widart

Lovers of vegatables rejoice. These carrots share a loving embrace. Entwined and intermingled in an imitate way, these carrots are a natural play following Robert’s serpentined driftwood.

I have to say I struggled with choosing today’s image for the Daily Photo Game. I went from humor, to abstraction and finally landed on this interpretation. What drew me to this image is the negative space between the slats, echoing the negative space between Robert’s diagonal lines. Add to that the diagonal of the ladder on the dock and there seemed to be a connection between them. Though at the beginning of the edit it was not my first choice. I have always liked this image, its has a haunting narrative of empty and off-season spaces, a stark contrast to its intended purpose, summer playtime. The black and white treatment adds to this haunting quality. I am also curious to see how this image frames on the page of the DPG website, as there is no tone in the sky and it will bleed into the page background. This lack of framing may extend and borrow more emptiness from the page itself. Or not, we will see.

 

My latest image for the game. Today was such a stellar day in Portland, I had to get outside. It was one of those afternoons I knew was going to produce blue shadows, I love these days. I went to visit a fellow photographer’s show in an industrial area of PDX, ripe pickings for a hard light shot. I found several, and this one rose to the top very quickly. Please feel free to share with your social networks and join my blog, thanks! Russ

What caught my eye in Robert’s “Tattoo Lady”, was the weird extra eye to the left of the woman’s face, its almost as though there is another entity surrounding the illustration of the girl. I then flashed on an illustrative photograph I made of a dancer who was revealing only one eye to camera. As I viewed the two images together, the more I liked the pairing, the flowing shapes around the figures, the singularity of form and subject, and in particular, the haunting eye.

Roberts image spawned all kind of ideas for me. I have some shots of a tree farm in Central Oregon that connect to the feather-like image I saw in Robert’s shot. I had thought that we had exercised the blue theme enough and was thinking about a change. Ultimately, though, I chose this image of a rocket vapor trail fired from Vandenberg space port near Santa Barbara. I took a series of images of this aborted? rocket launch and have attached the series for further interest. As I am leaving for Montana very soon, so I needed to go to my library for my selection.