I held out on Twitter for the sole reason that I can quote as this: “I don’t have time to write a bunch of crap.” The ironic thing is that this blog contains a lot more “crap” than any tweet would, and yet I seem to have plenty of time for this. I always saw Twitter as something that would be valuable for time-sensitive things such as breaking news stories, world events, natural disasters, etc. But beyond that it just seemed to be nothing more than a medium for people to talk about themselves. A friend of mine who is anti-Facebook and anti-Twitter said this “200 years ago people had something to say but no fourm to in which to say it. Today, people speak endlessly on electronic forums and say nothing.” He gave the example of he and his friend attending a long-awaited music concert and he was noting that his friend had his face buried in his cellphone tweeting every last detail second by second about their experience at this concert. The point is that the very experience being tweeted about was being missed in favor of the process of tweeting. I have to admit that I myself have gotten to the point where I evaluate the experiences I have as to whether or not I want to share them on Facebook, and in some cases, I find myself very eager to get back to my computer after some experience I’ve had so that I can post about it. That used to happen a lot during my first years on social media, but it’s tapered off quite a bit now. I have art that needs to be made!

But getting back to Twitter, I’m finally seeing the value of it as a way to help get my art out to more people. These days, attention spans are pretty short (you’ve probably alread gotten tired of reading this posting) so a quick tweet is sometimes all a person will pay attention to. It just occurred to me that I could view tweets as a sort of haiku: with haiku you get just 17 syllables to get your point across, so you have exercise economy with your ideas. In fact, because of that, I see myself using Twitter more often than other social media simply because I find the challenge of being economical quite satisfying. I could view clever tweets as an art form in and of itself. Hmmm…. well, I think I’ll stick to making pictures.

Follow me on Twtter: www.twitter.com/surrealscapes

In April 2003 I did my first “official” bodyart shoot: a photoshoot speficially aimed at showcasing this new medium I had gotten into. My new friend Emily, who I had met just a few months earlier, graciously volunteered to be my guinea pig model. Take a look at some images from that shoot. I had been into photography for about 7 years prior to this shoot, but I had always used natural light. This shoot was my first studio shoot using specific lighting, which consisted of one Lowell DP Light and a Smith-Victor 500W hotlight. I had also just recently switched from film to digital, the venerable Canon EOS D60 6MP digital SLR. I also wanted to shoot against a greenscreen so that I could comp a background in later. I can safely say that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and that all aspects of the the shoot, from the painting to the lighting to the camera to the background (and even the model), were completely new to me so I was just making it up as I went along. But even looking back on it now, I think I did a passable job. Many thanks to Emily, who remains my good friend, for taking a chance with the total rookie that I was at the time.

Emily in black latex, April 2003

Emily in black latex, April 2003

Here you’ll be able to view all my latest body art photography work, order prints of any image on the site, and of course, read this blog. I started doing this work in June 2003, so there’s almost 9 years of stories to share. I’ll be describing the journey chronologically in future postings, until we get caught up to present day. In between all that I hope to be making more images for you to enjoy.