California

Posts tagged
with California

Photography

Mirrors on Easels Create the Illusion of Desert Landscape Paintings in California’s Joshua Tree National Park

Photographer Daniel Kukla who has a background in both biology and anthropology has a new series of work called The Edge Effect where he photographed square mirrors propped on easels in locations around Joshua Tree National Park to catch the reflection of the horizon behind him. The resulting images create the bizarre effect of looking at a paintings sitting in the middle of the desert. Of the work Kukla says:

In March of 2012, I was awarded an artist’s residency by the United States National Park Service in southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park. While staying in the Park, I spent much of my time visiting the borderlands of the park and the areas where the low Sonoran desert meets the high Mojave desert. While hiking and driving, I caught glimpses of the border space created by the meeting of distinct ecosystems in juxtaposition, referred to as the Edge Effect in the ecological sciences. To document this unique confluence of terrains, I hiked out a large mirror and painter’s easel into the wilderness and captured opposing elements within the environment. Using a single visual plane, this series of images unifies the play of temporal phenomena, contrasts of color and texture, and natural interactions of the environment itself.

You can see his website for several more photos and Kukla tells me limited edition prints are available by getting in touch with him. (via junk culture and triangulation)

Animation Music Photography

Incredible Vertigo-Inducing Animations of San Francisco

This post contains a number of extremely large animated GIFs which might taken a moment to fully download. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Director Kevin Parry (previously) recently directed a wonderful music video for Kalle Matson, shot by Andrea Nesbitt, featuring a number of visual special effects that appear to slingshot the camera through wide views of San Francisco. Parry has a full gallery of smaller animations where you can see some of the isolated shots, but I had him export seven large, absolutely bandwidth-sucking versions, five of which are above. For two more, see also Ocean Bay Bridge and Market Street. Regarding how this was all accomplished he says via email:

The zooms are done by setting up a camera at each end location and filming the camera zooming in and out. The middle parts are done by putting a camera on the front of my scooter and driving the spanning distance. All that footage is then animated after the fact, only using a very small amount of the frames that were actually filmed. And everything is lined up, cropped, etc. to fit my needs. The spins are done by carefully mapping out a circle around whatever target, and picking roughly 36 locations to shoot a still from. Those photos are then processed, and lined up after the fact.

You might remember Kevin’s video from a few months ago, A Stop Motion History of the World. Again, sorry for dumping these giant images in your RSS reader, but worth it, right?

Photography

Glass Beach

File this under I had no idea this existed. During the early 20th century residents of Fort Bragg, California chose to dispose of their waste by hurling it off the cliffs above a beach. No object was too toxic or too large as household appliances, automobiles, and all matter of trash were tossed into the crashing waves below, eventually earning it the name The Dumps. In 1967 the North Coast Water Quality Board closed the area completely and initiated a series of cleanups to slowly reverse decades of pollution and environmental damage. But there was one thing too costly (or perhaps impossible) to tackle: the millions of tiny glass shards churning in the surf. Over time the unrelenting ocean waves have, in a sense, cleansed the beach, turning the sand into a sparkling, multicolored bed of smooth glass stones now known as Glass Beach. The beach is now an unofficial tourist attraction and the California State Park System has gone so far as purchasing the property and incorporating it into surrounding MacKerricher State Park. (images courtesy digggs, matthew high, meganpru, lee rentz and linked to sources. via kuriositas)

Art

The Luminous Earth Grid

The Luminous Earth Grid was a 1993 installation by artist Stuart Williams erected 50 miles north of San Francisco.

Luminous Earth Grid, an array of 1,680 energy-efficient fluorescent lamps, swept over 10 acres of undulating landscape, 50 miles north of San Francisco. Said the artist, “I see the project as a poetic statement on the potential harmony between technology and nature.” Over a five year period, Williams launched a rigorous fund raising campaign throughout Northern California, and raised nearly half a million dollars to realize the massive project. It was widely acclaimed by critics around the globe and drew tens of thousands of visitors.

I would have loved to see this firsthand. (via behance)