Last night the Madison Belly Dance Alliance held a hafla - a belly dance party - but with a twist: The dances were spoofs, send ups of "real" dances. With the proximity to Hallowe'en, a certain element of zombie was to be expected. And zombies there were! A veritable hoard of undead dancers shimmying and losing pieces. Not every dance featured zombies. There was a pleasing variety of choices including Cleopatra (with a zombied Marc Antony), the evil queen from Snow White, and an interpretive dance from Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea". I love Madison!
I had a fixed focal length lens on my camera (Nikon's sweet little 50 mm) and was confined to a single location. It is a low budget show on a low stage in a UU church with no specific lighting. To keep my shutter speed up, even at f/2.8 or 2.5, I had to use ISO 1000 or even 1250 which starts to introduce a bunch of noise. Caveats aside, I did manage to get some fun photos.
Knowing I would have noise, especially when I cropped in close, I gave up on trying to eliminate it and chose to embrace it. As is my habit with performance photos, I often alter the color palate to suit what pleases me, from over-saturated to B&W and all points in between.
I do not worry overly much about the details of technical precision when I shoot for fun. What I worry about is whether or not the photo is FUN or not. Did it capture some essence of the character? When I look at this next photograph, the first thing I think is, "I want to be whoever she is looking at!" That's when I know I captured a good image.
All in all a fun night with fun people. Madison really does have an amazing pool of talented people who want to share what they do, and often that sharing is inexpensive and a labor of love. The love shows, and that makes for a grand time. I have a couple more from the night that I want to share, but that will wait for a later post.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
MBDA Spoofla!
Monday, October 15, 2012
Finally! A Fall Color Walk
The recent plunge of temperatures here (to the upper 20's, F) prompted my beloved and I to take a fall color walk before it was too late. A couple of days ago I penned this haiku: Cold snap yesterday, Today the leaves are falling. The robins take wing. It was a clarion call to Get Out There and see the world before it becomes draped first in gray and then in white for the next five months. So after dropping off at the airport an aerial dance instructor who had been flown in to teach Cycropia (the aerial dance troupe of which I am part), we ventured to the University of Wisconsin's research forest area, the Arboretum.
While it is certainly true that we missed peak color, and many trees were already bare of leaves, there was much to relish. We took a side trail to "Teal Pond", a spot we had never visited. The above photo is from there. Just a moment earlier, before we ventured to Teal Pond, we also noted this shelter (for skiers?) which we had never encountered before. Since it is clearly not a new structure, it was just on a path we had never taken.
Leaves did not provide the only color. Not only did I see a small array of late blooming wildflowers, I saw for the first time autumn-blooming crocus. I just might need to find and plant some of those bulbs in my yard! My above haiku indicates the robins are taking wing they really are not, yet. What they are doing is eating berries. They were busy in and under all the fruit trees. This berry is one I have never seen before, and the range of colors in the bush were pretty amazing.
I am thrilled that I got my autumn walk in today. Who knows? I might even get in a fall motorcycle ride and find another sweet spot. Stay tuned... In the meantime, here are the rest of today's photos, and others from past trips to the arboretum. The first twenty are from today.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
The Tale of the S
There is a metal worker in town who has forged his way into our aerial dance community. Will Turnbull of 11th Hour Heroics / Paradigm Forge built a lyra (basically a steel hoop for aerial dance) for one of the students of Cycropia Aerial Dance, the troupe of which I am part. Once a bunch of us saw it, we were intrigued. He made a pitch to build more, and half a dozen people took him up on it. Not wanting to be with the "in" crowd, I talked with Will instead about building me an "S" as a replacement for an earlier attempt that was a structural failure.
He came and took a look at the existing one, and we continued the conversation via email (and ultimately Pay Pal because I was away when he needed a deposit) and we settled on size and amount of arc. You can see that this is not going to be small! Each curve of the S will be 48 inches in diameter, and the pipe will comprise 220 degrees of arc (a full circle being 360) or just under 2/3 of a full circle. Welded together in the middle, the two arcs will stand 96 inches tall, eight feet. That is about the same as the earlier version, though that one had top and bottom curves of differing size.
The shot above shows the substance of the pipe. I think the steel pipe is 1-3/4 inch OD, and it proved to be much harder to bend than anticipated. When I visited the studio Will told me that the first arc had taken forty passes through his bending machine, which is manually cranked. Worse, the shearing bolts he uses to make sure a cheap piece fails before he breaks the machine have been breaking with a frustrating frequency, and has delayed the process. I am not concerned about the timing. He will finish it soon enough.
Will is a character, and a pleasure to work with. While this particular piece is pretty industrial, he is a fine sculptural artist. While you are waiting to see images of the completed S, and better yet, see it with dancers on it in the air, check out his page (linked above).
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Who Needs Flying Dreams?
I know that I said I seldom use Photoshop, and my very next post is quite manipulated! Life is once again in a state of flux. My job ends tomorrow, and I do not yet have another lined up. On Friday I segue right in to a five day dance retreat which will provide a much needed escape from my brain and a deep decent into my body and intuitive/fluid/unscripted self. After the last eight or nine months, it will be delicious. This upheaval has made me think about life in new ways.
As I was flying to Boston last week to re-create the work lab that I had just disassembled here in Madison (dismantling my own job), I bumped into a former coworker. He's the sort whose primary talent is asking insightful questions. We got to talking about my job search and I mentioned that I was looking for direct hire, or contract to hire, rather than an endless string of hired-gun contract work. After a bit of verbal dicing, he said, "What makes you believe that a so-called permanent job will be any more secure than contract work?" And there it is: My old-school view about work is outdated, and invalid. No employer is going to show me any loyalty. I am a consumable resource. The old ways are gone.
And so I re-evaluate my goals and desires, stretch out my arms and L E A P
into flight, aiming for the stars. The next big adventure starts now.
Stay tuned.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Hoop Dancer
While I do not do a lot of work in black and white, every once in a while a photograph seems to beg for a more timeless look. This shot of a hoop dancer, again from the Willy Street Fair, was one such. The day was bright and it was nearly noon, so everything was pretty harsh and generally washed out with blown highlights. So I opted to accentuate that and worked to take it to sort of an infra-red feel.
Other than the conversion from color to black and white, I used Photoshop - a tool I use sparingly - to to add some more blur to the background to make her pop a little more and to reduce some bruises. She is taking aerial dance classes with the troupe I am part of, and she has been working with me on poles (ours are steel, and mounted from the ceiling rather than the floor) which are pretty unforgiving and we all sport a collection of alarming bruises on our legs and thighs, and the inside of the upper arms. In context, they are a badge of honor. In a photo like this, they are a distraction.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
More Willy Street Fair
Last weekend was the insanely fun Willy Street Fair. It is the end cap of four music festivals on the East Side of Madison (what's wrong with the West Side? They've never *heard* of these festivals, much less organized one of their own. Weird.) and it is an open door for geeks and freaks of all sorts, including and especially kids. The parade is a thing of beauty because despite its total lack of organization (only the start time and route are controlled) the costumes and creativity on display are awesome. I posted some pics of the fair in general earlier. Today will be some scenes from the fair itself.
The parade is lead by this car. Not typically with a lovely woman draped across the hood. The car has been modified to blow bubbles. A lot of bubbles. See those two tubas? They percolate bubbles. The owner and general-good-guy Jim Wildeman (aka The Bubble Guy) and the car creep ahead of the parade and blows bubbles. This photo was taken later in the day when slinky Luv asked for permission to drape herself across the car for some pics. Jim laughed and obliged. While fun in color, I like the result in black and white.
Music is a huge part of the fair. There are at least five stages set up along the four block route for a twenty or so acts to perform. I did not save a program, and I am uncertain of which band this horn player is from, but as is generally the case the music was fun and free (the fair is largely funded by grants and proceeds from the beer sales (this IS Wisconsin, after all).
While many simply take in the sights and sounds, those who actively participate: Costumed, performing, or dancing in its infinite variety are my tribe, the people with whom I identify. There is a burgeoning hoop-dancing scene in Madison. Trust me when I say hoop dancing - this is no mere hula-hooping that kids are doing. This is dance plain and simple, and you can clearly see the hours and hours invested in it. I love it and watch it with glee.
This demonstration of capoeira was fun to watch. A Brazilian martial art, capoeira is disguised as dance because the slaves who developed it were not allowed to train as, you know, fighters. These players - they never refer to it as fighting or sparring, but rather as "play" - were doing a nice slow demonstration. I have seen two experienced players going at it and at full speed it is pretty jaw dropping to watch.
Thus concludes my travelog of the Willy Street Fair. I may have the odd additional pic to pop up simply because I have so many, but life moves on and I can never look too far into the past. I'm more of a future guy!
Thanks for dropping by.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
And What To Me Wondering Eyes Should Appear?
Costumed beauties on stilts entertain the crowd at the World Music Festival in Madison, WI. The festival is a celebration of music from around the world, provided free to the public through grants and beer sales (it *is* Wisconsin, after all) to promote broader understanding of other cultures. These three are part of Cycropia Aerial Dance, a Madison-based collectively run dance troupe.
The music dovetails into the Willy Street Fair and lasts all weekend. Good times, and a closing bookend to summer.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Gratuitous Cat Photo
Does there really need to be a reason to post a photo of a glamor puss like Nala? I think not.
Lemons --> Lemonade
My last post was melancholy, the result of dismantling my job and preparing to ship it elsewhere. I am not, by nature, one who dwells on the negative side of events. There is always a silver lining, a soft landing, disaster averted. Yes I am losing my job, and no I don't have a new one lined up yet, but I am working on it, and I interview well, so it's just a matter of time. Meanwhile, there is much "trash" becoming available as equipment and furniture is determined to have no material value: Not worth shipping, and no obvious salvage value. Cue the junk-picking opportunities!
I passed up on the dozens of dead-or-dying servers that hit the e-waste bins. I didn't need one of the fifty or so wifi repeaters. But cubicle panels? Heck yeah! We were eager to replace the pipe-and-drape (and slightly transparent) dressing room we had created during the first days the photo studio was open. It was inexpensive, and worked to a point, but when the vanity lights were on, it was not the model of discretion for the model!
I was able to salvage enough 6-foot panels to make a pretty decent 8x8 replacement for the pipe-and-drape setup. Much nicer!
Part of the secret to happiness is finding ways to take the lemons life hands us and turn them into lemonade. This surely doesn't replace a job, but it is a nice little something to take the sting out of it.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Work, Work, Not
It has been FOREVER since I posted, for which I most humbly apologize. Life has been ... interesting ... in that way that does not always equate to fun and exciting. In addition to rehearsing four aerial dance pieces (2+ hours per week, each) I have been employed at a day job since January that proved to be difficult and demanding. I have been doing quality assurance for a local tech company. It is a job for which I am plenty smart, though not especially trained. To complicate matters, this software is complex, and a bit Frankenstein's monster in construction due to mergers and acquisitions. And there is no documentation. And there was only one other QA guy and he was buried and stressed, and did not particularly care to share information. And the software needed to be functional with perhaps twenty source and archive servers. Here is what my portion of the server lab looked like:
Until this last week. You see, in early July we were almost all fired. The company decided to close this MAdison office and only a handful of the forty-five employees were given an option to relocate or work from home. Alas, I was not one of them. The past weeks have been spent decommissioning the building and making plans to move or discard equipment. Over the last week I had the non-pleasure of dismantling and shipping my job and all its related equipment to another state.
You might understand how disheartening that is. Going to work every day and watching - and participating in - tearing apart your workplace is quite challenging. To make matters worse, I will get the pleasure of traveling to set up the lab in its new location and train my replacement. Joy. Rapture. Not.
In the meantime I am actively seeking employment and revitalizing my photo studio efforts. As the woman says, I will survive.
Who knows, I might even have time for more blogging!
Monday, July 9, 2012
Let There Be Leko Light!
I finally got a chance to try out the Leko spotlight that we have had in the studio for nearly a year. Actually we have two, but since I still have not built stands for them, they have just been kicking around. This time I REALLY wanted to use it to get that accurate spotlight look, so I bolted the darned thing to our ladder and made do.
Fun! The black background begs for some kind of hair light to make her stand out a bit more, but as I said, I was going for the spotlit starlet look, and that is what I got. Our studio is a bit small for spotlights, but these Leko's have adjustable barn doors built in so I can iris down the light as needed, plus they are adjustable for width of the beam itself. I will definitely make use of them again. I might not even clean the lenses so I keep the light a bit gritty.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Wrong In All The Right Ways
Every once in a while, things go wrong in all the right ways. Yesterday I had a client in the studio to do some pin-up / burlesque promotional shots. It was going to be fun. She is smart, sassy, and photogenic. The studio is a coöperative with three shooters sharing space, rent, and equipment, It let all three of us enter into studio shooting without brutal overhead start up costs. We all had some equipment, and once pooled together it becomes a fine array of tools. While the arrangement works 99% of the time, there are always those moments where things do not go right.
When I arrived at the studio to set up my environment, there was a light missing. No real worries, there were still enough for what I wanted to do, but it was one of the known lights. I subbed in one of the new shooter's lights and set it up how I thought I wanted it. When the client - Madison's own Wendy Whiplash - arrived I had her strike a pose while I verified the lights. It was not right. But it worked out any way, just not at all what was intended. Sometimes a good, fun shot can come out of small mishaps.
This was the first photo of the day, and I thought it was going to be a tosser. Once I tweaked the levels a bit, and played with saturation, I decided I liked it quite a lot. It might not be what the client is looking for, but it is one I am happy to share as a happy accident.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
One Barrel
Life continues to be crazy busy. Much of it is good, but it still doesn't leave much spare time. The Madison office of my employer is closing, so I am now job hunting again. They gave us several months warning, so there is no emergency, but it still adds a complexity I did not need right now. One small perk of the whole situation is that the boss decided that everyone should get the heck out of the office early on Friday, so I did.
It turns out that a brand new "nano brewery" (smaller than a micro brewery) was opening as a brewpub, in my neighborhood, and at 4 PM. How convenient! I showed up about five minutes to four and found myself the eighth person in a line that grew almost instantly to about seventy-five. When the doors opened we all filed in nicely and grabbed a spot. Within a few minutes of he doors opening, the place was jammed. This was a truly Wisconsin moment.
The place is called One Barrel, because as a nano brewery they are brewing only one barrel at a time. I think they need to brew their butts off to keep up! They are supplementing their beers with other local brewery's offerings. I only stayed for one - their summer kölsch style - and then I turned my stool over to another thirsty patron and went to meet friends elsewhere, and then on to a rehearsal.
I am really glad that circumstances played out in a way that let me experience the giddy grand opening of One Barrel. It seems like they have a good thing going and I wish them great success.
Prosit!
