Clair Dunn PHOTOGRAPHY

Long Time, No Post

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:53:00 +0000

And there is a good reason for this hiatus. I've been posting to another blog which is centered on the Vermont Arts Council's Art of Action project. It's Vermont Directions.

And there is likely going to be a longer hiatus. I'm preparing my presentation for the VAC at the end of this month. And, to make matters worse, I'm chomping at the bit to create an album of shots I took in White River Junction. A very, very, photogenic town. But, that too will have to wait.

Same Sunset - Two Artists!

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:01:00 +0000

This image (from an earlier post) is here again because of a wonderful coincidence.

I swear that this same sunset was photographed by David Kearns from the Firehouse Studio in Burlington, Vermont, just 30 miles south of me. David is not just another artist, but he is also, as I am, a finalist in the Vermont Arts Council and Lyman Orton's Art of Action Project in Vermont.

Here the link to his images of it that he displays in the small slide show that's second on the right of his page.

And here's my image (again):

Food for Thought

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 11:59:00 +0000

There's been a pause in this blog as I work on my proposal for the Vermont Arts Council Art of Action Project. That work also includes a blog, which is being updated far more than this one at the moment. See here.

But today, I stumbled upon this meaty piece by Andrew Keen about the Internet. It is, IMHO a must read.

Confessions of an Internet Iconoclast. You have to scroll down a bit to find it.

After reading it, I was reminded of my ever-so-often-recurring thought about television: it could have been such a wonderful thing.

Still, I am an IA (internet aficionado) and likely always will be. But, at the same time, I agree completely with Andrew!

YAS = Yet Another Sunset/Sunrise

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:35:00 +0000

I just can't let go of these. The color creeps into my peripheral vision at the end of day through my southwest window as my computer work is coming to an end. I look, and then grab the camera on my way out the studio door. And, so with this one, I finally gave in and uploaded it to Alamy. And, there it will sit, no doubt with the other gazillion sunset/sunrise images. It is, and will remain, the only brazenly obvious sunset image in my stock image collection.

Also, I've started another, very specific blog. It is a chronicle of my thoughts, experiences, excitement, and angst as I create, prepare, and finalize my proposal for the Art of Action project for Lyman Orton and the Vermont Arts Council. I figured it deserved its own blog, rather than having bits scattered among the general visual stuff here.

OT: Speaking of Light--as Photographers Do

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:52:00 +0000

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

We finally turned the light on again in this benighted country. Let's hope it shines into all the dark corners. The last eight years have created so many.

Clair Dunn
U.S. Citizen

Just thought I'd write that to see what it feels like to admit again that I am one.

Art of Action Update: Sans Art

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:14:00 +0000

Just read a fellow finalist, Elizabeth Torak's latest post here, and was happy to find I had company in my state of critical mass. Everything that passes into my brain now goes through the "AOA filter". Unfortunately it's not exactly a semi-permeable membrane. Rather it seems like the huge grates that stop logs upriver from where they are not supposed to get. Which means of course, that almost everything gets into my brain.

So far rolling around is Priscilla Paton, Edwin Smith, William F. Robinson (TWO bloody books) and, Spirn on the Language of Landscape. Unfortunately, her writing style leaves something to be desired, so that's a tough row to hoe.

You will note there is no image in this post. I, like Elizabeth, am, at the moment entirely "imageless". This may be the first time I've cursed my excellent academic background.

But, I am driven to read, to note things of note, which by now are all over the map and in absolutely no order in my notebook. I'm just afraid I'll forget what was triggered if I don't write it down.

An so it goes -- and right now, I can only go with the flow. I just want to read, though I wish there were four of me. (That's the number of books I've got going.)

Fluorescent Lights & B/W Prints

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:05:00 +0000

This is a small rant.

1. I try to conserve energy as much as possible.

2. I have replaced all tungsten bulbs with compact fluorescent lights.

3. I cannot now judge my prints in my studio after dark.

I've faked the results for you in these two images. The first is the image as it appears in daylight or with normal tungsten bulbs. The second is how the image appears under fluorescent lighting. Mine or in the gallery. (And there is no significant difference between Kodak Lustre and Fuji Pearl.

This drives me nuts. Some chemistry/optics genius needs to invent a fluorescent resistant photographic paper.)

Vermont Artists and a Coincidence

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:54:00 +0000

I've just spent the morning checking out a number of Vermont artists and what I saw was indeed "something to write home about."

Art of Action Finalists will take you to the AOA project coordinator's blog where he offers links to those artists who have a web presence. Take your time with these sites. (Skip mine.)

If you, like so many non-Vermonters, are one of those who has experienced Vermont as a state of mind rather than an actual place, you will get your grounding here.

What I've seen this morning makes me jealous of painters. Makes me love them unreservedly. And at this moment it also creates one of those "coincidences" that often occur to us, and which we usually shrug off.

Last night, early evening actually, I went outdoors to have my last cigarette of the day and noticed a faint, small reddish glow in the distance, rather near my neighbor's house. I determined that it wasn't emanating from their house, and began to get a bit alarmed as the glow was on a hill, and reddish -- in the countryside this usually means fire. As I kept watching, it began to get brighter and less red. And, in the time it took for one small, self-rolled cigarette, the moon rose, fully engulfed in wisps of clouds and pieces of night. I wept because I could not paint.

Useless Image -- Except for my Eyes

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:06:00 +0000

After looking at countless stock images as I was moving into the business, I spent a long time thinking about all the images with saturated colors that I saw. I also looked for comments on the prevalence of such images, but found almost nothing. It is apparently the norm.

I may be shooting myself in the foot, but I can't bring myself to do that. I try to send my stock images out into the world with their real colors. Of course sometimes this means that in the group of thumbnails on a stock agency's search page, my images will not jump off the page. I have to live with that. But if someone buys one of my images, they will get reality.

Which brings me to this image: this was taken outside my front door a couple of days ago, just before sunrise. I was transfixed by that sky. It was, as it appears, unbelievable. It looks like the most saturated of stock images. But it is not. It is wholly untouched. In my book, it's not good for anything except to take my breath away.

Analog Gear in the Digital Bag

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:44:00 +0000

After much cussing my second time at the site of a magnificent Vermont scenic, I have packed a compass in my camera bag.

A week or so ago, on a spur of the moment ramble around the back roads, I came upon a spectacular shot of a valley. It was late in the morning and the light wasn't good. Took some shots, but knew they'd be useless. When I got back home I looked in one of my Vermont atlases and determined that the best time of day would be late afternoon.

So, the next sunny day, I went back. Only to find that again the light was less than ideal. While the map told me that the road ran more or less North to South, it didn't show me that my exact spot was right after a severe bend in the road.

Had I had a compass with me on the first trip, my second trip would have been successful. I would have known the exact orientation of where I had located my tripod for those first shots and where the sun had to be when I came back.

Thus we learn.

September was a good month!

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:05:00 +0000

Earlier this month I announced that I'd made my first stock sale. Now, on the very last day of the month, I received notification that I was one of 20 artists out of 300 applicants to be selected by The Art of Action in Vermont. This means that I will receive a sizable grant ($2,500) to research and prepare a proposal for a visual arts project that will direct attention to some of the challenges facing Vermont in the coming decades. Vermont's independent newspaper, Seven Days, has a good summary of the project.

When I received the short note from the administrator of the Call for Entries, I cried--something I don't often do. And, it was because this award told me that others saw what I was trying to do with my images. The administrator, John Zwick maintains a blog on The Art of Action here.

I'm deeply grateful to Lyman Orton, the person who made this opportunity possible. He is a member of the Orton family which owns and operates The Vermont Country Store. More to the purpose of this entry, he and other family members administer the Orton Family Foundation, a foundation intimately concerned with the environment, with quality of life, with community enhancement in any number of areas.

PhotoShelter Shutdown: Tangential Interest

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:26:00 +0000

I stumbled across this link in one of the fora I regularly visit. Images of the WTC Disaster 9/11 taken on that day by Allen Murabayashi (erstwhile leader of the PhotoShelter Collection). The one I have linked to here is one of the finest images I've seen, except that it's not straight vertically. Something which can obviously be forgiven in such unprecedented conditions. It is the entrance to a slide show of more images taken on that day.

There are no comments or captions, which is appropriate here. For this immediately recognizable iconic disaster, none are needed.

I also found it interesting that there is no metadata in this image: something I find curious from a major player in the stock photography business. Needless to say, I added the basic stuff in the copy I made.

PSC Shutting Down - Archive Regaining Focus

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:15:00 +0000

It's the end of a very short era in the stock photography annals.

The PhotoShelter Collection announced yesterday, that the doors are closing. It was an effort that failed. But, at least they tried. I, along with many others, think perhaps a year was just too short a time, and perhaps the plan should have had at least a 2-year window. These are tough times, and so everything takes longer.

BUT, they are saying that they will go back to their roots, which is the PhotoShelter Archive. I applaud this. I've been a paying member of the Archive since January or February and find it valuable and slick. I'll like it even better when they improve the stats and search engine. My photography website links to my Archive galleries.

Here's their comment on the Archive in their Collection closing announcement:

As an ongoing indication of our commitment to you and the Personal Archive, we are currently developing a new feature release to address some of your most frequently requested items. We'll also be hard at work developing new innovations to help advance both the art and business of photography. We will be in touch soon regarding these exciting announcements.

And here's the link to the main Archive page.

Small Announcement

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 12:42:00 +0000

Since this blog may loosely be construed as a chronicle of my progress in the digital visual world, I probably should announce that I've sold my first stock image. Any stock togs reading this will already know that it takes a lot of work to even get to this point, never mind progressing to where your income from stock is significant.

And it has taken much work, much study, much shooting, much thinking.

The sale occurred on the 4th of September and was an Alamy sale for a book, full page, print run of 25K, educational use. So, I'm not suddenly rich: image sold for $205. My take is $133 and some change. At the time of the sale, my portfolio on Alamy only consisted of about 106 images. Very, very small.

I only do Rights Managed (RM). And IMHO if you are starting out in the stock business you should aim to have a large portion of your portfolio RM as well. A good article to start with on this exceedingly important issue is from the ASMP Library Rights Managed Stock vs Royalty Free Stock.

Wild Image Search and Hurricane Gustav

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:59:00 +0000

It's 5 a.m. in New Orleans now and my server, where this blog is located, is in Metairie, LA. So, don't be surprised if you weren't able to get here in the first two days of September! (Actually I just ran in here to post this after listening to CNN's Sanjay Gupta report live from Metairie.)

Bob Croxford in the PhotoShelter forum posted this link a couple of days ago and I must have wasted and hour and half with it. So, of course, I want all other togs to do the same!

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolour/

It's a wonderful piece of efficient coding--something not widely seen now in these days of cheap memory. It does color searches on images. I have a question though about the image pool they are using (It's from Alamy.). I wonder how they selected their 3 mil of images from the over 10 mil on Alamy. I wonder too, do they ever refresh it?

Anyway, if you are an Alamy contributor it's worth a look, and if you are an AD or graphic designer, you might find it quite helpful in some circumstances. And, for fun, trying selecting MORE than 10 colors.

A Day at the Fair

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:39:00 +0000

Last Saturday, with tickets to the Prairie Home Companion Show (a Christmas present), which also gave free entrance to the Champlain Valley Fair--Vermont's largest, I took about 250 shots. The interesting dilemma in sorting them on Sunday was something I hadn't run across before.

It's easy to decide between the bad shots and the good ones. But, once into the good ones, and after making the obvious decisions about the ones to work up for the stock agencies, ones to set aside for working up for gallery prints, and ones to file for the possible future stock request, there are some left over.

I like the vastly different sizes of the horses in the image, but the background is cluttered and not aesthetically pleasing. Here's another.
I've just put piece of it here to show the 3D aspect of the ribbons of the fireworks trail. The thing is too blurry for stock and the full image is broken up by shadows of the scaffolding for the stage.

Which leads me to mention why I didn't get my ideal images of fireworks. We weren't allowed to bring tripods in to the stage show. Grrr. And the fireworks happened right after the show (10K or so folks in the audience) and there was no time to get my tripod back.

Anyway, back to the images: I mean they are not good for stock; I'd never print them for display; but I like them. So, I've no idea what to do with them.

Sebald and Mueller = Inspiration

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:53:00 +0000

Some things are for the soul as well as the eyes. Put onto the books of W. G. Sebald by a friend, I am currently reading Austerlitz. This is not a "page-turner" book. It meanders richly through European memory and European places--in reality and in thought. Dappled with black and white images, for the most part uncaptioned, that make you feel, occasionally that you are privy to some off-planet view of things, this is a book for reflective folks who have much that can be triggered in their brains. Sebald offers triggers. It will likely take a long time to read this book.

The same person who recommended Sebald, also suggested I take a look at the photographs of Dana Mueller and I have done that. It's more than worth a visit if you consider yourself a landscape photographer. Also worth a visit is the ArtSpace interview with her. She is much exhibited and recognized for her work, and I for one am thoroughly embarrassed that she was unknown to me.

The Snap

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 12:04:00 +0000

Something snapped when I was tuning my friend Ellen's piano (see previous posts for other mentions of Ellen).

She was glued to her computer while I was tuning, and when I took a break, I went over to see what she was doing. And I saw images--gorgeous images. I was sucked in.

She had just discovered photography and was off the deep end with it.

I drove home in a daze. And all I had was my Nokia (previous post).

The rest of the story:

I went further into hock (What's another $1K when you've already HAD to run up the CC for car transmission replacement, gas tank replacement, vet bills, dead laptop, etc. etc. all within an 8-month period.) All for necessity and not one penny for the soul. It was then, in late September of 2007 that I said "screw it". And bought my Pentax K100D. Joined BetterPhoto. Got Adobe CS2--remember that crappy first photo of my cat?

When I was about to throw the image away, something about his eyes stopped me. Here he is transformed. The image also now has a title--Essence of Cat--and sells well as a matted print in my local gallery, STAART.

next installments utterly condensed!

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:29:00 +0000

You will note the great hiatus in dates here. I simply had too much work to do to and too much to learn to maintain the grandiose historical outline I had started out with.

history continued and much abbreviated . . .

2nd Warning: Don't read this unless you read the first (Background) one and are a glutton for mistreatment.

In the ensuing decades I worked for a publisher of college textbooks in Boston math and science as a production editor. Marched against the Vietnam War, worked on Shirley Chisholm's presidental campaign, was precinct captain in my area of Cambridge, MA for George McGovern. AND, had a few very valuable lessons in photography. This was the time of my first camera -- A Mamiya Sekor which I used for years, until I bought a used Pentax K1000. I was strictly a black and white shooter, and today, I still think like that for the most part.

Additionally and extremely important to my entire professional growth, I began collecting, studying, and using type -- lead type. And all the equipment necessary to do letterpress printing and established Fairfax Press.

To make a long story short -- I eventually ended up moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan and entering the Graduate Graphic Design Program at Western Michigan University. Studied with Jon Henderson who later became the head of the Hallmark Research Library. When he left, he was replaced by a person of, to be kind, about 1/3 his mental stature. I left t the department, spent a year in printmaking and then switched back to English, receiving an Honors M.A. and going on to Ph.D. work at the University of Western Ontario.

After leaving -- with the infamous A.B.D., I returned to Kalamazoo and set up my own graphic design studio, producing work for Selmer Music Company, U.S. Robotics, French Paper Company, and Western Michigan University.

In 1988 I had to return to Vermont to take care of my aging parents. This was the end of my visual life as these were the days before the ubiquitous computer and I could not take my clients with me. I had to work for others. All work for the next 10 years was for leading edge technology startups and therefore my normal work week was about 70 hours. No time for anything else except rest and recuperation to prepare for the next day.

From my third job in this era I got laid off (along with otheres) without severance and being owed back pay. It was then I tried to start a web design business. And that was a laugh. It was 1995 and everyone EVERYONE I talked to told me they thought the Internet was a "load of hype" and was never going to amount to anything. I knew they were wrong, but I didn't get any business except for a wonderful guy in California, Jed Donnelly, whose Computer and Communications pages, begun in 1993, are still active today. And, whose pages are still using my very dated banners! Reading Jed's bio is like reading a history of the Internet.

The other client turned out to be a fairly large one. He owned and ran a teleconferencing site called "Summons Teleconferencing" I redesigned his site and wrote a ton of perl programs for getting at visitor stats--in those days you had to roll your own. Within a couple of years he sold out to Genesys for a mil or so--nice for him, but my tenuous attempt at a web business was gone.

That was the end of my web design career. So for nearly 10 years I tuned and repaired pianos. (Don't ask.) And then, something snapped.

Background - First Installment

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:29:00 +0000

I think it's time now for a little background:

Warning: Don't read this unless you have some misguided interest in my professional history or in the low end of the publishing world.

I spent almost 30 years in some form of visual activity, which abruptly stopped in 1988. My visual career began quite unobtrusively in about 1962 or '63 at the State University of New York, Brockport. I was poor and a scholarship student who also had to work. My friend Patrick worked in the AV department and got me a job making line drawings of archaeological photographs so that they could be projected. I sat at a drawing table in the basement of the Admin Building with lead-paned windows--quiet and alone. I found I liked this very much. I liked the translucent tracing paper, the pencil sharpener, the clarity of the lines.

Humble beginnings to be sure. But, they didn't usurp my passion for reading and for all things literary. After a few checkered years, and an unfinished degree, I ended up in Boston running folding and collating machines at G.K. Hall, Boston, MA. For years they published huge books which contained reduced images of index cards from the library card catalogues of special collections around the world. And, that is what I did, for half the day I dealt out index cards onto a frame (21 to a page I think), slapped on a printed page header, clicked the camera, changed the header, swept up the cards, and replaced them with the next batch. The other half of the day I sat at a circular table, turned by a foot pedal, and pulled out folded pages that were then stacked--one signature to a stack. That alternated with running a folding machine which folded these pages in half.

(A web note here: Using these books, a researcher could "browse the stacks" of world famous collections without actually going to the library. Needless to say, this was doomed by the Internet (closed in 1993). And, interestingly, while there are myriad G. K. Hall publications referenced on the web, there is no history of this niche publishing firm, which certainly was a significant one in the annals of American publishing.)

I worked on the fifth floor, but it was the fourth floor that interested me. There was a woman there who work with triangles, rulers, and books full of variously printed alphabets. I would make any excuse to get down there and look at her drafting table. I also learned to play the numbers--strictly a fifth floor activity! But I made enough money to get myself transported back to Brockport and to buy my textbooks for the semester. I campled outside the Financial Aid office until they gave me a student loan and a job. I finished my degree (B.S. English) in two semesters and returned to Boston, where I ended up working as an editorial assistant for Benwill Publishing, now defunct, but then a publisher of two respected technical trade journals: Electromechanical Design and Circuits Manufacturing. (Electronic History Note: we featured the first "micro chip" on one of our covers and recognized the future--this was some time in 1970.) We also featured the first HP hand-held calculator -- it could add, subtract, multipy, and divide and cost $100.00!) (After my stint here, Richard Seltzer also worked at Benwill. (If you don't know who Richard Seltzer is, you weren't one of the early adopters of the web (or maybe just too young!).

Enough for now -- I'm finding as I write this, that my working life has been connected with the electronic age from the beginning. As a result, it's taking longer than I thought to get up to the present day. Stay tuned.

Fun with Better Photo

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:29:00 +0000

I mucked about some more with my cell phone and BetterPhoto, and managed to get one more interesting image while waiting at my vet's house. I sliced this out of the image and again PSed it until I saw something I liked. And, it is still one of my favorite images, though of course it is quite small.

Ellen and I began talking on the phone several times a week, looking at each other's images that we sent up to BetterPhoto. As I looked at our images, I felt an incredible longing for a "real" camera. Basically I was doing 0-60 in a two-week period here. But the crushing debt on the CC kept me tamped down. But only for another couple of months. I fell in love with one of Ellen's images--you can see it here and began to drool excessively. I dug out my old b/w contact sheets from the years when I first got into photography--all film, all b/w.

Then something happened; don't remember exactly what it was, but got dealt another financial blow which hit the card again and I said "screw it". After a great deal of research, (but not quite enough), I bought a Pentax K100D. And, of course it came on a dark and stormy night (UPS comes very late where I live.) Without having the foggiest about the myriad buttons, I snapped one of my cats in low-light (really non-existent light). Crappy image for sure, but dear to my heart.

Damn Kodak, Hello Nokia

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 11:39:00 +0000

All I had was a cheap Kodak DX3215 that I bought a few years ago to quickly get images of pianos up on the web. BUT, for some reason the software to do this no longer worked and when I tried to update it, I got a humungus program called "Easy Share" which did everything except connect my camera to my computer. (I'm very computer savy and surfed for hours trying to fix my issue, only to discover that it was Kodak's issue.)

I blew it off and looked at my Nokia cell phone, which heretofore I had considered to be "only a phone" and started taking pictures with it. Too poor to even afford a visit to a local campground, we set up our ancient camper in the backyard and spent a wonderful 24 ours enjoying Vermont! As the sun was setting, I saw this image of our old railroad lantern and its shadow, snapped it, and mucked about with it in Photoshop to get the second one. I had joined BetterPhoto and uploaded it. And, among all the Nikons, Canons, Pentaxes, and Canon Powershots, it received an Editor's Choice.

Serendipity Can Change A Life

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:18:00 +0000

I think it was sometime in July or August of 2007 that I went to tune my friend Ellen's piano. We go back a few years to when I took bass lessons from her--she's a brilliant jazz bassist, well-known in New England and an amazing teacher.

While I was tuning, she was hunched over her computer, and when I finished I went to see what she was doing. She was mucking about with beautiful images and they were hers. She had recently discovered photography and proceeded to show me her images on her BetterPhoto Gallery.

They were stunning and I was transfixed. My past intimate association with things visual came flooding back. I drove the 35 miles back home in a fog of excitement and memories. Days passed and the fog did not dissipate.

The Brass Ring

cadunn@vt2000.com (Clair) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:36:00 +0000

Listen up AARP!

I'm 64 and fed up with working a jobs that were at their best, bearable. On Sept 29th, 2007 (oops, was only 63 then) I went into more debt and bought a digital camera. A good one.

I'm making pictures. I used to do this a long time ago but the lack of money forced me to stop. Not any more. I'm going into hock for a last chance at the brass ring. I know what I'm doing and I'm doing it right.

And here starts what I think about taking pictures. And making images. They are two different things entirely. But when they work together, you get something greater than the sum of the two.

This is the short intro and I end with this magnificent quote from Dorothea Lange:

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.