People sometimes ask me why I put certain pictures with certain blocks of text on my blog. Is there an orgainzing principle? Yes and no. That is, sometimes I try to connect things. But I more often, I don’t consciously think about the connections between the text and the images. I break the text into bite-sized blocks and insert the pictures so they have a good rhythm of shape and content.
I also rely on the Surrealist principle that any block of text “goes with” any image. The uinverse arranges to put them together as a teaching. And the connection emerges. The coffe cup represents the adrenaline and anxiety of revising my writing; the (somewhat overly subtle in this picture, I’ll have to try again) so-called caustic bright-line reflections are the elegance of the language that helps, the sludgy stain in the bottom is the residual contribution of human emotion.
Yesterday I finished my latest revision of the story about the Cyclic Universe that Bruce Sterling and I are working on. I think it’s about done, though Bruce may yet have more revisions. Current title for the story: “Colliding Branes.”
Evidently this is a photo of the two branes about to touch. An equivalent.
I’m also starting work on the the Hylozoic revisions. And whenever I take a break, I play with my camera and my digital darkroom.
I could photograph this gully every day. The background is in some ways more interesting than the foreground, but the eye seems to balk unless I put the foreground in focus. And I havent been able to get good tone with the aperature down at f22 for max depth of field. Oh well, always good to see some bokeh..
Shears bird bites bokeh!
The shot above was taken with a Canon 50 mm f1.4 lense wide open, and the similar shot below was taken with a Leica 50 mm f2 lens wide open. Which has the better bokeh? As always it’s maddeningly hard to say, due to the pictures being taken at different times of day and having different tweaks on them. And they were taken in different moods and therefore are entangled with different world views and completely different “equivalents.”
Speaking of bokeh, my fellow SF-writer/photographer friend Marc Laidlaw sent me a link to a summary of a computer graphics paper about creating bokeh in software. The page has a nice Java applet demo of bokeh.
The bad thing about hard “rolled condom edges” is, I think, that it means you have “echo” lines along something like a tree branch; the hard edges add up to make an echo just a little bit distant. And the hill dots wouldn’t do this.
I can visualize a story called “Good Bokeh.” These guys notice that the parts of reality you don’t pay attention to are in a very real sense blurred. Quantum mechanically, they’re in coherent complex states relative to you. Fuzzy. And good bokeh is if you can keep the outer world fuzzy and no harsh precise thing like a visit from the cops intrudes.
Maybe at the end he leaves the Magic Lens inside the house and goes outside and merges into the bokeh. Ahhhh…
Wire is 1D twisted in 3D…shades of String Theory!
Rudy, Jr., made this heart from steel when he was a (single) undergrad at UC Berkeley, the seaweed is from Four Mile Beach in Cruz. Makes a kind of tadpole together.
A detail of a shot of the Jesuit Residence on St. Joseph’s Hill, Los Gatos. I like the concept of the peaceful kingdom lying up in the sky past a building. I’ve always wanted to go into the background landscapes of Old Master paintings.
It’s butt-easy to shoot fruits and vegetables—they’re colorful with nice shapes, they don’t move, and the subject matter has a positive vibe. The hose peps it up.
I’ve always been intrigued that pioneering photog Alfred Stieglitz shot several series of pictures of clouds and called them “Equivalents,” These shots were snatched-up representations for his state of mind when capturing them.
I like the aesthetic notion of trying to spot something that matches your mood. Though it works the other way around, too, doesn’t it? Your mood gets into synch with what you focus on. Entanglement.
State of mind shooting this one: “Gee, what a pretty mare’s tail cloud; I love being up on this hill; I’ve been coming up here for twenty-two years; it’s a nice early summer day, thank you dear Gaia, I’m glad I’m sober, happy June 1st!”
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Your relying on the notion that “any image goes with any block of text” brings to mind a project that my friend Shane Cooper did:
http://www.shanecooper.com/caption2.cgi
Keep reloading the page for more random caption/image combos. This phenomenon was also responsible for one of the more entertaining time-wasters we had at work, an internal email list called “non”. Supposedly, it was short for “non-sequitar”, and one of the recurring themes was including an image with a snippet of text taken out of context, or perhaps a series of posts with multiple images to be taken together somehow as thematically related. The best posts were the ones where you could tell there was a hidden, intended connection, but maybe you weren’t sure what it was. At its best, it was some really fantastic interactive social art.
I love our aggressive pattern-matching brains.