Update and photos.

Work is progressing… or at least I think it is. If nothing else film is being processed. I took a bunch of rolls of 120 film down to the one and only camera shop in Lancaster PA (probably the only one in Lancaster County as I imagine the Amish don’t have much use for them) and was surprised by the reasonable price for processing that they charge. They seem to have done a good job so processing film is one less thing I have to worry about now. I’d link to the COE Camera Shop website, but they don’t have one, just a text page that gives the hours and promises a full website coming soon. It’s said that for a least a year since I’ve been checking. I find that rather quaint.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking that a photo blog without any photo’s is kind of silly, but for now I don’t have any “new” work to post. So while I try to figure out how to get my newly processed film scanned I’ll work on some old photo’s that I have left over form my days at Pratt. These are a bit of a random selection of images that I began to work on but didn’t have time while I was in school to finish.

Up first are a couple of Holga shots. I love my Holga cameras, and find that the simplicity of them  really brings out the joy of photographing. I find they really encourage the act of, “Don’t think too much, just shoot!.”

I was always surprised at just how empty New York could seem at times.

Using Ektar 100 film in a Holga feels so decadent, like walking on a really beautiful lush carpet in bare feet.

Up next is a picture of my uncle at a wedding we attended a couple of years ago. What I like about this photo is that it shows how, at least for a hundredth of a second, anyone can look like someone else. It should be noted that my uncle is an attorney and not in fact the boss of a Polish crime family.

That being said, this had to happen…

Best Christmas gift of 2009.

Lastly for today is a photo from my time in Tanzania in 2008. I believe that this is a picture of Mt. Meru as seen from the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Then again I cant quite remember and it could be the reverse of that.

This picture was taken with a camera my parents got at a tag-sale for 5.00 which had to be at least 50 years old. I wasn’t even sure if it would actually function, and most of the aperture and timing settings were guess work. For the most part that went about as well as you would imagine and I have a lot of under exposed and out of focus pictures, but a few came out nice enough.

-Allen

Picking up the Pieces

I once read a statistic that over 90% of art school graduates stop making serious art within six months of their graduation. I have no idea if that is compleatly accurate, but after having graduated from art school twice myself I find it to be compleatly believable. You loose everything that you have become accustomed to for years in one fell swoop. And on top of that, if suddenly not having the structure of classes and grades to encourage your productivity wasn’t bad enough you also have to move, which may be more disruptive in it’s own way. All the organization and routine you have built up for two or four years is instantly thrown to the wind, and all the little pieces never seem to quite add up again. Kind of like disassembling and reassembling Ikea furniture, it’s never quite the same and you loose a few pieces.

But eventually things settle down. Your thesis project you spent a year putting together lays in a pile under the stairs, supplies from half started projects clutter your closet, and a bag of unprocessed film sits in your fridge.

I may have had a few rolls laying around.

The time for collecting dust is no over, it’s time to make some dust (I do some wood working, still, that was a pretty bad pun. Sorry). Getting the gears moving again starts small, and today I’m taking seven rolls of that film to be processed, and tonight I’ll try processing my own black and  white film in the upstairs bathroom. All should go well so long as my girlfriend doesn’t find out about that last part. Once all the film is processed I’ll need to find a a place to do some high quality scanning, and then the real work begins.

My thesis project, which really does need a title, is about half done. The hard part will be finding someone who can scan my film at high enough quality to match the earlier work. The project that the 120 film in the picture above represents is fully shot, and needs processing, scanning and editing, but with any luck I’ll be able to do all that from home (except the scanning).

I also have a couple new projects that I am excited to get started on, but they are both long term and only in the early planning stages now. I’ll need some help with those, and you may just be the person to do it. More on that later.

-Allen

When we fall down,

A strange thing happened to me. When I graduated from grad school last year I had no money, no job, and no more resources from the school. Not too long after that I had no place to live as our lease was up. I was confronted with that question that most graduates stumble across, “what do I do now?” Without a good answer I stopped making art, or even really thinking about it.

Now the strange thing is not that all this happened. I had more or less expected these events in one form or another. What was strange was the fact that it surprised me. Even knowing ahead of time it was coming, the shock of that transition hit me hard. I found myself back home with my parents exactly where I had started two years before with hardly any more idea of what I wanted to do than when I started. I put myself to the task at hand of finding a job to pay my bills, and art drifted to the back of my mind, where I could only hear echoes of ideas and schemes sitting half formed. I fell off the horse as they say (does anyone say that?).

Well the shock is wearing off. I’m not proud that I wasted a year of potential, but I won’t get caught up on it now. I have a job (I may even pay some bills someday!) and a place to live; and it’s time to get back into the game with the fine traditions of artists through the centuries, lie, cheat, and steal. And work hard, of course.

When we fall down, we must get up again. No matter how long it takes, the only way we will move on is to get back up.

More coming soon.

Thesis.

My thesis show went well. I want to say thank you to everyone who helped me along the way and to all my friends and family who made the trip into the city to come see it. I’m just going to post a few pictures from the event and a one paragraph version of my thesis writing here so anyone who couldn’t make it to the show can get an idea of what it was.

Setting up.

“My work plays with ideas about reality, illusion, and the truth of imagery. We have all been taught to “believe” photographs; as evidence of what we used to look like, as corroboration that we are of legal age, or as proof in a court of law substantiating events. I have presented this “aura of truth” surrounding photography as the basis for this work. By creating and presenting images that strongly reference the history of photography going back over one hundred and seventy years, my images give the impression of being straightforwardly depicted landscapes. But they are not actual existing landscapes at all.  They originate as elements of a computer war game, and I have appropriated them and recontextualized them, also mixing them in with landscapes I’ve taken at actual historic battlefields.  The use of high grain photographic film to capture the image from the monitor softens the images enough to make them believable, while leaving a sufficient number of digital artifacts to hint at the image origin.  I use the same film in making pictures from actual sites in order to blur the distinction between the two types of images.”

Getting ready for thesis.

Only two days to my show, and things are coming together. My images are printed, my frames are ready, and I have a key to the gallery. I’m really excited to get this going, I’ve been getting a lot of really good feedback from people about my work and I can’t wait to see everything all set up. I started putting my pictures in the frames today and the frames really pull everything together into a single body of work. Even the “real” pictures I’m putting in look more like the “fake” images when they all are in frames.

Looking good.

I’m also excited to get all this stuff out of my darkroom, seeing as it’s only the size of a closet. For the past two weeks I’ve been processing film on top of my stacked frames, and the door only closes if I stand in exactly the right place.

This is out of control.

The end of school as I know it…

I am tired.  

I have mostly late nights that seem to be followed exclusively by early mornings, work seems to need to be compleated in hours instead of weeks, and my diet becomes more completely replaced with junk food with each passing day. And so another semester comes to an end. As I end my college career I feel the pressure to finish assignments and study for tests that comes up every spring.  

But what I oddly don’t feel is panic. There are less than two weeks left and I have plenty to do, my thesis show has to be hung this weekend, I have a chemistry final to study for, a science project to complete, and the lions share of my thesis writing left to do. This is traditionally when panic would set in, but I’m not particularly worried. It’s a lot of work, but I know it will get done. I’ve become good at college. Of course that would happen as soon as I graduate.  

Anyhow, I’ve got a couple new images I wanted to put up here while I am sitting at work, nothing really related to my school work, just some left over frames on a roll of film that I wanted to use up. One is a behind the scenes view of a gallery, and the other is just a picture of a leaf that I thought I might use in a silkscreen project.  

The back side of art.

 

Just a tree at Pratt

 

I leave work at 4am, get home at 5am. I will be so glad when I don’t have to do this anymore.