Frowning in the Darkroom
 

So as some of you may have picked up, photography is one of my hobbies. In this space I'll be showcasing some of my photographs. Some will be on a theme and some might need to be split up between several posts due to the ten picture limit. Others will just be a random smattering of unrelated photos.

First entry soon to come.

So for this first batch, I went to a local creek and took pictures of reflections on the water, which was mainly trees. I got the pictures to be a little more diverse by throwing various amounts of rocks, sand, or sticks at different parts of the creek. The result is different every time, and I'm quite sure that I'll be playing with this idea a bit more.

Pretty amazing stuff, Frown. You have a real talent. You also have a talent for posting just past the deadline! Sorry man, but I'll make sure to highlight this next week. :thumb:

Those shots are ridiculously cool. I'll be following.

I liked the 4th one the best.

1 has a weird rorschach effect on me, i see a huge bug.

like the concept of this journal, looking forward to more entries

Thanks gentlemen. @Black Francis, I think that they could all be looked at in that manner. I kind of see an icon that you would see in a church in the first one, and the last one kind of looks like a clown.


Many readers are also aware that another one of my hobbies is music. Hobby may not be the right word since music is my passion and gives my life meaning. Having been playing for years I ended up recording a lot of stuff that I ended up releasing on full length albums. I took and edited all of the photos for all of my album artwork except for Wolves In Sheepskin's debut, "Bay Beef: A King." While I snapped the photos, Stryder (fellow founder of WISK and my best friend), was either present for the photo or helped me take it/set it up. In this post I'll be showing all of the artwork from past WISK albums as well as upcoming artwork once we get our asses to some recording.


This one was taken where we did a lot of our practicing and recording: the tunnel. It's a drainage pipe that's usually full of water, although for a couple of weeks during the Summer it dries up. The method for taking this picture was similar to my water series: we threw rocks into the water and the ripples messed with the reflection of the rungs that made up the drainage pipe.


This picture was taken from a hillside letter by the community college that I was attending in San Marcos. What you see in the picture is a parking lot at high zoom with effects.


Taken at Stryder's (the other WISK main member) haus when he was moving and the place was empty for a couple of weeks. A good part of the album was recorded in this place, there were a few songs recorded in the same time frame. This picture was taken when we started doing photography using all of the shit that was left in the haus, which included the boat, birdbath, and door that you see in the photo. We threw a devil's mask on Stryder's dog, Lucky, and attached a stationary magnifying glass to a birdbath next to the pool. Stryder was behind the door holding it in place and making sure that Lucky stays in the same spot with orders while I snapped the photo and found a good angle. This corresponded with 4/20 of that year, so we were a bit creative at the time.


This is another photo taken in the tunnel, but it's a lot more straightforward as it's just the view of the tunnel from one side. Having a shitty phone made the shutter speed very slow when I tried to take pictures in HD. Being in my standard state of mind when making material for WISK, I moved a little bit after pressing the button, causing an after-image to appear in the photo. When I was looking at the picture, I stared at it and back to what I was photographing while utterly perplexed. I tried to see if I could see that in real life while Stryder (who was present but didn't really aid with this one) convinced himself that he could see it before we realized what actually happened.


This one was taken on a photography hike that me and Stryder took with the intent to get some album artwork. This one was the first one where we got the artwork specifically for an album rather than simply dabbling in photography. The green substance that you see is algae that had taken over a pond, making the pond that bright green colour. Stryder took a stick and pulled up some of the muck from the bottom of the pond, making a black elliptical shape in the center.


I wake up to the dogs barking. Someone's at the door. I groggily walk downstairs and open it to see Stryder in bare feet and pajamas telling me to get in his car. We drove to his place and he showed me what he had found: a massive orb weaver spider. I snapped a few photos and noticed a pot in the background and lined it up to get some cool symmetry in there.


This one is from our next album, and it's a case of fucking with a random image to make it cool. That's a photo of plywood, but messing with the contrast and brightness and other things made it into something a lot better.

Dude your photos you post to Facebook have gotten me into starting to take pictures, so I might rip this journal off a bit in my own if you don't mind. Also subbed because these pictures are awesome.

Wow. Great stuff. That plywood pic is beautiful and creepy at the same time.

No I don't mind at all man, I'm honoured to have inspired you.

Ja, texture photos have a lot of variety. If you look closely it you can make out a faint demon child thing in that pic.


This picture was also taken from the hillside letter (from this point will be referred to as "the P"). It was taken at night and I took a high zoom photo of the city lights down below.


This was also taken at the tunnel, so you can probably guess at this point what I go down there to do for inspiration. After getting the photo for A Van Per Oven, I played with camera movement to blur lines and this one really stuck out to me.


I felt the urge to release an album of some of the random tracks that I was holding onto, but didn't have a picture yet. So I trolled around campus, trying to find things that could easily be abstracted when I came across a statue of Martin Luther at my school, which looks like this (photo not mine):


A little history on the statue. When they give you the tour of the campus they say that the statue signifies Martin Luther's influence on the Christian world or something like that but they're full of shit. I used to be neighbours with the sister of the sculptor who built it, and both are children of some of the school's founders (they helped spark my interest in the school). When I met the sculptor, who's now a CEO for Chevron, our conversation came to the sculpture. When he built this he was in his twenties during the 60s, and he was doing what all of the other young people at the time were doing: drugs. He said he was out of his mind on speed and LSD at the time, and was commissioned the piece because his dad was worried about him. I like to pull this bit of trivia and interrupt campus tours to tell it to prospective students. They usually make that part of the trip short when I'm around now.

Anyway, the concrete rise that the statue stands on has a lot of rot and deterioration, so I took a close shot of one of the more interesting sections and messed with it until it looked even better.


Upon waking one day, I was somehow conscious enough through the fog of my hangover to notice how cool the shadows on my wall looked. They were shining in through the window, the lines were formed by my blinds and the other figure was made by a tree that's right outside my window. I snapped it and went back to sleep.


I've already detailed the source of this picture in my analysis of the album in Stuck on a Frownapilago, but I'll run through it again. I was waiting on the train to go to a friend's house and it wasn't scheduled to come for about twenty minutes, so I had time to wander around and smoke a cigarette. I saw this area with the spare rails that were flooded in the recent rains through the fence. I took the photo, but then tried to get another without the chainlink in the way by hopping the fence and getting one from the other side. The original looked better, so I stuck with that after adding some blue hues to it and intensifying the contrast.

I liked the Gnashing of the teeth cause i see a needle in there.

Not in the water, in the shapes btw

Thunder music looks very noir i dig that one as well, good stuff.