Fab Pants

Because I take and process so many photos, I am often pressed for what to title them so that I can keep track of them on my hard drive. I have to do something with them other than just use the numbered data they are given when uploaded to my computer, so I tend to give them whatever title pops into my head first when it’s time to save an edited file. The title that popped into my head when working with the shots I took Saturday was “Fab Pants.”

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Then every shot from that set that I process I just number; so far I’ve got a “Fab Pants 1” and a “Fab Pants 2.” This is all I’ve had time to edit since I last updated, but I wanted to share it so I had to reach a bit to come up with a blog post, hence the rather lame rambling I’m doing right now. By the way, for anyone who’s curious – I actually had my leg up on a chair when taking this shot. Then I used the composite technique to remove the chair when processing. I’m getting better at this whole thing, I think. Even added some decent shadows this time using the burn tool in Photoshop CS5.

I also thought I’d share that I suffered my first optical tragedy during Saturday’s shoot: I always wear a spare pair of glasses when I’m shooting self-portraits because there’s so much putting on and whipping off of the spectacles that I worry about stretching out my real pair. I have several spares to choose from but I use the weirdest ones since I care about them the least. I will usually keep the glasses on until right before I hit the remote, then I toss them onto the floor somewhere for the photo, and sadly, on Saturday after posing for the shot above my left foot came down right smack on top of them and broke them. I knew it would happen someday, and as I said it’s fortunate that they were a pair I didn’t like very much – although they looked great in photos, they were too harsh on my face to wear them out of the house, and my husband always said they made me look angry. I don’t think he’ll be sorry to hear they had to go.

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By the way, it appears that Fly Fest 2014 has finally wound down, a torturous six days from when it started, with just a few stragglers hanging about that have yet to leave the party. Here’s hoping that’s the last aspect of the cycle of life currently breaking down inside our bedroom wall that we have to deal with.

 

More purple

So this costume change isn’t much of a change from the photos I shared yesterday. Basically the difference is I have on these wide-legged purple pants I bought off Amazon when I was searching for dance attire to wear in photos (this was before I discovered the joys of online vintage shopping via eBay). The pants are actually praise dancing pants, and I can honestly say I had not heard of that particular term before when I bought them. I had heard of liturgical dance, obviously, but the phrase “praise dancing” was new to me. I was sure I was the only person among my friends who’d ever heard of it, but so far, everyone I’ve told about it has already been familiar with the activity. So I guess I was just out of the loop on this one. Moving on.

Anyway, I put on the purple pants to add more flowy fabric into my movements, and I like the way they turned out even though the purples don’t quite match. This was actually the first outfit I wore, and these were some of the first photos I took; I realized after the fact that I needed to move the camera back some as a lot of these shots do not capture all the fabric in the frame. Bugs me a little bit, but I liked many of the shots enough to use them anyway.

I just realized I only have a few from this costume so far; much more to come. It may not be until the  weekend when I have time to work with more editing but I know I have more to edit from this section of the shoot.

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I blurred the edges because I felt it made the cut off material look more intentional. Not sure that’s gonna fool anyone though.

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What can I say – I could not be any happier with how these curtain sheers worked with the camera.

So just two for today. I am itching right this second to dig into the RAW files and find a few more to edit before posting, but I know it’s going to throw me off schedule if I do that, because I will get so engrossed in the work I won’t get myself to bed on time or anything. So I will have to be happy with only sharing two photos today. More later though! There are wigs and Mardi Gras masks involved in the next set of shots!

The purple series

Oh Lord have mercy, I have a ton of these I want to edit. I think I might actually do it this time, instead of saying that then getting bored after processing 4 or 5. I’ve already processed 14 of them – using a backdrop that required no editing and sticking to the basics when processing helped to move things along for me. Plus, when I’m all dolled up in costume I feel no one wants to see 30 pictures of me in the same outfit just moving my arms a different way; with the purple sheers, it’s more about the shapes the fabric make than anything I might be wearing, so I think that gives this set more longevity. If that makes sense.

And by the way, I woke up with sore shoulders from all the steaming I had to do the night before to get the wrinkles out of both the backdrop and the sheers. I did get my husband to move the backdrop all the way up to the ceiling, and after all the work I did on it I am just leaving it up for now. No way am I folding it back up right away and creating more wrinkles! So, when I turned my studio back into an office I left the backdrop up and kept the pictures that usually hang there off the wall. The more I get into this photography stuff, the less office-like my office looks, and the more it transforms into some crazy photographer’s messy, chaotic work space. Oh well.

For reference, here’s how wrinkled everything was right out of the boxes – I took some test shots Saturday night, and yes I was in a pair of swim shorts because it was so freaking hot that day – but you can see how much better everything turned out after steaming (although according to my husband I have damaged the sheetrock by steaming the backdrop right up against the wall; didn’t have the heart to tell him I’ve been doing that regularly for the past two years):

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This entire set needs Botox.

I did do a few outfit changes, although they were slight, so perhaps I’ll try to upload over the next few days by collecting the different looks together – but in many of them, you can’t tell what I’m wearing anyway. For today’s installment, I didn’t have much of a ‘costume’ on with the sheers at all, just black tights and a black leotard, and a black wig cap to hold my hair in place. (Moment of vanity here – the leotard was a weird fit on me, as things like that always are due to my long torso/short legs body type. The way it was pulling on me made me look much thicker around the middle than I actually am; my waistline was pretty much disguised, and I readily admit that there are a few cool shots I passed over because I looked, well, chunky. And yes, I did try to edit my waist into the shots, but you could tell. Moving on.)

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I love how tall this one made me look, and the balance of the feet peeking out on one side, and then the opposite hand. Totally accidental on my part, of course.

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Love the shape this one created.

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This reminded me of an octopus, or a flower. The two do have things in common, you know.

For fun, I’ll go ahead and throw this B&W in here. The photo itself wasn’t all that thrilling, but I did like how I came out looking like some sort of sad, gothy sea-creature, so I thought a little monochrome might add to that mood. Throw in some overlays and textures via good old Pixlr, and there you go. Nice and spooky for Halloween.

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I did make a collage of all these with the idea of sharing them in one shot, by the way – but I do not like how small it makes each picture. I prefer to share these full size, or as full size as they ever are when I post them on the blog. For a true high-quality copy you can check out my Flickr page, but I only post one photo there per day.So much more to come from this set!

New video – departure

This is the video portion only of a new videopoem I’m working on. In full form, with the spoken word, it will be about 4 minutes long.The footage is from two public domain films I found at the Internet Archives; the dancing, believe it or not, was filmed as supplemental footage for a movie called “Blood Bath,” and all the other footage is from a film called “Romance Sentimentale” by Sergei Eisenstein. The song is “Good Friday,” by CocoRosie.

I noticed after uploading that the “colors,” such as they are, are different. I’ll be sure to correct that before completing the spoken word version.