I am a bit compulsive and even when I have few other things to do, I still deferred to work on the rough edit of this body of work. Which is now done. Whew! So the final tally is 190 photographs winnowed down from the original 4,000 photographs I made while in China. Not all these photographs will be keepers, but a really good start in making the Black & White conversions. During the rough edit process I started to fine tune what I wanted to convey the photographs, so as I now re-examine the rough edit during the next phase, the fine edit process, I will be making some more tweaks to the context and tonalities of each photograph.
And as I mentioned in the previous article, I was trying to be sensitive as to what my photographs were telling me (aka the feedback loop) during the rough edit process. Although I came back to this earlier body of work due to the current COVID-19 circumstances and the need for sterile garments in hospitals, it seems that I am leaning towards two different resulting narratives. First is the TechTransfer concept, which is pretty hard edge and documentary in style (not changing the content within the frame), the second is much more interpretive, such as the photograph above. And the working title of Flow of Light Brush the Shadow (Liu Guan Lue Yin) also appears more relevant to the second body of work.
This photograph above is a nice illustration of how Flow of Light Brush the Shadow is developing. A nice way to describe it might be that it is impressionistic, thus a bit abstract and mysterious, and perhaps even surreal. I am also interested in the concept of the everyman, thus I needed to patiently remove everyone out of the photograph until the lone person (in this case the motorcycle rider) remained. I think patience is a nice word to describe the cloning effort as there are a lot of people in China and they are everywhere and it takes more than one try to ensure that at the end of the process, there are no visible traces left.
Sometimes at the end of the editing process, I may find out that I removed the wrong person as who is left does not visually resonate with me. So a do-over is required. But that’s part of this creative process. Thus, one of my versions is heavily leaning on manipulating the content while the other is more documentary while working with the content that is present. I find this an interesting duality.
In the next phase during the fine edit, I will be adding a Curves Adjustment layer to fine tune the tonalities as well as printing test photogaphs. So probably my first question; which version do I work on first; Flow of Light Brush the Shadow or TechTrasfer? I think the answer to that question is which photograph is the first one complete a fine tune edit, tweak the contrast and make a few test prints of? (hint, hint, its the one above)
Cheers, stay healthy and safe my friends,
Doug
Featured artwork above: PingHu Transition (Flow of Light Brush the Shadow – Liu Guan Lue Yin) copyright 2008 Douglas Stockdale
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Gardening For Ordnance solo on-line exhibition, Fabrik Projects on Artsy.net, March 24th – April 30th, 2020.
Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) Faculty Exhibition, in Los Angeles at the new LACP gallery, located at 566 Washington Blvd. The exhibition opened March 21st and the closing reception is Saturday, April, 18, 2020, from 7-10pm. TBD
Update! Medium Photo 2020 Workshop: Developing a Creative Book workshop that I will be leading, is now rescheduled for September 24 – 27th, 2020, a four-day extended weekend workshop in San Diego.
Medium Photo 2020 Lecture Series, I will be giving a one-evening lecture Artist Books as Art Objects on Friday, March 20th, from 7:30 – 9pm at the You Belong Here artist venue, located at 3619 El Cajon Blvd, San Diego, California 92104. TBD
Singular Images 