Aug 24, 2015

The new home of Picture Window

For almost nine years my photo blog Picture Window has lived here on Blogspot, and that's where you'll still find the archive of previous posts. But going forward, the new home for the journal of my ongoing adventures can be found at www.damianmulinix.com/blog, part of my new website.

Aug 14, 2015

On Emerald Streets again


While in Seattle for business earlier this week, I had a couple hours to spend walking around as the evening light was coming down. I've been using the Ricoh GRD a lot lately, an excellent little machine ideal for use on the street. It's about as big as my iPhone, has the quality of a DSLR and has full manual controls, something you don't usually find in a pocket camera.



I've been really trying to shoot on the edge of the light this summer, looking for scenes where the setting sun and reflected light off of surrounding buildings creates beams that illuminate the people as they walk through, but blow out the backgrounds, creating great shadows.











— DKM

Aug 8, 2015

On streets of Roses, Pt. 31


It's been an interesting few weeks since I last shared something new. I've been busy, freelancing for a few different clients and trying to figure things out. It was really nice to get back on the street and create some new work. 












— DKM

Jul 25, 2015

This, that and the other thing


Back in 2007, I knew I wanted to do this new thing called a blog and I knew what I wanted to do with it -- have a place for the many photos I made for the paper but were never going to find space in print. The one thing I didn't know was what I was going to call it. I settled on Picture Window, for obvious reasons, but one name I also considered was a phrase I used pretty regularly when describing things in a general way, "This, that, and the other thing." (Another silly phrase I'm known to use, "I know a thing or two about a thing or two" would probably also be good.) the blog was never officially done for the paper but it was featured on the Observer website for several years before I chose to remove it from there about a year ago and about seven months ago made a decision to stop posting work-related images on it. It has been home to my personal work -- like my Portland street photography and Crescent City book project -- exclusively ever since.
Earlier this week I was let go by the paper after 13 years. In some ways it's not surprising, in other ways it certainly was. I wasn't expecting it, but sitting here a few days later I'm really not sad or angry about it. It was time for a change and this is just how it came about. I've always loved doing the blog. One of my favorite comments that someone made to me a number of years back at an uneventful, rainy event where nothing went as planned but interesting pix were still presenting was, "at least you'll have something for the blog."
This site has been the one place that I've shared thoughts and feelings, like after my divorce or when my dog died or when I fell in love with Natalie. It has also been where the evolution of my work has been most visible. If you go back a few years and look at what was posting and then look at today, it's very different. Nat has really promoted the idea of "chasing my joy" and finding the kind of photography that inspires and interests me the most and then going out and trying to do it. This site has been the home to whatever I've come back with on that search.
So maybe the blog will be renamed now, maybe not, I'm not sure yet. But it will still be the place to chart my journey and see what I come back with, wherever I go.
"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the PoƩm of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn,
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure
and beautify it
-Walt Whitman




Brilliance is what?
Be it bright orange, yellow, green?
Or a withered leaf?

- DKM

Jul 6, 2015

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Pt. 3


I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to work on my ongoing book project in Crescent City, Ca. this last week. My hope is still to have it done by the end of the year, which will likely require one more trip, perhaps in the fall. 
So here is my original hometown, during the first week of July


















-DKM

Jun 26, 2015

On streets of Roses, Pt. 30


After doing a gear swap with the good people at Pro Photo Supply Wednesday I took a long walk around town looking for interesting bits of light and got lucky to find a few on a bright sunny day







-DKM