View From a Damaged House

A number of years ago, some friends of ours lived in a pretty fabulous home designed by a well known local architect and situated on a wooded multi-acre lot just outside of town. The home had not been well cared for or maintained over the years, but the beauty of the place won out over all the leaks and creaks. Once these folks relocated, though, the property was bought up by a local developer. The old place was what they call a tear down, and we knew we had to act quickly, so one cold morning, my wife and I spent a couple of hours photographing there.

Tasting notes: Nikon D200 digital camera.  

A Room Without a View

A number of years ago, I traveled to San Francisco for a conference. I scoured the internet for a reasonably priced room, and the most reasonable accommodation I could find was still about $300 per night. At that price, you'd think there would be a decent view out the window, but alas, that was not the case. At least the bed was decent and comfortable and my back was happy about that the next morning. I went for a walk in the morning and this was the best I could do on that day. After the passage of so much time, it's a memory I'm glad to have captured.  

Tasting notes: Fujifilm X-100S digital camera.

Romancing the phone

I've got to hand it to the famous fruit company. Their phone, watch and tablet all work in concert to have my back. It's weirdly comforting, sometimes. Other times, it's weirdly creepy. My tablet fishes out old photographs from my stream and features them on my Home Screen, and so, a different image from the past greets me every morning. At first, I thought this was a silly gimmick, but over time I've grown to kind of appreciate it. My technology has a different set of biases about photography than I do, and brings many overlooked images and memories to my attention. Like this image from 2008, the dawn of the phone photography era. We went to our first farm-to-table event just outside of Atlanta and my EDC camera at the time was the iPhone 3G. The camera had an amazing 2 MP of resolution. While I'm used to feeling nostalgic about old prints, romancing phone photos from the past is going to take a little getting used to.

Broadway and Bleecker - photographic imprints

It can be fun to go through your old photos to get an idea of what caught your more youthful eye back in the day. One of the things that struck me about New York City the first time I visited was the urban canyons that could be found by wandering around the back alleys downtown. Places that at ground level almost never saw the light of day, and where the rats roamed free. Places with their own microclimate. The Blade Runner aesthetic, if you will. Even after several decades, I still enjoy looking at this image. It's one of my photographic imprints of NYC, I guess. I wouldn't mind trying to re-shoot this image on my next trip back even though I'm not sure whether these back alleyways are still open to the public. 

Enjoy the upcoming weekend, and I hope your light is cinematic, whatever that means to you.

Tourist shots, memory, and the Olympus EPL2

You probably can't tell from anything in this photograph that it was taken in Puerto Rico, but I promise you that it was. Is that a problem? Is it dumb for someone who considers themself to be a serious photographer to make a cliched tourist shot while on vacation? I sure hope not. I captured this scene a decade ago when Instagram had been live for a just a few months. Back then, Flickr was thriving. 

  😃 

On this trip I was using an Olympus EPL2, a camera now long forgotten to history, but actually a pretty decent shooter. Looking back on the files, it was a pretty decent imager, too. 

I may not remember much about this beach, but I certainly remember the vacation well enough. My son had just turned 13. Perhaps there is symbolism here after all.

                                                                            😃 

I look and photograph, so it goes

Here is the last image from Italy for a little while. Once again, the photograph was taken on my trip to Bologna a couple of years ago. It is a calm view of the Italian countryside. One thing that is not conveyed very well by the photograph was how unbearably hot it was that September day. I was about ready to pass out after a longer than expected walk and was in a rotten frame of mind. So, I spent a few minutes sitting in the shade before firing off five vertical images that I stitched together later. I wonder if travel will soon return to the way it was before the pandemic, or whether it will take several more years for things to get fully sorted. In the meantime, I try to look and make photographs.

The importance of a little mystery

This is another image made in Bologna. Here, I responded to the mix of warm candle light and the cooler ambient lighting of the church, as well as the iconography, in particular, the contrast between the old and the new. The scene is somewhat mysterious, at least to me, which I like in a photograph. I sat on this photo for a long time because there was a distracting reflection of the candles in the glass that kind of ruined the impact of the image. Finally, I did the required work in Photoshop, as this really isn't intended to be a purely documentary photograph. I'm much happier with the result.

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.

Veni, vidi, vici...

On a trip to Rome in the first decade of this century, I became a bit obsessed with photographing the oculus of the Pantheon. I returned several times under a variety of weather conditions to shoot and re-shoot the scene. My goal was to make a single exposure that retained detail both in the sky and in the dome. Unfortunately, the sensor in the digital camera I owned at the time was not at all up to the task. Upon returning to my home computer, I photoshopped an image of the sky (including a bird, of course) onto an image of the inside of the dome. Mission accomplished. With today's camera sensors, I probably could easily achieve my goal of capturing sufficient dynamic range in one click. Would the final result be any better? At any rate, several years later, I was wandering the streets of downtown Chicago and saw some conceptual art on display. The experience triggered the memory of my Roman adventure, so I made a snap with my phone. It occurs to me that what I would really like to do is visit the Pantheon during a snow storm.

Is nostalgia always such a bad thing?

I've always tended to think that nostalgia is for idiots, and although I still have a real aversion to it, this year, as the days get shorter and we brace for the long, dark winter ahead, I find myself going through my old negatives and lingering on images that move me a little in that direction. 

Is this the first sign of some age-related mental decay, or is it something more benign, like simply wanting to think that things ultimately will get back to normal? I have a feeling it is the latter, which is kind of okay, I think. That being said, when I was younger, I probably would have burned the nostalgia-provoking negatives just to be on the safe side. So maybe there is a kind of decay going on after all. 

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.

Subject, camera, photographer, memory...

We choose to take a photograph because we feel a personal connection to the subject. There is a link between the thing photographed, the camera, and the photographer. When we revisit a photograph after a period of time has elapsed, we often cannot remember the details, or even why we made the photograph in the first place. The action of time on memory depends on our experiences and is fundamentally different than it is for a photograph, which is basically unchanged over time.

Often, how we choose to post-process or print a photograph changes over time as well.

Here is a photograph I took several years ago in Ventura, California, about an hour away from where I grew up in Los Angeles. This image was captured using the Leica R8, the 35 mm f/2 lens, and Ilford HP5+. It was developed and scanned at a lab, and is therefore perhaps the best representation of the experience between me, the beach at sunset and the gear I had with me at the time.