MIKE SEBASTIAN: Photographer

I am happy to report that electrons began to flow once more through the atrophied main bus of our home at about 7:30 pm Monday night, eight days and a few hours since last they’d made the rounds. Evidently “only” a couple thousand LG&E customers remain without power. The company says the “vast majority” of those should be restored by today or tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Day 5 of the Hurricane Ike Power Outage of 2008. I can affirm that having no electricity is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s kinda got the photographic juices dried up, what with no electrons to run the Jobo or the film scanner or the printer.

How ironic that, in 25 years of living on the Gulf Coast, I never experienced the degree of inconvenience from a hurricane that Ike has visited upon us here, in Kentucky, over 600 miles from the nearest ocean! I thought the occasional thunderstorm, tornado, or ice storm would be the extent of Mother Nature’s wrath here in my adopted home state. Evidently not. Read the rest of this entry »

After we got back from Cincinnati, I still had a couple of hours of daylight left. I drove downtown to check out the Arena site once more. Lo and behold, another LPD cruiser was parked in the identical spot as the fellow a couple of days before.

I chatted with the friendly officer for a few minutes. I confirmed that the site owners have posted a 24-hour watch to deter vandals and thieves—and their slightly less sleazy brethren, photographers, one presumes. The officer gave me the name and number of the demolition company to call to ask about access to the site. (That is, he pointed to one of the gigantic signs around the perimeter containing this information.) Great, but count me skeptical that cold-calling them is going to get me in. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we drove 90 minutes to Cincinnati to see Bodies: The Exhibition on the last day of its run at the Cincinnati Museum Center. This was a real treat on several levels. Yeah, I know, it’s not strictly a photographic subject…but it was just too cool not to mention.

First, the exhibition itself. Clicking on the above link will take you to its information site. Bottom line, this is a traveling exhibit of a few dozen or so human cadavers that have been meticulously dissected and preserved Read the rest of this entry »

My plans for yet another re-visit to the Arena demolition site on Friday were thwarted, both by rain and by a LPD officer who’d stationed himself strategically near the “entrance” I’d have used to get in.

Thanks to the remnants of Hurricane Gustav, tossing rain as he drags himself northward to die over the Midwest, we’ve had some sorely-needed precipitation the last couple of days. Alas, I’m more your fair-weather photographer, especially when the ground at the site is a debris-littered quagmire.

But the rain finally relented a bit, so off I set to survey the lay of the land. It was after 6 pm, and the skies were overcast. By this hour the sun would be nearly among the buildings downtown, so the site itself would likely be quite dim. I drove over Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote in my previous post about some of the technical aspects of shooting the Arena site, and added some ramblings about films and developers. I didn’t touch much on the artistic/aesthetic considerations there. So here goes.

I have always been drawn photographically to construction and demolition sites. I like the often-enormous scale of the bigger projects, with the opportunities for depicting both the massiveness of the place, as well as for delving into the smaller details among the refuse scattered there. Too, these sites represent a visually appealing mixture of chaos and order, positive and negative entropy. Fascinating. Read the rest of this entry »

Although it’s not as much fun when one is LEGALLY photographing something, it does make for a more leisurely workflow. Thus did I return yet again to the Arena construction site downtown to try to make something of the detritus there.

This time I was better equipped: tripod, Contax 645 and Mamiya 7 with two lenses each, and a couple of rolls of film for each camera. I decided to shoot from the only convenient publicly-accessible higher ground nearby, the sidewalk on the Clark Memorial Bridge, whose feeder street—2nd Street—bounds the site to the east. Best I can figure, this spot offers the only unobstructed line of sight from pedestrian level to the floor of the pit. It also means facing west while one is shooting, which is a potential problem if the sun is over there, as it is wont to be at 5 pm. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday evening, I drove back downtown to the waterfront area and to Main and Market streets. Late afternoon is my favorite time of day; angular, warm light with long shadows that bring out surface textures and light up buildings in the most intriguing ways. Even better ’cause I get all that without having to get up very early. I’ve convinced myself that, photographically speaking, dusk and dawn are co-equal and symmetrical, just 180º apart in the sky.  I’ll leave dawn to the morning-people, berserkers that they are. Read the rest of this entry »

While tooling around the Waterfront last Sunday, looking for something to move me to burn some film, I was listening to Roots and Boots on WFPK, our local public-radio outlet. Driving around The Ville on Sunday afternoons, pining for my missing muse to the strains of R&B ’s wide variety of country/rock roots music, has become something of a pathetic routine of late. Read the rest of this entry »