Then...

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We lugged all of that stuff from the college darkroom up on the second floor behind us. It was the middle of the night. See the big thing right in front of me? That's a Korean War aerial camera. My buddy Jim Furlong found it somewhere, got us some film and found a single engine, three seat plane with an overhead wing. We took the door on my side off so when the plane banked I could dangle right over the city held only by the seat belt. BTW, that monster camera didn't have a neck strap so I held onto it hard as the ground sped ay below.

We've got those odd expressions because we'd created a timer for the big ole 4X5 Speed Graphic camera. We just sat there waiting and waiting until PHWUMP! Flashbulbs popped all around us. Yep, flash bulbs! Funny, that one shot took all sorts of planning and set up (not to mention break down) and yet, who cared? We were young and time and muscle was what we had.

Jim Furlong was the most important photographer who ever lived. Because he infected me with a graphic obsession that's never gone away... that's why. I always wonder as my work comes together, what Jim will think. He created hurdles, and rewards.

Late last month Jim died. But I always wonder as a new image happens, "What will Jim think about that? You've got to have a standard, right?

Furlong

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So the guy says to me, "Ted, who's the most important photographer who ever lived?"

I scrunches up my face, the way you do when you're digging way deep into your idea piles and I says back, "You mean who do I think did the most for the way I wonder about image making? The one guy who opened my feelings to the possibility of this stuff?"

"Well, yeah," He says, looking all out of patience and like that....

"Simple," I says.... "No contest. This guy."
***

Ever noticed how crackling memories are vividly colored, but... but.. the details kind of bleed into one another? Like when you recall a spring afternoon when the sun was hot as a friendship and when you yelled to your friend... "Jim! Freeze!" And your mind and your camera fixed an instant... the latter in black and white, the former in the sizzling palette that the sun had washed away.

***
I was eighteen when we met. I'd taken some box-camera high school pix and lessons from a camera-happy priest. But the darkroom overwhelmed me. Still I got the rush of seeing images "come-up" in Dektol. Jim already knew all that tech stuff. And he had a Kodak Retina 35mm fixed lens folding camera that he insisted I borrow. He was more than an enabler to a kid with a passion, he was a pusher. We spent three, four, sometimes six nights a week and a lot of the weekends in the college darkroom.

We brewed our own chemistries, burnt through tons of war-surplus paper and film, and tried every trick and stunt the camera mags yacked about. The college had a couple of 4X5 Speed Graphics and a ton of fixed bulb lighting equipment. We lugged the big cameras to sports, car wrecks, politics, and flash-bulbed-out candid pix of our friends. The editors we free-lanced for back then still insisted that we use the old 4X5 150ASA, f4.5 monsters.

But we were young and strong and didn't much care. It did teach us a lot about framing, tripods, lighting, and carefully controlling the instinct to shoot. Even with young muscles we rarely lugged more than eight cartridges or eight potential shots.

Ahhhh... but Jim had a Canon, range finder, interchangeable lens, 35 mm (bought during his AirForce stint... he was the older guy), and until I bought my first Miranda SLR, I used his f 2.8 Kodak. We rolled our own, over-packing each 35mm film cart with 40 shots of Tri-X that we casually push-processed to 1600 and even 3200 ASA.

It was a monochrome world since the critical chemistry demands and expense of processing our own color were unthinkable. Our fixer-turned-brown-fingernails off-put some girls, but the pictures we caught of them somehow seemed to make us more exotic than grungy.

We studied all the periodicals, pestered the library to order all of the classic art and photography books, debated visual art, and of course, whether photographers could ever be artists. Jim and I became drinking-buddy close, dark-room close, obsession-close. And along with Guy, Mark, Lenny, Harry, Jimmy, Santo, and Bebey ... we walked through the door where our feeling-about-ideas lived (or was that ideas-about-feelings?).

Jim graduated to go off to media school and a career in photography and cinematography. I considered that, decided, "Nope, too damned hard" and enrolled in economics graduate school. But Thanks to Jim's little folding Retina camera, the stink of darkroom fixer, and the wonder of feelings "coming-up" in the magical developer baths... photographic art has been my refuge. A place to go where the only deadlines and tensions were my own. Where either darkroom doors or computer monitors could erect force fields that held in pleasure and escape.

And all because of the most important photographer who ever lived, and who died last month. My dear friend Jim Furlong. He made me so lucky.

What a debt.

Jim & Lenny and Battles

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In 1962 the guy on the left up there was 26. His name? Jim Furlong. The other guy was also one of my college roommates, Len Freiberg. Like Lenny, I was twenty years old and behind the 4X5 Speed Graphic triggering the shutter. Jim wanted to comment on the idea of subjectivity. You know, how opinions are all a matter of perspective, where you stand, how you view stuff. How people can see the same thing and one guy comes away thinking, "Hey, nice picture of a couple of men commuting on the subway." But someone else goes, "Holy dung! Those characters are dangling from the ceiling!"

Jim kept coming up with ideas like that, and talking us into risking our asses to make them work. He's the guy who taught me photography. We spent a bazillion hours together in a small darkroom at King's College where we were, I guess, the photography departments for the school paper, the literary magazine, and the yearbook. We also freelanced and sold pix to the local papers and some mags.

Lenny sent me this diptych last night. The originals had faded and frankly I was pretty sloppy back then, losing the battle against the dust storm that swirled in that darkroom. It was nice to have a second shot at them after forty eight years. I'm a lot more meticulous now and I've scraped away most of the lint, motes, and dribble that covered the images like a Spring snow.

Judging by the St. Patrick's Day Sale in that paper, it was early Spring when we did this thing.So there was probably as much white stuff on the ground outside as I left on these pix. Still, try as I might I couldn't restore one aspect of that cool evening. There was no real way to bring Jim back. He died recently. At least his body did. But that smile... that cheer... those ideas and feelings... They're just as real as my memories of two friends dangling from that ceiling and the way we laughed and still do... all three of us. Len and I here and I'm sure Jim somewhere else.

If it's a battle between death and Jim's warmth... Death runs a poor second.

Obsession?

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We're off for a visit to Peru in February. At least some of the adventure will be way up in the Andes at both Machu Pichu and Lake Titicaca. And I'd not been to the gym for seven years and my job has me sitting in front of computer screens, eating rich meals (not to mention the odd cocktail), well - at my age this trip can challenge this old body.

So.. so.... fifteen weeks ago I started to beat myself back into some sort of shape. Im not just dieting - I am TRAINING! Yea! There's six months between July when this started, and February when we leave. Now is about half way there. So... here's the old guy halfway back into a six month date with running, biking, swimming, and pumping iron thingees between working the gym's devilishly designed devices to pulverize fat!

So far I've shed thirty pounds and dropped four inches off my pants. But, the holidays are going to tease me big time and they will come at that critical time just before we leave. I know that they can puncture all will power and once lost the momentum will be hard to retrieve in January. Sooooo.... I'm determined to have such a head of steam going into the things that I'll power right through them without stuffing my mouth and body full O'fat.

All of this, scooped atop job has left my muse kind of dazed and reeeely reduced my art attention span. In fact work and training has eaten away the most productive hours leaving me sort of dimwitted in front of art projects.

Hopefully as endurance returns for the trip, it will also return for doing images. But in case you wondered why there's been less posting activity here... just take a look at my album cover and you can see where the creative time's been invested. February's just around the corner.... And by the way... it will be hot summer in Peru. More reason to be totally fit for the Andes, right? Sigh...

Summer's End

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How very soon
We paddle away
Summer...

Blonde In Savannah - 2

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Dolled up for her portrait, the little cutie posed in bare feet. I let the photographer work... And like a voyeur... snuck my lens into the posing space.

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

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Does this need a comment?

Blonde In Savannah - 1

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It's called "Factor's Walk". It runs parallel to River Street in Savannah, Georgia. I walked the old alleyway this afternoon. It's where Craig Tanner and Marti Jeffers will hold a workshop this weekend. Participants will work on street portraits. As you can see, there are plenty of characters to grab, eh?

This little star was prancing about in her TuTu. In Savannah I've found, the street photographer's got lots of low hanging fruit to harvest.

Lookit what you missed Andreas.

Artist Series #1

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Some time ago Apple pulled the plug on its original gallery page in Mac.Com. In fact it pulled the plug on Mac.Com replacing it with MobileMe. The images which I posted on Mac.Com are still there but are forever fixed - I cannot add to them or rearrange them in any way. I think I can take them down one time, or close the folders out completely. But the gave us a lot of warning so I arranged them a last time and that ship will sail as long as Apple keeps it bobbing - but it will be a ghost ship, never changing.

At any rate, there's a new option to post galleries on Mac.Me... which I'm slowly exploiting and at some point I'll post the URL. One of the new options will be a gallery of portraits of Lancaster artists... And my friend Ron Ettleman is the first in that series. That's one of his larger works which determined the palette and mood for this work.

Town House

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Some people collect stamps. The Landis Valley Museum collects buildings. They pluck them from the past and set them off in their fields to capture the aura of centuries of mystery. It's one of Pennsylvania's least known museums... and it's just around the corner from my gym. Lancaster County's littered with intriguing feelings.

Yellow Plus Blue

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Hmmm... Is there a difference between discovery and creativity in art? Lemme try that differently. Is it all about process or maybe its more about concept? Okay... okay... still not clear, right? Sigh. When Michelangelo decided to pull 'David' out of that enormous hunk of stone... well, how much did he know before he began hammering? Had he imagined the boy/man and then dug him free from the marble? Or did he find him as he chiseled away pieces of rock?

I started this concept out by watching a man on West Chestnut Street in downtown Lancaster. And I used my EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens to snag him free of the crowd. Then I went to work in PS/CS4 to reveal his character which originally attracted my lens - by building up tonal maps that let me dig into shadows and highlights. But as he emerged on my digital palette he demanded a setting. A moment... Yeah, his presence was the concept but the process wanted a place to both compliment and amplify it.

And I thought of the rugged coasts of Northern California where the yellows of the hillsides complimented the yellow of the guy's shirt. And then... then... a palette of yellows and blues all seemed exactly correct - perfect to balance the way that the coastline seemed too romantic for this portrait. So... so... process led to discovery. And where does creativity come to visit? Maybe that's a judgement for the visitor to make? Maybe we cannot conclude we are creative, merely presenters or discoverers... eh?

A FOOTNOTE: I built this image yesterday but before writing this tiny essay I rode my bike through Musser Park, next to my home here in Lancaster. And there on a gorgeous Sunday were two young painters from the Pennsylvania College of Art And Design each working in palettes of blues and yellows. While we each discovered very different images, I wonder. Is there a yellow/blue something in the air here in the Historic District? Cool.

***

Here's an image of the coastline which is really the result of three virgin images stitched together into a pano in Photoshop, which were taken with my Canon 20D through its EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5) at approximately the same time as mu subject on an equally sunny day.

Hot Fall Award!

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YIPPEEE! After half a century of doing photographic-visual art ---- DISCOVERED! ME! Lovvit!

Not enough exclamation points left in my quiver. Sorry. But it is very cool to be included among the world's top 35 Undiscovered Photographers. Thanks to Andreas Manessinger for bringing my work to the attention of the judges at the popular EpicEdits Forum.

And I'm number six on a list that is not alphabetical. Top Ten! Um... did I say... YIPPEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

Exploring

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For a little while yet, there are those who can mount expeditions to the golden age … which will exist until their memories don’t. When time will not check wither… nostalgia can try.

Happy Anniversary To Me • Ta-Da

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It was on 2006.... September 10 that I did this thing for the first time.... with these guys. You know what, I'm learning all of the time and my work's grown a lot in the past three years of posting, experimenting and experiencing your public and private feedback. Thanks so much to the many thousands of you who visit this site with support and reinforcement. I have a so many more friends as a result of all of this, and you know what? That's the real legacy and wonder of what we can do today.

Thanks to all of you.