The Fuji print and uncleared negative.

Bleach doing a number on the black backing.

Washing off the mess.

I haven't used chemistry in years!

Chilling in the fixer bath.

The final product air drying. Its a little thin as far as negatives go, but definitely printable.

More to come…

It hasn’t helped much that my photo contest career isn’t going so well. I’ve entered nearly a dozen juried shows or competitions in the past year with nary a mention but the kicker was a juried show at a gallery in Vermont. The theme, flowers. I really thought this one was a slam dunk. I mean, if there’s one thing I do well (in my opinion) its flowers. How could I go wrong? Well, my stuff didn’t make the cut. Reading that rejection email was a kick in the pants, but seeing the images that actually made the show was my own personal shock and awe campaign. Needless to say that whole experience really took the wind out of my sails.

I know its not popular to admit that an artist needs validation, but all I could think was ‘thats it, I’m done’. I hardly felt there was any reason to continue such a fruitless endeavor. Then one day last week I got an email from a long forgotten juried show I entered last year. I was so expecting another rejection that I almost hit the delete button without reading it. Low and behold, the photography gods (Mr. Weston and Mr. Mapplethorpe) must have heard my silent screams because not one, but two of my images were accepted.  I had to read the thing three times before it all sank in but yes indeed, I was in.

The show is at the SPIVA Center for the Arts in Joplin Missouri and runs from March 5 through April 25. For those of you that wont be able to make the trek, these are the images that will be on display.

Now of course this new development has helped ease me out of my recent funk. But don’t think I’m going back to my old ways. I’m on a quest for something I can call genuinely my own, something I would be proud to share with all of you…

The summer cut…

Who says film is dead? Oh wait, I think I said that. Well, that wasn’t my first time being wrong and I’m sure it wont be my last. In search of some new inspiration, I have been looking for ways to emulate the dead but not forgotten Polaroid Type 55 pos/neg film. I loved that film and shot a fair amount of it back in the day. Its now discontinued and the last remaining stock is highly coveted, selling for upwards of $200 per box on ebay. Checking out a Polaroid thread on flickr, I saw a post about someone getting similar results with Fuji instant film FP-100B. The results looked pretty awesome and had some (but not all) of that Type 55 magic and the process as described looked easy enough. So today I trucked my ass up to Freestyle in Hollywood. Talk about nostalgia. That place was a regular hangout back in the Trade Tech days. Not much has changed there, except they must sell a bazillion Holgas, cause there were piles of them in every corner of the store. I raced back home, dug out the trusty dusty old Speed Graphic, and started shooting away. You can’t imagine the culture shock this was for me. First of all, I had no idea how to expose the film. The Speed Graphic does not have a built in light meter… The film is rated at ISO 100, but the instructions I read mentioned rating it at 50 or even 32. Math, ugh. Focusing (under a dark cloth), closing the shutter, cocking the shutter all felt so odd I had to pull out the D3 just to make sure it was indeed 2009. Even loading the film had me double checking the instruction manual, but soon enough I had prints and alkaline developer goop flying everywhere. I spent the afternoon and 20 sheets of film experimenting with variations of exposure, development and clearing methods to get this one image. But it was FUN, probably the most fun I have had image making in a long time. Sure I made a mess of the kitchen and probably have chemical burns on at least three fingers, but damn what a way to spend an afternoon. By the way, some may argue that the image quality is not worth all the trouble. The truth is I have spent the last several years trying to emulate this look in Photoshop. Sure I don’t have any semblance of control, but isn’t that why they call them ‘happy’ accidents?

When I realized this show was at a hospital I thought ‘well, here’s another chance to not sell some work’. But I gues beggars cant be choosers, and I needed some new art for the house anyways. I cant imagine folks coming in and out of the hospital are much interested in buying art but maybe I’ll get lucky and some rich doctor with too much money will recognize how much talent I have and decide to redecorate his mansion with my pics. Anyhow, come check us out if you’re not hospital squeemish, I know I’ve certainly come to welcome the sting of hand sanitizer over the last few weeks…

And for those that cant come out to see the images in old fashioned analog, you can enjoy them here in all their digital glory. Enjoy!

I am finally done with my slideshow submission for the annual Palm Springs Photo Festival. I just got in under the wire- deadline was March 9. Who new it was so easy, yet so incredibly frustrating to make a decent slideshow. I started out in iPhoto. It was easy enough. Import photos, add music and export to MOV (criteria for the contest). The downside was two fold. Adding the Ken Burns effect was a simple one button click, but it had no options.  All of my images were getting chopped at the knees and neck, so I opted for the equally as simple fit to frame option with a nice cross fade between slides. What really killed this for me though was the resulting MOV file.  The defaults were a measly 640×480 movie, and I could not for the life of me change it to anything else.  It looked fine at one to one, but it fell apart when viewed full screen (plus I really did want to use some sort of Burns-ie animation).

Next obvious choices were the rest of the iLife suite. iMovie and iDVD both yielded results similar to iPhoto, but were much more difficult to use. Then I remembered the much heralded FotoMagico. This app was a dream to use.  Easy drag and drop operation and music integration. But the clincher was total control of the slide animations. It is very easy and intuitive to designate start and end points for each image, including scaling.  Finally, I had the show I had envisioned, but once again the export killed me.  There are several export options in sort of a wizard configuration. Simply choose your output device, answer a couple of questions and go get a sandwich while the video renders. Fifteen minutes later I eagerly launch my newly exported MOV file. My self satisfaction quickly turned to horror when I saw the first slide. WTF! every image was washed and faded, and not in the good way.  It was as if someone turned the gamma up to three or four (it just looked really shitty).  A quick look at the FotoMagico preview, both full screen and in the window, looked just fine, but the Quicktime file was definitely screwie.

Literally a day and a half of trying different export options all resulted in the same shit file coming out of FotoMagico, but the worst part was that the freakin’ previews still looked as good as ever.  If I could only get my final Quicktime movie to look as good as the freakin’ preview. THEN IT HIT ME. Grab a screen shot of the PREVIEW. Enter iShowU, a very slick screen cast app I acquired back when I thought I was gonna be the next Ben Wilmore.  I made one tutorial and hadn’t thought of this app until today.  After a little fiddling, I was able to set the FotoMagico preview window in line with the iShowU capture window, all while capturing system audio to get the soundtrack that was already synced. I initially captured the video with a little head and tail room, thinking I would trim the excess in iMovie.  I obviously had my head up my ass because the resulting iMovie file looked just as washed as the resulting FotoMagico export, but the intermediate iShowU file was perfect! Seriously, WTF?

FUCK IT! WE’LL DO IT LIVE!

After a couple of tries I finally did a straight FotoMagico to iShowU catpure, no editing required, and right to the contest specks, the whole thing clocks in at 3:00 minutes exactly (give or take a second or two). Of course the resulting file was huge, nearly 500 megabytes, so I took it into my favorite app in the whole wide world, VisualHub (RIP), and knocked it down to a much more palatable 40 megs or so.

The sad reality is that despite all of this effort, there really is no chance I’ll get invited to the show. But at least all of you fine people can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

BTW- the sound track is Heard Them Stirring by Fleet Foxes. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Untitled, originally uploaded by Joseph Orsillo.

Christmas Eve 2008, originally uploaded by Joseph Orsillo.

This Christmas was especially pleasant. It started off a little daunting with the news that both sides of my family were celebrating on Christmas Eve. In years past these were usually split between the Eve and the Day, but not this year. That meant all of the cooking and wrapping had to be done especially early. Luckily, my world famous chocolate chip cookies were baked the night before, although one batch was ruined due to spoiled nuts. If it were not for my selflessly making nut less cookies for the niece, the whole lot would have been toast. That still meant cream cheese wontons and green chile tamales had to be dealt before we left the house at 1:30 in the afternoon. I had made the wontons earlier that week so I was not so concerned with them turning out well, just the time involved with their preparation. The tamales on the other hand, were a venture into uncharted territory. I had found the recipe for the very tasty green chile tamale served at El Chollo in Pasadena. Michelle and I had them a few years ago but have not been back since. The recipe seemed easy enough, but I was dealing with all kinds of conversion issues; pounds to cups, whole ears of corn to cups of canned corn. Then we had to deal with the whole business of wrapping them up in corn husks and parchment paper. I think Michelle had seen her mom and sister do this before, but it really was a new experience for both of us. All in all, everything was done on time and tasted quite good. The wontons were a big hit at the in-laws’ and the tamales were a smash at my sister’s (a first for my Argentine/Italian family). All in all it turned out to be a very nice Christmas Eve, and the best part was Michelle and I got to spend Christmas day alone together at home.

You can see a slide show of the whole evening here, but beware, I was very snap happy that night…

Update: Sorry if anyone clicked on a link in this post and got redirected to something malicious. I’m not sure whats up with that, but I know there’s been something screwie with my site for a while now. If anyone is still interested in seeing the Christmas Eve shots I would suggest you copy the address below and paste it into your browser…

http://orsillophoto.com/Christmas2008

Vote for my photo!vote