Jump!

Jump!

Watching the SF Taiko Dojo perform at the Cherry Blossom festival, I tried to capture the sheer, raw energy of their performance. This was one of the luckier shots from that session — the main composers airborne from a simultaneous drumbeating jump they were making, soon to come down with a heavy whack on their drum skins.

There are things I would have liked differently in this picture — it's a somewhat busy background, and I could have gotten better separation between dancers and backdrops; but it's not that bad. The things I want to show: the dancers, the drums and drumsticks, the energy and action of the performance all come through as cleanly and clearly as anything. For the amount of snapshotting — of taking, not making, a photograph that went into this, I am quite happy with the results. Convincing, illustrative, emotional. A fair shot.

Gritty Tenderloin

Gritty Tenderloin

The view out of the window of my apartment where I lived in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. With a dramatic sky, and a bit of post-processing — graduated exposure-lowering filter, and some separate lowering of exposure — we end up with this picture.

It strikes me as gritty. It's the kind of picture I expect to see from a south-american city with pollution problems and favelas hidden behind the big tourist hotels. Façades that once were bright and cheery now look droopy with the colour faded in different amounts for different patches. Towering housing with speckled balconies filled with things.

The grimness of the picture is aided by the darkened sky, by the way that the tops of the high houses are drawn in with the graduated filter, and thus darkening towards the top, and by the sharpness of the image, in which all the flaws reproduced faithfully.

At the groundhogs' at SF Zoo

In media res

This pictures speaks mostly in what it doesn't show you. It is a mound of dirt, a crater, with a fountain of sand and dirt cascading out of the crater. It is a picture that, at the face of it, solicits questions. What spews out the dirt? Where is this? Even — what scale is the picture on? There are few hints, but a staging that leads the thought towards a number of different, but homogenous, possible stories for the picture.

Muir woods tree

Muir woods tree

In a forest, a single tree stands isolated (in the middle of a parking lot, as it were), and breaks the dark, organic monotony of the forest with surprisingly bright twigs and branches, almost illuminating the picture with the stark contrast between the single tree and its surroundings.

The picture invites the viewer to look at the tree, contrasting it against the surrounding forest, and by the dark and light of the various trees, draws the most attention to the contrast in coloration.

As far as a message goes, I don't think the picture is much more complicated than “Look at this tree” — a message supported by the picture composition: the tree filling out the frame, and billowing out of a centered anchor. The barely hidden cars and signs at the bottom do pose a number of questions in the image — the tree is obviously not in some deep forest meadow, since there are cars surrounding it, so where is it? The presence of humans is clearly signaled, yet strongly de-emphasized.

Inspired by this, I went back to the original image (at some nuisance — I hadn't registered Aperture at this computer, and the image was hidden in my old Aperture library…), and poked at it, removing the cars, and making it a black/white image, to see what would happen:

Muir woods tree (b/w)

Regularity

Regularity A skyscraper near Powell Street Station, SF, CA

Patterns fascinate me. Regularity holds its own beauty. And in this picture, the regularity, the solid pattern, the replication stretching out as far as the eye can reach is what you sense at a first look.

A deeper look, or one with an agenda, would point to the regularity in urban architecture as a symbol for modern society, possibly even of negative aspects of it. Paint a picture of indistinguishable office landscapes, of cubicles filled with drones turning leafs of paper as they progress through mechanical tasks.

In that sense, it is a picture that allows several interpretations. It is clear in each, but there is a spectrum of interpretations that can be had.

The way each of the interpretations I can imagine comes about is based heavily in the content of the message. The regularity in the architectural designs is the core of the message. It is assisted by the plethora of lines the windows form — vertical lines, diagonals in both directions, all of them continuing out of the picture, and together with the perspective chosen, indicate a continuation of the repeating motif along a nigh-infinite plane, emphasizing the vastness, and the … the indistinguishable aspects of the picture.

In the heat of battle

In the heat of battle SCA Fighters at an SCA event with the Shire of Cloondara

This image dives into the middle of a very action-rich fight. The two fighters are hewing at each other with all their might, swords and shields clashing as they lunge at each other in the meadow.

It is a picture full of contradictions. It is a depiction with modern day technology of dresses, armors and weaponry from centuries past. It is a picture full of movement, with shields and swords and legs blurring, while both helmets, and large parts of the combatants remain frozen in time, moving too slow for the shutter to get confused. And it is a classic triangular composition — which is associated (I am told ;-) with calmness, closedness and steadiness — while the picture itself is full of action, almost rambunctious in its energy.

Attention is drawn cleanly to the fighters, with the blurred background and sharp motif as well as the color contrast, and the complementary colors (red vs. green) all aiding the separation of the two fighters as the important part of the picture.

Here, again, context provides a bit of a difference in interpretation of the picture. I was there at the event, and I know the SCA as an organization. Hence, I know that the fight was sportsmanlike, there were no sharpened weapons present, and the attitude going into the fight was very similar to that of sparring martial artists. However, none of this is apparent from the photograph. Instead, from the photograph, it looks like a pretty vicious fight, one that will end with one or the other of the fighters injured if not killed. From their poses, it looks as if the left hand fighter is getting the upper hand — though once you acquaint yourself more with swordfighting, it becomes clear that a lower, more collected pose is not necessarily a disadvantage. The strong connection between their gazes, their hidden faces helps isolate them as a pair of fighters, as opposed to a part of an entire shield line, a band of brothers fighting side by side on a battlefield.

On the bench

Benched members of the Berkeley Roller Derby team.

The image conveys, to me, a feeling of rapt attention, and maybe even some dismay, in some — unseen — sequence of events. Most of the sportswomen in the picture have their gazes out to the left (as the viewer sees it), and with a mixed array of facial expressions. Whatever they are watching is not too horrifying — some of the watchers are relatively neutral — but it is certainly a strong attractor of attention and even speculation.

The exact interpretation of the picture, and of the story untold, the hypothetical object of attention, is rather open-ended. The picture doesn't push its own interpretation of events very strongly. While most looks follow the same axis that the line of the helmets sketches out, there are motions in the image that counter this — most notably the girl turned back towards her team-mates instead of out toward the action, seemingly involved in conversation.

The attention and drama I see in the picture seems to me to be a strongly encoded message: it is not something I feel particularly ambivalent about. It is strongly conveyed by the facial expression on the right-most face in the picture, but assisted, also, by the several other players looking in the same direction, and by the lines following their gazes.

I remember the situation I shot the picture in — at a Roller Derby bout between Berkeley and Richmond, two teams from the SF/Bay area. Just outside the shot is, additionally, the coach of the team, with her own face a picture of rapt attention and emotional investment in the action on the rink.

Purple house

[Roller Derby] The Chase

[Roller Derby] Zooming

[Roller Derby] Cleaning gnome

[Roller Derby] Jammer

[Roller Derby] Sprinting through the curve (diptych)

[Roller Derby] Berkeley Jammer

Standing proud

At the Conservatory of Flowers

At the conservatory of flowers

Purple flower beneath a blue sky

B/W parked buses.

Yesterday's photo, in a black and white composition.

Parked MunI buses