Hwhup The Deans List? The Jason Dean here, bringing you the IIIrd installment of The Weekender. Before we dive in, can we just…take a second to appreciate Roman Numerals? Like, I understand why we don’t use them anymore, because if math was also reading, we would be extra royally screwed. Holy cow though, do they just add an element such incredible prestige and class.

Let us waste nulla more seconds. It’s time for stuff.

Art

It’s always an honor to see your work highlighted as this piece was in the weekly update email from Sault Area Arts Center. I love being a part of what they do and appreciate them giving me a shout-out!

Winter may be gone still here but and I still have many more photos to share of this season. Here are a few for you to check out.

One Saturday morning last month, I got crazy. Like, real REAL crazy. Out photographing the north Ore Dock during a gently falling snow, I played around the different focus/multiple exposure/flash photographs. There were a few of the multiple exposures that I liked, but I absolutely LOVED the intentionally out-of-focus shots that basically ended up as colors and shapes. This is my favorite of those. The colored circles are the lights of the Ore Dock and the white circles are snow flakes caught by the flash.

One Saturday night last week I went on a photo outing with a couple members of The Society of The Secret Finch (I’m not sure if that’s actually what we’re calling ourselves or not) to hunt the sunset at the Black Rocks. I’m still culling, sorting, and editing the photos from that shoot but I did really like this one that I captured. This is a spot of standing water on the Rocks where the winter’s accumulation of dirt had settled to the bottom.

You’ll notice no hyperlink or title in the image above. That’s because I haven’t decided if I’m going to add this one to my website or not.

Part of this whole ‘Leaving Facebook, Creating Newsletter’ thing is an intentional move to make progress towards my goal of being a professional photographer/artist (that is, someone who primarily earns their living through photography and creating art). Part of that is updating and maintaining my website (sounds simple, not so much in practice), and part of that is really trying to focus on elevating the quality of my work. This means constantly sharpening and honing my self-critiques and reducing the number of my photos that make their way into the wild. On social media, you’re constantly having to share in order to appease the Algorithm gods. In that environment, I shared a lot of my work that I liked but didn’t love.

Is one way better than the other? Different images say different things differently to different people. Could gatekeeping my own work help my portfolio at the expense of the message? I don’t know. For now, I’ll just say that from time to time I will share images that I like but don’t love in order to give them a chance to breath. If you love them, please let me know. If not…it was never meant to be.

Last but not least- another shot playing around with different techniques. I used a slow shutter speed motion drag while firing the flash. There’s a lot of room to grow with this technique, but when I do it well it creates a sort of quasi multi-exposure effect that I really dig.

Thanks for checking into another edition of The Weekender! Only art today, but sometimes that’s how et b. Tune in next time for more stuff 😎

See you around,

Jason