Gallery – Page 20 – Jay Ressler

Week No. 5. In the Light of Day and Artwork Titles

Recent infrared photographs. The bottom two are from before the recent snow storm. The reflected infrared from the snow on the trees and the bright white outhouse was so intense the sky appears black because of the fast shutter speed required to capture details in the small building.

This week on his Red Dot Blog, Jason Horejs of the Xanadu Gallery posted an item entitled “Collective Wisdon: Creating Titles for Your Artwork” addressed a question dear to my heart. Anyone who as followed my work knows that I title all my photographs. To my way of thinking artists who exhibit artworks as “Untitled” send a message that they are interested in process but not in ideas, in telling a story, or in explaining their motivation.

Horejs makes a good case that not titling work is a bad business practice, but I think titling work is as much a part of doing art as process.

Week No. 4. Seven Deadly Sins, Preview of a Series

These are the first five pieces in a series I will be exhibiting later this year. The Preliminary title of the show is Seven Deadly Sins: 13 Pieces. The first piece in this series was completed in 2008 and shown at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in a group show under the aegis of the Pittsburgh Society of Artists entitled Saligia: Seven Deadly Sins. I decided to return to this theme with a series of my own after seeing Jamie Wyeth’s Seven Deadly Sins paintings on cardboard using seagulls as subjects.

There have been many ways of artistically interpreting the Seven Deadly Sins identified by 4th Century Christian monks over the centuries. In his Inferno, Dante arranged Purgatory according to the spiritual transgressions of Greed, Lust, Pride, Gluttony, Wrath, Envy, and Sloth. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also mentions them in the Parson’s Tale.

I hope to complete this series with several additional interpretations of deadly sins, less spiritual in nature, based in the real world of today — that is the sins of modern class society: environmental destruction, Islamaphobia & Anti-Semitism, racism & police violence, imperialist war, homophobia, and violence against women in addition to the pieces on genocide and capitalist greed.

I’ve created these by photographing videos, either production or trailers, at a relatively slow shutter speed to capture some of the action and compositing them in layers with scenes from a second video. Films referenced are for: Genocidal Wrath – Hotel Rwanda and Killing fields; Gluttony – Eat, Pray, Love, 9 1/2, and Tom Jones ; Pride – Legend of the Black Scorpion and Phantom of the Opera; Capitalist Greed – The Wolf of Wall Street and Chicago; and Lust – Last Tango in Paris and 9 1/2 Weeks.

Week No. 3. Blue Sky, Blue Ice — Developments in Infrared

Continuing my experiments with developing infrared photographs with a false color scheme I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The first photo of a patch of ice in a wheat field (before the snow when the wheat sprouts were still bright green) illustrates this best. Not only does the sky appear blue when the red and blue channels are switched, but so does ice and snow, reflecting the color of the sky. In the last photo with the barn and house, there is only a bit of snow in the scene, in the immediate foreground. I decided to desaturate it in this case.

Week No. 2. Blue Sky Infrared

Blue Sky Infrared with Yellow Florenence — Blue Sky Infrared II

Yesterday I received my old Pentax K10D back from Kolari Vision converted to an Infrared camera (Kolari is the only service I could find that converts Pentax cameras.)

These pictures from my back yard are my first tries at developing false color schemes with blue sky achieved by switching the red and blue channels. The picture that comes straight from the camera has strong magenta tones; the 720 nm IR filter blocks most visible light allowing artifacts from he red end of the visible spectrum through to the sensor. Note the blue cast on the top of the flowing grasses where reflection from the sky is strongest.

There is no such thing as color in the infrared portion of the electromagentic spectrum. Color is a function of human perception and human beings cannot see infrared radiation. By manipulating the artifacts of visible light between 720 nm and 850 nm a false color scheme can be achieved.

The white balance I used for the first picture was the one that was set in the factory that converted the camera. The second was based on using a custom white balance that shifted a bit cooler than the default. Further experimentation will be needed to find the best manual white balance to use with the converted camera. Green grass is used to set the white balance with infrared cameras. Photosynthesizing vegetation floresceses to appear white in infrared photography.

Week No. 1, Down an Road Less Traveled

A New Direction

For five years I’ve published a daily blog of my photography under the heading “Jay M. Ressler Imaging 365: A daily log of my artistic journey,” which was linked to my personal Facebook page. Beginning with this posting, I’m publishing the blog under a different moniker, “Jay M. Ressler 52 Weeks: Sights and Insights.”

During the first year of my 365 blog, 2011, I posted 663 pictures beginning in early April. Starting January 1, 2012, I organized it around one photograph a day.

In may respects the 365 project has been beneficial. It’s demanding and good discipline. On the downside, however, more than a fair number of pedestrian photographs ended up being published, while some real gems got overlooked. But isn’t that in the nature of the beast?

With this posting, marking the beginning of the second half of the second decade, I am changing direction with this blog. This will no longer be a daily blog, nor will it be strictly a venue for posting my own photographs. In addition, to my own photography, I hope with a more leisurely schedule to be able to examine the history of photography, the work of other photographers, questions of theory and practice in the medium.

This won’t be a “how to” blog (for my “how to” column refer to the bimonthly newsletter of the Berks Art Alliance, The Pallette). I hope to make this more project-centered—a halfway step between what appears on the blog and what I actually show in the real world. I also hope to include occasional video.

Part of the reason for making this change is to allocate more of my time to showing work on paper and to marketing.

This is new territory for me; we’ll see how it goes. My goal is to post once a week, on Thursday mornings.

In the process of preparing to make some needed changes on both my main we site and this blog, I introduced a fatal corruption to blog’s database. For that reason, I’ve had to start from scratch without the planned archives. A fresh start may prove to be a good thing, perhaps some archival pages can be partially reconstructed.