Giving me directions to her house in Bath, PA., my friend Ruth said, "Look for an old barn with the word 'Sleep' written on it. Fascinating.The new night series I'm out here working on deals with memory, concealment, dreams...The barn was a really cool location, the image plan hatched, and in spite of a drizzle the next night, a crew of an old photo friend from Allentown, Ruth, and I went off into the late night. The barn is located on a two lane highway in what seems like the middle of nowhere, but is apparently the only way to get to somewhere, judging from the number of cars speeding through. The camera set up on the side of the road opposite of the barn, and time exposure of 30 seconds necessitated no traffic time every time we opened the lens. There are a number of red and white streaked frames, but it wasn't too bad. Coordinating and checking the varied strobe flashes, looking at each frame as it was shot, had me and my assistant Ron, running back and forth across the road, waving flashlights so not to trip into a hidden ditch along the side by the barn. All of a sudden, we see a cop car slowly drive up and pull into a turn out next to the barn by our car...it's past midnight. I'm standing by the camera at this point, dressed in the black night gown I'm wearing for the photo, wondering how to explain what we're doing out here without getting chased away. The cop doesn't get out of his car. I thought they're supposed to approach you, not the other way around, but this is Bath, PA for christsake so maybe it's different here. So there I am, flashlight in hand, traipsing across the road in a night gown in the middle of a drizzly night to face a cop. Weird. I came around the back of his car to the passenger side window to avoid standng too close to the road, and was about to tap on the window, when I looked in to see that the cop was absolutely oblivious to my being there....he hadn't noticed us there at all....not the flashlights, not anything....he was lost in his own world, focusing on the cigarette he was putting in his mouth. I just stood there, peering in at him for a moment, then turning off my flashlight, stepped back from the car window into the shadows to watch him turn off his dome light and drive off. Surreal.

For the last few weeks my mind's been cluttered up with extraneous things, like the economic mess, watching network tv series at night, and being pissed about the small percentage of a sale that as a fine art photographer that isn't well known receives.After the gallery takes their 50% cut, and I've paid a quarter of the total for expenses, I'm less and less willing to sell work for my pitance when I continually realize that the reason for the sale in the piece in the first place, is that the buyer likes the image....and, that's the part I'm responsible for....the image, damn it. When that photograph is hanging on the wall in someone's house or office, it's because that person wants to live that particular image.

My rant has nothing to do with these photos, except to explain that I'm not shooting much these days. What's also going on is I'm taking a video production class, which is dragging my head away from stills and leaving me in the middle of nowhere, because I haven't started filming anything yet. Hence, tv shows are appealing... paying attention to the editing that goes on, particularly.

But, today, while drinking a cup of coffee out on the back porch, I noticed the reflections of the trees in the glass behind me, and so, fueled on joe, hauled out the camera. It came to mind that there was a connection to some reflection images I did over Xmas in NYC. These city window shots were done at Bergdorf''s on 5th Ave.

Double pane glass gives a bit of a stuttering to the image, which I like. The angle at which the camera was held to the glass decided how it would record the reflection.

I don't know about how other artists find their connections and similarities of the way they look at things, or come up with variations on a theme or subject, but for me, over the years of shooting, threads of ideas continue to show themselves, sometimes dormant over a period of months or years, only to surface again and again in a slightly different way, informed by a maturing or shift of consciousness on my part. Creating books seem like the best way to make myself pick through the archives of negatives, and slides, scour the boxes of prints, hit the hard drives of digital files, and get this lifetime of photography so far organized in some fashion. I do think that the process would reveal a great deal of insight into the heart of my passion and set a compass for the future.

*"Shmootz." Those of you who haven't spent time in NY or aren't Jewish, might not be familiar with this wonderful sounding Yiddish word that translates as "dirt" in a wider context. It isn't dirt, like ground from the earth (unless it's all over your face or clothing, as in "What's that shmootz all over your clothes?" kind of way...it's messy or dirty stuff that shouldn't be where it doesn't belong.

Like the greasy fingerprint a small child got on my lens when I wasn't looking!

I was in LA last week for a family event which is where the shmootz got applied. Later, driving through the West Hollywood area, I did a few "drive-by shootings" ...shooting while in the car, sometimes at a stop; sometimes while still moving along. Generally in LA that means not moving too fast because the traffic is abominable, which is how this series began when I lived there. It was so frustrating to be sitting in traffic so much of my life that I took to photographing out of my windows or windshield to feel more productive or at least to keep myself from traditional road rage. Also, street life and real estate is visually interesting there. As an aside, I have to say the series came to a halt when I moved to North Carolina. Anyway, I didn't notice the fogging in the photos until later that night when I was having supper with a friend and looked at a magnification of a shot I did of him across the table; his nose and mouth were blurry. A quick look at the lens told the whole story.



Examining earlier pictures, including a bowl of fruit I shot before leaving to drive around, struck me with a sense of wonderful serendipity...how cool it was that the shmootz added an element of soft focus shifting for the eye to enjoy as it wandered around the image.

I love when life offers little surprises and shifts to encounter and make us slow down for an instant......May they all be all be enjoyable and uplifting.

"All That Glitters Isn't Gold," "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (thanks to St. Mick), " Ya Shoulda Seen The Fish That Got Away."

Well, it was like that the other afternoon....
Driving down a street near town a delivery truck turned a corner and suddenly my windshield view was taken up with this huge square shape filled with a beer glass and bottle looking so perfectly scaled and color coordinated with the red, yellow, orange autumn follage surrounding it. And the sky's blue was the perfect complimentary color.... I reached across the seat into my handbag for my ever present camera only to not find it. I continued on searching for it, and my mind, wondering how I left it at home. The image began to taunt me....beginning to glow like a gem just out of reach. Blocks later, I had to turn off onto the freeway, and would lose my opportunity; the image began to be more and more important in the face of having no way to possess it.....We got to the freeway entrance, and omfg, he turned onto it also....and the tree lined expanse became more lush and perfect with the uncluttered road way, not messing up the perfect composition. The Photo Gods were laughing at me now, I thought, they're amused at my frustration. And then came the moment of "aha...the cell phone!!!" I have to say, I never use the camera function and barely know how to work it. So there I am, tailgating this truck at 65 miles an hour, clicking furiously, barely able to see what was on the tiny viewer without my glasses on,
plus not knowing how to save the little suckers....click, click, click. The truck finally got to his exit and away he went, probably grateful to get this crazy woman off his ass...I had no idea what I got, except feeling it was a futile attempt for the crumbs of a glorious cake that got away. When I finally looked at the file in the phone, most didn't get saved for not knowing how to work the damn thing. There were 3 frames of my dashboard only and this one with the truck somewhere out there in the distance, above the dashboard which I cropped out. It sure ain't art.

So the magic of the moment was the only prize of the day; the lesson for me is that's all there really is.

No one sees things exactly the same as another. If you put 10 reasonably creative people with cameras in the same situation I suspect you'll get 10 different photographs. Not only that, but someone else looking at those photographs then interprets what we have seen in their unique way. Pretty cool on one hand, because all we can do is what we do, then put it out there for others to see in it what they will. However, as an artist, we have many options to create a portal or path for an observer to follow into our own special world of visual delights. I find there are times I have a specific intention for a photo, and want to make a particular statement. Sometimes it's more illusive.....an image seems to make it's self intuitively, the outside beckoning me from within; a feeling sparking pure consciousness into being, connecting perfectly into a form in the confines of the camera's window frame. Those are magic times; I think that's what keeps many of us clinging to our cameras as one would a love interest. (that sounds weird, huh?) Anyway, with new technology adding more possibilities to extend our photographic vocabularies and flights of fancy, visual impact becomes more and more available and sometimes overwhelming. If money were no object, I'd probably overdose on lens and software, like a diabetic run amok in a candy store. I should probably be grateful I'm being protected from myself. That said, I found an interesting program that I'm using on a 15 day trial download (thank you photo-god.) It's Silver Efex Pro by NIK Software. It's a filtering program that goes into Photoshop and lets you create very interesting black and white conversions. Since downloading it yesterday, I've been experimenting with how one image can be altered to create an entirely different emotional feel.

Being unememployed is certainly a major inconvenience when it comes to having money, but the one trade off of having my time is priceless. Not having to parcel creative time around committment to being somewhere for so many hours a week, has opened a precious space of unbound availability to wander around inside and out, shooting and working on images way into the quiet of night. Here are some of the results of last week's meanderings.

Hello,
As an attempt to shake out my braincells quivering from too much listening and reading and watching the political, economic and world situation bouncing off walls, I've decided to begin what will be ongoing posts of my two cents (before inflation) worth of ideas and whatever else on photography, and probably some whatever else meanderings, as well. We'll see.

I've been shooting photos for over 30 years, for lots of different reasons. For the last 3 years I've been shooting a series at night called "Lifting the Veil of Night." (I'll do written rap that goes out on the press release, some other time.) You can take a look at my website if you care to.... http://www.ellengiamportone.com

I'm sure we all have our reasons for picking up a camera instead of a pen or laptop to write about it, or make music about it, or just go through our moments and experiences of life with no need to record, or impose, or extract. Some of us are just driven from within to "do" certain things, with or without or ego as the push. Let's leave that last thought for another post.....anyway, I'm one of those folks who always keeps a camera around, which is easier being a woman who carries a shoulder bag. Hmmm, when I was asked to write for this blog, particularly because I'd bring a female voice to a mostly male undertaking, I wasn't sure how that would manifest, but here it is already.... I can easily have my camera handy, because I carry a purse! Unless the male photographers want to stuff a little camera into their jeans, or use a back pack all the time (or Man purse) women shooters may be at an advantage here when just wandering around in daily life. Certainly, most everyone has their cell phones, so nothing will go unrecorded, but the quality may suffer. But really who cares....(raw gut shots can be great too) That thought then leads to making decisions as to why and what we take pictures of or intentionally make images.....My generation (gawd, here's where I'm old) wasn't born into the electronic age, where now nothing seems to happen without pictures to prove it. I think I'll mostly concentrate on photography as something done with intention....whatever that means to each of us.
I keep this postcard on my bulletin board as a reminder to not take any of this too seriously, but to also respect my own creative vision and stay honest.....

It's too nice outside this afternoon to spend anymore time in here.....until next time.....

Fotoloka