2012 Plus One Collection
Way back in January I posted that my photograph Feel The Wind had been selected to appear in the 2012 Plus One Collection curated by Ivan Marakov and sponsored by the Kilgoris Project and the Photographers for Good Foundation. Well my copy arrived yesterday and looks (and smells) fantastic. A large format (12" x 12") ensures the pictures look great. The range and quality of photographs is simply awe-inspiring and I feel quite chuffed to have been included in such company. There are around 300 photographers included with a single photograph from each. Lovely :-)
In Review - ZooPaGoo and Party Gravy
ZooPaGoo and Party Gravy at The Polish White Eagle Club 3rd May 2013
Is there anything better than live, well produced funk? Anything that starts a foot tapping? A tapping that quickly becomes a stomp and a uncontrollable urge to groove? Actually I can think of a few things that are way better but last night live, strutty funk was where it was at.
Party Gravy ... now there's a name for a band. Gravy ... thick, rich and fragrant. The sauce that enhances and helps the flesh go down. Such a lot to live up to... did last night's gravy boys deliver? They did. Featuring not one, but two drummers meshing like smooth cogs in a drive train effortlessly entwined with tight and solid bass, easily providing a Hard-Bop groove for alto sax, two trumpet and two trombone. Rounded out nicely with vocals, the 8-piece delivered well-crafted numbers that slowly but steadily filled the room. My favourite were the horn solos, with a trumpet solo performed by Ax Long a bright and colourful affair with excellent diction and stabs. They had slinky dancers. I like slinky dancers.
Interval saw us back at the bar ... it seems tonight's beer of choice is the Perla Chmielowa Pils - a crisp, dry brew with extra hops and a kick I didn't really feel until this morning. Thank you to the friendly bar staff who helpfully assisted with navigating the extensive range of Polish beers and vodkas.
I was sitting having a chat with Simon at the entry desk when ZooPaGoo took the stage. Listening through the curtain I was immediately impressed with the engine room of this band. The drums, combined with strong and dextrous bass produced a NY/Chicago strut that demanded attention. Keys that reminded me of fleshy orange marmalade, rich with texture provided deep colour and flavour to the mix. Local wah-guitar legend, the fez-adorning Zedman, added gravy all of his own. Sax and trumpet comprised the horn section and though they stabbed, swooped and dived in sync, I felt they missed their third member to fill out the mids. The horn solos were bright and left me wanting more which was a pity as they seemed a bit far between. But that's quibbling really. Original songs were interspersed with funk classics. There was a little roughness at times but their interpretation of Johnny Guitar Watson's Ain't That A Bitch was masterly with well-executed stabs and changes. That one was a real pleasure ... a great track preformed with gusto and stagecraft. Vocals shone with Sean 'Funklestiltskin Chickenstrut' providing the all important stage presence required of street funk done good. The band was joined on stage by a cohort of more slinky dancers from the floor toward the end of their set. While the members of ZooPaGoo aren't bad looking ... the dancers easily enhanced their stage presence.
I took no photos but there were two DSLR-wielding snappers and numerous phone-heads who I'm sure got some of the great pictures that were to be had on the night.
Sound was handled very nicely by Dave with responsive attention to detail and clear, well articulated sound. Nice work Dave. Lighting was used to dramatic effect by both performers and lighting desk (also by multi-talented Dave)
My friend and I arrived late around 9:45pm after enjoying ourselves elsewhere (unthinkable I know!) there was a DJ playing when we arrived but I only caught the last track ... it sounded good but I can't really tell you any more about them.
The Polo, strong beers, fine company mixed in with ZooPaGoo's funk-stuff and Party Gravy's Hard-Bop grooves made it a memorable, if blurry, night. Thanks to Nigel and the CMC for the double pass and the opportunity to write a review for you.
Sausages
I like sausages. I think I've always liked sausages. I like sausages so much I came to the idea that I wanted to make my own ... it's simply ground meat and spices stuffed into a casing right? So, my friend Ashley and I decided to give it a go. I mean how hard could it be? Well it turns out ... not very!
Bit squeamish about grinding up meat and intestinal things? Here's a completely different post.
Onward!
I have my parents original Kenwood Chef A701 which incidentally is as old as I am ... give or take ... and amongst the myriad attachments they had bought for it (many of which are still in their original boxes) is a mincer attachment. Please excuse the phone-pics ;-)
OK ... mechanism for grinding meat? Check!
Next we need some meat. This is roughly 2kg of pork forequarter prior to being coarsely cubed.
And after... some fat was left on to assist with the cooking...
And first pass through the coarse grinder...
Flavours ... We went with fresh, finely cut sage and thyme (about 2tbsp of each), some nutmeg and ginger and about 2tbsp of sea salt. The salt is the critical one ... too little and the sausage tastes like straight cooked meat and too much ... well, too salty ... see, I do something once and standing on the shoulders of Google Giants I sound like I actually know what I'm talking about! The spices were mixed through by hand with the addition of about 150ml of iced water which serves to congeal the fat. I didn't take any pictures of that bit for fear of encasing my phone in ground meat.
OK ... the next stage involves putting the filling into the casing to make sausages. What to use? Synthetic or gut? I spoke to my local butcher at Lyneham, makers of the famous Country Pride sausages and they supplied us a length of sheep intestine for the casing with instuction to run a little cold water through before fitting to the nozzle. As we did so it swelled up like ... well ... like gut... Ashley is seen here threading the casing onto the filling nozzle. In case you're wondering it is exactly like fitting a very long and slippery organic condom... there ... you always wanted to know that huh?
Here's the nozzle fitted to the end of the mincing attachment ready to be stuffed. I'm not going to share what I thought this resembled...
OK! Fire that sucker up and lets make a sausage!
Certainly looks like a sausage! And here's where we ran into trouble (and it wasn't because I was too busy documenting to notice what was going on ;-) ) but the Kenwood mincer with the nozzle attached kept getting blocked necessitating the regular dismantling every 40cm length of sausage or so. The reason is the design of the grinding filter and I think the worm screw was pushing meat to the plate faster than it could be pushed through. After several dismantles and scraping out of tangled meat ... definitely not a job for the squeamish ... and the application of brute force, we had ... you guessed it! Sausages!
We then cleaned up (how responsible is that!) poured some more wine and set about cooking a couple to sample them... it was about midnight by this stage...
And the result!
And they tasted bloody fantastic! It's always a cool moment in creation when you stand back and look at something you've made and think 'We did that!'. Going to do it again? Absolutely! The only part of the process I didn't enjoy was the repeated dismantling and hand-clearing of the mincer during the filling of the casing. The Kenwood really isn't the machine for that part of the job. It did great on the initial grind ... just not the filling. I'm looking into a dedicated sausage stuffer and we'll try again after that. In the meantime I'm off to a BBQ this afternoon where our sausages are the guests of honour ;-)
Dee-lish!
Collective Thoughts
I have been getting back into taking pictures again. This follows on from my moving and renovation experiences late last year when I took almost no pictures of anyone or anything except the progress (and at times ... total lack of progress) on the renovations to my flat. It was a period of perhaps six or seven months where I took next to no pictures purely for the pleasure of taking pictures ... it was like my photo-mojo had vamoosed. I like to think of it now as a kind of enforced sabbatical ... a time when I reflected upon other things and new directions ... though I recall at the time finding it confusing and debilitating.
I mean, after a while you start to think about whether you'll be able to take pictures again. You look back on the remarkable things you've captured and published before but they feel like they were taken by a different person and there's so much going on in your mind, things are moving so quickly, that even beginning to write a post feels like it's passed before you even start.
I knew the mojo would return ... I could feel it circling me. I began to see pictures again ... the ones the you compose when you aren't carrying a camera. You see the picture ... the light, the crop, the depth and the colour even though you didn't actually take it. Truth be told that's how most of my pictures are captured ... I have a large mental store of those ones ... the ones I saw but didn't take.
Enter The Ellis Collective; a six piece folk-rock (also referred to as 'Bloke-folk' ;-) ) group from Canberra. I'd shot them before and we were both very happy with the results. I met with Matty Ellis (the large chap with the shaved head) in early March and we tossed around some ideas. There were to be two separate shoots ... the first of the band having a picnic and the second ... well ...
Matty had this idea of a shot with band at night standing in front of a car's headlights and I began to think of how I'd do it. This was one of those times when you know technically how you would take a shot but have never actually taken a shot like it. I knew from my Strobist readings many years ago (that's a great site if you're into using any kind of flash in your photography btw) how to expose for the background lighting and illuminate the foregound with speedlights or flash. I knew I could do it and I wanted to do it and the band were into it but I'd never attempted it before ... and certainly not with paying clients! There was a real risk that we would come away with nothing ... that I'd assembled the group in the dark for nothing ;-)
The shot called for a stretch of deserted road ... I used trusty Google Maps and found a spot amongst the fields of Pialligo out near the airport, arrived at sunset and began to set up. We moved a car into position and I got the band to stand in front but it became clear that I needed more light ... so we moved another two cars to just out of frame ... now we had plenty of light :-)
Now for the speedlights, I used two (Nikon SB-910 & SB-800) atop two mid light stands on either side of the band. The SB-910 on the right of the frame sported a Honly speed grid to provide harsh, directional light across the band. I controlled the power of the speedlights using the the D600 camerabuilt in flash as a commander. The camera uses the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS) to alloow the body to remotely control the power setting of speedlights. The camera was atop a tripod and the pictures shot through my 70-200 f/2.8.
The road was dusty and I got the band to kick up some dust to produce a smokey effect. One hassle with that was there a light breeze blowing across the frame from right to left ... I left the camera (with my remote in my pocket) and went down to band to get some dust in the air. However, the remote sensor on the Nikon is on the left side of the body and wouldn't trigger from my upwind side ... for these pictures I threw the dust, ran across the frame, fired the remote and got the picture ... fun! I do like a picture you have to do some work for :-)
I even did a lighting diagram just for you :-)
And some from the picnic shoot too :-)
Sydney: Anish Kapoor - Museum of Contemporary Art
I have just returned from a glorious weekend in Sydney. Well, glorious for the people and things I saw ... the weather was cold and wet and so unlike Summer. The main purpose of the trip was see Dead Can Dance perform at the Sydney Opera House on the Sunday night. DCD are essentially two people; Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry. They have been working together for nearly 30 years with their first release coming in 1984 and their latest work Anastasis released last year. The performance was outstanding and supported by another 5 musicians. If you're unfamiliar with their work and you have 6 minutes of guaranteed 'alone-time' click here. There's no 'clip' with this one ... just a visual of the cover art for the album The Serpents Egg. The track was also featured on the Baraka Soundtrack. They performed this last night about half way through their set and I wept ... this piece always moves me and hearing it live has now somehow made my life more complete.
Anyways, I digress! I also saw the Anish Kapoor show at the Museum of Contemporary Art down on Circular Quay. This show is his first for Australia and didn't disappoint. There are many visually challenging pieces in the show and the scale of some is quite breathtaking. Like, for example My Red Homeland (below). From the catalog;
My Red Homeland is a monumental wax sculpture that consists of 25 tons of paraffin wax mixed with a deep red pigment. In this enormous circular sculpture, a large motorised steel blade slowly traces the circumference of the structure, which measures 12 metres in diameter. Each rotation of the blade takes about one hour, as it cuts a course through the wax, dissecting and reshaping it into endless new forms.
I know ... to make this work, I think we need some wax ... how about 25 tons of wax! And I want it red, blood red, so when it's cut and churned it resembles meat ... yes ... like that, flesh. Visceral, cut, shaped and continually reworked (once an hour) ... quite brilliant really.
The scale alone is enough to grab you in.
I went up to Sydney with my good friend David and his wife Thao. David's a huge DCD fan and he drove us all up to Sydney for our weekend of culture. Here he is in the picture below photographing Kapoor's Memory, a 24 ton hollow steel construction that required the roof to be temporarily removed to lower it into its install space.
Now, apart from these rather colossal installations, there are a lot of pieces that sincerely mess with your visual perceptions of the space you find yourself. Kapoor uses non-reflective pigments in a number of pieces which really works to mess with you perception ... I didn't take any pictures of those ... it would have been pointless really ... you have stand in front of it and experience them yourself ... sorry about that.
I did take a picture of When I was Pregnant (below)
Oh and there was a whole room of very shiny S-curves and C-curves all incredibly polished that served to reflect and cross-reflect the room and the people in it in a myriad different ways. I spoke to one of the assistants who explained to me that the artist has a team of specialist polishers flown over from New York specifically to polish these installations ... the polishing took nine days for the MCA show. They did a bloody good job!
I really enjoyed this show by Anish Kapoor. It runs until the 13th of April 2013.
How's about you? Been to visit any particularly fine art recently.
2012 PlusOne Collection
Found out yesterday that my photograph Feel the Wind was selected for the print edition of the 2012 PlusOne Collection.
It's exciting and it seems I'm in esteemed company ... the 299 other images selected are all fantastic. I've pre-ordered my copy and I'm looking forward to seeing it in April :-)
Great collection, great cause. Check it out.
About time I said hello again
A quick post to say hello again. Life has been very busy for me here at Chez Geoff with little time to devote to my blog or to photography in general. One of the exciting things I've been doing is pulling together an exhibition proposal for The Sum of the Parts sometime in 2013.
While I've been touching base in the briefest of spaces I have watched my list of unread post from the people I follow regularly grow and grow. I will come and visit but right now I have some things I need to get organised so I will be sporadically in and out. I did take the time to take a series of selfies on the weekend. It's been a while since I took any selfies and so I thought it a good theme for this post say hello :-)
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Finding the Spot
A couple of weeks ago I attended an artists retreat down on the far south coast of New South Wales. I had my oculus, my glass sphere with me and I was down at the beach before dawn each morning looking for that time when light and landscape come together to create something breathtaking.
Sometimes a picture seems to assemble itself before my eyes. I get this feeling as a scene unfolds, like a premonition, that right this moment or very soon after something beautiful is happening in front of me or 'just over there'. Perhaps it is simply my mind opening itself to the possibility of beauty ... that I am allowing myself to be open to what is unfolding in front of me. Other times I can be surrounded by a terrific scene and light but I'm oblivious to it as I search for something within it ... something beyond it. Those times I'm looking to scratch an itch I can't reach ... I know there's something there but I can't see it ... yet! This picture is a rare one of me doing just that.
This is a picture of me taken by my friend Helga as I walked across the wave platform in the light just after dawn holding my oculus out in front of looking for the spot ... in my left hand I'm cradling my camera and my back pocket holds my cable release and intervalometer. I have an obsessive gleam in my eye that speaks of concentration and an early start. I am surrounded by superb golden dawnlight that the ocean spray is carrying in foggy curtains around me ... beautiful!
About five minutes after this picture was taken I was taking the photograph below (which blogged about here) ... I had found the spot ... I had seen beyond and now I'm sharing it with you.
How about you? Do you search, often surrounded by beauty but oblivious to it? Maybe you find yourself standing inside a tree heavy with spring blossom and buzzing loudly with bees looking for that bloom that speaks for the tree ... that speaks for all of spring? The leaf that speaks for Autumn... do you find yourself finding the spot?
I'd like to know :-)
The Invisible Mother
This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.
- The Hidden Mother
Now I understand that this practice originated when exposure times were slow meaning subjects had to sit perfectly still to render themselves sharply. I get that some families wanted only to have a portrait of their offspring with no parents. I still find the pictures a little macabre and creepy. I know that I'm looking with a modern eye and that what I'm seeing was 'standard practice' for the photographer and subjects but I can't help feeling that the pictures resonate with our society's underlying desire to make mothers invisible at the expense of their families. We don't pay mothers to do what they do ... we expect it. The need of the next generation are put, quite rightly, first but at the expense of and often with hidden cost to the mother. The Invisible Mother.
So here we have a series of pictures which had they been taken today could be hailed as a representation of the western social invisibilty of motherhood ... but that's not why they were made.
Interesting stuff to ponder ... what do you think?
Footnote: I found these fascinating photographs over at BlueMilk and liked them so much I'm referencing the original site Retronaut where you can find a stack of these images.
Connecting you now
I was inspired by a post by fellow blogger Star Rush in Seattle called Currents. In the post, Star spoke of the currents of energy, life and power. The post was accompanied by one of her beautiful monochrome photos featuring a jumble of power-line and cable. While I liked the post very much, it got me to thinking about not only the energy the lines carry, about how they power our homes or carry telephony (remember then?) but how they connected us. I got to reflecting that when an operator said "Connecting you now..." they really were. You were physically connected to the person you were speaking to.
Think about that for a moment ... physically connected to someone else whether in the next street or on the other side of the planet.
While I embrace the freedom that the mobile age has brought, I feel that something somewhere has been lost ... a connection to one another if you will. How we're more connected than ever but somehow dis-connected at the same time.
Connecting you now.
'The Hotel' by Rudi de Jong
Picked this up in town from Rudi ...who wanders the town centres with photocopies of his work. I quite like them and happy to give him some exposure. I'll get a portrait of him one day and post that too...
'The Hotel' by Rudi de Jong
The oasis
the home away from home
old friends
the beer flowing freely
the publican
the weary pilgrim
music from the juke-box
the visitor
the cry
"Drinks on the house for everyone"
everyone filled with joy
troubles forgotten
problems solved
the beer glass raised high
the final word
Christ himself
a friend of publicans
and sinners
the Hotel
'The Hotel' by Rudi de Jong (20/3/2012)
Picked this up in town from Rudi ...who wanders the town centres with photocopies of his work. I quite like them and happy to give him some exposure. I'll get a portrait of him one day and post that too...
Sweet White Noise
When I first published this self portrait of me sleeping like a bat, I was listening to the album The Sound of White by Australian artist Missy Higgins.
Listening to the title track got me thinking about the sound of white noise and how relaxing I found it. About how white noise is the sound made by all the frequencies randomly occurring together at an equal or flat power. About how the sound is there but there is no discernible frequency or signal that stands out (because there isn't one!). It's like experiencing thick fog, an aural isolation chamber. Listening to white noise I find my mind exploring it, looking for a handle, something familiar. Rationally I know it's not there but my mind searches anyway, fumbling and groping. Then comes a strange feeling of floating with in the white noise as it surrounds me with no detectable source ... the sound comes from everywhere - omnidirectional.
White noise gets its name from the term white light which describes a light where all the frequencies are of equal power. I like exploring that too.
Wikipedia has a more thorough and technical description of white noise and it's myriad uses.
Family Portrait Session: R&T
From a family portrait session I did just before Christmas. These guys were great fun to photograph ... four families, 12 people including three littlies. There was much running around and chasing and everybody played. This is why I like taking pictures of people :-)
If you're watching ... thank you.
