ten

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Some library aquarium pictures for you today. This is a motif I tried before. I think I have still not mastered it, though it has gotten better...

Remasters: Water revisited

 

As I said there would be in the first round of my remasters of water pictures, here is round two, in a group small enough to hopefully not overwhelm you. Once again these pictures, while manipulated in all sorts of strange ways, aren't nearly as altered as one might think, and remain truly pictures of stream water and falls and burbling brooks, usually taken close up in strong light. And while I say that, knowing it to be true, I look at these pictures and remain a little skeptical about it myself. Sometimes it doesn't much look it.

While this concludes the water pictures in this remaster series, I remember having far more of these source pictures than I have found, remastered, and shown you in these two parts. But I'm not sure where to find them in the history of clerkmanifesto right now. But there's no saying there won't be more sometime in the future. 

I'm sure you'll manage them, if they happen to show up, as gracefully as you will today's showing.

The remasters: Water

 

These were always my most manipulated photos.

Early in clerkmanifesto's photography era I started taking detailed, close up pictures of churning water and waterfalls, mostly in my little Shadow Falls Creek that I have been visiting regularly for years. These have been the subject of a great many clerkmanifesto posts, and the pictures I have taken have been the starting point for my interest in photo manipulation as I sought to heighten these pictures, intensify them, and bring out their dramatic and abstract qualities.

So of all of these collections of remasters/reimaginings of my old photos, these were always the most likely candidates for this process. 

As this is far the populous category in this remastering project (outside of maybe the flower pictures, which came before we started this), and out of respect for viewer fatigue, I will split the water pictures over two different posts. We will visit the second part later on in the project when you're thirsty again.

While I will say these pictures have come a long way from their native in camera photos, you may be inclined to think they are mostly fabrications at this point. But these water pictures would still be surprisingly recognizable to the original pictures, whose strong lighting and intense focus, detail, and close up views brought forth intriguing natural effects to begin with. Despite all the mark ups and saturations, and AI work, these remain, in the end, pictures of water.

The first descent of shadow falls creek

 

This creek has fascinated me and clerkmanifesto for several years now. I have obsessed over its water and shown perhaps far too many close ups of its churning falls and currents. My native scenic shots of it and its tumbling water, its wild animals, and its strange seasonal phenomenon, soon graduated to Eeyore grazing by its shores and tigers prowling its banks.

I'm just saying that besides being a little secret world I love to visit, it has also been one of my chief photography laboratories from the last five years.

I'm not sure I was able to push the boundaries of that mission as far as I wanted to today. I think the small, almost playful size of this tiny creek has always caused me to play with its scale, or to want to, and with my history of canoeing and kayaking it was not much of a leap to imagine myself on a tiny boat racing along on its currents. Trying to capture that in my photos with my newly appearing cartoon representative was harder than I hoped it would be. To be fair this early Spring moment may be the least flattering one for my creek, bare and full of dead leaves and mud, but every AI I have ever used has struggled with alterations to scale as well, and placing a tiny boat in the stream was an uphill battle. Nevertheless, I don't feel my attempts were entirely fruitless, and so I would still like to show them to you and let these pictures fall where they may.

And with that, I present to you some brief shots of the first descent of Shadow Falls Creek: