Heaven or Hell

Heaven or Hell

digital photo, 2019

I shot this with my iPhone while wandering around downtown Chicago a couple days ago. The sign is from someone standing just out of frame handing out religious tracts. Seemed an appropriate one to post on New Year's Eve, when people tend to reflect back on the year.

Madison Rainy Night

I was in Madison, Wisconsin for a weekend getaway over Thanksgiving this year. The weather was terrible the entire weekend, but that didn't hinder my enjoyment of the sleepy college town vibe. Holiday weekend and no home football game meant the town was pretty empty. The bad weather actually worked in my favor on Saturday evening. We were about to walk the few blocks from our hotel to the restaurant we had chosen for dinner, when we noticed it was pouring. Really pouring, with periods of hail as well. I grabbed my camera, and made a couple shots right as we were leaving the hotel (the first shot at the top of this page), but then waited until after dinner, when the rain had slowed some, to make the rest of the photos you see here. Rainy nights are really fun to shoot, and it rarely happens that there's a rainy night when I'm in an interesting location, have the time to shoot, and actually feel like sloshing around with wet feet to make some photos.

Offering

Offering

collage on wallpaper, 2012

A collage made a few years ago, just getting around to posting it now. This one didn't excite me too much when it was finished. I didn't hate it, I just wasn't moved by it. Looking at it now, while it may not be the most interesting collage I've ever made, and it's certainly not where I'm at creatively right now (I'm not doing much hand made collage at all), it's not a bad one.

Posters

Poster #1

iPhoneography, 2019

Poster #2

iPhoneography, 2019

Poster #3

iPhoneography, 2019

Exactly one year ago, on December 13, 2018, I was doing some shooting in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood and saw these posters stuck to plywood covering the windows of a vacant building. I liked the way the tears in these old posters simultaneously degraded the image yet added texture, visual interest and mystery. I tried working with the photos a couple of times, but never ended up with anything I liked. 

Earlier this fall, I gave it another shot. I imported them into my iPad, and giving myself the instruction to make them look as different from each other as possible, started working with them using various apps (mainly Procreate, but also Snapseed, Fragment and Halftone). This time, I liked the results.

元気ですか'

元気ですか'

iPhoneography, 2019

Apps used: Phonto, Circular, Snapseed

I made this piece in about ten minutes a couple days ago. I was basically revisiting some photo apps on my iPad that I hadn't used in a while, and this was the result. The layout and main construction was done in Phonto, an app I quite like, even if I don't use it much.

The title, 元気ですか' (pronounced genki desu ka), is Japanese for 'how are you?'. Well, it kind of is, anyway. Translation can be difficult at times, and there's a lot of nuance lost when translating '元気ですか'' as 'how are you'. If you want a lengthly discussion that goes into all the nuance of that Japanese phrase and the ways it is used, look here. The pronunciation link above actually is for 'お元気ですか' (o-genki desu ka), which is the formal version you would use when speaking to a coworker or someone you don't know too well. I just liked the basic, Japanese 101 phrase with the rather grotesque photo in the piece, which is why I put it there.