Thank you Mary Virginia Swanson

It was a beautiful morning on Saturday. As I sat with my first cup of coffee I decided to check through my emails since I have been traveling and not as attentive as usual. I stumbled upon an email inviting me to attend a presentation by Mary Virginia Swanson (MVS) as part of Foto Week DC. It was Saturday morning at Glen Echo. I had been intrigued by the press and write-ups about MVS and on a whim I decided to hop on a bus to Glen Echo. I was not disappointed.
While she gives the same basic information over and over about the business of photography and representation she makes it sound fresh and she updates her presentation as she goes. She was full of ideas and ways to pursue fine art photography. A central theme was the community of photographers and the art world in general. She stressed the need to get out there, to have portfolio reviews, and to find avenues through connections. Towards the end of her presentation she mentioned that Foto Week DC might still have some openings for portfolio reviews. After she had described the necessary preparation for a review I thought it interesting that she would pitch a review at the last minute. So I popped the question and she said that it is always good to have a review as you always learn. With that, I contacted Foto Week DC and signed up for a review today.
Taking all the information provided by MVS, I spent my day sorting, processing, and printing. By late in the afternoon I had 20 respectable pictures of Antarctica to share. I was also out of ink and low on paper. So I packaged up the prints and trundled down to the Corcoran for my review. I don't really know what I was expecting. I had decided on the end of the day to not only get ready but to potentially have a little more time with the review than the 20 minutes alloted time. My review was with Melissa Farlow. While I prepared prints, I found that she wanted to see more work related to penguins in Antarctica so I was glad that I brought the computer along. Her review was thoughtful - stick with the penguins. It was clear that I had a way of capturing them in whimsical moments and that I took great care about how they were posed.
As we discussed the market, we lamented on the changes that have taken place with the advent of digital and while she had some suggestions, she agreed that it is hard to find markets, and certainly hard if you want to be connected with the top tier in travel, adventure photography.
Still she sent me away with some ideas of what to do next and spurred me on with her geninue response to the penguin pictures I thought were the best of the lot.
With the winter almost upon us that will give me a chance to regroup, figure out my next steps and see if I can launch these photos out of the computer and into the mainstream. At the very least it launched me back into blogging with something to say.

Hickory Horned Devil

The National Zoo is the most popular destination point for people who come to see me because it is only a five minute walk from my house. I always enjoy going, especially as the unexpected often happens at the Zoo and each visit is unique. Yesterday was exceptional as a Hickory Horned Devil ambled across the walk by the outdoor elephant area. As you can see he is quite colorful and quite large (approximately 5 inches long). He drew a huge crowd and we had to watch the children who kept getting too close and almost stepped on the little fellow. As it turns out he was seeking a place to burrow so that he could morph into a Royal Walnut Moth.
I thought at first that he must have escaped from somewhere else in the Zoo but he is actually a native of North America and is found throughout the deciduous forest areas of the eastern U.S. With the help of a Zoo volunteer we got the fellow to climb onto a piece of paper and then deposited him on the other side of a fence with lots of foliage and nice soft dirt. After searching for information about him on the Internet I learned that that is exactly what we should have done according to information from the University of Florida; "If a larva is found crawling on pavement or in an area of thick turf grass where it would have difficulty burrowing, it should be moved to an area of soft soil or a mulched area where it can burrow for pupation."
Now I will have to keep going back to see if I can find a Royal Walnut Moth someday.

Eastman Glass Plates

Sometimes buried treasure comes in small heavy boxes. In recent weeks I rediscovered several original boxes of Eastman's Dry Plates in my mother's Amelia Earhart trunk. The plates are well preserved and show Victorian life in all its splendor. In fact, whoever took the pictures really wanted to record everyday life as well as the more traditional family gathering on the porch. This first picture sets the stage with this traditional pose of all the men in front and the women dutifully standing behind them. It is one of the best preserved plates that I have scanned.
Eastman Dry Plates were made commercially available in 1880 after George Eastman decided that there had to be a better way to take photographs than carrying your darkroom with you, which was required by the then available method for photography using wet-collodion plates. He actually bought the wet-collodion plate system to record a trip he was going to take, but in fact never did as he became intrigued with finding options to this cumbersome system. He found articles in British journals about photographers who were making their own gelatin emulsions. It took him approximately three years to perfect his formula for a gelatin emulsion that adhered to the glass and remained light sensitive. This allowed the user to take pictures and then develop them later. It was a huge step forward in making photography accessible to everyone.

Web Site Update

I have made a few changes to the web site to reflect a broader range of what I do. I also want to make the site more dynamic with additions as well as subtractions of work on a regular basis. My goal is to add more work to the new "Places" category weekly. I am limiting the work on Places to just eight pictures per category. In some cases I will change the eight pictures over time if it is a collection where I have a substantial body of work. I have also added an "Events" category that shows a sample of event work. For actual events I still use on-line services to post all the pictures in an event for the client to view via pass code access. I hope to add to the Event category as well over time with some classic work. At present, I am just testing the new categories to see how they feel and if I want to keep them. I welcome comments and suggestions on what might be of interest and what you would like to see on the web site. Check it out at www.svenskastudios.com.

There is an article in today's New York Times that skirts around an interesting issue of how we not only view art but how we view our world when we are experiencing new things. The lead picture shows people in the Louvre taking pictures of the pictures with their point and shoot cameras. The essence of the article is how we don't really take time to look and study, we just seem to collect data points and feel we have something if we have recorded it on our cameras. Whenever I venture out to a Smithsonian Museum I find the same phenomenon of people just clicking away and not really looking, or seeming to not look at what they are seeing. An interesting observation by Michael Kimmelman is that "Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look." Now with the advent of digital, it is so easy to just snap a picture of everything as if seeing it all but are we really seeing anything at all that way?

Annie

Late last night I got an email that updated Annie Leibovitz's financial situation -- it just went from bad to worse. While there are those who can't understand how anyone would need to borrow $24M using all past and future work as collateral, it is what it is and that is just what Annie did. If she has a financial planner, accountant, and/or attorney none of these individuals seem to be present in the current situation. She is now being sued for not upholding her end of the bargain. I feel a little like Carl Fredricksen in "UP" when he finds his hero, Charles F. Muntz, deep in the South American jungle and Carl is excited until he realizes that his hero isn't a hero after all. It seems so incongruous that the world's most famous photographer with million dollar jobs would dig a hole this deep. Rumors abound including those that say the estate of Susan Sontag added mounds of debt to Leibovitz. Whatever the reason let's hope she gets some real help, including someone who can manage the negative press, which could just make this hole deeper without professional help.

Metro Red Line Crash

I try to avoid rush hour but today I was with out-0f-town friends and we were returning from the Holocaust Museum and on our way to Luna Grill and Diner on Connecticut Ave. We hit the Smithsonian Metro at 5:40 PM and planned to change trains at Metro Center. One look at the platforms at Metro Center and I knew there was a major problem. So instead of Luna we exited Metro and had dinner "downtown". When I got home I was greeted with a voice mail from a friend hoping I wasn't using Metro at this time. It doesn't take much to bring the system to a screeching halt and today, unfortunately, it not only brought the system to a halt but it took a number of lives with it. Metro is my transportation system. I gave up my car to reduce my carbon footprint over three years ago. I am now one of the crowd on this platform at Metro Center when something goes terribly wrong. It will take days, perhaps weeks to figure out what happened but it will take years for the families of the victims to adjust to their new reality. We may be many on the platform but we had the chance to freely exit. For those between Takoma and Fort Totten there was not the same option. My heart goes out to the families of the victims and to all the emergency personnel dealing with this horrific crash. For those of us stuck on the platform six deep, we were lucky to be there.