“If your pictures aren’t good enough,

you aren’t close enough.”

Sometimes the best way to learn about photography is just to admire the work of other great photographers.  So in that spirit  my new “Photographer of the week” is George Lepp.  I have been admiring his images for many years.

via www.georgelepp.com.

Black-throated Sparrow

The Black-throated Sparrow is a bird of dry scrublands in the western U.S. whose colors make it at home in the browns and tans of desert expanses. They nest within a mile of our house, and we’ve had them visit our back yard a couple of times. But its taken me over 15 years to get a photo of one that I think does the species justice.

I made the 75 mile drive to Kearny, AZ, departing around 5:30 am to arrive close to sunrise. I didn’t have any specific subjects in mind; I just wanted to get out of the Black Friday madness to a remote place. It was January of this year when I’d had my first amazing contact with a bobcat at Kearny Lake park, so it seemed like a good time to visit again.

Alas, there were no bobcats to greet me, nor was there any rare birds on this isolated body of water (it has hosted a Red-necked Grebe and a White-winged Scoter in previous winters). But the large clan of Common Moorhens were still there, and the bushes around the lake had lots of sparrow, wren, and gnatcatcher activity.

A walk around the lake was good exercise, but the small birds were just too active and stayed too far away for any photos. I settled for some time with the moorhens and coots, then packed away the gear for the long drive home.

But wisely, I kept the D200, 300/2.8 and TC20E on the empty front passenger seat and grabbed my monopod from the floor behind my seat “just in case.” As I drove out I saw some activity beside the road and worked my Toyota into position beside this barrel cactus. The payoff of the trip was this sparrow that posed in good light on a nice perch with a clean background just beyond my car.

Nikon D200, 300/2.8 AF-S lens with TC20E (2x), ISO 400, 1/1250th second @ f/8, -2/3rd stop compensation, monopod from car window, 79% of frame. No bait, no setup- just patience and luck.

A great many things fascinate me about art, but process is probably the most enthralling of all. Musical process has created some of the most astounding works to ever impact my life, be it Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, In the White Silence, or Larry Polansky’s 4-voice Canons. These pieces set out a trajectory somehow linked intrinsically or organically born from the material used, and yet the process never sound arbitrarily chosen. There is a link between crafting perfect materials, which will be constantly exposed and must possess a depth that allows them to endure repetition, and distilling the proper rules and formal desires from them. To me, when I deal with it, if you feel like you’re choosing, you’d best throw the piece away.

Earlier this week, my student brought me a video that made me appreciate this in a new way- the choreography of Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker, a Belgian choreographer who brought me a great deal of joy in her interpretations of Steve Reich’s phase pieces:

Eliminating distraction is a constant concern for the at-home worker. My PS3 is around three feet from my workstation, and the TV is just another foot beyond that. When I want to sit down and do some writing, I’ll try anything to make sure my attention stays focused where it should.

That includes OmmWriter, a new writing application for the Mac (s aapl). It promises a very unique experience, one that aims to reduce distraction and enable you to maintain your focus. Part of that strategy is full-screen text editing, which has been done before, but that’s only the beginning of OmmWriter’s story.

The other part of the story? A snow-covered field, white-out conditions, and a couple of lonely looking trees. And a soundtrack of calming, ambient instrumental music. I was watching “Glee” when I tried the app out for the first time, so I initially thought a musical number was starting up, but then I realized that the sounds were coming from my computer speakers. I can honestly say it’s the first time a word processor has played me music.

When you first boot up OmmWriter, it displays a splash screen that lets you know that it’s best to experience the program using headphones for a more immersive effect. I dutifully followed the instructions using my Apple in-ear headphones, and sure enough, I felt more like I was lost in a world of composition.

If you’re not keen on the default backdrop and music, you can change both. Two other backdrops are available, including a fabric pattern, and a completely white one. Both are preferable to the field image in my opinion, since they have no real focal point to distract the eye. There are also seven different background soundtracks to choose from. OmmWriter remembers your choice, too, so you won’t have to reconfigure your work space with every boot.

I know what you’re thinking. OmmWriter sounds weird. And it is, but it’s also different. Unique, in fact. It’s rare to come across a word processor at this stage that can make the same claim. I really recommend giving it a shot, even if you’re skeptical after reading this. You may just find it’s exactly what you need to stay on track and write something great.

OmmWriter is currently available as a free beta, though you’ll have to sign up at the site with your email address to get the download link.

Has OmmWriter helped improve your focus?

It’s End-Of-Year Concert time at Pelican Primary School so I am busy working with each class to prepare an item. With one class  I offered them a choice- we could either learn a song by Green Day, or we could write a song together. They chose to write a song together (though the following week told me that, really, this has been their teacher’s choice, and they had really wanted to do the Green Day song. But by then it was too late, our song was written).

The song we’ve written is a classic rock song called Long Summer Holiday. It has two verses, two pre-chorus ‘ramps’ that build up our energy, a rockin’ out chorus that most of us need to sing in a seventies falsetto, and a raging guitar solo in the instrumental break.

The best thing is, it’s going to be an air guitar solo. This started out as a joke, a bit of hamming up by one of the students. But then I thought, why not? It will be vocal improvising, it will be theatrical, and it will be a fabulously original piece of content in the concert.

Yesterday, we made a rough recording of the song so that they could keep the CD in their classroom and start working on some staging ideas (backing singers, drum kits, dancers, etc). I recorded the air guitar solos too. Two boys wanted to have a try, so I got them to take it in turns. I was surprised by how well it worked (oh ye of little faith, G) – they had an excellent feel for the kind of melodic and rhythmic motifs that could be used, they both ended up on their knees, and they got the hang of tag-teaming the solos so that there were no gaps in between.

Go home and google ’sir guitar’ I suggested at the end of the class. “I bet you’ll be able to find some great clips of people…. watch what they do with their hands and face and body… and listen to how they use their voice.” Study these to get more ideas, I suggested to the boys.

Without a doubt though, the real enthusiasm for this rock song project came about when their teacher suggested they could dress up, put gel in their hair, make mohawks, etc. That’s when they started to grab hold of the project with both hands.

I’m really delighted with this air guitar thing. Of course, it could al go horribly wrong. Pelican students aren’t known for their ability to recognise the fine line between funny performance and just being silly (‘being giddy’, my mother used to call it, that level of giggling silliness that kids get into and have difficulty breking out of). So I need to be quite stern and serious, to make sure they instil it with some performance discipline so that they don’t crack up laughing when they are in front of their peers, and some strong musical qualities.

I think they’ll get there. The two boys who’ve volunteered are pretty committed to the whole idea, with one following up on the google idea the moment he got home.

My teaching style usually emphasises creative projects with children where they are actively engaged in inventing music, and seeking out solutions to musical problems or challenges. However, it needs to be said that this approach (which I believe to be far richer pedagogically, leading to deep musical understanding among children) can be very demanding on the teacher:

• It requires you to think on your feet, constantly ready to respond to the music as it emerges from the children’s efforts;
• My creative projects often span several weeks, if not the whole term, so there can be quite a lot of planning and developing that needs to take place between each lesson;
• When children get over-excited through the freedom of the process (which can happen, and is quite an issue at Pelican PS), then a huge amount of energy needs go into simply containing them and keeping the process on track. It is this last point that I think I find the most debilitating sometimes.

By the time Term 4 started, I knew I was feeling pretty weary. It has been a busy year of projects! The children were too, so I decided to develop a number of ‘directed’ projects for us all, projects that would involve playing and singing, but primarily through learning material, rather than inventing it.

It has proved a good tactic. At the Language School, the Middle Primary class with its very particular group of demanding, narcissistic boys has really benefited from learning specific, pre-existing material. There had been too much hijacking of creative tasks in previous terms, in terms of disruptive behaviour, and tantrums when collaborative processes didn’t go their way, and things felt much calmer this term.

Here’s a rundown of the kinds of things we’ve done:

Lower Primary – Learning the song Ho ho watanay and developing accompaniments (some learned, some invented). Lots of instruments, and detailed structure to memorise.

Middle Primary – Learning the song Ah ya zahn (traditional song in Arabic from Lebanon) with various learned instrumental accompaniments. This song introduced the children to thefull chromatic glockenspiels, and they learned to play the melody, with its wonderfully twisting, middle-eastern mode.

Upper Primary – Learning the song Sakura form Japan (both in Japanese and in the English translation that I wrote some years ago). The UP students also created new melodic material on glockenspiels, using a Japanese mode (take off all the Gs and Ds so that you are left with F-A-B-C-E). I asked them to think of a flower or plant that is special to the country they come from. From these suggestions we developed three spoken phrases, with rhythms implied by the syllables of the words. Then, working in teams, they selected notes from the mode in order to make a melody to this rhythm. Their words included:

Hababa flower, many colours (from Ethiopia, Oromo people)

Some big, some small, pink, purple, white and blue

Yellow sunflower, follows the sun (suggested by an Assyrian boy from Iraq)

Shishke on the Christmas tree, all the year round (from a Russian girl)

At Pelican Primary School, things have been similarly structured:

Preps and Grade Ones have invented their own simple version of the song Driving in my car (originally by the UK pop group Madness). These are very cute songs. We’re trying to add instruments, and on a good day, it all comes together.

Grade ones and Twos are singing The Earth is our mother and have created several melodic phrases inspired by sentences that describe ways to keep the planet healthy.

Grades 3 and 4 have learned to sing Ah Ya Zahn and developed similar accompaniments to those that I’ve taught at the Language School.

However, my Pelican Primary School experiences are making me re-think a lot of the creative work that I do. These children have so much creative energy, but zero internal discipline (as a group) to hold their focus long enough to make something work. In my experience, this kind of constant distraction, or distractedness, is quite common in schools where there are high numbers of refugee-background students. These kids have so much to gain from well-managed, clearly-structured creative processes. However, many of the tactics I have developed at the Language School have been proving too loose for the children at Pelican PS.

I’ve spoken about this with some of the other teachers, and they confirm that this lack of capacity to engage well with creative tasks occurs in other classes too. “Even just having a discussion about something with the class is very difficult in this school,” one teacher admitted. The disciplines of listening to each other, taking turns, not interrupting or shouting another person down, aren’t really present.

In music too, more open tasks make many of the students feel uncertain about what is expected of them, and this uncertainty (coupled perhaps with general insecurities, and the abstract nature of music in the first place) sees them go off-task very quickly, and just make random noise.

I’ve written before (see here) about the way the Pelican students seem to respond to noise in general, and specifically to multiple sources of sound in music. Little by little I am realising that the strategies I’ve been developing for ESL/ELL students in the Language School can’t be transferred here automatically. The students in the Language School have a far greater capacity to focus and remain engaged.  Perhaps the length of general classroom focus is always determined by the shortest attention span – or the shortest attention span among the more dominant class members!

There are lots of children from refugee backgrounds at Pelican Primary School. If we think about survival skills – being able to stand up for yourself, and get what you need for you and your family, making sure your voice is heard over the top of many other voices, making sure you are never at the end of a line, no matter what, being quick to react to any new potential threats around you, and learning to respond to a constantly chaotic environment – then we can see a kind of progression from those survival tactics to the common strategies employed by many students in the school. Lots of shouting over each other, interrupting conversations (often not noticing if said conversation is even taking place!), turning heads to watch whatever is taking place elsewhere in the room, and so on.

I feel very sure that music can offer these children opportunities  and motivation to break some of these patterns, and to experience themselves as learners in a different way. Creative music-making offers the additional benefit of a sense of ownership over the music, a validation and endorsement of one’s own contributions to the process, a deep understanding of the music from the inside out, and a powerful means of self-expression and individual voice. But I do need to figure out some new and powerful ways into creative music that scaffold each of the smallest of steps, and offer tangible experiences of success and delight to the students in as short a period of time as possible, due to those peskily short attention spans. Those experiences of success and delight are the key to their motivation to continue working cooperatively with me and with each other.

I recently scored some music for videos created around the idea of translating Australian poetry to other mediums. I wrote for two videos that explored two elements of the poem Bustles by poet Jessica Raschke, which explored the way a person may feel affected by a change to a more hectic and chaotic environment. The two videos are entitled Escapism and Displacement.

Escapism:

Displaced:

More about prod!.
More about the Australian Poetry Centre.

Week 8 started off with a recap on Semiotics and our Semiotic Assignment. Week 8 brought us on to Design Principles. We already covered shape/form, space, point, line, texture, pattern and colour earlier during the module but these can be considered elements of design used to create a composition.  We learn that space between and around our elements is very important and can be as dominant as the elements themselves. How we combine the elements of design forms design principles and the method we apply these principles determines how good our compositon/artwork becomes. We can combine our elements using balance, contrast, movement, emphasis and unity.

Balance
Balance refers to the equilibrium in a compositon. This is achieved by choice in arranging the elements in relation to each other and frame area. There are 2 forms – Symmetrical and Asymmetrical. Sysmmetical is an even distribution/mirror image. This is achieved by placing elements evenly in design.

Asymmetrical Balance
Asymmetrical balance is an uneven distribution of elements on the page/frame. These designs can be difficult to achieve but can work out very well. They can be created by placing small or no items on one side and a large item on the other side. This can create tension drawing the viewer in.

If you know the rules you can break them, lack of balance can convey action and motion. An off-balance design can make people think, it’s not good to end up having an off balance design by accident.

Contrast
Contast means difference, having similar components throughout and become bland and boring. Contrasts in composition, shape, size and colour can make a dynamic design. It creates interest for the viewer. Contrast can create tension by placing opposing elements in relation to each other. This can be achieved by placing subject to the side of the frame or even partially out of the frame.

Contast in size can be usefull for visual arrangement of elements such as large bold text for a dominent headline followed by an arrangment of text and images. Contrasting shapes can add tension to the image, the difference in elements should be obvious. Colour contrast can be very effective, small areas of vibrant colour and contast large areas of neutral colour.

Movement
Movement is the path our eyes follow when we look at art, this creates unity and can be achieved by using line, repetition and rhythm. Movements combines all elements together. Repetition in movement is when elements are often repeated or hav similar structure creating visual rhythm. Lines can be used to create movment, this is used alot in cartoons and Japanese animation ‘manga’.  Rhythm refers to the way your eye moves through a picture

Emphasis
Emphasis is the creation of an obvious area of importance in an image/design rather than have everything equal. Without emphasis nothing stands out drawing the eye to it. Simplicity/minimal-design omitts all non-essential elements and details with only the important elements represented and can be called KISS (keep it simple stuipd). A large object placd in the centre can be seen as a focal point.

Seperating bright and dark areas of colour can also be used to create emphasis.

At the end of the lecture were were broken into groups and each given a movie poster to talk about its principles of design. We were given Casablanca

We discovered that there was movement using rhythm by the arrangement of people on the right hand side of the poster and thru line by using the sloping text. We found emphasis on importance by use of the main 2 characters in the centre of the poster. There is a colour contrast with the name in bright red and the main characters in colour with surrounding yellowed compared to the dark blue tint all around the poster. The poster was slightly asymetrical with a heavier concentration on imagery on the right hand side.

That concluded our lecture for this week, we continued on with our semiotics in the lab.

Music Professor Only Canadian Composer Chosen for International Electroacoustic Recording.

Multi-channel, electronic work, generative processes, variables: factors of a science project or sonic art?

“[Multi-channel electronic work] is music produced fully on a computer,” explained Hannesson. “In this case, all the sounds are synthetic. As a multi-channel piece, it is designed to be played back on more than two speakers. The piece hidden intensions is engineered to be played back on four independent channels.” 

“I have a program which generates pitches based on rules I have taught it,” explained Hannesson. “The program can make choices to follow different routes through the piece and so each time it runs, it generates a different set of pitches in different times. These pitches are then sent to the synthesis program to be played and recorded.”

“As the pitches are being sent to the synthesizer by the generative program, I am free to change the synthesizer settings – or alter its variables – as the piece plays,” Hannesson continued. “In this way I am free to creatively improvise, focusing fully on timbre rather than on pitch, harmony and rhythm as one would in conventional improvisation.”

“It gives me the ability to control the spatial placement and movement of my sounds in the performance space with greater control than stereo would allow,” said Hannesson.

So, this blog’s first post appears in light of a discussion I was having with a friend this week about our approaches to composition.  We both trained as classical/western notated composers, but it is a training that I have significantly moved away from, toward beatmaking and a more abstracted pop practice.  I have as many issues with the world of classical contemporary composition as I have with the world of contemporary improvisation and other allegedly radical practices that position themselves as counter to what they perceive as more traditionalist/conservative music-making.  Classic FM is a particularly turgid bastion of self-satisfied conservative bullshit, but then so is Radio 3, which relegates the most left-field of its output (which is generally the more accessible pickings of “experimental” (yuk) practice ) to extremely late slots at night – novelty freak shows – but at least they have those shows.  In fact, Radio 3 could probably convince you that Nitin Sawhney was the vanguard of “experimental music”, but the problem is, he probably is, and I have a feeling that the people who own Sawhney records are the people who own the Nu-Jazz wankfunk of 4hero and Quantic Soul Orchestra, or the soul-sucking-deadness of the Gotan Project.  Of course what I’m really doing here is exposing my qualms with a certain brand of Guardian-reading London-centric middle-classness, where a need to appear to embrace or try and identify with the multiculturalism of the city is met by Sawhney and his cohorts who provide the appropriate stonewashed cultural signifiers in the form of this particular monstrosity, where we follow (yet another) pretty girl in a big red dress as she smugly fannies around affluent London neighbourhoods, singing a song so bland that my face melts off every time I hear it.  It is so fucking safe that it makes me consider slipping some hideous airborne poison into the air conditioning system at Waitrose.  But no, I wouldn’t do that, I like Waitrose.

Anyhow, aside from this, something that has been frustrating me recently (but which might be remedied by my friend Helen’s decision to make me a certain mixtape) is why young composers (of my generation, aged 20s-30s) continue write pieces of music that seem to serve as nostalgic artifacts, or as homages to, a high modernist aesthetic.  The most radical compositions I tend to encounter (particularly in universities and festivals) are pieces that loudly declare an open-endedness in certain passages; the incorporation of improvisatory elements, which of course, is something as old as notated composition itself, but tends to feel a little bit like a token gesture.  But that’s not really what bothers me, what bothers me is a strange, and continuing aspiration to a musical aesthetic (in notated music) that was dominant thirty years before most of us were born.  In a highly mediated western society, whereby quickening technological developments have heavily influenced aesthetic ones, I am always surprised that young people produce works such as these, and perhaps this is particularly because I feel I have been unable to ignore the huge influence of club and dance culture upon my listening histories, the pervasiveness of a groove, if even an unstable groove, of rhythm and repetition, of loops, of beats.  (Sorry, this is impressively scrappy…)  I always feel that there is a tendency toward a rather heavy-handed abstraction that betrays a very specific academic repression of the body, and even of joy.

Audio visual project brief  for HN Unit Audio & Video 1 DF66 34

Take 8 shots using a still image camera.

They have to demonstrate the following techniques

3 images showing examples of the Rule of thirds

3 – Images showing use of framing – ie close up; medium close up ; long shot.

2 – Angled shots – ie high angle, low angle, dutch tilt.

Size the images to have a maximum width of 800 pixels

Put the images into a presentation demonstrating the different techniques you have used.

Northern Mockingbird at Gilbert Water Ranch

My preferred style is birds in habitat, and I mostly shoot “loose” with lots of room around my subjects to show the setting. This is a way of working that became ingrained in the days of film when I worked with a 400/5.6 lens, often coupled with a matched 1.4x converter. That style has carried over into my digital days where I have a lot more optical power: a 300/2.8 with a 2x on a “cropped” sensor that makes my current optic equivalent to 900mm in my film days.

But sometimes the birds won’t cooperate and stay away, like with this Northern Mockingbird at the Gilbert Water Ranch on November 19, 2009.  I was walking with another photographer when we came around a bush along the trail only to find this bird at point-blank range picking buds from this shrub. I just set the tripod down and started shooting, and got off a few frames before the action was over. My Nikon D200 was set at ISO 400, matrix meter with -1/3rd stop exposure compensation dialed in, aperture mode at f/8. The meter gave me 1/60th second with the existing light – almost enough to stop the motion of the head in this image.

Its definitely not my typical style and I’d prefer less magnification here so I could have included the entire bird, but I still like the image for the immediacy this tight framing gives the image.

So,  hopefully you didn’t have any difficulties with my directions (it seems my wife felt my wording was somewhat comical).  Here are the results of our test shots we were using a Canon Xsi with a 17-85mm lense set at  a focal length of 56mm.  So what are the differences between the images?

f32 and 8 seconds

f11 and 1.0 Second

F5.6 and 1/4 Second

We were focused on the salt shaker in the middle of the objects.  With the lower ambient light levels we had to use a tripod to get steady shots.  There are two main things that happened with the images.  At the very small aperture (f32 you can clearly see both the foreground and back-ground images are in focus (as well as the background plug-in, and the fridge and well, just about everything).  As you move to larger and larger apertures, less and less of these things are in focus, at f5.6 there is much less in focus.  Look at how less distracting the background in the f5.6 image.  An f4 or larger also has much less in focus.  If your image needs the information in the background use the small aperture.  If not, use the large aperture.

What else changes between the images?  In fact, it is not actually evident in these images but if you look at the exposure information the image, the difference is there.  The shutter speed.  Changing your aperture will always make a corresponding and opposite change in shutter speed.  Always keep in mind that the two are related.

Now to move on a little further we are finally moving on to this weeks actual assignment.  Use your aperture.  Take your camera out to an area where you usually like to take photos.  A park or a section of the city — anywhere that you find interesting subjects to photograph.  But go over several days and photograph the first day with a large f-stop (remember small aperture).  You may need to increase your ISO speed or more effectively use a tri-pod in order to deal with the slower shutter speed.  Shoot so that what you have in the photograph is supposed to be in your picture.  A large f-stop will require you to really concentrate on your foreground and background.

The following day work exclusively in a small f-stop (a large aperture).  Use this f-stop to help isolate your subject in your images.  When you change your f-stop you change how you photograph.  Learn, what the different f-stops do in your photographs and pay attention to the differences.  Soon you will be using this incredibly powerful tool to help improve your photographic compositions.

Good luck and happy shooting.

As you can read on my About page, an epogdous in numbers (the ratio 9/8) is a while tone in music. 9/8 is also one of Debussy’s favourite time signature (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Claire de lune, etc.). Even if the notational convention is not properly a geometrical ratio, 9/8 is a very strange meter to me. Nine-eighths time divides the measure into three parts of three quavers each, making it into a triple meter. But the same time signature can divide the measure into different parts, making it even into fractional beats (e.g. 4/4+1/8) resulting in music with an extremely irregular rhythmic feel. Take notes composers! ;]

Here is an example of a few early drafts to show the revising I learned to do in the class.

althusser

NationalismArticle

…Naz Akyar?

I link like a good girl;
http://pirpirnazisnotyourbitch.wordpress.com
http://pirpirnaz.deviantart.com/

Who is she?

“pirpirnaz is naz akyar. naz akyar is pirpirnaz. a visual arts and communication design grad. student from Istanbul, Turkey. loves visual storytelling, visual narratives, graphic novels (hates superhero ones and fumetti, everything else is great!), book design, cool book covers, learning spanish, photography, everything about music (making, singing and enjoying), food, cocktails, chocolate, bows, kites, video, fairytales, fables, mermaids, pirates, crime fiction, counting crows, sylvia plath. and most art-related stuff. hates haters. and some other things.

and the most important of all: she is not your bitch. she belongs to herself.”

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Ever wondered if or just how much your images will speak to the viewer?
This is a video of digital images being played back as a audio file.
This is some awesome stuff!
I wonder what some of my nature stuff would sound like?

Photosounder is a one-of-a-kind image-sound editing program. It is unique in that it opens images and sounds indiscriminately, treats and processes them as images, and synthesizes them as sounds.

September 1, 2009

Copyright © 2009 Jim Sizemore.