Mourning After

Fern Bench

The first freeze finished Fall - overnight. There's a whimpery thing about Autumn:  it lacks a happy ending. Spring triggers hope but Fall-fans know it brings scouring squalls: then flash-frozen rubble of summer memories and wintery worry. Yeah... The  mourning after Fall ends is best framed in black, huh?

GEEK STUFF: Nothing special. A Canon 40D grab shot finished in PS2019 with an assist from Exposure 7 and A.I. Gigapixel (plus a texturizing screen mesh). The grey daybreak result is both morn-full and mournful.

And so another still life filled with obvious purpose. But a feeling of medieval palette?

Summer + Winter - Fall

It's cold outside. 

Summer's green went memory last week and now? Winter stalks don't know they're dead when only last week sun made air green. Summer's a memory, even in summer. But winter's real... hard as a grant tablet. Even in summer, winter's hard. 

Y'know?

GEEK STUFF: That stalk shivered in front of my Canon 7D MkII. It was the day before night flash froze it. And this technique is new to me. I've rendered the image almost entirely with brushes in PSCC in an attempt to place each feeling. 

Flower pictures are hard to understand. It's so hard for an artist to deal with their form, color, line, texture... So hard to let them say anything more than the immensity of what they come to us with. Only the greatest artists can speak through flowers... can find in them a metaphorical doorway to something else. Not something more necessarily, but something other than what they scream into our brains through our eyes. 

Flowers are loud. Thoughts and feelings are subtle. It's easier to change a blinding klieg light than it is to change, bend, influence... the meaning of a flower. Flowers mute the artist.

You ever done a picture-perfect image of a flower? Shown it to someone? Hear them murmur, "How pretty. You are a good photographer." And if you've rendered it in all of its beauty, well you are a good photographer. But if all that an audience sees and feels is flower... You are not an artist. 

Art without wonder is merely craft. Flowers prove that more forcefully than any other subject except... except for babies, dogs, and Hustler centerfolds. 

The Pennsylvania Farm Series 5

Go on back and study the 3rd in this series which I posted on June 26. See there on the lower right... behind the spring house? There's a natural spring fed green lake. This one... In the Fall...

Now look up there on the upper right. See it? There's a heart carved into the crop. Remember, this is a working farm. And in October, well, there are few more gentle places on earth. Can you envision a bride in the foreground? Some of the party lolling in the chairs... Drinks in hand? Once this was a swamp which the family dug out and created more efficient drainage into a stream. See there on the lake's right? Yep that's a diving and fishing dock. The float on the left is the drain as well. Centuries of hard work. 

And now, directly behind me here sits the restored barn. Nope, not shabby at all, huh? BTW: Look at the last post in this group... Series 4. Follow your eye to the far right about a quarter of the way down. See the chairs? Yep, there they are up above. This is a large scene, perfectly executed. 

GEEK STUFF: Yep, hand-held with my Canon 7D Mk.II through its 17-85mm glass - I captured a 3 panel pano. Then it got stitched together in PSCC-2018 where I fixed the distortion, optical range, and relative dynamics. Then I added pieces of various imaging from Topaz Clarity and finished the work with the power of Alien Skin's Exposure X3's Agfa slide film. 

The Prospect of Fall

Daily Specials 6-Noon

Here's the incredibly shrinking Prospect Diner. A once-once-upon-a-time stop for railroad workers before and after each shift. Ditto millworkwers, and before the interstate... truckers and intra-city commuters. This street was once the Conestoga Trail where covered wagons picked up in Conestoga began their way to the Rockies. Until the 1950s, this street was the Lincoln Highway... America's first transcontinental  path between the seas.

Now? The mills and railroad yards have closed. Back behind those cornfields PA Route 30's a divided east-west expressway. Standing here you can hear the song of its tires - a melody of growth. And each decade the Prospect Diner's shrunk its menu and hours. 

Fall's come to the Prospect Diner framing a poignant detritus of change. It's a cooling ember of a dead fire.

Summer Meat

Backyard city bloom • Late Summer 2015

Look at this fella. Then go find a slab of raw steak. Heft them in your mind. Squeeze their bulk. Okay, the steak'll drip something, this thing probably won't. Probably.

Here's a man's flower. Muscular, burley, fisty.... Nothing delicate here. Smash this into some face and it'll welt, huh? This'd damage a butcher's scale.

I like that. A flower that a hammer might not damage... Easily.

It's a guy thing.

Dream Keeper

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There’s a place that you keep
All your world that it seems
Glows dark as you sleep
Filled full with your dreams.


Fall: East Denis, Cape Cod, New England
Canon 20D • PS4: custom textures/brushes, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Watercolor

Almost Autumn

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In moments
It seems
They’ll burst.

Leaves afire
To sear
Your eyes.

And your heart
But not
Till then.

In moments?

***
Chatham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Canon 7D, PS4: pano, Topaz, Custom feelings

Non Textured Texture

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There was so much texture in the scene, I can now file my nails on the image. Wuddaya think?

History's End

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There’s only one track now
Coming to or
Going from?
Castel Gandolpho.

Where once the Popes
Ruled the West
In summer heat
That hasn’t cooled.

Though history
Has…

I wonder if this track is there to fill the now tiny town or to empty it out? I wonder if the devil lies, as they say, in the details? That is to say that the devil dares to lie anywhere near a papal palace.

Geek Stuff
Cannon 20D, Post Processing in PS:CS4: Topaz, Alien Skin: SnapArt – Colored Pencils, custom textures and brushes.

Sunday In The Park

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The lad comes with his mom and dad... his receiver. And he tosses with all his might. Aiming high and far, the thing spins like a bullet. And he tosses and tosses. And dreams...

Geek Stuff

My Canon 7D through the long, long Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens, Then afterward I searched for my feelings in PS-CS4 with custom brushes and textures.

Melancholy

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Autumn sometimes gets me down. Rita and I were homebound this weekend. Missed a nice evening at friends' home. It is true, Autumn is a time when one starts to miss things, huh?

Of course this is a rework of an image I did some Autumns back at East Dennis on Cape Cod.

The first freeze came this morning and killed the flowers. Some seemed startled in their crystal casings especially the youngest blooms which had only begun to blossom. They were caught in that clear syrup of glassy death which only after minutes of sun caused them to wrinkle, brown, and droop from their leafy homes. I'm guessing they felt pretty safe last night... but somewhere in their sleep... Their season ended.

And they are among the things that Fall causes you to miss, huh?

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Chill breeze puffs
The day before a
First frost
Crackles summer
Away with
The boat for
Winter.

GEEK STUFF: Chesapeake Bay, MD. • Canon 20D: Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5), PS/CS4, Topaz, AlienSkin/SnapArt/Watercolor, Custom strokes, textures, brushes, filters.

Fall Before The Fall

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This soon may be gone!

Rode my bike through the Pekway region of Lancaster County yesterday. Fall’s come onto the Amish farms.

Next month the EPA will begin enforcing rigorous standards here to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Runoff from these farmland’s had an impact upon the Bay which people downstream claim is negative. Even though this is a record year for the heavily fished bay area, the pleasure boaters and fisher people have colluded with the Obama administration to impose draconian regulations upon the nation’s richest non-irrigated farmland here in Lancaster County.

The results may have the same impact that the EPA’s had upon the Central California Valley where in order to protect some odd species, they’ve shut off that area’s water supply almost entirely. The result? Ruined farmers, a greater dependency upon imports (from countries with no similar endangered species regulations}, and an increase in food prices which fall, of course, most dramatically upon the most fragile American families who are struggling to survive in this recession. I suppose those are the unintended consequences of well meaning people trying to do utopian stuff, huh?

So I’m making images before Lancaster County’s farmers, and urban areas are laid waste with EPA regs that will topple them into bankruptcy. Why the urban areas? Because they built water reclamation plants before the EPA was founded. Those operations do not meet the new standards. However, while the Federal government provided funds for communities which never built any treatment plants, it refuses to provide funds to upgrade the existing facilities (remember the Stimulus Bill and all of those never materialized shovel ready projects?).

Since every city in Pennsylvania is teetering upon insolvency as a result of other sorts of mandates imposed but not funded by the Pennsylvania state government, these waste treatment costs will probably be the last straw, creating ghost towns throughout what is the commonwealth’s most economically diverse and lowest unemployment region.

Go figger, huh?

Oh well, enjoy it before winter sets in….

Canon G10
Lancaster County, PA

Processing: Canon G10: 3 handheld wide angle images stitched together in PS/CS4: AlienSkin/SnapArt, Topaz, custom brushes.

PART TWO

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And thirty miles or so south of that image up top there was this one taken last week at a friend's house overlooking the river meeting the tidal waters of The Chesapeake Bay. Here's on the shore of Northeast, Maryland we're watching the runoff of centuries of Yankee farming flowing into the headwater's of the American South's most treasured Atlantic Coast bay. And here they're arguing that the tons of fertilizer and animal droppings carried by the river system have changed the very nature of their life.

Once again this is PS/CS4 stitching together six handheld Canon G10 images taken with its widest angle at ISO 600 as the sun set. I used Topaz to additionally enhance the dynamic range.

Rebecca knew better but...

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naughty Samuel had skittered through the door into the darkness toward the crumbling Herr place. She ran behind him in a night momentarily lit by a Fall moon breaking the cloud spattered sky.

Grabbing up Sam, Becca twirled toward home when from the abandoned place she heard, or perhaps felt, a whisper.

—

Camera: my Verizon cellphone’s 1.5 mpx. Had it with me just as I heard… or perhaps felt… the whisper :-)

PP: PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: Bokeh2, SnapArt:2 -> Pointillism. Custom brushes. Construct from images found at a country tag sale and lonely farm-in-the-night pix.

Taxidermy

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John Updike wrote, "We cannot expect the camera to suck in, with light and shade, the photographer's emotions."

Of course he's right, but we can expect today the photographer to reveal his emotions almost transparently in the finished image. Right?


Rhinebeck, N.Y.

What A Card!

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I'm almost out of my website/blogsite cards. So it's time to think about a new design. Hmmmm.... Since there was a lot of nagging from people who were in disbelief that I wasn't transfixed with taking pretty pictures of Fall - well, how about a tongue-in-cheek presentation of a Fall image? A BIG Fall image. On the wall of a gallery. A BIG gallery. Of course it's a virtual gallery. But why not... I am a virtual artist. And here I am presenting a virtual Fall. Hmmmm.... maybe the gallery's not BIG enough?

What do you think? Maybe it should be presented on the wall of Grand Central Station? Or how about I put it up and present it on the wall of The Metropolitan Museum? Or... or.. how about St. Peter's Museum in Rome?

Maybe I gotta think on this, eh?

Gratuitous Fall Picture

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There's a strip mall in the City of Lancaster. When they built it- it became apparent that Red Rose Commons would not be able to spill onto an adjoining wet land. So imagine this... here we have a wild bird preserve that's the result of and virtually a part of a city mall. Cool, huh?

Oh, as for the image look. It's Fall. I take pictures. So I've got to take at least one picture of Autumn in Pennsylvania. Those are the rules in the Ancient Book Of Photographers,right? And this week was the high color. Yesterday I went to Barnes & Noble at the mall, and took this on the way out. Another annual task checked off.

Just Before It Came

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Went to Hyde Park, New York this week. It's just east of the Catskills. You probably know it as the Vatican of the Democrat party in America. It's where FDR and Eleanor lived and got buried. The American taxpayers have preserved both of their homes (they didn't live together, but that's another story). Pilgrims to Hyde Park are just this side of death. They have memories of these people and their dog. Look, I'm not a young puppy myself, but among the tour groups trembling their way through these MUSTY buildings... well, I'm The Kid!

Hyde Park, like a lot of Appalachian Pennsylvania and New York towns, seems encased in amber. You peer through a golden shell to see things that were everywhere at a time just a tiny tad before the memory of sixty percent of most Americans. It's a clean, Stephan-Spielberg-sort-of-place where the buildings look like sets for pictures of restored vintage cars.

Hyde Park feels like grandmother's living room – outside. You can barely smell the moth balls.

It wasn't clear how best to show The Eveready Diner. Above I teased out a romantic pano but then there's a grittier way, this one taken at 1600 ISO to make the noise explode along with the blare and glare of the morning sun careening around inside of my lens to zap up the contrast. Dunno which evokes the essence of this place. Above I feel the 1940s-50s floating into view, and here the place is clad in a harsher light of the moment. Where's the truth lie? Perhaps somewhere between stark and warm? You call it, K?

NOTE: I am an economist. It's what I do all day long. Some weeks ago it was apparent that the world's financial institutions were at ghastly risk. As you all know now, that risk is upon us. In that period between recognition of potential disaster and its first encroachments... I have been seeing commonplace things as potentially temporary. Existing in borrowed time as the storm built.... Standing here, innocently unaware and doing business as usual... Just before IT came. This is not a happy picture. I am not happy just now. I am developing a nostalgia about... not the past... but the present which seems so fragile as I look around. A storm is coming, and people go about their days, unwarned and unprepared. On top of it we have a bitter election in America. Its shape frightens me even more.

Next October

SUMMER'S CHAIRS ARE EMPTY

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I'm sitting here on the last Sunday morning in September hearing the hourglass sand drop away. It's flowing inexorably toward October. So my fingers work to remember the future. Each time we wish that this time we'll hold this glory forever. Each time we hope that it all won't die. Each time it does.

We are the only species in history who expect that we are entitled to a Fall, and a climate, that never changes.

Fall would be the finest time of year except... it lacks a happy ending.


***

Here's the virgin Middlebury, Vermont image from my FlashCard... Comments?

My Cousin Joe

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When I last spoke with my cousin Joe Manson early in November, he was leaving for the airport to go to Miami where, he explained, he was going to work with his sister Maryrose to handle a family problem.In searching the net a few moments ago I discovered that his sister, my cousin, Maryrose died on November 5th.

Joe either knew nothing of Maryrose's illness, or chose to keep their secret. Perhaps it was sudden. He must have been at her side at the end. I was searching the net tonight because last evening one of Joe's daughters called me to explain that on Saturday evening, her dad passed away from cancer. I am very sad. I loved them both, but Joe was much closer to my age so I knew him better. I am told he was lucid to the end, and indeed he'd written copious notes that directed his own funeral. Apparently he planned it for next Saturday, but he neglected to recall that Saturday is a Holy day, hence the Catholic parish church he served as a deacon is fully available only on Friday.

Joe and his wonderful family live just outside of Philadelphia, and this gap of ninety miles has let us lose regular track of one another. I shall miss knowing he was near. He was a blessed friend to my parents when I lived in New England stopping in almost every other day. As a CPA, he handled their finances. He did for them much that I wish I could have. He was always available for advice... Now I wish I'd called upon it more often. There aren't an abundance of very solid people in my world, solidity is something so damned precious and when a piece of it slips... Even a piece that you neglected, yet counted upon... Things become shakier. Damn... It did not seem to be his turn. Others on our line of cousins are older. Others have had more happy days with their grandkids. If you believe in God, you probably wonder why such a good guy wasn't given more of that.

But perhaps God himself grows lonely for solidity,eh?

Take care....

Ted

BTW... I took Rocco out for an adventure a couple of weekends back along the Conestoga River as it flows past Lancaster. This mystically regenerating tree against the color and promise of fall and that endless river felt so hopeful even at a time when things seem to be shutting down for awhile. I recalled it when I thought of Joe and the flow of family memories which continually regenerate and pass along as colorful bits for those who wait downstream.