gallery

December 31, 2024December 31, 2024

2024 in review

Well, if you had asked me how 2024 was for photography a couple of weeks ago, I’d have said “meh”. I’m usually down on my photography when I’m not looking at it or really thinking about it.

But then I thought about it and realized that it was actually a pretty good year. I joined Toronto Focal Forum (http://www.focalforum.ca/) in February, which led to socializing with excellent photographers and taking part in print critiques.

As well, one of my photographs, Vintage Gowns (part of my hopefully-ongoing series Vintage Hamilton) was selected as one of only twelve photos for exhibition in an international competition by Viewpoint Gallery (https://www.viewpointgallery.ca/), a photography gallery in Bedford/Halifax.

My work was also in a couple of shows, in the Scugog Arts Council Annual Juried Exhibition (Port Perry) and The Station Gallery, Whitby, as well as a couple of online shows by the Aird Gallery (https://airdgallery.org/).

So I decided to pick put some of my favourites from 2024 and present them here. As you can see, there is no theme or “look” to my work. There vever has been – more on that in a future post (I found some journaling from the mid-1970s!)

Vintage Soul Geek window 1 – Vintage Hamilton -March

Vintage Soul Geek window 2 – Vintage Hamilton -March

Vintage Gowns – Vintage Hamilton – March

Niagara Falls Eclipse Day Glasses – April

Super C – May – Bike touring in Quebec – 800km!

lief coffee – June – Newmarket Farmers Market

Willowtree Farm – June – Newmarket Farmers Market

Camping laundry – Shangri La campground, Ontario – September

Commercial kitchen (before scrubbing) – November

Reflections across Queens Quay – November

Reflections under the Gardner – November

That’s it – thank you for scrolling to the end! Please leave a comment.

Cameras include Fujifilm XT5, Canon M5 and Pixel 7 Pro. Software includes Silkypix Developer Studio Pro 11 for Fujifilm (a bit specialized?), Canon Digital Photo Professional Pro 4 and Corel Paintshop Pro 2024 Ultimate

September 3, 2017September 12, 2017

Scanograms – a new medium?

There are things I miss about traditional “wet darkroom” photography – the magic of watching an image appear in the developer; the photogram, where objects are scattered on photographic paper, which is then exposed and developed; even the anticipation during the time, often days or weeks, between the exposure and the print. Scanograms use a technique I have invented to create the digital equivalent of the photogram. I open the flat-bed scanner and start a scan. I then “paint” with some object – in this case a tulip – over the moving scanning bar. I don’t get to see the result until the scan finishes, so I also get back some of the anticipatory delay that I have missed.

If you look closely, you will see bands of red, green and blue around some of the scanogram’s features. These are a result of the way the scanner works – sequentially scanning in the digital primaries – combined with the flower’s motion.

The only processing I do on the result is to (laboriously) take out the inevitable dust spots. I also crop it a little bit to make its proportions better for standard frames.

August 31, 2017September 12, 2017

Gone live!

So here it is at last – Aug 31, and I just set up the linking so pixsilver.com shows my new site. I will add more galleries, change up the images from time to time, continue writing, and get guests to write.

It’s still a work in progress, but so is my art. And so am I…

Please leave comments to let me know what you think.

Dave

August 8, 2017September 12, 2017

Hello world!

It’s August, 2017, and I am re-creating my website. Again.
I rather liked my last one, but I had hand-coded it in Javascript and CSS about a decade ago. It had some responsive features, which was cool, but the language features to really do that were not stable yet, so I did that by hand too, and did so by placing the images on backgrounds that were the same size. Made the re-sizing calculations easier, but it was a kludge, and extra work.
Speaking of extra work… the coding to let viewers scan forward and back, including rollover between first & last images in a gallery, was so tedious that I wrote a completely separate program to read the .jpg file names in the gallery directory, then generate the necessary Javascript.

I was showing off to my computer studies students… I don’t do that any more, so, you can see why I’m rebuilding it.