semillerimages.com - Images of the Week 5/30/05 The Last Two Weeks

[Steve]

Greetings to all,

Thanks for tuning in for another week... this is a busy one.
First and foremost though, I want to explain something very explicitly.
This whole deal has been from the beginning, a very personal project
for me. The explanation of the images, and the context of them are all
part of my personal experience in the making of each image. This weekly
(or such) mailing is more or less like a personal journal of my own
that I have chosen to share with everyone on this list. On occasion, I
have offered images for sale, as I thought they might be of interest to
people reading and looking at the images, but let me make it clear,
this mailing is a very personal thing to me. In most cases, I would not
talk like this to people in a group or one on one... it is an easier
thing for me to elaborate on my process by writing my thoughts rather
than talking about them. An issue I have? Perhaps... needless to say,
the last email for me was marred by controversy, a person close to me
took great offense to it... and this whole paragraph is a statement of
intent, as if it was not obvious from the beginning... I will, and
have, address personal feelings in regard to the images I capture, if
this is not something you want to read, please don't read the emails...
just look at the pictures. If you want no part of the emails anymore, I
will be saddened to see you leave, but if you must, take yourself off
the list. If you do not know how, email me and I will remove you. Thank
you for your understanding.

Anyway, this last two weeks have been monumental to me. I have
purchased, with an overly generous loan from my parents, the best 35mm
digital SLR available in the world. Sixteen megapixels of image data
that stun me in their beauty. I have shot a couple thousand frames in
the last two weeks and I was numbed by trying to pick one image to
share. I spoke with a friend recently about being overwhelmed by
certain aspects of life, and I have realized that for the last two and
a half years, I have been overwhelmed by my own output of images. Those
of you in this group have seen a minute fraction of what I have
produced. Being overwhelmed produces frustration, and now that I
recognize that my production is reduced by frustration with too many
options I have chosen to show all of you a plethora of images that I
have captured in the last two weeks. I don't have any real good stories
to tell with all of them, but I will mention a few facts along the
way...

I will start with the first image shot my brand new Canon 1DSmarkII -

I ordered the camera from an outfit in Atlanta, and received it on May
13th. I ran out to FED-EX to pick up from the depot because I was so
impatient that I did not want to wait for the driver to bring it to me.
Of course I had to wait for the battery to charge before going out to
shoot, and that was a long few hours... I also was hesitant about what
I wanted to shoot as my first picture with my new camera, but as I
walked outside armed with my new camera I saw a wild atmospheric
phenomenon and pushed the shutter button.

Here is the image:
http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/firstpic.jpg

With not much to do in the afternoon, I went to visit my good friends,
the Meisenheimers... they have twin boys, eight years old, that I
absolutely love to play with. Great thing about friends with kids, you
get to hang out with them when they are fun... and you get to leave the
parents with the hard stuff :) Jonas and Anders are about as photogenic
as kids can be and we get along famously. A breath of fresh air in a
rather adult life I try to live...
A series of Jonas and Anders at their home in San Luis Obispo:

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/jonasandersseries.jpg

Numerous times I have gone out after work at the castle to watch and
photograph the kite surfers of San Simeon. It has been a bit windy as
of late, and as I was driving down the road to SLO I saw I good large
group of kite surfers right near the hotels in San Simeon. I wanted to
test out the tracking capabilities of my new camera's autofocus system,
so I shot a few images of the surfers. If you do not know, these
guys/gals go out in the ocean on a surfboard and they hang on to what
looks essentially like a parachute. They achieve extremely high speeds
and some MASSIVE air when they launch off of the waves. Here is an
excellent shot of two of the surfers, one of which is in the beginning
of a major launch for some big airtime off of a wave...

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/kiteroostertail.jpg

I have been selling notecards of my images for some time now... and I
am always looking for 'saleable' images. In my wanderings for the last
couple of weeks, I have found two images that I will be making into
notecards quite soon. One, an image of Morro Rock peeking out of the
fog is similar to one that I had in the past, but with this one, I can
enlarge to huge proportions... and another of a wide angle view of
Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa.Uptown Espresso in SLO and Hands
Gallery carry some of my cards... if you want to purchase any, drop me
a line...

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/missonandrock.jpg

I of course have to get some paying work to pay for my equipment, and
my first job to shoot after I got my camera was an album shot for a
friend's new CD coming out soon. Kristen, on the left in the following
picture, is the mother of Jonas and Anders from above. She is a PhD in
Chemistry as is her husband Pancho, she is a triathlete, and a SUPREME
musician. Her boys have a scary set of genes to be sure. Kristen and
her friend Carol are coming out with a new CD soon, and it is
absolutely mind bogglingly good. They asked me to take some pictures to
include in their new CD and the following image is my favorite from the
session...

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/kristencarol.jpg

One of my favorite places in all of San Luis Obispo county is San
Simeon point. Accessed by hopping a fence onto Hearst property, it is
so heavily visited that there is a huge path leading through the trees
all the way to the point. One day after work, I spent five hours
wandering the small peninsula and came back out with some pretty cool
pictures of the variety of the trees that are all non-native, but are
thriving quite nicely. I have to say that walking through this area is
like walking into a fantasyland. There is no place in the county that
even comes close in my opinion to the splendour that this location
offers.

The trees of San Simeon Point:

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/sansimeontrees.jpg

The beach is pretty cool too:

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/sansimeonoceantexture0834.jpg

I had a job from the past months that I needed to complete recently for
Robin's Restaurant in Cambria. I was assigned to the responsibility to
create some images of the garden at the restaurant for use in
advertising and such. The following images were shot in the late
evening light in Cambria at one of the town's best loved restaurants.
The shots were meant to make the garden dining setting look enticing,
did I succeed?

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/robinsseries.jpg

My birthday was just eleven days ago, a friend of mine Leif has a
birthday just a few days before mine, so we like to spend the time
together in celebration. I walked on over to his and his wife's
apartment to spend some time together and these two pictures of them
are in their apartment:

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/leifsarah.jpg

They are quite photogenic too I think...

We went out to eat at a new restaurant in town... and I had to bring my
camera of course. The following pictures were taken at that restaurant
and then of my subsequent walk back to their apartment and then to my
own home. They are... umm, what you would call 'artsy' pictures:

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/slonight-series.jpg

This last weekend of Memorial Day, I had the chance to hang out with
some friends at Avila Beach. We had a little site down at the end of
the beach where we bar-b-qued and had some beers. A few guys were
zipping around the ocean on their jet-ski, so out the camera went and I
shot this pretty cool sequence of one of the guys catching some air off
of a very small wave. Four frames a second, with autofocus tracking...
I hate to say it, but you cannot do this with a point and shoot
camera...

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/jumpsequencesmall3000.jpg

I loved riding the jet-ski/boat when I was in Mexico last year... so
this image sequence gives me some fond memories of that trip. I have
one more image to show you of a FANTASTIC bit of rooster tail...

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/roostertail.jpg

Oooh lala!

Finally... one last image.
My art... my vision. The sequence of natural colors and textures of the
land. Yet again in San Simeon, the late evening light on the ocean and
golden grass:

http://www.semillerimages.com/iow-link/imageoftheweek-c1dsii/c1dsii_I3_2866-100_050529-sansimeongrasssky.jpg

Simple, but I love it.

There you go, a full blown sequence of my life with my camera in two
weeks. I would absolutely love to hear comments about these images as
they are so eclectic. I wonder which ones appeal to you as that type of
feedback enables me to see what is valuable to capture and what is not.

Thanks for your support.

*steve
http://www.semillerimages.com