Close Meditations of a Visual Kind

Been reading here a while? You'll recall the occasional post where I emote over what web-based image hosting provider should I use. As is, I currently use three point five, with the point five being LJ itself, though it's been quite some time since I put anything into the Scrapbook there. Note: I did originally attempt to post this here on the date & time (27/04/11 @ 15:17) and ran into difficulties getting logged in. Either this was due to the Internet connection, or to the hardware at teh Ranch. Long story that.

The largest body of photographic work I've got hosted on-line is through Flickr. This is the one I pay for using; there's some history behind that, and it could still change, and blahblablahblah. It remains, this is the largest body of stored work. Changing off this will result in a lot of 'broken link' images in the photo-blogging I've been doing here.

A few years ago, I started investigating Deviant Art. DA keeps nagging me that I need a premium account, and I keep ignoring their nagging because their rates are somewhat (noticeably) higher than Flickr. I also told myself I'd be a bit 'stricter' with myself posting to DA, in part because the ability to limit who sees ones work is somewhat less than what Flickr provides. On Flickr, I can 'filter' who sees work by declaring someone a 'Friend' or 'Family'. Then one needs to be either, and have an account on Flickr to be so tagged. On DA, I can set a level of image that will require someone to be a DA account holder and logged in, but not to my knowledge much more than that. If one isn't a DA member, you can still browse over to the DA site. What you will see for those 'Mature Content' images will be a place-holder image.

All of the above is side-line as it were from my subject, and still applies. Flickr keeps twiddling with the setup. Surprised? Shouldn't be, so does LJ, and most other blogging sites, eh? Anyway, I posted some recent work to DA yesterday, and this morning to Flickr planning on posting to here with the latter links.

Except the page wasn't acting in the manner to which I'd become accustomed, and I couldn't grab the html coding for the photos. Should be able to, couldn't. New buttons in place to make it easy to share via e-mail, share to LiveJournal, and to Facebook. Then a drop-down arrow, which is what wasn't working. The Share to LiveJournal wouldn't let me use it, saying I couldn't because the photo wasn't public or not flagged safe.

What artwork is safe? That's a whole different question. For much later. But hey, when did this button come along, and is Flickr a 'whitelisted' site, I wonder? Another whole different question, for later. Right.

So I went to the trouble of gathering html coding to link to the DA postings, then tried logging back into Flickr and hey, now I could grab the html coding to link to those images. So. Well.

About a week and a half ago, I worked with a model new to me, one MordsithCara on Deviant Art, Chelsea on several other photography/modelling related sites. I came across her work on two separate sites more or less the same time, and on one of them decided to view her profile. There, I learned she currently resides fairly close to teh Ranch, making an artistic partnership possible. I contacted her, she proved interested, and we worked. We set up a date with two options, one outdoors for good weather, one indoors for inclement weather.

On the day, the weather proved quite clement, some overcast, 'partly cloudy', nice sun. The theme for the outdoor session was Dryad. Dryad are tree-spirits, specifically from Greek mythology and even more specifically, primarily of oaks. I suspect this means there are other **ads for other trees; I know there are others for water and such.

The location for the session is teh Ranch, where we enjoy several copses and stretches of North Central Baja Jorja live oak and laurel oak trees. We set out walking about the place, and since most of where I wanted to shoot is over on the east side of teh Ranch, where the cows live, we perforce went where the cows are. Mostly they ignored us, though they did come to see, while we worked fairly close but not right by the gate/fence, if we would provide any food. Not having any, they wandered off. We did keep an eye open, though, as this particular day was the day after the evening one of our cows didn't show for dinner. Since we knew that cow was pregnant, I figured that to be because she was calving. She was, though probably delivered, actually, early in the morning of the day we shot. We kept an eye out for her and her calf because we didn't need to disturb them.

Quite a bit of work later, and I've rather a good collection of pieces to keep working up for show. Being made with a digital SLR, they are all colour images. Being that I've been seeing these concepts in B&W, I've been working them over to that. Some I may leave in colour. Some, I may leave a little bit in colour.

( These are not in Colour. Nor are they WorkPlace Safe. For most definitions of WorkPlace. )

So. Credits:
Model, Make-up Artist, Hair Stylist: Chelsea Christian, MordsithCara