Photo Editor’s Choice/Jan-Feb 2012
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Steve Bromberg
©2011 Steve Bromberg
40 Hours
We were in the second day of a two-and-a-half day train trip to Urumqi in Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu from Wuxi Jiangsu Province. This was my very first travel experience in China. My student invited me to spend the holidays with him and his family in Yining, on the far western edge of Xinjiang. This was spring holiday season and all the students everywhere in China were finished with exams and traveling home to be with their families for Chinese New Year. Every train everywhere was sold out. I was late buying my ticket so I ended up with a standing ticket. This meant I would have to stand in the isle of the train for the two-plus days to Urumqi. As luck would have it though, when we boarded, we were given a sleeper car because they had run out of seats on this train. The only caveat to this was we had to sit four to a lower bunk that fit three people. The bunks were stacked three high but we were not allowed to sleep in the upper bunks. Rules are rules in China. So everyone for two plus days sat and slept sitting up. The train was packed. Having a seat was good fortune. I was lucky, my student talked the conductor into letting the weiguoren (foreigner) sit with him. On this trip, Colin (my student’s English name) discovered a girl from his hometown in the same car we were traveling in. Wu Yuan Yuan, Colin’s middle school classmate. Tired and bored, I wandered through the train taking pictures and caught Wu Yuan Yuan deep in thought. It ended up being a very long trip for all of us.
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Larry Hamill
©2011 Larry Hamill
Fluid Dress
I photographed the woman wearing the dress at The Highball event in Columbus, Ohio, around Halloween. I combined that image with an HDR shot of a waterfall I took a couple of weeks earlier near Lake Tahoe. The background clouds were shot during a sunrise at Mt. Shasta, CA. I used Photoshop CS5 to merge the images.
I was fortunate 23 years ago that a friend gave me a Beta copy of Photoshop. It was a challenge to figure out how it worked without a manual. Playing with the software seemed the best way to learn and it was and is a fun process.
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David Aschkenas
©2011David Aschkenas
The Floating Dress
As for the photo of the floating dress, this piece was part of a large show in Prague, Czech Republic, in November. The exhibit was housed in 3 large buildings called NEW ART. It was made up mostly of university art professors and work by their graduate students. All of the work in the show had to be no older than 20 years and seemed to be made up mostly of Czech and central European artists. A good bit of the show was installation art rather than two-dimensional work. This piece was obviously an homage to the photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing over the New York subway grate, with her dress catching the breeze and flying up in the air. The photo was originally done by George Zimbell during the filming of Billy Wilder’s film “The Seven Year Itch”.
It was interesting to see such an iconic image recreated as an installation piece of art. The structure of the box fan on the ground echoed the structure of the subway grate and the dress kept billowing in different directions as if floating. The placement of the window behind the piece served to back light the dress, causing it become a bit transparent adding to the drama.
Regrettably, I didn’t make note of the artist who created the piece.
http://www.daschkenasphoto.com/index.html
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