I LOVE THE OCEAN! I grew up in a landlocked country in the middle of Europe, and I was already fourteen years old when I saw the sea for the first time. The occasion was very special, because I visited St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) in Russia during the White Nights – the time of the year when day and night intertwine. It was an amazing view, even though I only saw a small portion of the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland.
The first time I experienced the actual ocean happened a decade later, when I moved to the East Coast of the US. My favorite places to visit the shore were in Maine, on Cape Cod and in Rhode Island. Two decades later I moved to the West Coast, where visiting the ocean has become one of my regular activities. I don’t actually like to swim in the ocean, but I love looking at it, listening to it, and even smelling it. The early morning beach (without the crowds) is very calming to me. It’s just me, a tiny spot on Earth looking at the vast, powerful body of water that covers almost three quarters of our planet. The weirdest feeling is to be actually standing on the very edge of a continent. I am standing on the land, and before me is the “never ending” ocean. One of the reasons I am more drawn to the ocean during low tide is the fact, that I am able to take a few more steps into the ocean, but still stay on the land. And while I’m walking there, I get to experience plants and animals that are usually hidden from me.
I took some pictures of the low tide at Little Corona del Mar a few days ago – it wasn’t the lowest tide, but it still felt and looked amazing. How did it feel? Like this:

In the Spring of 2013 I’ve attended two workshops at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, CA. You can read about my thoughts about former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro visit in my previous post. As part of the workshop series we were also asked to submit any or all of our images, which were then juried by The Legacy Project. I am happy to announce, that two of my images were chosen to be displayed at the exhibition entitled A Different Point of View. Please read the formal announcement for dates and other info. If you are visiting the Great Park during the Summer, come see our images of the places usually hidden from the public view.
Picture

At the opening of the Different Point of View exhibit


A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW
The Legacy Project Photography Workshops Exhibition

Saturday, June 15 – Sunday, September 1, 2013
Saturday-Sunday:  10:00am-4:00pm
Artists Studios at the Palm Court 
(The Park’s entrance is at Sand Canyon and Marine Way, adjacent to Hwy. 5)
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 15:  1:00pm-3:00pm
While documenting the transition of former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro into the Orange County Great Park, The Legacy Project members famously turned a giant jet hangar into the world’s largest camera and used it to take the world’s largest picture.  From March 2 through May 18, 2013, The Legacy Project offered a series of on-site photo workshops providing participants an opportunity to improve their photographic vision and technique while accessing historic MCAS El Toro.  This exhibition, juried by The Legacy Project, features photographs captured by participants of the photography workshops.
Featuring photography by Jeff Antenore, BJ Bateman, Greg Borchardt, Jennifer Bruwer, Mark Chamberlain, Jesse Childers, Leonard Correa, Lori DeNicola, Malena dePersis, Dennis Doran, Kevin Erikson, Judy Flagg, Jacques Garnier, John Hesketh, Anna Johnson, Rob Johnson, Glenn Kasai, Tricia Kennedy, Marlene Klein, Darlene Laguna, Douglas McCulloh, Rita Medina, Mark Muckenfuss, Gizella Nyquist, Toni McDonald Pang, Denny Saunders, Andrew Schmidt, Clayton Spada, Robert Staeck, Jennifer Tacujan, Carey VanDruff, Kevin Vincent, Kyle Webb, Mihoko Yamagata, Jenner Yamane-Woodring, Todd Young, and Gary Zager.
We live just a few minutes from the Orange County Great Parks in Irvine, California. The parks hosts many interesting events from the Sunday Farmer’s Market to gardening classes – just to mention our most favorite ones. During our visit there in March I picked up a flyer about photography workshops lead by The Legacy Project*. The opportunity to attend a few of these events was awesome, because in addition to learning more about photography and the history of the park, we could also visit and photograph areas that are closed to the public. I was able to attend two workshops; one with Clayton Spada and one with Robert Johnson. During the two days we visited Hangar 295, Area 396 and one of the runways of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. I was really taken back by what I saw. The Air Station closed in 1999, 14 years ago. Now, only a fraction of its original buildings remain, and soon they will be all gone. I feel lucky that I was able to capture some of its last moments.
I’ve entitled my set of images Disconnected and Disappearing. These two words came to my mind while we were walking around. It was hard to imagine, that a little bit over a decade ago this place was active and alive. I hope my pictures will take you to this Disconnected and Disappearing place, even if just for a few moments.


*About The Legacy Project
The Legacy Project is dedicated to documenting and interpreting the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, simultaneously honoring the history of the site and celebrating its transformation into the Orange County Great Park. This group of six photographers have created over 200,000 images of El Toro in addition to shooting several videos. Their most notable work is the world’s largest photograph, The Great Picture, a 32-by-111-foot image of El Toro created by turning a former f-18 hangar into the world’s largest pinhole camera. The six members of the project are: Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, and Clayton Spada.

I have been asked a lot lately about the creation of my Hidden Within thematic images. Let me share the major steps of the process with you.To begin with, I took pictures of the bark of many California Sycamore trees. I looked for trees with colorful peeling patterns, and made sure, that my images were as sharp as possible.
After importing the raw images into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4, I made some changes: digitally sharpened them, enhanced the colors and reduced any noise. Finally, I cropped any part of the picture out that was not tack sharp. Due to the curvature of the trees, the images usually had a narrow unsharp part on the sides.
Next, I opened my cropped image in Adobe Photoshop CS6. I also opened a new document with the desired final image size and a transparent background. From the Sycamore image I cropped a part that was one fourth of my final image (half the length and half the height). This is a trial by error step, where you don’t know if you cropped at the right place until you move the piece into the final document, and see the result.
At this point, I moved this piece into my new document and dropped it in the top left corner. After flipping this quarter to the right, then flipping both to the bottom, I produced a double symmetrical image. My goal with the Hidden Within series was to create pictures with recognizable faces in them.
Sometimes, a face emerged right away. Other times, I found the eyes to be too far or too close to each other. In this case, I re-cropped the Sycamore image, and started the symmetry treatment again. Even a tiny little difference in the cropping made a huge difference in the image. Occasionally, instead of re-cropping, I just had to rotate the quarters by 90 or 180 degrees to arrive to a nice face.
When I was happy with the image, I enhanced it again with either built in or third party filters to bring out colors and textures, and to exaggerate the main subject of my image, the face.
The best part of the whole creation happened at the very end, when my almost nine year old daughter sat by me, and we started discovering lots of different faces and creatures in the new image together. I was also inspired to write brief stories about some of the characters living in my pictures. What a fun project!
Click here to see the final image.


 

[Article by Bob Killen Fine Art Photography]
Calumet University, the photography and visual arts education division of Calumet Photographic, presents Merging Harmonies, an exhibition of personal themes from three graduates of the CAL U Fine Art Photography curriculum.  The exhibition is open to the public at the Calumet Gallery, 1430 S. Village Way, Santa Ana, CA 92705, from April 26 to May 26— with an artist reception on April 26 at 5:30PM.
The artists, David Nelson, Gizella Nyquist, and Pamela Lagoni, present fine art photographs immersed in individual and revelatory discovery.  Each artist has investigated a personal thematic with camera and fine art postproduction skills to produce prints that are visions beyond documentation. While the subject matter is unique to each artist the unifying power of light binds them into a common text of uncommon views that explore visual metaphors.
David Nelson, lives in Buena Park, CA, delivers a thematic project that explores ‘Giant’ commercial signs and business friendly sculptures from Southern California’s boom years. These huge ‘sky-punching’ works of neon, steel, and plastic are iconic metaphors that testify to the egos that drove the urban sprawl and rapid unchecked development. His work is large in capture with exquisite points of view, and the use of light isolates the images as commercial works of art. Yet, his thematic “Giants” (a solo body of work), renders deeper allegories, for each of the images tells us in two-dimensions about the three-dimensional, oversized egos that crafted bold visual statements to promote their enterprises.

Pamela Lagoni, a resident of Irvine, CA, explores mechanical detail with robust images of gears, spokes, and clutches, each of them rendered with an ‘in-close’ perspective. Her prints form a body of work entitled, “Radius’ of Motion”, draw viewers into a world of images that present the hard edges of power works as well as the soft glamour of chrome and candy apple paints. However, these tiny details are in reality huge metaphors that portray the discipline and order of mechanical construction from images of parts already in service. As viewers, we can feel the pain of wear and tear, the entropy of use, and ultimately the need for replacement and repair.

 

Gizella Nyquist resides in Irvine, CA, and presents an inventive exploration of form and structure derived from her study of tree bark, the California Sycamore specifically. Her eye for detail at one level and her sense of the grander meaning of nature pushed her to explore various forms “Hidden Within” the rich textures and colors of the bark. In post-production, she assembles the bark and in the process discovered new faces that are hidden within. Rabbits, birds, cats, and more suddenly reveal themselves with character and we see intricate details of man’s relationship to structure.
“Context is fundamental to reading images,” says Bob Killen, Director of the Fine Art Photography program for Calumet. “These new artists worked hard to explore a theme and then create images that relate as a body of work.  Thematic approaches require one to explore and find a visual voice that presents a story that is often deeply challenging to the photographer, as well as to the viewer. As Paul Klee, a painter famous for his orientalism, tells us, “Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes the visible, visible.” These three artists do exactly that with thematics that merge together with visual harmonies.

​Calumet University invites the public to join us as we celebrate new work, new artists, and new views of the visual world.