Three Pieces, One Source

 Here are three pieces made with various apps on my iPad which start from the same image. In this case, it's a photo shot from a girl's exercise book published in 1964.

Two Pieces, One Source

 Here are some pieces made on my iPad a couple months ago. Recently I've been playing with shooting images from old magazines, textbooks, etc. and making at least two different pieces from the same image. These are some of what I've made.

2 Versions

 Here are two different versions of a piece I made on my iPad a few months ago. Haven't posted them anywhere because I haven't titled them, and I thought they needed a title. Suggestions happily accepted.

Weekly Shooting Excursion XVII: Blue Island (Again)

For my seventeenth ‘keep me sane during the pandemic’ photo shoot, I returned to Blue Island, a suburb just south of Chicago I had already shot twice on these outings. My first of these weekly shoots was to the Olde Western area of Blue Island, and I returned a few days later to shoot on a rainy night. I shoot in Blue Island often because it’s close to home and easy to get to, and I find it kind of photogenic. It’s also good when time is short but I still want to get out and shoot, which was the case this time. With the Fall semester in full swing, I had to focus my attention on teaching, and any shooting trip would have to be a quick one. Also, I had hurt my knee, was painfully hobbling around wearing a brace, and didn’t want a longer outing with lots of walking (although I ended up walking for about 1.5 miles, until the knee hurt too much to continue). I chose the north end of Blue Island, which looks less like a small town than the areas I shot in earlier, and more like an aging suburban area, which, if I’m being honest, is exactly what it is. I love mid-century architecture, especially the low rise commercial buildings found on the edges of cities, and there’s a few of them in this area, so that made the shooting fun.

In case you’re wondering, I still don’t know what was up with my knee. I ended up braving a visit to a medical facility during the pandemic to see a doctor about it, but they didn’t think there was anything serious. X-rays revealed a completely normal knee. Wearing a brace for a while and icing it a couple times a day eventually took care of the issue. Guess I’m just getting old!

Here are my favorites from this shoot.

Weekly Shooting Excursion XVI: Bridgeport

My sixteenth ‘keep me sane during the pandemic’ photo shoot can’t really be called a summer shoot. It occurred in early September, still summer by the calendar, but fall was starting to make its presence known. This was also after the school year and full-time teaching duties resumed for me, and keeping myself busy was no longer an issue (after a summer filled with stress wondering if my classes would actually run, it was kind of a relief to be busy with work). After two weeks in front of the computer, countless emails, lesson planning and videoconferences, however, it felt really good to step away from all that and enjoy a few hours shooting on a sunny, quite warm but not too hot summer/fall cusp day.

I chose Bridgeport, a neighborhood on Chicago’s near south side. I had shot in a different area of Bridgeport a few weeks earlier, and have shot there a couple times in the past, and knew it would be an interesting area for me to shoot in. 

The central area of Bridgeport, where I shot on this outing, is a pleasant area with an almost, but not quite hipsterish/artsy feeling. Many artists live in the neighborhood, and there has been a strong artist’s presence in the area for decades. There are a couple prominent art centers in big old warehouse buildings in the area, and a sprinkling of galleries in storefronts. Even with all the artists in the neighborhood, however, it has never quite shaken its working class roots, or its unfortunate race issues. Chicago’s history is fraught with unpleasant race issues, and Bridgeport is an area which comes up often when discussing them. The location of the I-94 expressway, for example, along the east edge of Bridgeport is largely believed to be a purposeful attempt at creating a barrier between the neighborhood and Bronzeville, a historic area long known as a center of African-American culture in the city, which lies just to the east of the expressway.

While maybe lessened in recent years, and while it now is considered one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the city, unpleasant race issues remain in Bridgeport.

None of that was evident while I was shooting there, however. There were people in the cafes and restaurants that dot 31st. St., kids playing in playgrounds, and it felt relaxing wandering through the neighborhood shooting photos. Here’s my favorites from this shoot.

 

Weekly Shooting Excursion XV: Little Village…North Lawndale…Bohemian California?

My fifteenth summer ‘keep me sane’ outing was a really interesting and enjoyable photo shoot. I decided to shoot along Cermak Rd. (22nd St) west of Western Avenue, in what I assumed was Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. I had really enjoyed shooting along 26th St. in Little Village earlier in the summer, and was expecting something similar shooting a few blocks to the northeast. While there were some similarities, there were also some big differences. The first difference was the actual neighborhood where I was  shooting. I thought I was in the northeast corner of Little Village, just west of Pilsen. Looking on Google maps, it showed the area as being part of Little Village. Looking in Wikipedia, however, I read that Cermak west of Western was actually in North Lawndale, the neighborhood directly north of Little Village. North Lawndale is more a struggling neighborhood than Little Village, and doesn’t have the buzzy street vibe that Little Village has. To further complicate things, when uploading photos from this shoot to my Flickr account, it labeled most of them as being in ‘Bohemian California’. Flickr comes up with a lot of odd neighborhood names (so does Google Maps),  but I Googled ‘Bohemian California’ and found that the area was informally called that in the past, as it was once an area with many Czech immigrants (that also explains why nearby Pilsen, now a largely Mexican neighborhood, also has a Czech name).

The other big difference was in the feel of the area. While 26th St. just a few blocks south and west of where I was shooting is a busy street full of small businesses and shops mainly catering to the large Mexican population in the neighborhood, Cermak Rd. in this area is much quieter. There were quite a few businesses, but also a lot of closed storefronts, and there was considerably less pedestrian and vehicle traffic. It’s more run down than 26th St., and the farther west I walked, the grubbier the neighborhood felt. The street eventually became a couple block stretch of auto repair shops and weed filled lots before ducking under railroad tracks and continuing as a residential area.

Regardless of the name and the feel of the neighborhood, I found the area very photogenic, and shot a lot of photos. Urban areas always attract me when shooting, and the somewhat gritty feel of the area was easy and fun to shoot. 

This shoot was also the last time I used my Nishika camera, a cheap plastic 4-lens camera made in the late ’80's to produce lenticular photos. I had my Nishika loaded with old, expired film, and was shooting photos, when it jammed while trying to advance the film. I tried again, and the entire film advance mechanism broke. I was a little disappointed. While it’s a cheap crappy camera I bought at a garage sale, I had rediscovered it this summer after not using it much for ten years or so, and was particularly enjoying shooting panoramic or mosaic scenes with it and joining those images in Photoshop. I may try taking the camera apart to see if I can get it to work again, but as it’s a cheap plastic camera, I’m doubtful that will be successful. Replacing it isn’t going to happen either, as crappy camera enthusiasts have discovered the Nishika. The camera I paid $2.00 for now sells for over $100 on Ebay, and it definitely isn’t worth nearly that much! Along with my favorites shot with my real camera, I’ve added a couple of the final photos made with the Nishika to the end of this post.

 

Made with my now broken Nishika camera.

The last photo shot with my crappy old 4-lens Nishika camera. The double exposure is from the camera jamming and exposing twice on the same piece of film.