Sparkler Painting

For a self-portrait, set your shutter on the low low and go to town. Then flip the image horizontally. If someone is taking the picture for you, set the shutter to Bulb. The shutter will stay open for as long as they hold down the button, allowing you to write a really long message. In either case, amp up the aperature to 22 or higher.

Try different lights: laser pointers in different colors, flashlights. I experimented with a square shaped light that produced thick white strokes like graffiti.
Don't let those sparklers go to waste. Try writing a love note or drawing a picture (especially contours) with light!

♥

Primary portraits.

Primary colors (wrinkled vintage dress + ballet flats) 

+ tripod 

+ new Canon 30D 

+ back yard 

+ 8mm cine camera

Amazing how even self-portraits in one's own back yard can be intimidating. After figuring out the tripod and waiting for a curious neighbor to go back in his house it was exhilarating. Dressing up, red lipstick, primary colors, new cameras, and jumping in the air! Finding my happy. Now if I can just figure out how to use this 8mm camera....

xo Lara

Ghost jars & jumping cats

A warm afternoon at home.

Indoor cats with springs in their step.

Drinking chai tea on the steps with warrior cat curled up at my feet.

Hot cat fur and happy art mail.

Contemplating the hours.

Another drive in search of photographic adventure. 

We saw a few abandoned and semi-abandoned sites that we'd like to explore further, took country roads with dilapidated farms and defunct restauruants. 

Our best find (or what made us get out of the car) was this historical building which at the turn of the century was home to "good Irish stock." Agent P. is enthralled with old structures and abandoned factories, learning about their histories, dreaming about the people who used to live or work there, and ultimately preserving them with her camera. It's frustrating that this subject is now en vogue, causing people to desecrate these beautiful remnants just to get a good shot. 

 She sat on the stoop and contemplated the hours of the people who had sat there before, and the hours in between. What did they wait for?

Blue sky, red brick, green grass, perfect sunlight: perfect day.

Another set of twins.

Lone door, pebbles, and snow.

Contrast.

Contrast & treasure!

Slick pavement, beautiful road shot through the winshield. 

There were so many gorgeous puddles and illuminated praire grasses. 

Loving the warm weather.

And there are ghost towns in Illinois. Who knew? Not as cool as the ones out west but worth exploring. There's a county in southern illinois with five such towns!

xo Lara

Nothing, Indiana.

Pictures of nothing.

Like sandy water in the sky.

Textures that go unnoticed

or are eradicated because their beauty is not apparent.

Seeing the little things

and appreciating them before they disappear or are washed away.

This intriguing structure may not remain for much longer.

Agent P and I decided that we needed to go for a Sunday drive. We flipped a coin once to determine North or South and again for East and West. This lead us to Indiana where we saw a rainbow in a single cloud floating above riots of development. When it is warmer and the snow isn't to our knees we will try and find this house again and remember that there were once footprints in the snow. I want to bring my camera everywhere, it's becoming a part of me. I'm always taking note of pictures I would like to take but soon forget about. 

Did you go on Sunday drives as a kid to another neighborhood or state? To the city or country? To people watch? My mother used to tell me stories from her childhood when she would nestle in the car with her mother and father every Sunday for a Sunday Drive. I hope that driving aimlessly to Love FM and the oldies stations becomes a Sunday ritual; having the freedom to pull over at every point of interest and take pictures (when it's not freezing). I love it, even if the destination seems boring the act of driving and listening to that happy music you can sing along to is worth it. 

Can you guess what the nothings are?

xo Lara

Plumbing pianos.

Marisol, a kindred photographer and friend, initiated a Chicago adventure this weekend. She spirited me away in the dead of night to Hyde Park, which is where I spent a few of my "formative" years. We stayed at her friends apartment for the night two blocks from my old one. In the morning after coffee coupled with pitas and olive oil we poked around his apartment with our cameras (including the rooms of his roommates...)

There was this great enclosure between the apartments with a lid of windows. The photo below was taken through a window.

Then we grabbed all day CTA passes and decided to start in the loop. She took me to her favorite building, a relic from the late 18th century, and it instantly became my favorite building as well. We spent hours here, discovering hidden rooms and lonely instruments and

this magnificent white room with windows overlooking the water

twins

Crawling, sliding, clicking shutters and posing all over the these dusty surfaces for art

The grand white room contained a stage and a shrouded piano

harmonious trinity

plumbing pianos for their secretslooking through keyholes and opening doors


finding ghosts at work

we slipped through a door, went down a short flight of stairs, into a dark room through a thick plastic curtain filled with machines with red and green lights from floor to ceiling and thick wire tresses flowing across the ceiling. Marisol found a door, the light from which illuminated the machinery, leading to this fire escape on the 8th floor. I'm afraid of heights so i had to take this picture as proof :)

Click the mosaic to see the full set. Our next stop was the Museum of Contmporary Photography which is featuring a series of work by Michael Wolf entitled The Transparent City. "Chicago is known for work by innovative architects such as David Adler, Daniel Burnham, Louis H. Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. After World War II, it established itself as a world capital of modern architecture influenced by the international style of Mies van der Rohe and home to notable projects by Helmut Jahn, Philip Johnson, and more recently Frank Gehry. [...] Wolf depicts the city more abstractly, concentrating less on individual well-known structures and more on the contradictions and conflicts between architectural styles when visually flattened together in a photography. His pictues look through the multiple layers of glass to reveal the environment, focusing specifically on voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. Wolf explores the complex, sometimes blurred distinctions between private and public life in a city made transparent by his intense observation." --Natasha Egan, Associate Director and CuratorChicago is a fascinating metropolis by virtue of it's claim of the only throughly modern city in the world all because it nearly burnt to the ground in 1871. The building we played in was built a few years later and is remarkably intact. I can't see myself choosing to live in a metropolis (although the prospect is intriguing) however, I feel honored to live near enough to be able to explore its relics and learn its history through exploration. Marisol and I ended our jaunt by hopping on the El again and rode it until we exited at stop we deemed compelling, wandering around another hour before returning home. It was just the ticket to get out of the house, meet warm people, wander about, and take hundreds of pictures.
Happy wandering :)xo Lara

Adventures in Library Land part 2.

Continuing to poke around my library. The Natural Sciences Center caught my eye. It is located in the center of the library and is encased by glass so visitors too feel like specimens when exploring the curiosities within, large study tables facing one of the walls. The masks  in Part 1 protrude from a wall across the hall; it as if they too are peering through the glass at you. I love how these architectural and artistic nuances converge to create an uncanny little experience. Thanks to Photoshop my snapshots came out well considering how quickly I moved through the space under the direct gaze of these masks. When I was originally editing the first set of photos I added speech bubbles to the masks in which they alluded to the treasures on the other side of the glass and, therefore, also to this post, but later deleted them thinking it too childish.

I want to make dioramas of my own with chamberpots and robots.

Lots of editing to bring out the contrast between the hearts and the gelatinous solution in which they are suspended. The cross-section looks like an eerie fruit. 

I will never forget having to dissect a rat in highschool. At least I never had to touch it since I deliberately partnered with an affable nerd. Sometimes as I walk by library patrons I detect the scent of fermaldehyde lingering in the air and hope its just my imagination.

A little artistic editing here but I tried to keep the beautiful texture and colors of their wings intact. A self portrait indicating a rebirth of sorts? I'm not sure.

This exercise somehow managed to lead me down a spiral path in Amazon's book search resulting in about 50 book requests divied up between my college and local libraries for books on curiousities, robots, natural history museums, automata, pop-up books, puppets, hand shadows, the evolution of the silver screen, and more (click on my Shelfari widget to see the titles!). I dream of a magical room in the house we will have which will be devoted to books and swaddled by built in bookshelves. Agent P has sworn to help construct my dream library and insists upon installing one of those moving ladders as seen in Beauty and the Beast (my favorite part of the movie when I was little was when Belle was in the Beast's library). I crave bookshelves. I have only two stout ones from childhood which do not begin to cradle my collection. Consequently, I am fixated on having proper bookshelves and think to myself that my bedroom would be so perfect and organized if only I possessed them. I will continue to be the Oscar to Agent P.'s Felix regardless of fixtures to be sure :) 

Are you fixated on anything at the moment?

xo Lara

Winter advisory with rusty icicles.

There is nothing better than a self-declared snow day with which to bask in the beauty of winter and spend time alone. The frost on my windows is beginning to melt. I snapped these yesterday when it was 14 below.

My dream catcher and witching ball against frozen webbing.

Tin bowls scattered around the house to catch the leaks. 

With the lighting it looks like a divine messenger...hmmm

Dreaming about Clare's world and thinking she might need a glittery mohawk of flower petals :)

What do you day dream about as the frost builds and the snow falls?

xo Lara

First day of school.

Getting ready for the first day of a new semester
Documenting my new back to school ensemble: rust colored shirt and jingly earrings that remind me of peacock feathers
and getting distracted by the textures, patterns, and curiosities of the bathroom my mother decorated in the seventies
lovingly touching them through a lens 
photographing objects of the past while embarking on something new
illuminating the trinity while i'm at it
Focusing

but not too muchWondering how to fuse intellectual activities with the creative thrust that makes lifeworth living. Hoping that I can manipulate the two causing them to push up on each other's edges this semester.
Taking, editing, and uploading pictures is relaxing. It is the quickest and most gratifying way to connect and explore artistically.I don't need to be in a "zone," just a subject that intrigues me.Art journaling can be more of a struggle.Still searchingfor a personal, effortless style. wish me luck! xo lara