How in the hell did I do that? Sometimes when I look back at an older photogram or print that I made I wonder how I got an effect or what kind of process I was using. Fortunately I have my own personal time machine. It works some of the time. It is pretty simple. …
As far back as I can remember my family created and sent our own original Christmas Cards. Yes, my heritage is Jewish, but we never practiced, and like many German Jews in Cincinnati we celebrated Christmas. I have continued the tradition of making my own Christmas cards since I moved out of my parents’ house …
A recipe for a Silver Sunbeam – A glimpse at how I made a 21st century edition of the classic 19th century book of photographic techniques. John Towler’s 1864 “Silver Sunbeam” was a revolutionary book that shared recipes for making those very new and magical things called photographs. The PDF of the 1864 edition The …
The photos for this post should be shot through a hazy filter since the story sounds impossible in light of the current state of the stock photography market and the memories are unclear. I was thinking back to when I used to make a decent income from stock photography. Yeah, like Getty Images… but different, …
Some would say I like to make things unnecessarily complicated, and that might be true. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to just press a button and be done with a picture, but I simply don’t know when to leave well enough alone. Take for example my new series Pythagoras… Named for one …
“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” (said to be from Ernest Hemingway, but the quote has been attributed to others and the source probably predates Hemingway.) Regardless of who said it, the sentiment is real. Writing isn’t hard, but writing well is very hard. …
“Photographs do not lie” …. but then again, they don’t tell the truth either. I like to say that and I love to make pictures that don’t tell the truth. A good example is my Borderlands series. They appear to be panoramic landscapes. But they are actually gigantic enlargements of the artifacts on the …
It is a cliché but true… “If you can remember the Sixties you weren’t there.” I can’t remember much of that era but I was there. When I was in high school and before I was old enough to drive (16 was the legal driving age in Ohio back then) Johnathan Crawford, one of my …
Making “Undeveloped” – a recent 3D printed artist book – required a bunch of experiments and changes. I can usually see some of the problems and some of the ways I can improve the piece in the digital stages, during the CAD design in Tinkercad or in the slicing in Simplify3D. But sometimes when the …
When I was little we used to “play war” which meant the neighborhood kids would roam the neighborhood with fake guns and hide behind bushes and sheds to surprise ambush their friends shouting “Bombs away!” or “Bang!” or “Boom: you’re dead!” That was the 1950’s and 60’s when the true war fears had caused the …