C. M. Franke | Photography

W hether you saw the movie Inception and loved it, or hated it, (I loved it) you have to admit - they made the dream sequences very interesting. Maybe not as stylized and bizarre as they could have been, but that might have distracted from the story line at hand. Personally, I loved the moment when the Cobb character explains to Ariadne:  "...D reams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize that  something was actually strange. " It always struck me how true that is: The things we see and take as perfectly normal in a dream, are really outlandish when we see them through the filter of our waking normality. A person walking down a street transforms into a scurrying mouse on the curb, which soon becomes an eagle lifting off to become a small airplane ascending into the sky. As it begins to then transmute into a huge jet airliner, somehow, through all of that, we understand - we just "know" - that the person we ...

" Use the bricks of the ruins to build a new castle. " -- Unknown I remember having heard this many years ago. Using bricks from an old ruin to build a new castle. I understood the idea that was being put forth. I've even encouraged any number of people over the course of time to 'dust off and move ahead' using the same allegory. Sort of a more eloquent way of saying "If life hands you lemons..."  Only now do I somewhat understand how it applies to art, and photography. It is incredibly easy to have an idea in your head that you cannot seem to shake. No matter how many times you try to make it work and fail to get it right. No matter how many times you do it over and over and still walk away unsatisfied - that idea remains like an ever-clanging bell somewhere in the distance. Just when you thought you have left it to the past, it comes back, wanting to be heard. Here - I have learned - is the key: Perhaps it was not the idea that was weak, but...

       R ecently, due to a major family crisis and several other issues that came rushing in on me all at once, I was pulled away from "my own" photography. I phrase it that way because as those in the business know, you can be contracted / paid to do photography; but it might not be the work that you will later gauge your progress as an artist with.        I n that time 'away' I was able to step back and take an honest look at my work. To see it more objectively than I had in the past. To realize that some things worked - and some things did not. Some ideas needed to be refined; to metamorphose to their next logical form. And others simply needed to be pruned away. Such realizations are not easy when we are so closely "married" to our creative vision.        I think it is important for all who aspire to be photographers to reach this stage - perhaps many times. We need to step back every now and then and really, honestly lo...

Standard soft-light shot with umbrella Snoot light for that film-noir look T his past weekend I had the opportunity to shoot with a very talented East Coast makeup artist, and an amazing model (!)            S ince I knew that I would be working in a relatively small space, and did not want to set up lots of plugged in lights, I used a Vivitar 285-HV speed light and bounce umbrella. Once we got the images we were after, but before we wrapped the shot and struck the set, I dropped a snoot on the light, swiveled it around, and tried my version of a "noir / vintage album cover" look. These are just quick samples of both styles, pretty much as they look straight from the camera. The refined, polished, edited versions will be coming up later - but it is nice to see that even a small and often overlooked "old-school" flash unit can still create pretty impressive light!

I have this image that keeps recurring in my mind. It involves the cold blue feeling of a dark winter and the glowing orange of a firelight. So far it seems to keep eluding me, although I think this is largely because every attempt I have made to capture this "mood" has been done in a hurry, or in the rain, or some other situation that forced me to run through it rather than walk it out. This shot is one such version. I may need to go back with a slightly different lighting setup and try some more. Perhaps in a different location.

E ven though this post does not contain photos, I think it contains an important message for those of us that create photos, therefore all the text.           O n more than one occasion I have shown people - disinterested parties that had nothing to do with my work at that time - various photos that I had shot on a given theme, before revealing the one I thought was the best. And more than once I had people pull out a shot that I was intent on eliminating, and said how much more they liked that one. Not just one person, but usually a handful - enough to make me reconsider keeping the image.           A t first I began to think that perhaps I was not really as creative as I had thought, since all of these people gave a blank expression toward my 'crowning image', and insisted that I keep one that did not speak to me at all. Wow, didn't they see the vision I was going for? Didn't they "get" what I was doing in the sho...

J ust a quick little blurb to let anyone who reads this blog (All five of you; you know who you are) know that the CMFranke Photography Facebook page is back online. It had been taken down in order to be streamlined; The initial iteration was loaded with too many random, oddly chosen photos and mismatched watermarks from my days of trying to settle on one branding logo. Well, now we are back up and running on FB, so come along and "Like" the page, and keep tuned to the latest and greatest. Woo Hoo! (and so forth)