Purposeless

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Has anyone else noticed that the great northern U.S. cities are becoming seedy? As folks post images of Asian, European, Canadian, and Southern American cities - you see glimmer, high-tech and a patina of elegance. In the north, it looks as if the economic tides are receding, leaving behind shells, and detrius which still have the shape of their purpose - but their essence has left.
I wonder if bricks, cement, wrought and mill work have any way to miss their now dead functions? Look here, see how each was crafted to shape a hope, a dream, a plan? And now, urban weeds grow up as signage of abandonment. All over America there are bodies like these, not yet crumbling, not yet decayed... just lifeless... purposeless... Answers seeking questions. They're memories really. But they're not written in words, so they'll soon be like a melody carried in bits on the breeze... hardly heard, and increasingly unfamiliar.

Terioration

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I've heard that daVinci's Last Supper began deteriorating only months after it was finished. Apparently the north wall of the monk's refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan was not entirely hospitable to the oil-and-tempera based medium the master used to paint the masterpiece.
Ironic then that this wall scribble is maybe a decade old on the southern wall beneath a railroad bridge going into Lancaster. While it rarely gets direct rain or sunlight, it's otherwise completely exposed to the temperature and humidity shifts of our part of the world. Yet it's still as bright and uncracked as it came out of the spray cans. Just as roaches will survive an atomic blast, grafitti will probably build the stories of the Fourth Millenium's archeologists. Don't you wonder what they'll conclude about us from these sort of things?

Lock Boxes

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It's said that it was Bobby Coyle that built them to house he and Cassie's wedding gifts until they returned from their European honeymoon.
On the Titanic.
It's said that it was Cassie Costello who wanted the metal strong boxes built with opaque glass doors so her things would smile in the sun until she came home.
It's said that since that long ago time - no one has seen them smiling.

Neon Night

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The smoker's haven't gaggled here yet. They will.
You look at this place and you know it's a city because rural spots don't have "out-backs" like this. And you know that very nearby there are girls in short skirts, and guys who like girls in short skirts accompanied by a driving bass.
And you know that a neon back alley and a driving bass behind a club are as much a pulse beat of a city as blue skys and brook babbling are to the country. And the cool thing about Lancaser is that it is minutes away from both.

Life? Down There?

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In the late 19th century all applicants for a civil service job had to submit to a phrenology examination. A phrenologist searches among the bumps on your head for information about personality. Now there are new designer proceduress for making strangers less strange. Are they similarly bogus? The only thing between us and the bogus is the scientific method... yet still we feel an irrational tug down alleyways where glimmering things seem to swirl.

Can you tell that my brain feels itchy today?

Crow Storm

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So the city has a new party in power and, well, just look. It's like Hitchock came to town with these people and pooped all over everything. Okay... now I'm not saying that the Mayor is personally responsible. But I have been listening to Al Gore, and he makes a lot of sense. And he says that The President and his Congress are causing hurricanes, and making it warmer and all. But I figure that The President can't just diddle into every state, county, township, or city, right? I mean, like, he's busy screwing up the entire world. So, well, who's left to diddle with little places like here? Which makes me wonder what the new City Council has been doing since January. After all, I've parked my car in this spot for thirty years and... And... Well, I'm just sayin'... You know? It do make you wonder... You think I oughta walk on down to city hall? Huh? Huh?

Facade

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Yesterday I showed you the wreckers who were digging around into the middle of something. I told you that they were banging and drilling inside of the very epicenter of the city of Lancaster. In fact where King and Queen streets come together is the town square - everything else radiates outward from an obelisk memorializing the county's Civil War dead.
And just behind that sculpture on the south-eastern corner sits the county's grandest building... what was the Watt & Shand department store. The wreckers are disemboweling it to create room for a grand new hotel and a convention center. But, with the care of a diamond cutter, they're preserving this radiant vista.

Wrecking

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And tomorrow I shall post what they are digging behind in the very epicenter of historic Lancaster City. In the interim you might notice that this guy is looking at stuff that hasn't seen sunlight in well over a century. Those fire escapes to the right? they were hidden in a dank, grim alleyway - and you'll note they were appended quite a while back. Apparently the original structure was built for access from this side, but later structures which have just been demolished closed off horse-drawn deliveries. This walkway is wonderful, the best view in town to what's turned out to be an archeological surprise.

Cubey Alleyway

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Charles Demuth was called a Precisionist painter. As far as I can tell, that was like a flavor of cubism. Demuth was born in Lancaster in the late 1800s. It's not clear that he loved his city. It is clear that many of his masterpieces which hang in the world's greatest museums were impressions of Lancaster, PA. His family home and business were a block from where I took this picture today. He undoubtedly knew this place. Lancaster uses its alleys putting important front entrances on them. A recent remodeling to 100 Christian Street created this doorway sculpture literally in the shadow of 18th century steeples. It's State Senator Armstrong's office. He chairs the Senate Appropriation's Committee. See, this city really uses its alleys. Judging by the way Demuth saw everything else, well I sense the ghost of his brushes dancing all about this, and so much of his town.

Suppose He Was Now?

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This young man isn't - young. In fact he's dead. His faded picture on a battered postcard was recently found in a drawer by his granddaughter. I was asked to bring him back. And I wondered. What if I really could? What if we could grab him to roam around our streets for say, a week? Would he freak? Or would he slide into our place as easily as he slid into the European war where he was about to be dispatched?
So many of us wonder what it'd be like to visit the past for a day, or longer. But so few of us wonder about visiting the future. As far as this guy is concerned. We have visited it. Tell me, do you like it better here than they way you understand that it was back then? Do you freak?

Happy Thanksgiving

Nociception Overcomes

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Some ideas are so simple... Clichés actually. But here this one seems so profound. And when I saw this spacecruiser landing in my backyard... Okay, twin leaves, in fact, taking up space in our garden... I saw how painfully eaten they were, yet they still looked leathery and strangely beautiful so as a result this concept popped right into my mind.
"Nociception" of course you know is the technical term for the perception of pain... So the title says? Why, "No pain... No Gain!"
Wuddelse?

Two Americas

John Edwards is maybe running for President. During the last race, as John Kerry's running mate he complained that there are, "Two Americas".
Well maybe. Maybe on the left there is one that is licentiously giddy, while on the right there's another that is impenetrably moralistic - so that the bulk of us in the middle stand agape at their antics and even portentously fearful of their political torque which threatens the civility of our political processes. When one cannot compromise, when those who disagree are dismissed as evil, when one sees the other as threats to their very definition of themselves... Can civil war be far off? Is it time for Streisand and Limbaugh to each crank it down? Or are they both together - one America - while we're all in the other?
Perhaps it is time for us to build a wall?

Random Clicks?

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Once a guy took a bunch of frames and walked along flinging them in all directions. Then he returned and took pictures of whatever the frames surrounded. He then showed them to people who almost uniformly found the pictures of value and most had good things to say about their compositions.
The human mind looks for patternsm, works to identify them, and once found - sucks at them for meaning. Ever noticed how you can find figures in clouds? Cleaning the backyard last weekend I came upon this tableau atop a potting table that was covered by a linoleum sheet which came with the house. The dirt was from last summer. The leaves dropped in the Fall. I saw this... this pattern. Does it have value? Is the composition interesting? Can your mind suck out its meaning? Maybe I should go find a pile of frames to fling? Wait, isn't that what we do whenever we click the shutter?

Panorama

(Click left) A couple of years ago I tried my first panorama. It was November in E. Dennis, Mass. That's Cape Cod beyond the abandoned cranberry bog. Fall was late in 2005 but it burst out in fiery glows. The image is sort of primitive but it gets at the idea.

Appalachian Fall

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Um, well, it wasn't a formal workshop. I mean, like, there was no one there to accept a tuition. And the instructors sort of looked way inside of themselves. But, in fact you can look back over my postings of the past couple of weeks to see what sort of work I managed to get from that shop up at Lake Harmony. All things considered, it was way worth it. At least I think so. Oh, that's my buddy Steve on the poster. Anybody want to sign up for our next workshop? We work cheap.

Complex Simplicity

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It's an odd thing. When I set out to do an image I want to resolve everything inside of the frame. You know how a sixty minute TV drama resolves it all? That's the way I seem to want to work here. So I start looking for my concept within the borders and I pull and poke, pick and peel to let it free. Problem is, it's tough to say, "Hey! That's it Ted. Here, you've told a story of the serenity that can happen even when vivid color's trapped within an impending storm. So STOP!"
But I worry that something can escape my attention that makes the point. So I keep poking and scratching. There's such a compulsion to over work the jewels that digital reveals. So, I stop it at a point where I hope that all the complexities explain a simple idea. And that's it. Of all the endings that could be of this image. This one is it.

Tone Poem

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Composers have tried to mimic nature with tone poems. But, can an image maker mimic, say a concerto? Can I create a pulsating theme that's spirited and pleasant enough for you to sense a solo oboe? A cloud of violins? A vibrant hue of muted horns? Can an image contain both quiet resting places surrounded by lively dancing textures, and within it all a structure that's firm and leading through it its center to some distance spot deep in a piece called Lake Harmony Steps #2?

Or not...

Fuscous

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A dusky, somber moment: what the poet would call "fuscous" - that's what I was after. And I wanted to bag it right at that crack between Autumn's end and Winter's start. All - out fuscous. Fuscousness all around. I wanted my viewer to sense it tumbling from the image.
Oooooo...kaaaay.... so what to do? Howzabout getting up reeeeeely early, on a stormy morning... at a mountain lake that the summer people had abandoned. Howzabout finding just enough color to remind my of what happened here a couple of weeks back, and enough silver/gray to remind me of what will happen a couple of weeks ahead. And do it before the sun bathed everything in golden contrasts. Does that nail it? Do you feel all fuscoused up?

Vatic Color

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I'd never heard the word, "vatic". You? Then, reading something by John Updike... there it sat, like a hole in the sentence. For me it was a drop-out in. You know when you've got someone on a cell, and the.... there's.... a gap? It was like that. Sent me to the dictionary. Ah-hah! So how to use it in an image?
Well at Lake Harmony I stalked the thought through my lens. Hunted the thing down like a predator. Found it dangling from the crook of a tree branch. See here? The color? Vatic's an adjective used in poetry. A vatic guy tells you about future truths. He's a prophet. So - here's vatic color. Reveals future truths, righ?

Rock On

"Magic Realism"... That's what they called the inventions of the great Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez. He wrote stories which seem totally real when suddenly, "PHHHT!" a torrent of flowers pours from the sky... or a rock glides across a pond. Well, here's a rock at Lake Harmony. And here's a pond. Hmmm..... Will the wait be long?.

Voice

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Meditation... David Bayles & Ted Orland wrote, " In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive. (Art & Fear: Image Continuum: 1993)"
Meaning? I trigger the shutter, run the result through post processing, and out come images like 'The Juice'. Now, who determines whether 'The Juice' is any good? Um, I guess that depends upon what your definition of 'good' is. Wait, maybe it depends upon what MY definition of 'good' is?
I've got a friend who believes that an artist must have an audience. Audience is a part of the definition... his definition. You can't be a closet: sculptor, musician, painter, dancer, or photographer. To him, every art is a performing art. Okay, but even if he's right (and I don't buy it), it still begs the question... what makes 'The Juice' any good? If the audience rejects it, is it bad art? Is it art at all? Is it implied that art only exists if it has an audience which likes it? Now there are two conditions, well actually three - since without the creator, there would be nothing to put before an audience. So, to be any good, then first 'The Juice' has to exist... then it has to have an audience... then that audience has to approve of it. Whew....
Now back to Bayles and Orland.... if an artist learns to accept him/herself... and follows her/his own voice. And that acceptance results in a personal concept that is out of tune with the cultural moment... Then what? Culture says the stuff is bad... audience, a creature of culture deliver's culture's opinion and POOF!... "The Juice" is no good. For a few years, when culture evolves and... POOF!... "The Juice" is good. Sounds like art is a moving target, eh? Or maybe, art is what artists do. Take it or leave it, audience.
Maybe "The Juice" is as good as I feel it is? Hey, I like it. A lot. And as long as I'm not asking for a market to deluge me with money... That's good enough. Right?
Artists are different from doctors, locomotive engineers, street sweepers, or economists. They are not defined by credentialing boards, or their boss's job title. They are artists when they believe they are artists. And as long as they keep believing they are artists. It is a matter of faith. Hmmmmmm....

Ornamentation

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Grief... that's what I've gotten recently for my abstract posts. "What's happened to your organic center, Ted?" Some ask. "Have you no sense of the decisive moment? The photographer's responsibility for reportage?" Stung... Yep, I am stunnnngggggggg! But, not a tad apologetic. All photographs lie... Hold that... They are to truth as music is to truth.
A composer presents a melody, then varies it through changes in texture, changes from major to minor, and ornamentation... Yadda... yadda.... So does a photographer. Through choice of perspective, framing, lens, filter, film/camera, exposure, f-stop, speed, depth of field... chrome or monochrome... A visual melody is changed until the moment that shutter allows light to hit film or sensor. All the stuff that happens in post-processing is ornamentation. And it as much a part of the process as purchasing a tripod - only more essential. An artist lives within the process. Before him comes an insight or idea... after him comes a completed work - but it is in the process where the entirety of the artistic thing happens.
Here... see this image above? I took it at sunrise on an October morning following a stormy night. This tidal spillway was drained in a daily cycle that's been going on since glaciers choked it dry. Can you sense the channel? Can you feel how life is coping with that force? Can you sense a primal moment? If so... the image of pre-sunrise light upon an ancient marsh expresses my concept... my feeling. It is true, and it was process that made it so.

DATA: Wednesday, 10/06/06, 7:16 am: Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto, Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 400, Lens Canon EFS 17-85mm, Focal Length 33 mm, Exposure Bias:-.67, 1/125 at f/9, RAW

Colored Bubbles

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I caught this at first, peripherally. Colored bubbles danced at the corner of my eye, glimmering at me to look, then squint so that my eyelids squeezed the vivid gels of stuff. You ever done that? You know, just peeked through narrow slits so that all you saw was a kind of concept of the things that were there? On occasion it's a useful way to look at images, ideas, and life. The challenge was how to communicate that concept of The Shirte, as opposed to a definition of it.

It seems to me that if an instant resonates in a way peculiar to just that moment... then that is what I need to capture, and try to communicate. So here is my sense of the fabric of the epicenter of Provincetown, Mass - on a dreary Halloween Day in 2005. Think of it as a colored nuance.

Yuck!

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The Gothic cathedral has three levels. Above rise the towers, connected by the gallery of gargoyles - images of hideous beasts that were believed to keep evil spirits away. Below are vibrant deigns in glass and paint that measure dozens of square feet. And then lower down are the gallery and entrances separated by a huge mural dedicated to Gluttus The Max.

This place looks like what happens to a tattoo addict who keeps going back to different artists. It is a cacophony of dischordant swirls, graphics, and colors spitting it's taste into the face of every passer-by. Look at it for long and you want to wash. If you could cuss with design... this is how you'd do it. You know the kid who always acted out in class? He owns this place.Call it the Cathedral of Ugg.

Deer-Ness

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So a guy says, "Yo, this thing's not a photograph, Ted. I don't know wudda-hell-itiz, but it ain't no photo."

Wrong! If it's not a photograph, um, wudda-hell-izzit? See this image exists. It came from my camera. This deer was standing on the back porch of a mountain cabin up in Lake Harmony. It was chewing on a cracker and staring at me through the back door window. And I took its picture with a wide angle lens - standing that close.

But then I figured, wait. Everybody's got some kinda picture of a deer. I mean how rare are the things? But then I says to myself... "Self, what's a deer? I mean what is the essence of deerness?" Now you may wonder why I talk to me. Passing right by that... I looked to see if I could isolate that deer essence. You know, leave just enough so that if I took anymore away – POOF! –No deer.

And here it is... it shows what deers have, and other things lack. Why... it's... it's... an ontological miracle. Right? Um, oh yeah, and it's still a photograph... I just kind of shoveled stuff off of the photo plane to reveal that cracker eating deer. If you know what I'm saying here?

If It Ain't Baroque

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Suppose you could see radio waves. You would be blind. Ditto if you could see air. But if you could see the the contrasts between light and dark forces that held the smooth and broken surfaces of colors to the shapes all about us... What would you be then? How would you see the world? Would you see the cables that kept everything together? Have you ever noticed, out of the corner of an eye, something just a tad odd. No, not odd, say, out of place?
Imagine you're here, at Lake Harmony and a rising sun's about to explode from last night's storm clouds. And in the dramatic contrast between night and emerging day, for the briefest instant... you sense there are strands, wires, aerial ligaments that tie everything to everything... and then they are gone. Whoa! Crank down the Vivaldi, Dude.

Time Out --- Be back by Tuesday

Got a new computer yesterday. My main machine is a MAC-DP-G4. Yesterday we went to the MacStore and I bought this bright new MacBook Pro and a Mighty Mouse. Of course it is consuming all of my spare time, first in bringing everything from the G4 onto line, and secondly, testing its limits. I've also gotta figger out how to get my PhotoShop CS running on the thing... it gives me an error message, even though I'm supposed to be allowed to have the application resident on both machines under the licensing agreement. So.... I shall work on that a bit later.

Until then.... I am on blog vacation... See ya on Tuesday November 7.... K?

Ted

Spigots

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So you begin to tell something, right? Open your mouth, waggle your tongue, words tumble out and in an instant or two, there's an imaginary period that completes a new sentence which no one ever before heard. Including you!

Where'd it come from? That sentence. When you started your tongue going, did you know all the words that were about to stream out? The sentence completed an idea. Where'd that come from? Do we have, like a faucet at the end of a hose that connects a glowing passel of squirming idea soup somewhere in our minds... one end's connected to that place, with its spigot spraying its contents onto our tongues? Hey! Where'd that idea come from? And say, you're walking through a woods on Hilton Head Island and you come upon a hacked tree part that'd been carefully fit across a sharp gulley. And as the light sparkles through a high tree canopy – what does your spigot spray out? And if you're alone, with no ear to hear it...

Do you make a sound? Or is that the entire purpose of a place like this? Quiet reverence? Maybe there are places where the spigot has no function? Places that exist solely as input... So later, somewhere far away, our spigot has something to output?

Syllogism

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The sun sets on trees
Hilton Head has trees
Therefore the sunsets on Hilton Head

Some things are intuitively obvious... like the trees, drenched in Spanish moss, hugging the shoreline against the glare-gold washed skies of a South Carolina sunset. They are (is this a word?) syllogisitcally correct. While humans float around in words which can mean this or that... contentions which can mean anything... the sun, the sea, the rocks and the trees dance together into a performance which means exactly one thing... There's solace in their honesty, no?

BTW... I missed posting this yesterday by three minutes. But, well, I just wanted to get the image the way I understood it wanted to be gotten. It took three minutes too many... So be it. Sorry, but sometimes art just won't cooperate with the clock :)

Syllogism

Canon

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In Renaissance music, a canon is a staggered imitation, like the child's song, "Row, Row, Row, Your Boat." I saw the striations in this boat's bottom and found the pattern haunting. See how they repeat, and stagger over one another? This thing went over the same rocks - again, again and again. Or were they rocks? Maybe roots? Maybe some of the other hard mystery things that your feet find beneath the muddy surface of a lake. Whatever...
This wrinkling old buddy aged along with its family, and now it's upended awaiting what? Next summer? The kids who've grown and won't be back? Its aging friends who found it so many years ago and paddled it through memories? It's a soft thing that ground against the glacial rocks of these ancient mountains. Will it get one more round in the canon of its life? Did it win? Are warm memories... winning?

Stumped

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Is there spiritual essence in a stump? Look at that thing, it's probably a lot older than any of us. And it will be there for a couple of hundred years or so, unless someone finds a need to pull it. A century from now the machine saw marks will still look fresh as if they were cast in concrete. Who cut this thing? Why? There are cottages behind me as I took this picture. Did this pine obstruct someone's view? Not enough apparently to finish the job, just enough to get the thing hacked but not low enough to do anything else with this plot of ground.
Yeah, I think there is a spiritual essence to this corpse-that-won't-decompose. Unlike you or I, it's body will survive the snows and the searing suns. And it'll poke itself out of that rocky ground long after its killer's body has bio-degraded. Maybe that's the payback, eh? Maybe that's the essence of the hardy old stump's spirit?

Harmony

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Lake Harmony is in the Pocono Mountains, about 25 miles south of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It's a place that time forgot. Everything's nicely maintained, or built to feel as if you've driven through a shimmering door into the 1950s. We ate at a restaurant last night, "Shenanigans," where every area is a smoking area! It's as if the post WWII people have been preserved in some kind of patina. Nothing at Lake Harmony's seedy, or ratty, or uncool. And it isn't a museum of any sort. People there seem to have simply decided that they want to live in Eisenhower's America but out in the woods. So they do it with iPods, DVDs, and washer-dryers. The whole place is built around this lake that started to attract summer people in the 1920s as cars got popular.

In Philadelphia back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, they had a name for the Poconos... During the steamy, city months, they called it, "Air Conditioning". Here's an image from this morning as the sun cracked through a snow spattering sky.

Sundown

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We're going to the Poconos this weekend. Leaving tomorrow so, no postings until maybe Sunday night. These are part of the Appalachian Mountain range which runs down the east coast of North America. They're particularly ancient mountains without volcanic activity, and their highest peaks are up in New England. The Poconos are the name of the range as it passes generally through northeastern Pennsylvania. The color should be just past its peak, but we should get interesting images.
So... it seems as good a time as any to set the sun on my early October visit to E. Dennis, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. I like the light over this marsh. The sky was angry, but the storm never hit us. See the red flowers? They're somehow harbingers of Christmas, don't you think? By now, I suppose the frosts have killed them off up there in the north country. And snows are only weeks away from the Poconos. We'll get there just before Fall's window closes. Cool.

Pizzicato

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This blog-site system (blogger.com) was down last night. Couldn't post yesterday's pith. Pity, no pith, eh? But now the blogger.com has returned, waiting in my window for me like a loyal chauffer who took a day off. "Any pith today?" he wonders. "Forget annoyances, what perks you up?"

So I htought about it and well, Pizzicato always makes me happy. It sparkles atop daily life's mixed medium tones, you know? It's like when, on the periphery, a glimmery froth tickles your mind and you can't help smiling. Your baby's giggling, a window twinkles out rainbow rays, a dog's rolling on the carpet, your friend's laughing, the air smells like baking bread... And magic trickles over you. Here, look at my image from a fuzzy sheep meadow in E. Dennis. Pizzicato's like that... it's the shimmery part of life.

Sea-ness

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Souls, Plato believed, were exposed to the perfect forms for everything in heaven - before they were born. There was a perfect form for beauty, for redness, for eloquence, for everything. So instead of spending our lives in the pursuit of discovering perfection, we live to remember it. And as I built this image, I felt myself with a tantalizing memory first of Nantucket-ness, then of sailing-ness, but finally, even more primal... I look at it as a tantalizing glimpse of my perfect memory of sea-ness. What do you think? Does it pique your Platonic memories even a whit?

DATA: Wednesday, 10/01/06,1:21 PM: Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto, Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 200, Lens Canon EFS 10-22mm, Focal Length 22 mm, Exposure Bias:-.33, 1/100 at f/8, RAW

KniteShip

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The jet catamaran ferries tear across the waters between Hyannis and Nantucket Harbor in about an hour. But even with good winds, it's four hours by sail. At night from The Cape, you see the ships reaching out toward the island, their canvases puffed full, and quickly they become black specks. Halfway across, these things can dart from the darkness - WOOOSH! Abruptly they'er there, burly intruders for some moments, the only rectangles and hues against the charcoal sky and waves. Even when, perhaps especially when, their colors are light - the things can intimidate. Glowing ghosts, cloaked in wind. Bulks, hulks, heaving things. And for a moment, as terribly beautiful as night at sea.

DATA: Wednesday, 10/01/06,1:17 PM: Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto, Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 200, Lens Canon EFS 10-22mm, Focal Length 10 mm, Exposure Bias:-.33, 1/320 at f/11, RAW

95

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I missed my post yesterday. There were furies to deal with. Sometimes it seems as if the Great White is just off the horizon and all sails are furled under a dark sky and... and... Saturday was a day like that. Furies can get distracting... It's good that it's Sunday.

Harvest Moon

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First off, I shoulda' mentioned that the Lancaster Barnstormers first won their division and then won the Atlantic League Championship. They grabbed everything while I was up at The Cape. Lancaster county is very happy. Oddly, there were nincompoops that thought baseball wouldn't work in Lancaster. In fact, a politician from a township bodering on the city lost his job because he championed a ballpark there. Now it's up in the city, thousands and thousands of people come almost every night that they play, and life is nice.
It's a shame about the nincompoops. They have now turned their opposition against a convention center for the city which is in the heart of Amish Country. The nincompoops can't imagine how any organization would want to have its conventions here midst the gentle rolling hills of one of the prettiest historic places in America. They can't imagine how a grand new hotel and a convention facility could lure professional and commercial associations with headquarters in Philly, NYC, Baltimore or D.C. – places that are a morning's drive away, but just far enough away to ward off the commuters. Cylo the Barnstormer's cow likes to moon the visiting team. It'd be cool, during harvest season, if she'd moon our nincompoops. It'd give 'em something to imagine.

What's This?

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There's a debate raging among photographers. They are much like painters in the late 19th century who when confronted with photography were perplexed to the point of fury. Photoshop and digital post production techniques allow far greater control over an image than the photographic process every allowed. And the digital effects are replicable. So traditional photographers are dressing themselves in uniforms marked "Purist" and "Organics" to reject the photographic status of images that are post processed digitally.
People who will take multiple and purposely blurred time exposures onto exotically colored and processed film to produce prints that are heavily manipulated in the darkroom... these people will call the resultant images "photographs" yet deny that the image above is one. Odd, since I can replicate the things I have done to that image... an image by the way which presents all of the trees, paths, and the like that were there at Elk Point Maryland that afternoon, in exactly the same position where they sat. No physical things were added or subtracted from this image during processing. Yet, I'm told that I cannot call this a photograph! Odd, are photographers people in control, as I was here, or are they folks involved in a mystical process whose results they simply do not understand and cannot predict? Are photographers merely the first people to happen upon the scene of an accident?

Fading Hertz

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Width, length, height and time... the four dimensions by which we measure tangible stuff. Funny thing about that last dimension. Look at this wall in downtown Lancaster. See the painted sign. Look real closely and you can make out an ad for Hertz car and truck rentals. But time lends a patina to the moment which tells as much about this wall as its physical measurements.

There's a very odd thing about time as a measurement. Not only does it fix an image in a moment, just as surely as the other dimensions. But it also slowly erases all of the others. And then finally, it becomes the only dimension which also erases itself. Time is the only lethal measure. It will extinguish everything... which is why I call this "Fading Hertz".

Marsh-Mellow

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It happens that we can lose faith in so many things as a source of betterment in our lives. Sometimes we regard even revered institutions as pesky ideas that exist, at least in part, to disguise essential truths. And news is seen as the opposite of objectivity, there to create enough tension to attract an audience or distract thought.

When, as someone wrote, prominent professors of literature regard polysyllabic gobbledygook as the best way to write, and law or medicine momentarily seem a scramble for profit with doctors and lawyers becoming speculative business people for whom neither justice nor curing have special value... It's time to recharge. To sit on a dock, aside a marsh and count the glacial stones. Ignoring for the moment those storm clouds but instead focusing upon the meaning of the distant, golden glow. Every form of human discomfort it seems is susceptible to the magical powers of burbling water. It is the ancestor of insight, recovery, superstition, optimism, and therapy.

DATA: Sunday, 10/01/06,1:02 PM: Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto, Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 200, Lens Canon EFS 10-22mm, Focal Length 11 mm, Exposure Bias:-.33, 1/125 at f/7.1, RAW

Fencing Dysfunction

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Once upon a time someone put a whole lot of effort into constructing this thing on the very edge of a tidal marsh in Wellfleet Massachusetts. To the left is the marsh, to the right an open field. Okay so far?

Now, was the fence... Um, was it supposed to keep something in the marsh from the field? Or something in the field from the marsh? After a while fences become that way. Nobody remembers which direction they were aimed. Contention's like that. Something arouses it, years pass and it's no longer clear what it was fencing in, or out. But just as sure as God made marshes... that contension never quite drains away. I've met folks who surely suffer from contention dysfunction. A lot of them in Massachusetts. But, there's another story doncha know?

Shhh! Hear It?

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Consonance versus dissonance - is the struggle composers do when they're working to create a harmonic support to a melody that's pleasant yet just sufficiently unbalanced to be interesting.

In this visual triad I've combined texture and classic composition together within a clash of reds, yellows and greens to stage the startling fortissimo of a Wellfleet sunrise. Now, if I can only learn to hold my camera straight... I'd resolve this thing on a much happier note.

Seriously, "harmony" comes from the Greek word, harmonia, which means "fastening" or "to join." If I did this image correctly, the cant to this thing reinforces the way I've tried to balance the dissonant elements. Does it sing?

Permanently Bogged

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That's an abandoned cranberry bog. The water's fresh, left behind by an overnight downpour. The cloud's are just clearing around the sunrise.
There are rules there against developing abandoned bogs. So those homes can keep their view. Behind me was another dune, and then the bay. So if you're sitting in that white house - you view the bog, the dune and Cape Cod Bay. Which is where, twelve hours or so after I took this snapshot, that same sun - set.

Till When?

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Somewhere out by Blueball this thing sat. It was probably put together back in the Forties... That's the 1940's for you kids. A couple of mules pulled it then, still do. There are those who sigh when they hear that. Wonder about how romantic it must be to live in the time when the Amish turned off the technological clock.
I'm not one of them. I don't respect the Amish for giving up on the only thing that makes us dramatically different from folks in 1869, 1269, 69 or 2069 BC. It is the distillation of our technological knowledge through science that's done more to improve the human condition than any number of theologians, philosphers,sociologist, or historians. The bards of the Arts & Humanities may sing ballads of beauty, but I can't think of a poem which has reduced infant mortality, overcome hunger, allowed us to escape tenements, or permitted more people to appreciate a sunset at age 69.
There are a lot of things in modern society worth rejecting - but technology doesn't burble to the top of any list I'd compose.

Trial of a trail

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It's often hard to get from here to there. And even a summer can make it tougher. There was a trail up this dune last winter. The workers used it then. But they stopped coming. When this winter's storms arrive, the roof's blue tarp on the bay side probably won't last. Somebody must have run out of money, rights, or enthusiasm. Maybe all three.

Makes you wonder how much restoration those things can stop. Makes you wonder if they're the speed bumps of history. Makes you wonder if the paths between wherevery you are, and wherever it could be interesting to go could all be swallowed up by growths that are just lurking in wait for the exhaustion of money, rights, or enthusiasm. Fragile, this civilization thing, eh?

DATA: Friday, 10/06/06, 7:36AM: Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto, Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 400, Lens Canon EFS 10-22mm, Focal Length 22 mm, Exposure Bias:-.20, 1/160 at f/10, RAW

Our Rulers Need Rulers

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Government keeps us in line with lines. Painted on the ground - They order us to stay within... Keep together... They order us to be orderly. But look really closely at their work - Get down there and peer at how government operates... How it governs us. The cracks show!
The orderings are scratchy... Disorganized... Squiggly. Government's directions are hard to ignore... But the way they pull it off. Well, "elegance" is not the word that springs to mind. The moral? When it comes to government, don't look too closely. We get what we settle for.
DATA: Sunday, 10/01/06, 12:38 pm:Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto,Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 200, Lens Canon EFS 10-22mm, Focal Length 22 mm, Exposure Bias:-.33, 1/250 at f/13, RAW

Din

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Here's a tidal marsh. It rises quicker than an Irish temper. This sunrise was announced by birdsong and water burbles which sounded nothing like a Debussey tone poem. Nope, the meter was odd, and the notes discordant. I imagine that the fuss is an aquired taste to sleepers behind those windows.

There's nothing still about a seacoast morning. Water birds seem as grumpy about daybreak jostling their sleep as me. Up the coast a block or so, a timber mill's already sprung to life, its saws and claw trucks stirring additional whines and grumbles into the thickening sound stew. But those reeds and the colors seem to compensate. There are those who love early mornings. I'm not one of them.

Award Winner 2006: Is Up Better Than Not?

Note: Accepted as one of the world's finest Travel Images of 2006 for Canon POTN Book published in the Fall of 2007.

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Didja ever wonder how much of life goes to places that... Well you just can't tell where it's going from where you are? You can be standing right in front of a way that looks like it's going up – You with me here? And the passageway seems as if it's been there a while and that means others must have passed along... but yet.
Are all things that go up, worth the climb? And when it looks as if the way hasn't been taken in a while, well... the hell does that mean? And suppose that you're not certain if the time's right to climb? Like you can't decide if the sun's setting or rising on the whole idea. Well, didja ever wonder? Huh? Huh?

DATA: Friday, 10/06/06, 7:34 am? pm?:Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto,Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 400, Lens Canon EFS 10-22mm, Focal Length 10 mm, Exposure Bias:+.85, 1/200 at f/9, RAW

Bogged Up

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This was the perfect day. On October 1, they flooded this indented field of cranberry plants by damming up the water flowing through the bog. On October 2, a device shook and raked at the sunken plants so that the berries would bob atop the pond. And a couple of hours after I visited on October 3, they skimmed together, then vacumed the fruit into a tank truck.

These wet-harvested berries are processed into pastes and canned jellies. Only berries whisked dry from their plants can be sold whole. Here's an image which exists for only a precious few hours, then is sucked away. Just like life.

Data: Tuesday, 10/03/06, 8:28 am:Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto,Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 200, Lens Canon EFS 17-85, Focal Length 80 mm, Exposure Bias:-0.67, 1/400 at f/11, RAW

Pellucid

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Just got home from a week in E. Dennis, Massachusetts. That's on the bay side of Cape Cod. The days defined "pellucid". There was a quality of light last week which happens when a tired summer gets gently squeezed by fall's first hug. It's the sort of light which creates accessible shadows. Those are the sort whose darkness is just open enough to invite curiousity. See how that happens in the shoreline here in the marsh? It's as if you've stumbled upon a gaggle of poets, each reciting, and far from its being a din, you can make sense of both the parts and the whole. Post a comment. How does this let you feel?
DATA: Thursday, 10/05/06, 2:36 pm:Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto,Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 200, Lens Canon EFS 17-85, Focal Length 38 mm, Exposure Bias:-0.67, 1/200 at f/10, RAW