Meet David's Admirers...

Later, after I took the first images of David, I walked by the same gallery and saw these other people admiring the sculpture. I thought it'd make a good picture, so I put my camera to my eye right as this guy turned around to imitate David's pose.

Yeah, he saw me. And yeah, I didn't stick around...

David: Slab-Man

David is not real -- David is actually a work of art called Slab Man by Duane Hanson that was made 1976 (yes, David is older than I am).

But, boy, does David have a presence.


The first time I saw David at the Cantor Center I didn't actually see David. I was looking around the museum and came upon a gallery that was still under construction. The two outside areas (near the doors) were complete, but the center was still under construction. So, I walked in, noticed one of the workmen (a rather large, husky guy) taking a break, and avoided eye contact while I looked at the art. After all, it was near the end of the day, and this guy's body language was saying he was tired and didn't really want to be bothered. I finished with the gallery and moved on.

It was only a bit later when I went by the same room and saw other people looking at David that I realized he wasn't real. So, yes, I was alone in the same room with David for 10 minutes... while I was looking at each piece of art in turn... and never noticed he wasn't real.

Furthermore, even when photographing David, when you invade his space, you feel it. In fact, I took a few shots right in front of his gaze, and it was quite unsettling.

Meet David...

More about him tomorrow...

Table Salt

A close-up of some table salt. Probably about 5:1 magnification (versus life-size, in terms of the image on the camera sensor).

It is kind of gross, but I have no idea what the hair is in the image.

Table Sugar

This is an image that I submitted for the DPChallenge Table Shot II challenge.

Some of my comments on it:

This is literally sugar sitting on my table.

I reversed my Canon 50mm f1.8 on the front of my Tamron 70-300mm at 70mm to give approximately 1.2:1 magnification. Masking tape held them together. I also stopped down the 50mm to f2.8 because it caused some distortion wide open. As it was, to get decent depth of field I had to use a really small aperture on the Tamron, resulting in a ton of vignetting (most of which was cropped off).

And yes, I did arrange the sugar crystals with a toothpick. The full word was a little less than 1 cm long.

Final processing was aimed to make it look like an electron microscope image (or similar) to excentuate the feeling of magnification.