The Sespe and the Santa Clara Rivers meet just outside of Fillmore, CA. The sandy bottom is home to a lot of tall reeds and other plant life. Shot just before sunset.
Reeds and bare trees by the Sespe River in Fillmore, CA. Fall skies and Fall colors right before sunset.
Cat tails on the Sespe River in Fillmore. Being late in early Autumn, the riverbed is completely dry and the foliage is brown. Shot just after sunset, and texture for artistic effect.
A pair of dried yuccas by the Sespe River in Fillmore, CA. Sometime after sunset, the dry riverbed is in the background. Has a groovy textured effect applied to the image.
By the Sespe River in Fillmore, CA. A copse of sycamores stands beside a small footpath on the riverbank.
Here’s a nice little image from the Sespe. I like the contrast between the two plants, and I like the way the color of the sky came out an ominous gray. I shot the original image shortly after sunset, and the sky was a sort of bluish gray to begin with. I stumble upon an area along the river bank where there seemed to be a lot of really old husks of cars strewn about. Perhaps it was a place where people dumped their trash a long time ago.
Pretty exciting – I’ve cranked out 3 of these images in the last couple of weeks.
Here’s a pretty little picture I shot this week near the Sespe River in Fillmore. This is probably the first edited and completed image I have posted this year. With a death in the family, and a few other artistic distractions, it’s been an odd year for me. It feels good to be making landscape images again, and I can guarantee there will be more on the way!
So, I guess that I’ve been slacking way hard with this blog lately. I got really caught up on a really big web project that took months out of my life. I don’t think that I ever really recovered. That’s not to say that I haven’t been keeping up on my own projects. Just in the last few weeks, I knocked out a few images for my Fillmore series. I’ve been kind of focusing on taking pictures of the town as well as the usual images of trees and farmland.
A couple of images from this series will be in the upcoming Art About Agriculture show at the Santa Paula Art Museum. I very excited to have some of the images in that show. The exhibition opens in November, and I will post a more detailed announcement at a later date.
So I guess I haven’t posted to the blog for a while – there’s been plenty going on that is post-worthy, but I’ve been working on an epic web project for a client and it has been taking up a lot of my time. The site prototype looks great and should be complete sometime next month.
The biggest news I have is that Amelia has started her own blog and has been reviewing restaurants in the Ventura and Los Angeles areas. You can see her blog at ispygoodfood.wordpress.com. Definitely worth checking out. I took some portraits for the site which was pretty exciting for me because it’s pretty rare that I can get her to sit still long enough to have her picture taken.
Speaking of photography, Amelia got me an X-Rite Color Checker Passport for my birthday last month. The X-Rite Color Checker Passport is an invaluable color calibration tool for the photographer. It’s basically a Pantone-calibrated color chart that come with some super-cool software to create camera profiles in Lightroom. I shoot a close up of the subject holding the chart before or after the shoot, create the profile and voila! Awesome color in Lightroom. This is really cool for people like me who shoot with the otherwise super-awesome Panasonic Lumix GH2. I love my Lumix – it’s a great camera, the lenses are superbe, but sometimes the stock color profile leaves me a little uninspired. Taking a little extra time and using this tool has pretty much erased any dissatisfactory color issues that I may have experienced with my Lumix. Thanks, Amelia!
My Freekmagnet books are coming along. I made a slight improvement with the binding by adding a layer of bookbinder’s cheese cloth in the gluing process. I think it add a lot of strength to the final product. My next step is to make improve the way that the spine is attached to the cover. I’d like a little of the glue to wrap around to the first and last page of the book. I’ve been looking at other perfect-bound books and they seem to follow this design. I think that this will be more of an esthetic choice as opposed to a structural advantage. In the end I think that the trick will be to get the glue to wrap around consistently.
I do have three copies of Freekmagnet for sale. They will be sold for $85 and for now, can be ordered from me directly. I will have some nice images of the final books posted soon.
Lastly, in a effort to begin working on my own new website, I’ve taken on the challenge if scripting HTML5 Canvas backgrounds. Not having the skills of a super genius web engineer, I’ve been playing around with paper.js. Paper is a pretty cool little script library for knuckleheads like me to work in HTML5 Canvas. So far, I’ve managed to modify some of the demo scripts to my liking. I have a little sample here to post until I finish something else.
