Long Time, No See...

Yep, I'm still here. And wow, it sure gets easy to put off posting once you get out of the habit of doing it on a regular basis.. before you know it, one or two months have gone by.
My regular commercial work and now,  running the new gallery, are conspiring to keep me from getting outdoors to shoot, but that should change in September, since my wife and I have booked a week-long trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington right after Labor Day... I hope to spend a lot of time photographing the lush, green rain forest and uniquely beautiful beaches up there.  That should certainly generate some interesting new work and will be kind of a fresh subject matter for me, which is always nice.

A couple of weeks ago, my old friend (from art school days, back in the '70's.. a long time!) stopped by here for a few days with his family, while on a north-south tour of California, visiting various family and friends along the way. He teaches art now at a private school in western Massachusetts, where we both grew up, and is a really fine plein-air painter... he works at that a lot during the summers while he is off from teaching. He of course wanted me to show off some of my favorite local scenes so he could take a stab at painting them and on the one session that I hung around while he was working, I couldn't resist to wander up the stream and do some studies with my trusty iPhone while killing time. Of course the quality is not there for any kind of printing, but it's sometimes fun to just shoot carefree with no tripod and no worries about quality... and see what you can see.


Since I don't have any new stuff right now and haven't had the inspiration to dig up and talk about anything already in the can, I thought I'd post a few of these just for a hoot.  All here shot with my phone. Notice the detail in the shadow area of the first one below. The iPhone has a pretty nifty HDR capability built right in; it takes two exposures, then blends them right in-camera and it works quite well... I actually had to tone it down some to make it look natural. I expect most digital cameras will have this feature in the near future.

Making Progress

As suspected, no chance at all to go out and shoot new stuff recently, but our gallery here in Idyllwild is really taking shape, though still some final setup work to do.  Then, we can turn our attention to marketing and promotion... the most important stuff.  We did manage to get the doors open this past holiday weekend and will have an official opening reception in 2 weeks, after we take care of all the details. Meanwhile, some "Before" and "After" pics so that you can see that I've not been just goofing off recently:)
So far, we have gone from this:

To this:

After installing all-new lighting, painting the walls, refinishing the wood and cleaning the tile, we've got a nice little space going, I think. The walls are all mine, (love it!), and then sculptor Norman Deesing has the floor (yes, he is almost an exact double of a certain well known actor:).. We also found a fine collection of classic native-american silver and turquoise jewelry to provide some smaller choices and it complements the larger works beautifully. Join us on Facebook at "Earthlight Gallery", for news and updates.

Probably my next update here will be regarding the grand opening and then I'll hopefully get back to generating some new work...

One More From the Foggy Forest... and Some News.

The third, and probably the last one from this series, at least for now.  Somehow I'm picturing this set of images as large, contemporary stretched-canvas prints, probably soon to be seen on the walls of my new gallery.  Which bring us to the "some news" part...
Ever since we moved here from the city a year ago, it has been a goal to have my own permanent space to show and sell in. (Setting up outdoors at art shows is fun, but LOTS of work and hard to do consistently, while showing in a large gallery among dozens of other artists is less than ideal for sales.)  I didn't want to do this right away last year, because I knew we needed some time to get resettled and there was lots of other work to do on the house, etc., but this spring, the right space, at the right price just kind of popped up. Also, I was lucky enough to find a motivated and talented partner (a sculptor-who only needs floor space, as opposed to my needing only wall space, so that's perfect) to help out and share the expense. It's a fairly small space for now until we see how it goes, but there are neighboring spaces that will be available in the future for expansion if we can make it work. Selling artwork even in the best of times is tricky and with the economy still shaky, there are no guarantees of success, but I am excited to give it a try anyway. Idyllwild is known as a destination for it's galleries and art... and with the busy summer tourist season coming, we should be able to do o.k.
I'll be tied up with planning and setup for the next few weeks, (we want to open for the July 4 weekend), so I may not be posting any new work for a while (probably not SHOOTING any new work for a while either:), but I'll try to keep the blog updated with our progress on this new project.  Stay tuned:) 

And It Gets Thicker...

The second in my "Foggy Forest" grouping.  The soft transition from detailed foreground to the misty background gives it an especially watercolor-like style that I always like to see.  It's really nice to compose under these conditions because the background is so easily abstracted and free of distracting details. Walking past this spot yesterday evening, I noticed that there are quite a few wildflowers blooming now that would have been a nice accent.. too bad I was a few days early.. not likely to get this opportunity again before they are gone, at least for this year.