Melanie Anne Phillips

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Teresa:  You know those young actors in the Harry Potter series were so lucky to play against the cream of British actors. Me:  Not just the education but the experience. Teresa:  Can you imagine, being that age and working with Kenneth Branagh and...  Peter O' Toole...  no, wait, not Peter O' Toole...  that other guy, the one I like. Me:  Oh, yeah..  the guy who played Dumbledore originally.  I can't remember his name now either. Teresa:  I hate getting old Me:  I don't think it's age so much as experience.  You stuff sot much information into your mind over the years,  you just can't find things easily anymore.  Oh, I'm sure age can be a factor, but there's also the overstuffed warehouse aspect. Teresa: I know what you mean. Me:  Richard Harris!  See, it was in there, I just had to track it down.  That's why I don't let my memories wander the halls at night.  Everybody has to go bac...

"American Gothic" (1972) Saw this along the road by Aunt Jessie's house in New Hampshire.  Wondered if the nearby forest was Grant Woods.

"Transitions" (1971) Compositional exploration of the zen-like progression from solid to ether to null.

"Neon Soldiers" (1971) Somewhere across country on the 4th of July in the middle of the family coast to coast road trip vacation.  Another stab at time exposures.  Again, a shaky camera (hand held) but the end result of this (out of many no-so-good shots) was something that looked like tin soldiers made out of light with their bayonets glowing at the ends of their shouldered fire-rifles as they march beneath the aerial bombardment.  Sometimes what makes a snap shot into a photograph is nothing more than picking the right mistake and giving it a catchy name full of imagery.

"Moraine Park" (1971) Colorado.  A truly beautiful spot in the expansive meadows left by the retreat of the great glaciers after the last ice age.  Good spot to experience a Rocky Mountain High.

For this shot, I had just discovered the wonders of time-exposures.  This was a hand-held shot on a city street at night, taken from the passenger seat of the family car.  As a result, the shot was shaky, and when I got the slide back, it struck me as looking a lot like lighting.  Imagine that, "struck" by lightning!

Continuing to go through my old photographs, organize them, and archive them.  Here's the current on worthy of sharing.... "Memorial" (1971) At age 18 I was into "trick" photography and photo manipulation (old school - no computers). So, I took two slides, one of Arlington and the other of the Lincoln memorial. I sandwiched them together, using a paper hole-punch to create the circle that features Lincoln. It seemed to me that the combination of these two memorials, Lincoln, and the "little" people on the steps/grass made some kind of political statement, but I couldn't figure out what, exactly. Graphically, I like the way the pillars of the Lincoln memorial kind of line up with the sides of the head stones. Make of it what you will....

The Grand Tetons (1971) The foothills of the Grand Tetons is a land of a thousand lakes.  the cobalt blue skies, glaringly white clouds and snow, and the silvery reflections in the pools of water, all against the dark rocks and earth - all of this creates such a stark contrast that it actually hurt to look at it.  My eyes would water from the intensity of the light.  In fact, I actually had to wear sun glasses or I would have become essentially snow blind.  Though you can get a sense of that from this scan of a slide, the reality is more as if the whole scene was backlit with an arc light.  That is one reason I shot slides at the time - the dynamic range of the brights to the shadows was so much more intense than any photograph.      

Me: I've lost a lot of weight lately. Teresa: I haven't lost anything. Me: Yes you have. Teresa: What? Me: Hope. Then she hit me....

"We are but a petty mold upon the dark side of inconsequence." (Line from my novel-in-progress).

My latest musical composition is now on YouTube under my performance name of "Tarnished Karma"

Narrative Space in the Real World

" Candy Loop " - mp3 This is a new song I wrote and just recorded. Usually I play all the instruments myself, but I just got a new Macintosh with Garage Band and thought I'd fool around with loops, which I'd never tried before. Both parts of the vocal are me, each heavily filtered. (Neither one is my normal singing voice.) Amazing what computers can do these days! The lyrics are just one verse from a song I wrote a couple of months ago and haven't had the time to fully record yet, so I thought this loop version with just one verse repeated would be kind of a fun experiment. http://melanieannephillips.com/music/candy-loop.mp3

"Glass Deer" (1971) This may be the very first picture I took when I was given my first 35mm still camera in 1971.  It is certainly my first indoor picture using natural light.  I remember wandering around the living room, looking for something interesting - something that offered a really good composition.  Plus, I was interest in "macro" photography at the time, due to my six years of previous experience shooting super-8 movies with my Canon 814 Auto Zoom (which had a macro setting for some really cool close-ups no one else could do in super-8). This deer is about 3 or 4 inches tall - something my mom had picked up as a little display trinket for the house.  I noticed the light coming in through the front window behind it and liked the matching colors of the sun and the glass, plus the matching curve of our front room lamp (the dark silhouette that bisects the deer, right along the legs, completing the curve and casting the trinket have in front of light and hav...

"Farmhouse" (1971) Somewhere in the Great Plains - snapped this shot of this tiny farmhouse beneath a huge threatening sky. Really drove home the pioneering spirit to me, man against the elements, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and no one to rely on but yourself.

Just a title idea for a Country Western song I'll probably not ever get around to writing.

1971 - Outside Denver, Colorado.  Shot this from the car while my dad was driving.  I've always been enraptured by clouds.  Clouds and also silhouetted leafless trees against an evening sky.  I used to waste a lot of film on those kinds of shots.  Now I waste a lot of meg. This particular shot caught my attention because of the contrast differential between the sky on the left and the dark storm clouds on the right.  And, I liked the silhouettes along the bottom which nicely support the shot. Problem was, in the original there were four phone lines snaking across the clouds right in the middle.  I always hesitated posting that picture because it ruined the mood - "Just ignore those phone lines and focus on the concept of the shot - what was intended - the majesty behind the imperfection...."  Yeah, right. Well, I've tried fixing shots but never found a program that did it easily and cheaply - until now.  Recently I've received...

1971- Experiment in "negative space."  For those of you who aren't heavy into photography, "negative space" is an area intentionally left open in a prominent way.  This creates an unusual composition in which the informational parts of a shot are on the periphery (or at least off center). While one might expect this to create a sense of unbalance, the impact on the viewer is to force them to consider what's between the lines, the spaces that connect or separate other graphic components.  It engenders a more thoughtful appreciation of the subject matter, much as one might one day look down a side street while on the way to work and discover a whole new micro-world or feeling that was always there in the shadows but drowned out by the blinding light of what's directly in front of you.  I believe this was my first attempt at that kind of composition, which I have revisited many times in the decades since.

Narrative Space “Narrative Space” describes the complete breadth and depth of subject matter in which you seek to define a story. Simply put, most authors don’t come to a story with a complete structure immediately in mind. Rather, they are attracted to the subject matter, which may include setting, time period, activities and events, personalities, snippets of dialog, situations and anything else that is not inherently part of the argument of a narrative. For example, take Santa Claus. You can have him be the main character or a victim or a villain. You can make him a spirit or a man. You can have him involved in a western, a science fiction, a romance, a buddy picture or a tragedy. In and of itself, subject matter is not part of a structure but just the raw material from which a structure is formed. That is part of the reason that in Dramatica theory we named a story’s structure the storyform as it brings form to story. Think of subject matter as the interstellar gas and ...

1971 - An inspiring shot at the top of Eagle Cliff near Estes Park, Colorado. I took this shot of my friend Bill Krasner who accompanied my parents and myself on our cross-country road trip vacation. We climbed up the steep hill behind the cabin of our friends who's dad was a ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park in the summer and found this old cross made of branches.

Hey, cats and kittens!  Today I'm continuing this new year's project of organizing all my old archival material.  This includes all the music, photos, movies, writings, and even old memories that I've created and collected over the decades. Basically, I've always been so forward-focused and innovation-seeking that I've never stopped to realize I've left this rubble trail of old ideas and creations in my wake.  In fact, I'm kind of anchored to it.  You really can't escape the past, you can (at best) stay one step ahead of it.  A single slip, though, and it all piles into you from behind.  Worse, every year you live that thundering beast on your heels is getting bigger and meaner.  I'm beginning to suspect we never just die - we simply get consumed by our own history. I suppose some can just turn around, yell at their past and shout, "Get out of here - I don't love you any more!"  And others may pretend it isn't really there. ...

1971 - A craggy peak at Bear Lake Colorado.  Taken while my parents and I were on a cross-country road trip from California, visiting friends. I was just staring to think about "arty" shots in those days, as I had already been making movies for six year when I got my first still camera, and was more "focused" on "trick" photography in moving pictures. I think this is the first reflection shot I ever (intentionally) took. What I liked most was the symmetry and the darker-than-life exposure.  To this day, I'm usually not satisfied with the exposure on automatic setting, even on my most sophisticated professional cameras.  I tend to shut down almost every shot between 1 and 1.5 "stops" before an image gets the richness and depth I'm looking for.

Slow start, but trust me - wait for the dancer in red. Once he get's warmed up it is the most amazing thing!  

Okay, so I woke up last night around 1 a.m. and was up for three hours trying to figure out how to deal with a lifetime's worth of digital data.  And I actually found a way to alleviate the biggest part of what was bothering me.  More than anything, I have this fear of all of my creative works, all of my personal history being totally erased and gone forever, just like when wedding photos used to burn up in a house fire. Just having a 2 terabyte back-up drive isn't enough.  If the house burns, both the computer AND the back-up are gone, so that only protects against crashing the main drive but not against catastrophe, such as an EMP. And, putting it all on DVD is good, but not on a regular basis - too time consuming and too much work - better to do this just once a year on the New Year. Fortunately, there's the Cloud.  Now you can back-up online.  This creates a regular daily-updating copy of everything on your computer and even also on your external hard ...

I like a clean ship.  But life isn't like that much.  Especially these days with all the gigabytes of information one carries around.  It's worse than possessions.  With material things, at least they can be crammed into a storage facility where you know you still have everything but just can't quite get at it very easily. But your digital life is another story.  With all the different web sites, blogs, and the social media, everything you've created, everything you've expressed about yourself - hell, you're whole personality - your SELF, is spread all over creation, a bit here, a byte there, and there's no single place you can go to get it if you want it. Things get lost that way, out of site (sic) out of mind.  There's got to be a better way.  Wouldn't it be nice if every time you created anything, a blog entry, a photo, a sound recording, a video, a caption for a picture, a personal journal entry - whatever - that it could simultaneously: 1. b...

1978 - a "charging" mammoth at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in L.A. Another of my photos from the archives, just turning up.