Archive of journal entries re "Observations"

Exploring Chinese scrolls with David Hockney

Colin OBrien

Over the summer I’ve been reading various books about the explorations of David Hockney, mostly expressed in the form of interviews. A lot of what he has gotten into is around the idea of perspective, of how the 3-D world is translated into 2-D. He talks »

Flowers always in focus

Colin OBrien

I think I’ve been struggling a long time with focus: where to place it in the scene; how much of the scene to get in focus. Now I realize I might have given more weight to concerns over diffraction than it warrants and not enough to what I am »

Hockney and Path Ways

Colin OBrien

This week we have been enjoying Christmas with Jill’s folks in Palo Alto. Yesterday we headed up to Sebastopol to catch up with a couple of her friends. On the way we stopped at the de Young Museum (part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). The highlight was the David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, »

Amazing what you can see in satellite photos

Colin OBrien

I’ve been trying to track down exactly where some of my older photographs were taken. They’ve been cataloged in Lightroom, so I know when they were taken easy enough, and I know what the event or excursion was, what the general location. But the specifics are pretty bare. I’ve been using a combination of Google Maps and Ordinance Survey maps to try and come up with better captions. For this photograph, I had a pretty clear memory of much of the hike, and I knew the general area, so I started zooming in with Google Maps. »

Is art fair over?

Colin OBrien

This week is “Art Fair”. There are actually 4, or maybe even 5, separately organized fairs going on around town simultaneously. It’s most clear it’s this week because the weather is so ‘bad’; as in, this is the week the heat and the humidity both peak, at »

Art or not

Colin OBrien

“Is photography art?” was discussed for over a hundred years. The photo-secessionists, like all pictorialists, thought they had in some way to ape painting to be acceptable. Perhaps more success came when photographers accepted the strengths of their own medium and people like Paul Strand, and then the Group f/64, got to work. But »

Familiar – style or subject?

Colin OBrien

When I look on the computer at a photograph I’ve made, many times I’ll think, wow that’s like …, and though I typically won’t be able to actually say who it reminds me of, but there will be something that seems reminiscent of some famous photographs, or photographers, I’ve »

Not like last year

Colin OBrien
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This weekend I was trying to take a longer bike ride, while still staying close to town. At one point I was out at the Broadway Bridge, and I went down to the river. I was at the point where last year I saw the kayaks going under the path from the Argo spillway and into the Huron River, below the Argo Dam. »

Influences

Colin OBrien

Whenever I get together with my friend Paul, and even when we talk on the phone, although not so much nowadays, he likes to ask me, who are your influences. My answer has always been, I don’t have any photographic influences (other than the million images I see a day of course); I would instead look to painters, especially the Impressionists, and more recently also Constable, as well as Vermeer. When I got home from this latest visit, I looked once again at the postcard above our fireplace, and thought, yes, that would qualify. It’s “Chez Mondrian” by André Kertész. »