Parting shot

Last view of Oregon, taken with my blackberry on the way to the Redmond airport. Heavy fog left moisture that coated everything in tiny ice crystals.

Christmas at Crooked River Ranch

Christmas in Oregon. Not taking any photos, even snapshots. Suttle lake was covered with small glittering cubes of ice that made celebratory clinking sounds as the waves moved and crashed onto the shore. Today all the trees and grasses are covered with ice. For our traditional Christmas workout we ran the Deschutes river trail. Because of Oliver's obsessive love of super heroes, there has been an ongoing joke about the special powers of certain family members. Rough-Estimato Man, also known as Approximato Man, (his motto is "More or Less!")-duking it out with Overly-Precise Man..
Photos above taken by brother Nathan with his plastic Hero action camera from Smith Rock, looking out at the Cascade Range.
I'm signing off until the new year. Happy New Year Everyone!

Making up

This shot was done a couple of weeks back when I had Toto over to model. This past weekend I had a studio visit with that wizard of spacetime, Adam Magyar. I'm not entirely sure, but I think there was a wormhole shadowing him. Shot some photos, too but the results were iffy.

Dekotora!

It is time for my post about Dekotora! These are the "art trucks" of Japan as seen by California based photographer Roger Snider. Roger says the Japanese art truck movement started in the late 70s when this movie came out.
The truckers cite the movie as their primary influence to design the rigs.
The trucks have evolved over the years, first being designed to look like ships then evolving towards the spaceship look.
Color schemes in the murals reflect what part of the country they are from. Muted tones are from the colder Northern area and the brighter ones are from the south.
Large companies shun the trucks when they pull up to pick up loads and sometimes won't let them in the yard in they are too garish. The truck owners have to take off all the decoration to pass the DOT inspection once a year. Japanese truckers love the American rigs and refer to any American truck simply as "Convoy".
The lights require multiple generators under the truck, and they can only run for about 30 minutes before the whole rig needs to be shut down. They do not drive on the road with the music-synchronized lights running.

Roger Snider shoots all things truck.
He also has books for sale.

Andreas Rentsch

I first saw an Andreas Rentsch photo in an ICP course catalogue. I immediately looked him up and was gratified by the images on his website. I'm wondering if I might be able to use his images in an upcoming article about time travel.

These images reminded me of questions surrounding cave paintings- were these made for human eyes, or as a kind of communication with the spirits? They also reminded me of some of my favorite Anselm Kiefer images.
Andreas Rentsch has an interesting history, growing up on prison grounds as a child of the warden. If you are interested in hearing more about him and his process, check out this recent video. The above images are from his "Figure Series", and were made in the American southwest.