Viewing some of my art work

I have a hard time shooting pictures of some of my art work. The pictures never quite show what I see. I suppose that’s a common complaint among amature photographers. Just the other day I discovered a way to shoot some of my work in a way that I really like.

I realized that I don’t interact with my work from a distance and see the work in a static view. No, I walk around or past each piece. Sometimes my eye catches one or two elements. Sometimes I get drawn into fragments. So I started shooting details of some of my pieces, isolating parts from the whole. For some pieces it works nicely.

Detail from painted table base by Todd Fillingham.

Detail from paper table by Todd Fillingham

This last image is a little off-putting I think. It is really not out of focus, this is how the print looks on the table base.

Another way that seems to work for me to shoot some of my work is to include some of the context or enviroment that the piece is in. Sometimes I like the environment to be a little undefined. Here’s a sketch for a carving.

Drawing by Todd Fillingham for a carving done in mahogany.

Resin nude on Paper Base Table, both by Todd Fililngham

And sometimes just shooting the piece in room it is shown in when the light is just right is OK.

Boy With Kite by Todd Fillingham

And this last piece I had to “photoshop” the background.

Resin, wire and cloth figure by Todd Fillingham

I’ll get back to that post about the next table I’m working on soon.

Oops, I wanted to add this painting as well.

the approach deja vu

Way before Photoshop was ever conceived of I use to spend some time in a dark room I put together while still a high school student. I would shoot 35mm black and white tri-x or pan-x film (terms of antiquity), develop the negatives then work at creating a print. I tried to make the prints evocative of the shape and patterns of the world around me. This was when I was approaching adulthood and a lot of the world seemed to swirl around me in a meaningless way. Maybe I was creating beacons for an older me. It would be nice to think that after so many years. Ego beacons bobbing up occasionally to tweak my normal, obsessively linear view of time.

I ran across an old acquaintance on Facebook and remembered that I had a few old images that he may want to see. While rummaging about to find them I came across several others from that era. This is one. One that I had created in the darkroom. It has it’s fair share of faults I guess but they show that it was hand crafted.

A lot was going on back then especially around that park. It’s a long story, but people were hurt, arrested, the cops rioted. I don’t know the woman in the foreground but her expression seemed to sum up some of what was going on. I scanned the print just as I found it, I didn’t even take it out of the old album page for fear of damaging it.

Once I put it on the scanner I realized that I was about to make some choices that would effect this new version of this old image. A couple of images had been formed on negative film. I chose the paper and exposure, dodging and burning to create the print, showed it around for a while then slid it into a page in an album. Years later I’m back to deciding how it will look again. I suppose your monitor affects the image you are seeing. Since I’m making choices I could “correct” some spots, old marks and flares, white fossils of a loose hair and lithe puddles from developer and fixer. No, I’ll pretend that this is a true representation of what I hold in my hand.

Once scanned I can zoom in. I see a pattern in a detail that I had never seen before.

Brachia like shadows across her face pattern her expression.

And reach down her neck and throat. Tattoo foreshadow? Something tactile in this image, a smooth surface covered in random texture. Marshall McLuhan wrote of this phenomena, the frisson created. He referred to fishnet stockings on a smooth leg. This is more ominous. It is with trepidation that one approaches adulthood. A knighthood of sorts, not to be taken lightly. Nevertheless a font from which so much will and has flowed.

Studio made slide scanner

I’ve never been happy with the results of scanning slides on my Microtek ScanMaker 4850 with the slide attachment. Some of the slides came out fantastic while others were horrible. So I started doing a little research into buying a new slide scanner and read quite a few online reviews and comments by others. While some seemed pretty good they were quite expensive and I wasn’t about to plunk down several hundred dollars for a scanner I wasn’t sure would really do the job for me. The lower end ones seemed to be no better than the set up I had already, however the least expensive scanner intrigued me. It was an attachment to your digital camera that held the slide. You would then point your camera with the attachment towards an appropriate light source and take a picture of your slide.

As I thought about this I decided I needed to do a little proof of principle research to see if this could really work. As I got into it I realized that I could put together something that worked on this principle myself. Here’s is the set up so far:

The set up starts with my light table, something I put together years ago from an old studio lamp and some sand blasted glass. I found that it really helped to eliminate extraneous light and to have the slide well away from the glass so that the camera could focus on the slide and not on the texture of the sand blasted (not really “ground”) glass. To accomplish this quickly, again I’m still in the proof of principle mode here, I taped together some card stock as shown.

It also was helpful to have the slide line up in the same place every time as my light table did not uniformly distribute light over the glass. The center was brighter than the edges. At this point I taped the box onto the glass and tilted the “light table” so that I could use my camera on a tripod to try a few shots. Those initial test images were promising but there was too much light coming in from the studio as incident light on to the slide.

I took a plastic container that once held yogurt, cut a hole in the bottom of it and painted it black and then set that on top of the slide holder. I placed my camera on top of that container and had my scanner.

When I get a little more time I’ll work on getting the camera settings fined tune. Here’s one of my test shots after a little doctoring with my Paint Shop Pro application.

I have got tons of slides, I can’t wait to scan some of the best and put them up in my portfolio of my new web site.