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Welcome to APG's February 2018 Newsletter

A February Contest

 
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Gallery Views and News

February 2018



 
 
A Contest for February


A Contest for February

     Writing a good sentence is hard work. So is making a good photograph. Sometimes the photograph is easier than the sentence; sometimes harder. And, like the famous first lines of novels we quote this month, photographs — if they are to last — must be carefully crafted.

    In the digital age crafting a photograph includes computer post-processing. Akin to developing negatives in a darkroom, almost all photographs need it to some degree. That does not require a departure from reality, it only means crafting a photograph that is a true reflection of what the photographer was feeling and intended when she opened the shutter. But beautiful, artistic departures can be made if the artist chooses.

    However, you can do a lot of strange things to a photograph in a computer. Humor is also possible, as you can see from the thumbnails accompanying this article.

          Whereupon Editor bursts into the room: What are you doing? Those                 photographs you are using aren't real!
        
Writer: Yes, I know. We're having fun here.
        
Ed: Fun? You're not allowed to have fun. Take those photos out or I'll                send you back to the plutonium mines where I found you!

         Ignoring Editor, the writer continues his work . . . .

     


    But just because you can do something in a computer does not mean you should. To prove the point, and just for fun, we are doing a mashup of carefully crafted first lines of novels this month. It is a contest. Below you will find the mashup. Think of it as “photoshopped literature”. Your job is to identify the work from which each comes.

    The prize?  A 16x20 matted print of your selection from those currently in the gallery. Or, if you are a photographer and prefer, you may have an hour tutorial in either Photoshop or Lightroom from one of our photographers.

    Here is a hint: Twenty-four works were used. One author has two entries, the rest one each. Some are combined into one sentence and a couple are actually the first two or even three first sentences. Minor editorial changes such as verb tense, pronouns, and connectors have been selectively made. Because you may, if you wish, look these up on a computer, the winner will be the fifth person to email us with all the correct answers. Email your answers to abqphotogallery@gmail.com or with a header entitled “CONTEST”. Or you can use the “contact us” button on our web page at www.abqphotogallery.com.



Here is the Contest. Good luck!   


    Who's there?
    Call me Ishmael. I am an invisible man.

    It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen when Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. To Sherlock Holmes she was always the woman. To Watson he said, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, Watson, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

     It was a dark and stormy night. In his family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. 

    All day the sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. After all, all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. On the other hand, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. But many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. That was after a little girl woke up and asked, “Where’s Papa going with that ax?”

    One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack mule was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico. They were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong. “Take my camel, dear,” said Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. The last camel collapsed at noon. Captain Ahab was neither her first husband nor the last. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

    I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.





 

The grass is always greener when you crank up the saturation in photoshop.

Anon

Gallery News

   

 

February First Friday in New Zealand
 


    
    
     Rhonda is just back from a trip to New Zealand. The islands of New Zealand resemble a fish and a Maori gentleman once told Rhonda, “you must travel from the head to the tail.” She and her daughter did that on this trip and Rhonda calls it a transformative trip. She will describe the journey and show you some fantastic photographs at the Gallery Friday evening, February 2nd at 6:30. As always on a First Friday, the gallery will be open from 11AM until 8 or so. Please come join us for “New Zealand: A Photo Journey from the Head of the Fish to the Tail.” You'll see photos of the Pancake Rocks, 30 million years young, at sunset in Punakaiki on the West Coast of New Zealand; Fairy Falls in the Mt. Aspiring National Park rainforest, lush, verdant, and impassable without at least a machete; silver ferns; and the scenery for which New Zealand is so famous.


ARTful Saturday in the Galapagos

    We get around. From New Zealand we'll take you to the Galapagos with Stan. He'll be talking about — and showing — photos. His talk, “The Galapagos National Park from a Photographer's Perspective” will be our contribution to ARTful Saturday (Feb 17). Stan will talk beginning about 2PM and will be there during the afternoon to show you his work. Mark your calnedar so you don't forget.

Knate Myers on Time-lapse Photography

    Knate will be doing the monthly talk for the Enchanted Lens Camera Club Thursday evening, February 1st. That's at the Jewish Community Center, 5520 Wyoming NE. He'll be talking about time-lapse photography and we would have shown you some of his time-lapse work here but Knate is so self-effacing he never tells us anything. We believe he would not tell us if he won the Nobel Prize, let alone the fact that he will be teaching at the Santa Fe Workshops this year. Hint: Save the Date: September 8-13, 2018. Here is a link to what Knate will be teaching. (Not that Knate told us this himself. Oh no, we had to look it up ourselves and a powerful bother it was too, I can tell you that.)



Kelly Wins Honorable Mention in International Photo Contest

     Kelly Haller was awarded an Honorable Mention in this year's International Monochrome Contest, headquartered in London. The 2017 Monochrome awards received almost 9,000 entries from 87 countries. The winners were announced during January. This is her winning photo entitled Dream Lake. You can see the other work at the Monochrome Awards site.













Kent on the Weather

    The attendance at Kent's January workshop “Bad Weather Makes for Good Photography” was so stunning that he plans a reprise as we get closer to Spring. Stay tuned.

     He also tells us that he and Peter Boehringer will be leading their annual photography trip to Lake Powell from October 30 through November 3rd. More on that trip in a subsequent Newsletter.



Lisa Sego, Master Photographer

     Former Gallery member and honorary FOG, Lisa Sego recently was awarded the honor of being a Master Photographer by the Professional Photographers of America. She becomes one of only 14 New Mexicans with that honor. To achieve that status is a time consuming, artistically demanding endeavor and usually takes a minimum of four years. We congratulate Lisa! That's quite an honor and speaks highly of her work.

     (Being a FOG is quite an honor also. It stands for “Friend of the Gallery”. We don't award that coveted status to just anybody.)

 

Psst. Here's the block where we suggest that the best way to support the arts is to buy some. Photographs make wonderful presents because they demonstrate that you have thoughtfully selected a unique gift. And, if you are unsure what photograph is best for someone, give them one of our gift certificates and you can enjoy an outing with the receipients as they select a work at the gallery.

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.

Yousuf Karsh



Items of Interest


Your Brain on Art
  
     Neuroscientists are beginning to study what humans have known to be true for millennia: Art is good for you. Here is a recent piece from the Washington Post using ballet as an example and metaphor.

     Here is another take on why we need art. This one from the biologist E.O. Wilson who has devoted a lifetime to thinking about it.


Bears Ears

     Two national monuments, Bears' Ears and the Grand Staircase Escalante are in great danger. Here are two articles what is happening, one from the New York Times and one from the Washington Post.

Computers and Artistic Creation

    We said in the beginning of our introduction to our contest that computers can be used to create artistic departures from reality and well as reality. Here is an example of a photographer, Paul Ernest, who uses computer enhanced departures to tell stories in the manner that Andrew Wyeth used paintings.

     Enlarged versions of many of Ernest's photographs are here.


Copyright Changes and Photographers

     Of interest to photographers is the recent change to the copyright law that affects how photographs are copyrighted.

 
Every day you play with the light of the universe.


Pablo Neruda

 
Photo of the Month

     This month's photo comes from Albuquerque resident Norm Gagne who has a show in Boulder, Colorado. His wife Jane, wrote about Norm's work for the show. She says, “Norm strives for a photograph that portrays reality, that evokes the same feelings the the reality evokes. He wants the viewer to walk into the photograph. [Here] an old cottonwood rises in the Bosque along the Rio Grande, its grand trunk grown to three smaller trunks, each a tree in itself.. I have the urge to put my hand on the tree, feel its rough bark beneath my palm.” She adds, “Norm has been interested in photography for decades.  Now, in his retirement, he spends hours, days, weeks, to get the perfect print, the kind of photo that makes you want to touch the bark.”

     Norm has been making pictures in the Rio Grande Bosque, a Cottonwood forest that has flourished for centuries in the historic flood plain of the river but which, in more recent times, has been radically transformed by human actions to control and use the river water.

     His incisive pictures of the Bosque reveal the uneasy beauty of areas transformed from the natural splendor that existed along the river less than a century ago.  He says, “Construction of flood control dams and diversions for human use, and depletion of river flows from drought and climate change have all but eliminated seasonal inundation of the flood plain and have lowered water tables along the river's course.  Cottonwood seeds need moist, fertile soil to germinate and grow.  New trees are no longer sprouting or growing fast enough to replace the dying elders.  These old cottonwoods forests are perhaps the last. The outlook, at best, is guarded.  

     “The Rio Grande Bosque will never return to its natural state.  The residual impact of human actions will endure.  Yet with time, the forces and rhythms of nature will bring forth new orders.  Many have found instruction and hope in the wisdom of Rachel Carson, for, “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”


     The show is “Residual Natures”, open now and remaining open until March 1st. The opening reception is this Thursday, February 1st from 5:30 to 8:00 PM. It's at the Paramita Gallery of Naropa University at 3285 30th Street in Boulder. If you are in Boulder anytime this month we highly recommend going. 

 
Like so many artworks, the brain is largely an object of mystery. One secret yet to be discovered is how the fragile

folds of matter locked inside our skulls can not only conceive art, create it and contemplate it, but can also

experience being transported by it, out of the head, out of the body, out of space and time and reality itself.


Sarah L. Kaufman
Newsletter Copyright © Kent Winchester, All rights reserved.
The Albuquerque Photographers' Gallery: The Southwest's premier gallery of contemporary fine art photography.

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