Notice More

At the time I made this exposure, I noticed the shadow play, the form -- that is obviously what caught my eye in the first place -- but I didn't really pay that much attention to the gradation of tones in the shadows. That is one of the most valuable things about a photograph to me, it freezes time and gives you a chance to notice more.

Old Topographics

Superficially, this scene might look like something Lewis Baltz could have encountered on his travels. But, of course, we are nearly fifty years on from when the New Topographic photographers were out documenting the country. Over the course of a half century, the landscaping has been neglected, a few electrical feedthroughs have been patched onto the building facades, and things appear to need a little TLC. TLC ain't coming. Folks seem to prefer new construction to sprucing up what we already have. I like the old stuff. I could totally see this little building as a pretty sweet studio. It's just too far from my house is all.

Good light to you this weekend, fellow traveler.

Trying Too Hard?

When I saw this image in my archive, I thought, 'Whoa, dude, you were trying a bit too hard"! Not sure I would compose a shot like this these days, but still, I am really glad I kept the image. You see, even though it was taken almost 15 years ago, I still remember exactly how I felt at the time I made the exposure. Funny, right? I remember being bound and determined to somehow get the damned arrow in the frame. And I did, too. :)

Tasting notes: Nikon D300, 35 mm lens.

 

Entropy Always Wins

Objects in the landscape, trees, stones, or old human built structures, often transport me back or forward in time as I consider what to photograph. The fleeting existence of a spider web, the slow toll of entropy on the built environment. Different experiences of time. Red clay in the water and rust on the corrugated siding. It is all pretty similar at the molecular level.

Tasting notes: Canon R5 digital camera with nifty fifty lens.

I like it cuz U like it! 😃

 

I think sometimes it's easy to become infatuated with images made using a new lens, taken from a novel perspective, captured on an unusual film stock, that kind of thing. Maybe these images won't stand the test of time all that well, but we sure get amped about them in the moment. I was taking a new lens for a test drive the other day -- the Pentax 15mm f/4. I had it mounted on the KP digital camera. Now, 15mm is a wide field of view, even on a crop sensor camera. I was having a good time walking around and filling the frame with the tree canopy in different configurations. I was also shooting at f/22 to get a nice sunstar, not something that is normally part of my aesthetic. But, hey, it's Spring. I offered up the image to my wife for consideration, and she said, "I like it because you like it". Fair enough, and the thing is, I still kinda like it. I'm hoping it grows on her a little bit over time.

A sense of time

We watched the movie Paterson the other evening, accompanied by a delicious pizza with a cauliflower crust. I found certain aspects of the film quite interesting, while other parts flowed past me like the waters of the Passaic River. The notion of time as the fourth dimension came up in some of the poems (you'll have to watch the movie), and this got me thinking about how time manifests itself in photography. Of course, poets have their own ways of dealing with time.

Here, waves of water passing through a double slit superpose to create a simulation of the diffraction that can also occur at much smaller scales. Coherent and incoherent wave dynamics are an interesting way that time can be manifested within a photograph.

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.