Cameras for Visual Artists

Bon Voyage from Bayshore Boulevard

Yesterday, Palm Sunday, the Bayshore Boulevard (of Dreams) in Tampa could not look more inviting than in this snapshot.
 
For several months, my fifth digital camera has been on the fritz. I've only had this one for three months. Granted it's only a P+S Kodak, but the prior two gave me acceptable results when shooting outdoors. I'd drag out the old SLRs but they're no longer practical. I don't even want the bulk of a DSLR.

 Bayshore Boulevard Rainbow Sans Pot o' Gold

This photo taken across the street from the above, and minutes apart, is a little pond in old Palma Ceia. It's actually the old Palma Ceia Spring swimming hole from days long past.

In different light, different colors, this shot is problematic for many digital P+S cameras. The lens is fast enough to stop motion, stabilized, but colors are hard to correct.

Look at the rainbow, though, beautiful. While the greens are okay and the focus is spotty in a few areas, this is still a pretty greeting card scene.

Point+Shoot cameras I've owned and researched have a problem with contrasting and differentiating the transition from sun to shade and, in my more colorful flower shots, correct to blobs of bright color, or everything is monotone blurred blues.

Bayshore Garden Club Live Oaks Draped in Moss

A lovely scene across the side road to the spring, shot on automatic setting with strong backlighting and multiple shades of green. Not bad. I'll re-shoot when I have a new camera.
This link offers lots of information from an experienced professional fine art photographer.
Photograph Art 

Maybe more technical than you need, but you can easily pick out the sections on 2-D art and just enjoy the pictures in the rest of the post.

Cruising Down the Bayshore

Off to look at cameras now. Our difficulty in photographing our art is the close-up focus required for reproductions. Artists need those fantastic scenery shots only for reference, unless like me, uploading photos for prints.

With my current information, I may choose a Panasonic Lumix today and continue reading before committing to a Canon Powershot SX40HS, as referenced in my prior post link - New Camera - which the author has updated.

Comments are always encouraged.
If you're following interesting blogs, feel free to comment or post those links here, too. 

All the best,

Gail Kent
Gail Kent Studio

Find me or my work at the following addresses:
Gail-Kent.artistwebsites.com 
 Twitter -  Twitter.com/@Gail_Kent,  and Facebook -  www.facebook.com/GailKentStudio
www.etsy.com/people/gailkentstudio
https://sites.google.com/site/gailkentstudios
 

Silence Sounds

Silence, being still and listening to silence, is overpowering on a deserted seashore. The senses are filled with rhythms of the wind and water and seabirds. Gordon Hempton, Audio Ecologist, knows all about this silence and the sounds which fill it. Today  On Being  tweeted from an interview about his "sound tracking" which I'm hoping to hear Sunday morning. He said in this interview "Silence is the think tank of the soul." I'm looking forward to getting to know his work on his website Soundtracker

Picnic Island Low Tide

Yesterday was a day to listen and to gather, figuratively and literally. During high winds and very low tides, I was able to explore the floor of the bay while gathering a variety shells--some to keep, and others to leave in place for their occupants. The deserted beach was closed to swimmers because of high bacteria counts from heavy rains and winds over the weekend. I heard the silence call and took my chances, walking far from shore, absorbing the quiet.

Cockle Shell

I walked ankle deep into the quiet water, hearing only palms beating in the winds, and the sound of my own thoughts. An island hiker acquaintance came by and showed me a coconut he'd retrieved from the bay--one-upped me! I did find this huge cockle resting in the sand, many other shells, and all the thoughts and memories I collected in the sounds of silence.

Carolina Trail

Today I spent an hour in a lifeguard stand listening to myself  sing Cockles and Muscles, an Irish folk song I learned as a child, accompanied by high tide waves, fish jumping from the water, and hungry seagulls sailing on the winds. That song carried me back to the North Carolina mountains of my childhood where hiking on a trail like this offered completely different sounds in the silence. These hills are definitely a think tank of the soul.

Forsythia Gone Wild

I've been working on a number of  North Carolina Spring studies in traditional style for several weeks. Our recent bay high winds certainly flooded me with memories of March winds whipping through tall pines and lawns covered in wild flowering shrubs. I'm so very fortunate to have both mountains and seashore to soak up sounds and vistas for inspiration in my art.

Mountain Stream

I always listen to my surroundings, to the nuances of nature's songs. A stream runs though this horse farm just outside Asheville city limits. It's marvelous to walk and listen to the land just minutes from city life. The babble of this little brook, the gentle waterfall tumbling over jagged rocks, and sounds of waves in ebb and flow are integral to my painting. These studies will be uploaded to my FAA site and painted in oils as larger works for my gallery.
 
Value of the "soundtracker" outing: priceless!
Value of my new Cockle shell: one new pair of New Balance walkers and another camera (dropped it again)!


I hope you, too, will enjoy Gordon Hempton's On Being interview and his movie, as tools to enrich your creative inspiration processes.

Comments are always encouraged.
If you're following interesting blogs, feel free to comment or post those links here, too. 

All the best,

Gail Kent
Gail Kent Studio

Find me or my work at the following addresses:
Gail-Kent.artistwebsites.com 
 Twitter -  Twitter.com/@Gail_Kent,  and Facebook -  www.facebook.com/GailKentStudio
www.etsy.com/people/gailkentstudio
https://sites.google.com/site/gailkentstudios

Richard Diebenkorn Ocean View Series

http://www.sfmoma.org/images/
artwork/medium/72.59_01_b02.jpg

Richard Diebenkorn's art is indescribably beautiful and simple, especially his Ocean View series currently on exhibition at OCMA Diebenkorn Exhibition

Ocean Park #54 is one of my new favorites for the colors and because Diebenkorn left the trail of his thought processes as he scraped away layers to add new paint for a different effect. Pride doesn't allow most of us don't leave that trail.

I'd love to line up all the images from this series for you - just google Richard Diebenkorn Ocean View Series images for a visual treat.

How often we see feeble attempts of imitation in these representational bands of color. They are mesmerizing to me as I live on the coast, daily painting my own bands of color, and could easily step right into one of his images. Everyday, I work in my own seaside environment of angular industrial lines, bright interior angles, and open expanses of blue sky meets green water or green sky meets blue water.

Though meeting with criticism, Diebenkorn stayed the course with his thoughts, with his application of colors to convey his surroundings. In this brief video you hear his response to early criticism. Diebenkorn on his Method

I'm off to the beach now to create new works after spending a little time with Diebenkorn's paintings. Hopefully, I'll work under inspiration, not influence. A few of my own images will show my affinity for the sea's translucent linear colors. If you arrive on the shoreline on a foggy morning, you will be greeted, on rare occasion, by a low tide horizon similar to this Morning Low Tide
This print is currently included in Fine Art America's Sales Favorites







 A rainy seaside morning will greet you with brilliant colors as storm clouds dissipate and you begin a new painting to capture the moment from shoreline. Living on the Central Florida Gulf Coast, I get an extra long season of these images during our six-months-long hurricane season.  Skies are Clearing
(I'm right there with the wind and waves when we experience the melodrama of a good storm.)

And then we have Winter on the coast in the Tampa Bay area. This cold windy day of crisp clear blues was captured while trying to hold everything down. It was an awesome blue bay on that frigid day.Winter Morning. This print is currently getting a lot of FAA activity. I've seen several somewhat similar images pop up recently on other sites. Some never learn that if you weren't there, you probably can't capture the essence--we're going to see a lot of Diebenkorn influence coming.




Enjoy your visit to Diebenkorn online you won't be able to catch the exhibit. I did.

Comments are always encouraged.
If you're following interesting blogs, feel free to comment or post those links here, too. 

All the best,

Gail Kent
Gail Kent Studio

Find me or my work at the following addresses:
Gail-Kent.artistwebsites.com 
 Twitter -  Twitter.com/@Gail_Kent,  and Facebook -  www.facebook.com/GailKentStudio
www.etsy.com/people/gailkentstudio
https://sites.google.com/site/gailkentstudios