Seeking the World’s Soul

This is Karina, the first of the two models I’ve been working with and the reason I went out and bought studio lights. We did a lot of playing around with props and poses - I love the golden age quality of this image- sort of a vision of Queen Maeve of Connaught via 1940s Hollywood.

Shot with one softbox for lighting on my usual Canon 350D, 18-55mm lens at 27mm. The matte black background is wide rolls of crepe paper I taped to my bookshelf. I did a little bit of “painting with light” on this one - above the basic image layer I created a transparent layer set on “soft light” and then dodged and burned that layer by painting white, black, and golden yellow at 8% transparency over the photo.

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So I couldn’t figure out how to get that backup to work, but luckily I’d been crossposting just about everything from this blog to LJ and was able to manually copy and paste most of my posts back in. I skipped some that were just links to galleries without text; I figure it would be better to do some writing about the photos and then put something like them back up later.

In the meantime, I’m thinking to use this as an opportunity to redo my site a bit. Now I just have to figure out how!

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Well, some bit of malware just ate my site. I’m extremely annoyed - as if I wasn’t in the middle of moving to a new city and trying to get the apartment ready and all that!

I do have a backup file from two weeks ago when I last upgraded wordpress, and I may even be able to figure out how to use it. But, not tonight.

Anyway, if you’re here for my photos, please view the gallery here. Be sure to check out the new work with Tamta in the “Models” folder especially - she looks like a Renaissance beauty and I’ve really been enjoying working with her.

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I think my website has been hacked… the main site has disappeared and I can’t get into the Wordpress admin area either. The other wordpress blogs I’m hosting for my family are messed up too. Arg, computers. I’ll deal with it tomorrow. Gallery still works, anyway.

Anyway, a bit of what I’ve been working on:

First edits up here.

The model is Tamta, a Georgian girl who’s a refugee from Abkhazia (and sort of a student though I’m not charging her), who I’m helping develop a modeling portfolio. She’s a treat to work with, though I had to do her makeup (just a touch of it) because all she has is colored chapstick.

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Went down to the Belarussian consulate to get our transit visas started today, but the line was too long and they said they wouldn’t get through what was there now before closing for their 2 hour lunch break… Now I have to go back again tomorrow but even earlier. Ugh. I hate mornings.

Today was just… long. I felt like I was running in circles pointlessly. Did a shoot with a girl who’s sort of a student (we’re trading modeling for a couple lessons. She’s gorgeous and so poor she doesn’t even have makeup… not that she needs it. Sigh. She looks like a classic Italian beauty, and is sooo slender - seriously, every time I see her I want to feed her. She’s Georgian and lives with her mom, though, so it’s probably just her metabolism, given how heavy their food is. Arg.) Anyway, eventually got some good shots in spite of having light coming in through the window interfere with my infrared flash system. Eventually I just gave up on it and used natural light instead, even though it was pretty dim.

I do feel like I’m getting an increasingly good grip on how to handle models, anyway. It’s mainly fun, but dammit one more thing to run around and do that I don’t really have time for right now! Right now it’s just feeling like yet more work, though I have to say I enjoy it a lot more than teaching English.

I feel like I’m going out of my mind, hopping around in circles over and over, and am not at all ready to move.

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We’re doing it.

Yesterday we went out and got tickets to Berlin for April 30th. We leave on the 9:15 pm train and arrive in Berlin 24 hours later.

So, yeah, we’d decided to leave later in the summer. Getting questioned by the FSB, the main Russian intelligence agency, for 2 hours with no translator or recourse or anyone knowing where I was… well, it rather muted any lingering desire to stay in Russia.

It was a very cultural experience, I suppose. Gave me a whole lot of insight into how Russia works. The responses of local friends and people at the agency was even more so, I think. I’ll write about it when I’ve cooled down a bit more.

Anyway, it’s time to go and I am damn glad to be getting back on the road and on to new things.

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Been having a stressful week… got stopped by the FSB (the Federal Security Bureau, loosely translated, and successor to the KGB) and questioned for 2 hours yesterday because I stopped to take a photo of a cute dog and it turned out I was right next to some “secret office”. Bother. It was scary, but they were pretty professional overall and it was just some elderly former KGB guy who kept me from leaving within 10 minutes of getting pulled in.

Felt really jumpy today though. It was a plainclothes guy who grabbed me and dragged me to the office, and I really didn’t know if he was a criminal or what, and today I was just looking at everyone and wondering… really wanted to just go to the train station and get a ticket to anywhere away from here. Fucking police states. I left home because it was starting to feel way too much like one, and had no trouble for three years and then I go to take a picture of a stupid dachshund in a raincoat and end up spending two hours explaining what I’m doing in Russia.
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Anyway, got Windows reinstalled today. Don’t have all the drivers in yet but I think I’ll have everything important back on it by this weekend. Spent Saturday doing a major model shoot with a girl named Karina, much fun, and need to get those processed.

In other news, I want to drop about half my students because they’re driving me nuts, or because their “fastest way to the metro” happened to go right by an FSB compound and thank you very much I don’t want to go through that again.

Anyway, stressed and tired, off to bed.

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Ah, Moscow: the never-ending greyness, the lousy weather, the winter depression, the bad air… I doctored up this photo in honor of all that. (Sorry about the lack of posts recently, by the way; there’s a bad flu going around and I ended up sick in bed for 8 days straight.)

Anyway, this photo. I shot it two years ago as a standard color image, in RAW format of course, and then started playing with it. The light scattering of snow and twilight lighting suggested something odd and murky and vaguely fairy-tale like. The lighting and my mood at the time made me think of living in an aquarium. I converted it to greyscale, applied distortion similar to a pinhole camera, and then tinted it in cyans. After that, I applied a “painting with light” technique - you create a new layer in Photoshop, set it to “soft light” and then paint whites and blacks on with a very soft brush at 8% opacity. It’s a nice way to dodge and burn an image subtly and reversibly.

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Found this at http://www.lokis-laughter.com/

The River

One day, three men were hiking and unexpectedly came upon a large, raging, violent river.
They needed to get to the other side, but had no idea of how to do so.
The first man prayed to Woden, saying, “Please Woden, give me the strength to cross this river.”

Poof!
Woden gave him big arms and strong legs, and he was able to swim across the river in about two hours,
after almost drowning a couple of times.

Seeing this, the second man prayed to Thor, saying, “Please Thunor, give me the strength….. and the tools to cross this river.”

Poof!
Thunor gave him a rowboat and he was able to row across the river in about an hour,
after almost capsizing the boat a couple of times.

The third man had seen how this worked out for the other two, so he prayed to Frige saying,
“Please Frige, give me the strength and the tools… and the intelligence… to cross this river.”

And poof!
Frige turned him into a woman. She looked at the map, hiked upstream a couple of hundred yards, then walked across the bridge.

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Having at least a basic proficiency in some foreign languages is essential to traveling well and understanding the places you visit or live in. Though traditionally taught in a classroom setting, the modern traveler has some very interesting new resources for solo study of a foreign language, including two new web sites demonstrating some very innovative teaching methods. [Read more →]

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