Shed, Surreybrooke Gardens, Middletown, Maryland, June 17, 2006

Posted by commart on March 12, 2013

I had hoped my related artist’s blog, J. S. Oppeneim – All Together, would be the more intimate vehicle, but for the past week or so, I’ve been posting on it items like that above as I’ve gone about reconstructing and editing an archive dating back to the build of my desktop computer over the winter of 2006-2007.

It has been nice posting pretty pictures, as they remind me that I can shoot pretty well when I want to give photography proper a little attention.

Now I want to give Communicating Arts a little more attention.

I got a call yesterday to shoot a toddler’s birthday party.

I didn’t jump.

Should I have? Is all exposure good? Is all work good?

Instead, I’m thinking about printing, so “Bertha” hasn’t had to have been spitting ink and checking herself out for nothing lo these many years.

Also, instead, I want to package together driving / journalism / research / shooting.

Somehow.

What is that right combination of artistic esprit and freedom, country living, and, not so pretty but light aristocratic pretension?

Condé Nast? Meredith?

I think I like owning my work even if it is not (today) ginning up royalties like a well pumping oil.

Darn it!

Subjects intrinsically interesting to me: artists and their lairs — I like my Hollywood-in-Maryland down at the coffee shop; environmental portraiture; farms and other elements of the pastoral (no better location for that than mine five minutes from Interstate 81, which cuts down the west side of the Blue Ridge on its haul down to Tennessee (and up northeast to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania followed by a hard left northward to the Canadian border in upstate New York).

Much else is fine too, provided the gear needed (and on hand) fits into the Mustang.

Where is the work?

Is it in the facility for taking “a good picture” — or a great one every time out?

Is it in the hucksterism with big brag and prospect lists to match?

I don’t think I have any “big brags” at the moment — just small ones with occasional weddings, some volunteer work, from which I may post here, and always some moving along in the other arts and in intellectual circles. Still, my ship remains adrift beside the Great American Economy, my course uneasily navigated.

Posting Like Crazy — At the Other Place

Posted by commart on March 1, 2013

http://jsoppenheim.com/

I embarked on a rebuild of the studio’s main computer last month, and now with momma and all of her attached children happily sucking down electricity, I’ve had to approach recovering from backups all the data — business administrative, personal, photographic — accumulated since the initial build in 2007.

In the “digital imaging” arena, revisiting some 20,000 files (five-to-one shooting; copies in various formats; ratings from can’t-toss-it-now-but want-to to “Pretty Good!”) makes for a bit of a headache.

Add to that headache that the bulk of the digitized collection was in a single directory on the way to frying my old C: drive (yeah, that happened); and on the return, there are now a dozen separate annual directories plus some odd collections. My goal is to get the “Wall Worthy” into DNG and TIFF collections.

Eventually.

No matter the art or mode, much aesthetic and business success relates to the artist’s ability to explore themes and produce projects. Be that as it may, right now “it’s hard drainin’ the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators!”

It’s not quite that bad, but there’s a lot to deal with right now — in the box and outside of it.

Snapping off a pretty picture now and then doth not a career make.

For the photojournalists, winning a Pulitzer may “make” a career (or name), but the value of the “one-off manufacture” is notoriety only: all who or have or have left something to look at, from Doisneau to Salgado, have produced a lot on their way to becoming their own brand.

I’d like to catch up but it may be late in the day . . . . although I think there’s some light left in it too.

I don’t know if I have a career or have had one or am having one — hard to tell, all that — but I have made an awful lot of pretty pictures and hope to continue making more of them quite (quite!) soon.

Starlings, Hagerstown, Maryland, December 8, 2012

Posted by commart on December 9, 2012

The Affair With Montpelier Mansion, Laurel, Maryland

Posted by commart on November 5, 2012

I find with the shade-of-gray theme that it’s generally more beguiling to post pictures without interpretive rigmarole.

However, most pictures don’t tell their own stories.

I lived in Laurel, Maryland for 15 years, a crossroads perhaps as significant in American history as Greenwich Village’s Washington Square but more easily overlooked. Those who know — Fort Meade, National Security Agency, National Agricultural Center, central to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., University of Maryland, etc., and home to the Pin Del Motel — know.

A building fire on a February morning in 2006 plus high rent at the height of the real estate boom forced the move that led to my hop over the Appalachians and into the Cumberland Valley of western Maryland.

However, back to back when the Internet developed its still early social forums, including “model-photographer culture”, and I had gear, accumulated over time, albeit with some acceleration attending the predictable change in generational status, I had just the space for faux fashion photography, not to mention romantic open space, just two miles, if that, from my apartment.

Laurel also hosted a major regional camera store — Penn Camera — and a still operating custom lab (“United Photo” in Beltsville).

Good times!

I’ve held onto my film gear, including a medium format system, but film, for all the obsessing — if no other post gathers comment, this one might for hitting a well known nerve — requires a comparatively long basic shepherding process from exposure to lab to scan to scan cleaning and then, finally, the same editing as any other digital image file.

It’s just easier working with the D2x or D200 and Lightroom (and it’s going to be very painful here sorting, culling, scanning, and preparing old slides — sufficiently stunning (often enough) for the labor involved — from three or four or more decades back.

This was scanned from film, probably Plus-X or a very good Tri-X (I miss my old walk-in closet of a lab too):

I’ve better pictures of “Jessica”, a model — for the above, one on the “Time for Prints / CD / DVD” plan — but it serves for why I miss the old (shooting) space, the babes (not so many), the empty and open — for me and my purposes, miraculously underutilized — park grounds.

Here she is again.