Picture Show App

Erosion
Originally uploaded by Zanalee

I'm kind of flipping out right now over the seemingly limitless possibilities of my latest new iPhone picture app, "Picture Show" which one of my fave flickr photographers turned me onto. I am beyond thankful.

Picture Show has been one of the few picture phone apps (I have about seven) that actually rival Hipstamatic in my opinion. Hipstamatic won app of the year on iTunes this year. I think Picture Show is a really close second. Of course I haven't taken it out for a walk yet. So far all the shots I've taken with it have been interior.

I guess the feature that really puts it over is it's ability to take one shot and put it through a varying combination of filters, color settings, noise and light leak levels, frames, either those of your choosing or by using the random setting and just seeing what happens. Random comes up with some truly amazing stuff. I mean I can spend a good half an hour just processing one shot several times and saving only the ones I like.

Last night while I was taking this series of Zoya, I experienced something deeper about the process of making pictures that I've always known I loved but was not fully conscious of. Light and color take you on a journey whether you know it or not. And the creative manipulation of light and color can take you to so many different places inside of yourself so may different moods and emotions. Picture Show really allows for a crossover from the photographic medium to a sort of painterly or multi-medium expression. It lets you play a lot. And I love to play,
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"There is only one idea" -Prince

Originally uploaded by Zanalee

I saw Prince at the Izod theater in Jersey last Friday with my best friend from high school and now all I know is I want to see him again. And I will.

I can't really describe how amazing a performer he is. I just know that I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to see this man do his thing live and to see him happy and healthy and full of a giving loving spirit paying homage to his heroes on stage and giving of himself what God gave him.

I've been listening to Prince since I was eleven so it's really an understatement to say that his music is embedded forever in my emotional DNA. My mom was the one in our family who loved him first. His music, his spirit, his multi-facted Gemini soul have been constant touchstones to my understanding of my own self. So when I look at him, I feel eternity ringing back. Sounds real good.
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"There is nothing else to want."

 

I have to say that recently, for me, working in an environment where it has become increasingly difficult to know who to trust (because we are so clever at being phony and outfoxing ourselves and each other, a fact I never dreamed would ever become my everyday reality) this quote shot out at me among so many other amazing quotable passages from James Baldwins "The Cross of Redemption" which is a no less than stellar collection of candid and previously unpublished essays and writings by Baldwin.

For a man long gone from the physical plain, he never ceases to continue amazing and enlightening me as if he was, and is still here, everyday, every time I pick up this book and open it. He is fearless and brutal and beautiful and loving. And he is clear about that. Very few artists come along that can break open the tight shell of human apathy and pour out it's content so irreverently, and with such unapologetic fierceness and concern for humanity. Sometimes that's all I need to get  by.