Kathleen McGivney

A Tree Grows in Los Angeles

Roots, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I've been going through a lot of film negatives lately, some new, some old. I used to shoot tons and tons of black & white film, and I miss it. Looking at some of these negatives has inspired me to pick up one of my old Leica SLRs and run a few rolls of b&w through it. Since I have a better scanner now (his name is Atom and he procrastinates much less than I do) I should be able to post more film shots soon.

This image is one of my favorites from my film archives. (Calling them "archives" rather than "piles of old negatives" makes it sound fancy and organized.) I took it while walking around the grounds of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church near downtown Los Angeles. A friend of mine and I were out shooting just to see what caught our eye. As we were walking around the grounds, I saw this knotty old tree behind the church near the rectory, with its bulging roots displacing parts of the nearby sidewalk. I thought it was an interesting subject and I liked the way the light was hitting in only in certain places because it was streaming through the branches of another nearby tree, so I captured the image.

If I recall correctly, I was using fairly high-speed black & white film, not because I was working with low light but because I like the large grain in higher-speed films. Sometimes a grainy look can impart a certain aesthetic to a photograph that I find appealing. For example, another image that I shot during this outing is of a side of a building and some trees and landscaping next to it; the grain in the image makes it look as though it was taken 80 years ago rather than with a modern camera. It gives it an artistic, somewhat painterly quality that I really like in a photograph.

More scanned negatives coming soon, as soon as my scanner gets home from work!

Statue of Liberty

Statue of Liberty, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

During our recent visits to Los Angeles to clean out the stuff from my old place, I found an old desktop computer that I hadn't booted up since early 2006 or so. On it were some scans of some negatives I shot a few years ago, when I was primarily shooting film. I still shoot with film cameras, though not nearly as much as I used to since digital is more convenient for me on my frequent travels. However, I do love using film and looking at old images I've created help me remember just how much.

This image of the New York New York Casino was shot in 2003 in Las Vegas with a Holga. Holgas are medium-format, cheap plastic cameras with plastic lenses that yield images with soft focus, vignetting, and light leaks. They're really fun for creating artistic, sometimes weird images.

The image was scanned as a negative so it looks backwards, but I didn't bother reversing it. I think it looks a little more surreal this way.

Comic-Con Update

Robert Pattinson, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I used to go to the San Diego Comic Con every year. I started going in 1993, when the convention (and the convention center) were much smaller. Since then, it has expanded quite a bit, to include movie and television promotions and huge booths, not just from the usual suspects like DC Comics, but other media like the Sci-Fi channel and Sony.

This year, I found myself with only one day to devote to the convention, so I headed down on Thursday. My main reason for being there was to photograph the cast of Twilight, particularly Kristen Stewart, for an article for Premiere. I met up with my awesome journalist colleague Pamela Chelin and joined her for a roundtable interview session with the cast, a short photo session outside the interview room, and their panel to discuss the movie. As I was mainly there to capture the leads, Kristen Stewart (photo also included in the article on Kristen at Premiere) and Robert Pattinson (pictured above), and had limited time, I didn't capture all of the cast, but there are a few more candids and some shots of the panel in my Twilight set at Flickr.

More Comic-Con fun, nerdy goodness, and links to good-looking people after the jump!

Gama-Go shirt at Comic-Con

Gama-Go shirt, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I was in San Diego for the first day of Comic-Con on Thursday and was walking around with my writer friend Pamela as we waited for our scheduled meetings. We stopped by the Gama-Go booth because I love their stuff and buy my husband a LOT of their t-shirts. One of the staff at the booth was wearing this old Gama-Go design, which he said was discontinued because people kept mistaking the Katakana lettering for Hebrew.

We sent it on over to Heeb Magazine, who collects such items for their Jewish esoterica archives (or perhaps just likes free t-shirts).

More photos from Comic-Con in my Comic-Con set at Flickr. (And a full Comic-Con report coming soon.)

Zeitgeist Films

Zeitgeist Mugs, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

Recently, I went to the offices of Zeitgeist Films with Jenni Miller of Premiere while she interviewed them for a piece about their 20 years as a filmmaking team and their retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. I was there to shoot photos of the two for the article. I only posted a couple - this one of the mugs that a friend of theirs made for them, and another of the two filmmakers, which are both featured in the article on premiere.com.

I am looking forward to doing some more work with Premiere, which I'll be doing next week as I cover one day of the San Diego Comic Con for them. Yes, it's a comic book convention (and one I've been to many, many times before), but there is quite a large film company presence there and there will be many filmmakers and actors there promoting their films. And I'll be there to take pictures of 'em doing it.

Raging water

Raging water, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I have blogged a few photos that were taken using a Lensbaby before. As I mentioned in this post, the Lensbaby is a hybrid of a tilt-shift and a bellows lens that allows a photographer to create a selective focus effect. With a traditional tilt shift lens, you can create focus on your desired subject and have the other areas of the image out of focus, which makes the subject really pop out from the background. This is achieved by creating a very shallow depth of field.

What the Lensbaby does that's a little different is adds a blurry effect around the center area of focus. As you can see in this image, the flowers and foliage surrounding the water that I was focusing on look streaky, as if you took a watercolor brush and dragged it away from the subject. This effect happens when you focus the Lensbaby, which is done by pushing down on the bellows until your subject is in focus. The flexibility of the bellows also allows the photographer to concentrate their area of focus at any point in the image. So I could focus on the upper right corner, for example, and the rest of the image would have that streaky, soft-focus, watercolor look. I especially like to use this lens for high-contrast or difficult lighting situations, because the Lensbaby allows for some incredible ways to play with light and color.

On our last trip to Ireland, I used the Lensbaby much more than I did our traditional lenses, so I'll be posting some more on the artistic possibilities that can be achieved with this lens, which has a very attractive price point, just $150 USD for the Lensbaby 2.0 (my preferred version). It's a good way to take a step towards expanding your creative vision with your photography.

To really see the full effect in this image, it's best to view it larger. Bigger version posted after the jump.

A friendly horse

A friendly horse, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I have been to Ireland a number of times and always love exploring there. It's a beautiful country and in case you couldn't tell from my name, I'm of Irish descent, so visiting Ireland has special resonance for me. So it was with great delight that in 2006 and 2007, I spoke at the Irish Lotus User Group meeting in Dublin, Ireland. In 2007, my husband (then boyfriend) and I brought his parents with us and had a little vacation before the conference. One of the places we visited was Inis Mór, one of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway.

While we were exploring the island, we came upon this little horse, grazing in a field behind a stone fence. She was very friendly and interested in us, allowing people to pet her and sniffing at us with curiosity. She was much more reluctant, however, to let us get even a glimpse of her foal, who she was quite determined to protect. Two more pictures of the friendly yet overprotective mom are after the jump. You can barely see her foal hiding behind her in one of the images.

Flowers from Belgium

Flowerpots, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

One of the subjects that I like to shoot often are flowers. That sounds awfully girly, but I like them for the same reasons I like shooting landscapes and people with pink hair and architecture and crazy dudes walking down Park Avenue in a bunny suit - because something about them catches my eye. Sometimes it's the color, sometimes it's the texture, sometimes it's the novelty, and sometimes it's the juxtaposition of modern and ancient, like an office building in the same shot as a Roman ruin. With this image, it was the bright yellow of the flowers contrasting with the muted colors of the windows, flowerpots, and bricks surrounding them.

I took this while we were exploring in Bruges in 2006 on our annual Thanksgiving weekend trip to Europe. Bruges is a really romantic and lovely city - lots of old brick streets, beautiful buildings, and many, many chocolatiers. Of course, because of that, pretty much all of our friends and family got Belgian chocolate for Christmas that year!

More photos from Belgium here, and more will be added soon. We're moving our photo archives from all of their many disparate storage locations to a centralized 1TB shared drive, and finding lots of photos that we thought we had lost. I'll be sure to share them with you soon.

A tower that leans, you say?

Leaning Tower, Pisa, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

While we were on our honeymoon, we took a day trip to Pisa to check out the Piazza dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles), which contains the world-famous Leaning Tower. We didn't have time to climb up the tower as there was a 6 hour (!) wait for a climbing time. They only allow a set number of people up in the tower at a time due to its, er, structural issues, so we decided to pass and instead took photos inside the Baptistery (one here) and the Duomo (cathedral).

Many efforts have been made over the years to stabilize the tower and keep it from completely falling over, but it still leans and offers a great opportunity to play with perspective. I shot this with the Canon 5D and a Canon 17-40mm f4 lens at its shortest focal length. The wide angle at 17mm causes some perspective distortion. This, along with the direction that I was pointing the camera, makes the bottom of the campanile look larger while making it look like the tower leans much more than it actually does.

Lucky

Lucky, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

This is our housemate's cat, Lucky. She is tiny, only 5 1/2 pounds or so, and is 18 years old. She still scampers around like a kitten, though, and kills catnip-filled mice with reckless abandon.

She was the lady of the house until we brought my one-eyed cat, Jack, to NYC from L.A. (She may look like she has one eye in this image, but her left eye is just in shadow.) They get along in that uneasy cat way, where they swat at each other occasionally when we are around but will sniff each other's noses and sit close to each other when they think we're not looking.

This shot was taken with our Canon 5D and the Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens. I just got this lens, and I really love it. It was quite difficult to maintain focus in this shot because she's a cat and therefore refuses to hold still when I want her to. I did manage to catch another shot with her face in focus, shown after the jump along with a couple of images from the Nokia N82 - a kitty standoff and Lucky lounging on her most prized possession, our cat-hair-filled cable box.