Short and Sweet

It is a beautiful rose, but does not linger. By the end of the day most of the petals will have dropped and the flower will be gone. It marked an evening, an evening when a group gathered for a meal.

Blissfully Unaware

This image was taken in early 2020, before we even had an inkling about the pandemic that would upend our lives in a matter of a few weeks. Just a simple record of the state of the forest floor on a winter's morning, nothing more. I often look for telltale signs and significance in photos like these, but for the most part, what I've learned is that a photograph is just a record of a particular moment in time. It is the viewer that imbues the photograph with meaning. This is about a pleasant walk in the woods, just that, a reminder to always look down. 

Good Bones

When speaking of an older home, it is common to hear the phrase, 'it has good bones'. I guess this residence is well past that point in its decay. But the structure and construction of the fireplace is interesting in its own right I suppose. And there are no complaints about the location within the landscape. The tree may have been in the original front yard, or perhaps it is more recent. It is hard to be sure.

Good light to you this weekend, fellow traveler. 

Mona Lisa Smile

There are more varieties of magnolia growing down here than I ever knew was possible. This fallen leaf looked like a smile to me. Happy Thursday. 

A Double Exposure for Humpday

Multiple exposures are interesting in this age of photo post-production in software. But the thing is, if you create your multiple exposures in the camera, you have to deal with chance operations, to coin a phrase. And, that is part of the fun of it, dealing with randomness. It can lead to plenty of rubbish, certainly, but the surprises are so worth it! In fact, the double exposure feature is one of the first things I test out on a new camera. Turns out Olympus, Canon, Nikon, and Pentax all have somewhat different implementations of the double exposure, which is another excuse for owning multiple cameras (should one be needed). For example, Pentax allows up to 999 images in one multiple exposure! And then there is the case of chemical photography. In the exposure above, I combined a photograph of the television screen with a woodland shot taken the next morning. 

 

Quiet Work

In a world where everyone and every photograph is screaming for our attention, is there room for nuance, subtlety? Not so sure about that if I'm honest. But at least for our personal images, there certainly is a place for quiet work.

Breathing New Life Into Your Kit Lens

Photographers are a funny bunch when it comes to their lenses. They can be downright persnickety. For example, there is a general disdain among serious photographers for so called 'kit lenses'. Which certainly makes a certain amount of sense, but us more pragmatic folks can sometimes benefit from such attitudes. I picked up a very lightly used copy of a 24-105 mm kit lens for half price ($200) and was perfectly happy to use it in Japan as my walk about tourist lens. While it works a treat outdoors, indoors, it struggles. But with the new AI tools at our disposal these days, many image problems can be corrected with a simple mouse click.

A Splash of Color

Black and white is certainly nice, and I am tending more and more to focus my film photography exclusively on monochrome work. Color film is getting expensive and sometimes it is hard to find and, frankly, that is not something I want to contend with anymore. That said, who knows how I will feel in three months...

Sometimes, though, the situation just calls for color. Simple as that. I'm happy to grab a digital camera for that.

Best Laid Plans

Generally speaking, it is my job to clean up the dead things around the house. In suburban America, this is, generally speaking, not the most onerous responsibility. The worst case I 've ever had to deal with was the opossum that got stuck in a trash can. The remains were pretty ripe by the time we noticed, and it was a bit of a chore to shovel the putrid remains into the trash bag (extra strength). 

This little bird was flying freely and suddenly crashed into a picture window. Usually crashing birds are only stunned and fly off again in a few minutes. But this poor creature was one of the few that die on impact. I was planning to photograph the decomposition back to dust, but an evening scavenger had other plans.

Business Casual

It was a small town in the middle of nowhere. The town's mail was out on the loading dock. Just sitting there. Nothing ever happens in this town.

Have a pleasant weekend, with good light, fellow traveler. 

Nothing Left to Lose?

University campuses can be interesting places to visit and make photographs. But things are a bit strange at academic institutions these days, it seems to me. There are posted 'free speech zones' and 'graffiti allowed areas' scattered around the places. In spite of these constraints, some of the graffiti is actually pretty good, I have to admit. But I am still grateful I don't work in such an environment.   

Sufficiency

Evening. The beams of light outside and the shadows inside. That was enough. I wanted to remember these things.

Not the Neighbors We Wanted

A few years ago, we contemplated purchasing a home in a fancy part of town. And it was a fine home indeed, reminiscent of Italy and France. The amenities were top notch, the doors were solid wood, and the porch was stellar. I loved that porch! Even the insulation in the unfinished attic was amazing, as evidenced by the accompanying photo. But the neighbors looked to be a touch too highfalutin' for us. 

Boke for Boke's Sake

Every once in a while it is fun to explore lens properties, like boke (or bokeh, if you prefer) for example. Just for the shear pleasure of it. Yeah, I know, turning the blur up to eleven can get tiresome pretty quickly. I've seen painters try various techniques to achieve selective focus. I wonder how many of them have been influenced by how a lens renders the world... 

P.S. That's Boke for Boke's Sake. Nothing to do with sake.

🙄

 

Discount Aesthetic

When getting everything done as cheap as possible drives most of a town's decisions, well, there can be some consequences in the long run. Let's just say it like that. Cheap paint, discount plaster. And what's up with those transformers, y'all? In the end, the town just isn't as pretty as it could be. If you're looking at the screen of your phone most of the time, I guess it don't matter. Folks are still nice and all.

The Poetry of Hard Facts

I've studied the history of art, and especially photography enough to have a certain aesthetic stamped on my brain. A certain set of expectations about how a photograph should look. Some admixture of Bresson, Kertesz, and Atget, I suppose, when I'm in Europe at least. Sometimes, though, the reality in front of you appears not to align with what the art historians have written. Luckily, I took the shot anyway, and over time I've come to accept this photograph for what it is. There really was a lot of goose shit and old feathers in the water that day.

Black and White: Final Frontier?

The fact of the matter is, I end up converting many, if not most, of my digital images to monochrome. And I much prefer shooting black and white film to color. Call me Mr. Monochrome. So the fact that two different monochrome digital cameras were announced yesterday definitely caught my attention. Is this the next direction for camera manufacturers? Development of bespoke products for specialized groups of photographers?

Good tones to you this weekend, fellow traveler.

Fotografia Povera

A rusted out piece of industrial pipe. As seen on a beach in Ventura, CA a few years ago. The light from the sunset and the underlying colors of the rust combined harmoniously, I think. 

Its a Film Photography Thing

There was a time a few years back when I thought I should buy as much boutique film as possible, you know, to support the whole film revival that was going on at the time. So, what do you do when your tastes inevitably change and you're stuck holding a bunch of aging film you no longer like the look of? Well, I'm trying to come up with a creative way to use it up before it becomes an expired film I no longer like. Wish me luck.

Tasting notes: Leica R SL2 mot, 135mm f/2.8 lens. 

Refreshing Mistakes

I was shooting with an unfamiliar older camera that I recently picked up for not much $$$, and ended up overexposing this photo. And, sin of sins, the highlights blew out. Oops... Thing is, though, I kinda like the result. Getting the correct exposure is so ingrained into my photographic workflow, it is actually somewhat difficult to make these kinds of mistakes. In that sense, shooting freely with an old, unfamiliar, or even broken camera can be refreshing from time to time.

Ready or Not...

Most photographers, and I could probably generalize to 'creatives', are rightly skeptical about the long term unintended consequences of artificial intelligence. (I ain't gonna use caps.) Even if they use it everyday in the form of 'smart' masking and other tools in Photoshop and Lightroom. We have all been on our collective guards since the likes of Richard Prince appeared on the scene. That said, I have still experimented a little bit (in the privacy of my studio) with Dall-e and the neural filters in Photoshop.

This image was shot on black-and-white film and colorized with one click in Ps. Not yet perfect, but with rolls of medium format film approaching $20, getting pretty close. 

 

Happy Easter

Since we live on one of the busiest streets in town, our kitties stay indoors. Hey, we've got hundreds of dollars invested in them! Which means that our yard is up for grabs among the outdoor felines of the neighborhood. Looks like there's a new cat in town. Enjoy the squirrels and chipmunks, friend, but please leave the birds alone.

Cock A Doodle Do

Even if I could afford it, I wouldn't buy an oversized rooster sculpture like this one to cock up the yard. Dad humor aside, there was once a lion sculpture in our front yard, and we had to make a bit of an effort to convince the previous owner to take it away. It was far nicer than this chintzy rooster, too. As far as sculpture is concerned, my preference would be for something far more minimal. I'd consider a Serra, for example.

Hair of the Dog

This is what the Jeff Koons sculpture at Glenstone looks like in the Winter. It is my preferred time of the year to view the piece, as after seeing it so many times, I am now mostly interested in the armatures and engineering aspects. A Dusseldorf School approach, kinda sorta.

Anyway, hope your weekend is filled with good light, fellow traveler.

Oscillations

There have been a few signs of Spring this year, but my perception is that our weather here in the South is oscillating between Winter and Summer. On the afternoon I made this photograph, the sky looked like what I expected for Spring, although the temperature was warmer than normal. Yesterday, temperatures flirted with 90 degrees. 

My art making at the moment is similar to the weather -- changeable, I guess you'd call it. I'm getting some good photographs, but I don't really know which way the wind is blowing.

Surprise and Delight

I saw this composition immediately, just as I was stepping out of the car. I pressed the shutter within 30 seconds of parking. It goes like that sometimes, you get a straight-up fun shot right out of the gate. Other photographs I made that day may turn out to have more gravitas, more staying power. Only time will tell. But it sure is a good feeling to come away with at least one photo that pleases you.  

Extroverted

Mostly, cats keep their distance from strangers, and for good reason. But every once in a while, you encounter an extrovert, like this friendly fellow.

Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Stupidity

At the moment, I'm thinking about the demise, in one short week's time, of a famous online source of information about photography that has been around since the late '90s. About 15 years ago, it was one of the sites I would browse every morning as I put off getting started at work while nursing a cup or two of Folgers. Yes, Folgers was the coffee our group could all agree upon. The wisdom of crowds. Anyway, I really valued the standardized testing and reasonably unbiased reporting featured on this site; on the other hand, I totally despised the discussion forums from the get go. A real cesspool of mansplaining jackassery! Alas! In some sense, the site exemplified both poles of collective intelligence. 

Monochrome

We were thinking about a screened porch in this location, but it didn't work out, as it would have blocked too much light from an important part of the house. But we did build a wooden screen to protect the area and diffuse some of the road noise. It is an opportunity for shadow play in the afternoon. I always enjoy when a photograph is essentially without color as photographed.

Quote of the day -- Maya Angelou

 All great achievements require time. -- Maya Angelou

I'm going to try to put in some time behind the camera today, how about you?