This summer we had the joy of welcoming a new nephew, Peregrine Kenneth Emmanuel Nelson. So far we know that he loves sunshine and that he has the same wrinkles on his forehead as me. His name means wanderer or pilgrim.

Congratulations Andrew and Rachel!

View gallery with more photos here.

Newborn boy in mothers arms with golden sunlight

newborn baby with goofy expression looking up from fathers lap. B&W photo.

peaceful newborn baby boy bundled in blue cloth cocoon

mother swaddling newborn boy in white blanket. B&W photo

happy newborn baby smiling

upset newborn baby furrowing brow and crying

mother gently kissing newborn baby boy. B&W photo

close up of sleeping newborn baby in sunlight

close up photo with peaceful newborn baby sleeping in sunlight

close of up newborn baby's hand

baby sucking on hand and laying down in mother's arms

mother and father looking down at newborn baby in their arms

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Recently, I was invited to photograph a local Indonesian wedding in a village near where we stay in Cisarua, Bogor. The reception was an afternoon-long receiving line where friends, acquaintances and family come to give their blessings and gifts, and then enjoy a buffet of food and live music. The wedding was very formal, but atmosphere was also lighthearted and very relaxed. Personally, I had a lot of fun with the challenge of capturing a wedding in a new context.

Congratulations Robert and Dia!

Indonesian bride and groom joke and lauch during wedding portraits

Indonesian bride and groom pose outside by banana trees

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wet grass in the yard at Puncak
Our yard at the villa in Puncak.

laundry and water tanks in rain at Puncak
The laundry takes a long time to dry here.

close up green lizard eye in puncak Indonesia

view of houses and laundry and hills in puncak pass indonesia
Puncak Pass a few kilometers from our house.

tea fields and highway in Puncak Pass Indonesia

tea fields and hills in mist, Puncak Pass Indonesia
Tea fields in Puncak Pass.

wild monkey in Puncak Pass Indonesia

Monkeys hang out in the tea fields around Puncak Pass.

house rooftops in Jakarta Indonesia
Rooftops in Jakarta seen from a pedestrian overpass.

motorcycle in tunnel with garbage Jakarta Indonesia

traffic in Jakarta Indonesia and man walking with crutches
“No traffic, no Jakarta” – our driver

silhouette of man on bicycle on road in Jakarta

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My wife Liz and I just embarked on a five month adventure in Indonesia, where we’re working with World Relief (an organization that provides services to refugees). After a couple of weeks here the culture is still very unfamiliar and I’ve been pretty shy about pulling my camera out. This last week, though, we were in Bali learning the language, and I had a little free to capture some images.

Historical Museum of Bali, in district of Renon

Historical Museum of Bali, in the Renon District where we stayed

Vacationers from Jakarta enjoying Sanur Beach in Bali

Vacationers from Jakarta enjoying Sanur Beach, a few kilometers away

Awesome game of catch.

Hindu offering by the rising tide at Sanur Beach in Bali

These beautiful little Hindu offerings are everywhere, even at the beach.

Balinese family at smiling for photo at Sanur Beach in Bali

Colorful wood rocking horses in Denpasar, Bali

Traffic in Bali, outside the KFC in Sanur.

Street in Denpasar, near our Kos (home stay)

Street in Denpasar, near our Kos (home stay)

White rabbit in yard

Plus our friend the Dalai Rabbit, so named because he ate the offerings in our driveway

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Over this Christmas break, I had the chance to start tinkering around with electronic audio and immensely enjoyed the process. There’s something about knowing you don’t know what you’re doing that makes it so much easier to have fun. Maybe because there’s no fear of failure? Maybe just some good spiced wine?

Anyway, plug into your favorite speakers and enjoy!

1. Ewok Christmas Rave

2. Cheese (with collaborators)

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This last summer I helped to facilitate a community art commission exploring how we try to find hope in the midst of failed dreams and deadened hope—specifically how people of faith respond respond to experiences where they feel betrayed by God. For my own entry, I branched out of my photographic comfort zone and made a painting with my digital tablet. I’ve been captivated by aesthetic of cinematic concept art for some time, so it is exciting to finally take a baby step in this direction. For more on how this intersects with my personal journey, see my artist statement below.

Artist Statement

Clearcut is not so much a destination in itself as a snapshot from an ongoing process. For me, this has been a process of reconciling a series of failures and disappointments with my hope in God and for the future. So many of the dreams God has given me seem to have crashed on the rocks, dried out in the sun, failed, or just died. To the open road of the future, my spirit goes limp.

In this space, the words of Israel’s prophets cut through the confusion into my soul. The hearts, bodies, and stories of these men are seared with living Truth. Their words are disturbing and provocative, but drenched in the vivid colors of eternity, and it is here that I have seen hope. I’ve started my day readings these words, fighting with them, trying to understand them, and then falling asleep listening to them again. They continue to haunt and confuse me, yet they don’t leave me hopeless. Even in God’s most severe judgement, there remain powerful seeds of hope. Seeds that promise a better future.

The fire and smoke of judgement are also the pillar and cloud of God’s delivering presence and shelter. The Cedars of Lebanon are destroyed, but the stumps of these blessings-turned-idols become the nurselog for the shoot of Jesse. The light that exposes this destruction and scorches the earth is also the light that brings life to the new shoot.

May our clearcut dreams leave space for seeds of the kingdom to grow—space to find the Light of Life.

Completed October 3, 2010
Media: Digital tablet, Photoshop
Output: 8×12″ Epson Print

.

Feel free to download a copy for your personal use as a desktop wallpaper.
1024×7681280×10241440×9001680×1050

_____________

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Why Havasupai?
Last fall I outlined the trajectory for my thesis research. In a nutshell I’m using photography to introduce slight disruptions into how we perceive the world around us. My hope is to cultivate an experience of wonder, curiosity, visual presence, and critical observation. Some of the work I’ve been doing—The Ave Up Close for example—purposefully investigates places that I wouldn’t default to engaging in visually. This trip was set up to do the opposite.

Havasupai is probably one of the most incredible and unfamiliar places on this planet that I’m aware of. After spending an afternoon there six years ago, the beauty and disorientation I experienced are still a vivid memory. My intent in returning was to use the environment as a sort of experimental sandbox that might spark my imagination in directions it wouldn’t otherwise travel.

Conspirators and Itinerary
Along with me were my wife Liz, and our friend Øyvind. Liz and I flew from Bellingham to Vegas, where we met Øyvind who had flown in from New York. It was his Spring Break and our finals week. Our challenge was to find the canyon, drop somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 feet down to the bottom, survive temperatures ranging from freezing to 85° F for a few days, then make it out alive. The render below from Google Earth shows our trail. As you can see, most of the elevation drop happens in the first few miles.

The hike down was pretty intense. I think that’s all that needs said :-).

Us at the trailhead.

Composite panorama from about 2 miles in.

The land belongs to the Havasupai Tribe who continue to live at the bottom of the canyon in Supai village.

As far as I know, Supai Village is currently the only place in the United States where the mail is still delivered by horseback.

Øyvind climbed up the hill to take this overview of Supai Village.

Our campsite! The campground and waterfalls nearby suffered heavily from severe flash floods in 2008.

The trip down to Mooney Falls involves crawling through caves and climbing down cliffs. It’s pretty awesome.

One of the things I began to think about after making this climb five or six times, is how our location and identity are linked. For me it was incredible to let parts of who I am open up in response to the aesthetic and physical terrain where they felt at home.

For most of the climb down we could grab chains bolted into the rock.

Continue reading »

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Hi Friends, While I’m working on pulling together a few posts from my recent thesis work, I thought I’d share a few awesome things I’ve run into recently. Enjoy!

SFINA: Time Stoppers
The first part of this video is the same “bullet time” technique that was pioneered in 1999 for The Matrix. It gets especially interesting toward the end when the participants mix this technique with long-exposure light painting.

Sfina:13. Timestopers from SFINA on Vimeo.

TinEye
Upload an image, then see where it lives on the web. This tool has totally revolutionized my ability to legitimately investigate orphaned imagery that captures my interest. If you’re interested, also check out “Google Goggles.”
http://www.tineye.com


Beetle Cam

Ever wondered what a lion looks like from the perspective of a small rodent who’s about to be consumed?
http://www.petapixel.com/2010/04/20/beetlecam-shoots-african-wildlife-up-close/


New Stop Motion of Solar Flares

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8635207.stm

Galileo
A beautiful animated 2D short. Gorgeous, slightly disturbing.

Galileo from Ghislain Avrillon on Vimeo.

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After posting on oxy-acetylene earlier, I thought it might be appropriate to share an example of what someone might normally do with these tools. “Untitled Tree” is my first serious attempt at using steel as a material (made Spring of 2009). It was in the process of creating this piece that I became intrigued by many of the residual artifacts left over from welding, plasma cutting, hammering, grinding, and ocy-acet torching. In many ways, the aesthetic of this tree has been purposefully built around these artifacts.

This tree is one in a series of several I have made exploring the animate qualities of trees as creatures as well as the mythical quality of trees as a habitation. The other trees are made from coiled clay, driftwood, and a lost-wax glass casting. The photos below are from the 3D4M Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, where my steel tree was selected for display (Winter 2010). If you’re interested in seeing the rest of the show, I also photographed my peers’ work and posted the images to a gallery.

The cavity toward the top of the tree was designed to hold a candle. When lit, the branches cast incredible shadows!

The holes outside this cavity can be seen as windows in a dwelling space.

The leaves were made by a mixture of hammering, oxy-acet heating/bending, and angle grinding.
The edge on the base is a deep, angled plasma cut.


My favorite leaf.

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Last Friday I hiked out of the Grand Canyon after spending five days camping in Havasupai with my wife Liz and our friend Øyvind. In addition to being an incredible spring break adventure, the trip was a part of my thesis work at the UW. My intent was to respond visually to the physical explorability and unfamiliarity inherent to a place like Havasupai. Since I don’t already have an established pattern of how to see (or even move around in) this sort of place, it seemed like an ideal space to apply some of the visual disruptions I’ve been working with.

The image below is a 30″ time exposure with Havasu falls painted in by our headlamps. You can think of this image as an artificial rendering of extramissive sight, where our eyes both project and capture light. Though this theory is long-debunked for explaining how our eyes work, it perfectly describes many scientific imaging processes like electron-based microscopy. Also, in this mode of seeing, we only capture 1 frame per 30 seconds, rather than the reverse. As a result, this type of vision occupies a tracing of light in time much more like how we are accustomed to perceiving smell.

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As I’ve begun learning to make things with metal, I’ve been captivated by many of the unintentional visual artifacts left behind. Techniques like welding, plasma cutting, hammering, and oxy-acetylene torching are generally used to modify a 3D form, but I wanted to make a piece that specifically highlights the artifacts they leave behind.

This video below is a stop motion of 447 frames captured over about 15 minutes of torching a 24″x24″ piece of sheet steel. Even though I’ve put a lot of hours in using this technique, this is actually the first time I’ve been able to watch the process without darkening effect of protective eye wear and the pressure of operating the torch.

NOTE: For proper viewing, click the link to my Vimeo page and view full screen in 720p HD

Oxy-Acetylene Torch on Brushed Steel from Daniel Nelson on Vimeo.

I brushed the steel beforehand to remove the oily milling on the outside, so the temperature changes would be more visible.

The rainbow outlines the edges of the areas that have been heated, while the dot is literally glowing hot.

The fading intensity of the glow traces where the torch as been. Note the dark blistered circles in the areas that received the most heat.

Continue reading »

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I live on a funny little street called University Way. It is conversationally called “The Ave.” In addition to being the road I must first cross before going anywhere else, this is where I eat yummy ethnic food (more than 42 different varieties I’m told), drink the best lattes I know of, and find awesome used books. The funky vibe has become a part of me. I can’t get anything done without the bustle of nerdy conversations around me and I have come to genuinely believe that flannel jackets and argyle socks are pretty much the coolest things ever. They are right?

But the Ave is also home to hardened faces, lungfuls of exhaust, near-death biker v.s. car encounters, intoxicated brawls, zombie students sealed off by their earbuds, and many others with nowhere to go and few who care. Visually it’s all rectilinear architecture and color can be scarce.

I love The Ave, but there’s also a point when too much character can be depressing. I miss fresh air, sunsets, quiet, growing things, wild places, and untamed topography. One of the side-effects that I’ve encountered living here is that my visual sensitivity feels dulled. If I had grown up in a city, I suspect that I may have learned to see much more in urban spaces. But I didn’t. I grew up on a mountain and northwest forests are where my vision is most attuned …and also where my capacity to see feels the most refreshed.

On a personal level, I’ve been asking myself whether it is possible to approach an urban environment with the same visual curiosity that a forest draws out of me so naturally. Can I come to grips with what simply isn’t there to see? Is it possible to challenge the limitations in my viewpoint that make the The Ave feel visually claustrophobic or inaccessible?

As a simple gesture to explore these questions, I took an afternoon to walk down The Ave and to look at it up close with my camera. I used my 50mm lens and a 13mm extension tube. The extension tube moves the lens away from the camera, which brings the focal plane closer–allowing the camera to focus on subjects almost close enough to be touching the lens. The side effect of this benefit is that anything more than about 5″ away becomes completely blurry. Most of the images I made span a distance of about 2-4 inches, and are about as far away from the camera.

More than enough said. Here are some pictures!

Beer bottle cap in alley.

Telephone pole.

Marlboro on steel drain cover.

Cigarette filter.

Layers of paint on signpost. It is interesting to me how we literally paint physical layers over little histories like this. Continue reading »

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© 2011 Curious Imaginings Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha