The Fullness of Time

This is a photograph I made back when I was but a lad -- in the 80's or thereabouts, I reckon. I found this negative in a pile of old crap memorabilia, and decided to scan it into the computer. The good news is that it looks like the negative held up okay over time. Hey, there's an image to work with. The midtones do look a little 'fluffy' to me, if that makes any sense. But mostly, I'm feeling pretty satisfied with the overall composition that younger me came up with. I think I was out on a hike trying to 'discover myself' or something along those lines. That's how we tend to remember ourselves, isn't it? As clueless wanderers seeking enlightenment. In the fullness of time, though, I hope I can be kinder to my youthful self.

Tasting notes: Canon AE-1, Canon 50 mm f/1.4 FD lens, Kodak Tri-X, D-76 + Sulfite 1+1.

Bespoke fence

This is one of the longest picket fences around here and, of course, what I find fascinating about it is how the construction accommodated the tree. Maybe I'm getting cynical, but I also thought that these days there might very well be a lawsuit about the fence being constructed in the first place, and that at the end of the day the tree would have to be cut down because no one would be willing to give up a single centimeter of their property. 

Canon AE-1, 50 mm f/1.4

Remains of the day

I had a boss once who told me that he would frequently go on long drives for pure relaxation. If he had a crappy day at work -- and, being the man in charge of a large operation, he had many crappy days -- he would announce that he was going to leave early and take a long drive to chill out. Now, it seems like there are always too many other people on the road to relax very much, if at all. Which makes it easier than ever for me to relinquish control and be the passenger. Car photography is probably one of the major sub-genres of photography, and we've all gotten a few good shots out the window of a moving vehicle. We were driving through Marin County on our way up the coast of California when I made this photograph. I remember wanting to capture a silhouette of a semi trailer in the distance and the disk of the sun burning through the fog. I used my trusty Canon AE-1 for this one.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

I wish I could remember the details, but I've heard it said that if you want to get classic images of a city like NYC, you should aim your camera to the third floor or higher when you shoot. I thought it would be fun to test that hypothesis by comparing an old photograph I made on a visit to NYC several decades ago with something current from Google Street View or Apple Maps.

So, here we go. Shown below is a photograph from the mid 1980s shot on the corner of Lafayette and Bond Streets looking roughly east along Bond. Great Jones would be the first street you came to if you went to the left. Canon AE-1, 50 mm f/1.4, Tri-X, Rodinal. 

Blue Highways and Flyover Country

After settling in Austin, my trips back to Los Angeles slowly dwindled in frequency from about twice a year to every now and then. Mostly, I would fly to save time, but on one occasion, I decided to drive in order to see with my own eyes what some folks refer to as 'flyover country'. The journey West by car truly was a great experience, but, unfortunately some jackass Angelino stole my license plates and I had to drive back to Texas with no tags. It was a bummer -- I got stopped by a tag teaming pair of CHP cars near the Arizona border. Seriously, guys?! In retrospect, maybe they were just a bit bored, but the episode unnerved me a little, and I spent the rest of the trip home with one eye always looking in the side view mirror.

Anyway, the only camera I had with me at the time was a Canon AE-1 and a 50 mm f/1.4. A person could do far worse than that. I was going through a phase where I developed my Tri-X in Rodinal plus sodium sulfite. In my one and only photojournalism class, I had been criticized for too much grain in my Rodinal souped negatives, and the addition of sulfite was supposed to ameliorate this issue. It did, but at the expense of yielding pretty thin negatives. That was actually fine for darkroom printing, but I'm not so sure about how well it works for modern day scanning. A bit of a moot point with these negatives, though, isn't it?

Most of the driving time was spent crossing the State of Texas, and I was traveling along what are sometimes called blue highways -- I was avoiding the interstates, in other words. There were plenty of spectacular vistas, and stopping to take a picture didn't really have much of an impact on travel time. I have absolutely no recollection of where I was when I took this photograph, but looking at it now does trigger other memories from the trip.