SNOW!!!

Woljeongsa Temple

Several weeks ago I took a trip out to Woljeongsa Temple to get a look at the beautiful Fall leaves. In Gangneung the leaves were a beautiful fiery red, as you can see from my earlier photos. At Odeasan National Park, home to Woljeongsa Temple, I was hoping to find a mountain park full of the same colorful leaves. It was a two hour bus ride but the thought of the beautiful photos awaiting my camera kept me going. As it turned out, I forgot to account for the higher elevation of the park. At that height the leaves had already fallen and all that was left for me were some bare trees and extremely cold weather. Here are the few good pictures I managed to get out of the day.

Fun with Photoshop A.K.A. Zombie Dawn

Minor adjustments in Photoshop to punch up the image:



Major adjustments made by adjusting the curves and saturation.


This would be the cover to my independant zombie movie.

Weird!

Of all the photos I took on my last trip, I think this one is the most interesting. It's just a picture of leaves, but it's interesting because the image hasn't been edited in photoshop. This is the way the camera recorded it. The way the color is arranges, with it's areas of saturate and unsaturate colors, is not what you'd expect in the value range. Compare it to the black and white image below:

More Afternoon Foliage part 2

All photos were taken within a mile of my home.

More Afternoon Foliage

I got off work early one afternoon and rushed out to take some pictures before it got too dark. All of these were taken under natural lighting conditions, though they've been minorly tweaked in Photoshop.

Afternoon Foliage

Here are some of the autumnal colors you can find here in South Korea.

Art and Fear part Duex

Here's one of my most, most favorite quotes from the book. I'll include the entire paragraph, it's just too good.

"The belief that "real" art possesses some indefinable magic ingredient puts pressure on you to prove your work contains the same. Wrong, very wrong. Asking your work to prove anything ONLY INVITES DOOM! Besides, if artists share any common view of magic, it is probably the fatalistic suspicion that when their own art turns out well, it's a fluke - but when it turns out poorly, it's an omen. Buying into magic leaves you feeling less capable each time another artist's qualities are praised. So if a critic praises Nabokov's obsession with wordplay, you begin to worry that you can't even spell "obsession." If Christo's love of process is championed, you feel guilty that you've always hated cleaning your brushes. If some art historian comments that great art is the product of especially fertile times and places, you begin to think that maybe you need to move to New York.


Lol, the last line is the best. I suppose for filmmakers or actors, the same applies to Los Angeles.

Art and Fear

I just finished reading Art and Fear by Ted Orland and David Bayles. It's a good, quick read and it's funny, in a painful sort of way. It constructively criticizes the bad, irritating and subconscious habits of every artist. It's like having a close friend point out all your bad points, to your face, in public. If the book had a shoulder I'd punch it and tell it to shut the hell up and yell, "You don't know me!!!".

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"Most artists don't daydream about making great art, they daydream about having made great art."

"Making Art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do and what you, in fact, did."

"But wait a minute-your work doesn't feel inevitable (you think), and so you begin to wonder: maybe making art requires some special or even magical ingredient THAT YOU DON'T HAVE!" (LoL, don't I know it...)

"It's hard to claim victory when your competitors may be entirely unaware of your existence-after all, some may have already been dead for a century."

"But the undeniable fact is that your art is not some residue left behind when you subtract all the things you haven't done-it is the full payoff for things you have done."

"Idealism has a high casualty rate."

"Universities rarely have trouble attracting good artists. Art has the dubious distinction of being one profession in which you routinely earn more by teaching it than doing it."

"Making Art is dangerous and revealing. Making Art precipitates self doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be."

"In a general way, fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception prevent you from doing your own work."

"For you, the seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your last artwork."

"Catering to fears of being misunderstood leave you dependant upon your audience."

"In making art you court the unknown, and with it the paranoia of those who fear what change might bring."

"Learning is the natural reward of meetings with remarkable ideas and remarkable people."

"To the critic, art is a noun."

"Style is the natural consequence of habit."

"There is a moment for each artist in which a particular truth can be found, and if it is not found then, it will not ever be. No one else will ever be in a position to write Hamlet."

"The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are custodian to issues larger than yourself."



As helpful as these quotes are, reading the book has actually made me more apathetic. Now that I've only my own goals and inner vision to develop, there's no reason, rush, impetus or incentive to worry about making or not making art. I'm just gonna do things at my own pace, and eventually things will work out. Hopefully.

Big View of Gangneung

Gangneungs a big place, so this is by no means all of it, but it's a decent view.

Streets of Gangneung

Foliage #2

Two Favorites from the Market

Here's a detail of the photo above:

Gangneung Central Market

Foliage

Same park. Here are some close ups of the vegetation you would see in Korea. It was super cold that night.





Korea isn't this dark or scary, it just so happened that 10 at night was the earliest I could go out to take photos. I'll post happier, more brightly lit photos at a later date.

More Photographs

I'm using a Pentax k200d Digital SLR. It's amazing where digital technology is taking the image making process. The camera has an anti-shake feature that made a lot of these images possible without the use of a tri-pod.