Bus shelter project

First things first: Happy New Year! :-)

Wow, it's been a month since I've posted and sure a lot has happened in the meantime. It's been hard to get back into things after the holidays, but I expect to catch up with a bunch of posts over the days to come.

I just learned that 3 out of the images I'd submitted have been printed and will be mounted on 2 x 8 ft panels on 3 bus shelters in the Seattle area. It's pretty exciting to have contributed to public art in Seattle. For better or worse, these images will be up for the next 10 years, so it'll be interesting to watch how they age. I've been having technical issues with the blog, so instead of uploading the individual images, I ended up uploading my end-of-project presentation. If you can't see the slides too well, you can click on them to enlarge them. The six images I submitted are slides 18-21. One of them didn't make it past round 1 and two more were eliminated in round 2. Overall, though, 3 images to be selected is well beyond my expectations, so I'm happy. Which ones do you like the most?


At the end of the deck, I've listed the 3 that made it. Once the shelters get set up, I'll drive by and photograph them...I'll post the pix here.

Winners: time for coffee (16), locked secrets (18), swimmers (21).

Some abstracts

I realize that I've been having lots of fun creating abstract images. It's something I'd like to pursue and explore further.

Here's one that captures London traffic for me. It's a composite of the same image of a passing bus shot horizontally, overlaid by a few versions of itself, shifted vertically. It's a bit Piet Mondrian, I admit. It wasn't intentional. I took the original image from my hotel room when I was in London in November.

The second image is for one of my Design for Photographers assignments. We had to photograph a response to Kurt Weill's violin concerto. I'd never heard it and in fact, Kurt Weill is not known for classical music. He wrote a bunch of cabaret songs (Mack the Knife, among them) and was quite popular in the first half of last century. Anyway, I thought his violin concerto sucked big time. He was only 24 when he wrote it and I thought the piece was disjointed, lacked maturity and cohesion. There were snippets in it that made sense and were almost beautiful, but the overall piece was confusing and I couldn't make sense of it.

In response, I decided to photograph a detail of an Art Nouveau building, which was from the same era as the concerto and break it apart to the point of making it unrecognizable. It's almost like the opposite of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". I found that the concerto was actually lesser than the sum of its individual snippets and that's the idea I tried representing visually.
I've also included the original image, for kicks.

Yes, it snows in Seattle

Just before Thanksgiving, we had a couple of days of snow. When that happens, the whole city gets in crisis mode, as Seattlites really aren't prepared to deal with ice and snow. In all fairness, with so many hills around, it is pretty hard to get around, even with only a couple of inches of snow. Despite all my years of training in Montreal, I chickened out and decided to work from home...

Bubbles and Tiger loved the snow, especially Bubbles who has enough fat to protect him from Siberian weather. Here are a few shots from the school yard.

More France pictures

Gosh, it's been so long since I've posted and so much has happened in the last month. I'll try to catch up over the new few days. Here are some more pictures from our amazing trip to France.

The impressive Château Margaux

les chais...

Lynn, Fred and Fred's goddaughter at Château d'Issan

Château Haut-Brion

Château Haut-Brion

Beautiful Saint-Émilion (If only I could have a little place there...)

Beautiful Saint-Émilion

Private Cognac tasting at Hennessy (in Cognac)

Private cognac tasting at Hine, with Bernard

Hine cognac aging...

Colin and I at Chambord...it was a truly gorgeous Château and worth the detour. I'll post more pix of the actual Château

A few shots from France

First day in Paris. The guy who took the picture made the Eiffel tower look like Pisa, but I was able to mostly straighten it, thanks to Photoshop. This is our only picture from Paris...

In Jarnac, in the tasting room of Hine Cognac. The picture was taken after Bernard took us on a private tour of Hine and then did the "dégustation" for/with us. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

In front of Château Margaux in Bordeaux. Unfortunately, we weren't able to go in or do wine tasting, as it is strictly by appointment only and we hadn't made arrangements ahead of time. We did, however, visit a number of other well renowned wineries in the area, including one of the other few wineries considered Premier Cru for Bordeaux, Château Haut-Brion (more on that later)...