A Lot about a Lot...

Along West Chestnut Street • April 5, 2003

Once upon a time a train ran through it. Here my lens looked north. About two miles to the right... toward the east... the main line of the old Pennsylvania Railroad and now AMTRAK's main line runs east along those nearby tracks to the Atlantic and west to the Pacific. For about 80 years, until 1929, those trains sliced Lancaster City in half. Here's a picture looking northeast of what once stood in that lot up there.

N. Queen St & W. Chestnut streets • Lancaster City Depot c. 1900

When the big smoky engines wormed their passenger and freight across Lancaster's streets, traffic stopped. Lancaster stopped. The 'new' station up by the mainline's been recently restored from it's 1929 shabbiness and the old tracks plucked out of the streets, restitching the city's halves together. Incidentally, that RR station is Pennsylvania's second busiest. And was the set for key scenes in Harrison Ford's Amish movie, Witness.

And after the old depot was razed, until two years ago, stood (??) that lot I'd captured in 2003. Sometime I'll get around to showing the sparkling structure that's been fit into the lots from the Chestnut street curb to behind where that Hertz-signed factory stood. Now the entire street's renewed and filled with period-appropriate new transport, retail, pubs, offices and condos. The gentry's returning to the diverse mix of Lancaster that's constructing new layers atop what archeologists will someday probe. 

You can smell ambition and optimism in the air that once hovered above that shabby 2003 lot.

"Why," the old man said, "If you can keep it."

Across The Street From Us • Late November • Lancaster, Pa.

Someone once wrote an essay about Derry, Ireland. It was after the fragile cease fire between Brits and Irish was holding and the bombs, gunsmoke, and carnage that littered the city had sunken into a recent memory place. He called that story, "Reveling In The Ordinary."

It's something we don't do enough. Media likes to find a man with his fangs into a dog. If it bleeds it leads. If anyone's destitute, then that's the lede line, or the headline. Media craves circ, audience, clicks. Many blame that on their source of revenue... advertisers voracious for messaging to the largest markets. And yet, when governments support media, it's still filled with fangs in dogs, bloody sidewalks, and those who cannot - or will not - do for themselves. 

And images like this one? Hey, not cool. Not edgy. Too... yesterday. They're reveling in the ordinary. Won't do... Nope, just not enough... grit. Eh? Sigh...

So we're living in a time of broiling politics, fueled by discontent and eager to smash the whole thing into a zillion chards of tribes to set upon one another and let blood spatter those walks. It's an atomization bomb that brings to mind an old man answering a group outside of Constitution Hall who  were asking what sort of government the framers inside had created. 

"Why," the old man said, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Maybe we can... if perhaps we may once again appreciate and revel in the ordinary?

GEEK STUFF:  Canon 7D MkII, 50mm, post in PSCC. It doesn't take much of a kit to grab a feeling of, well in this case: A merry Christmas time. But the only thing cool about it is... the late November air. Pity, this week I cannot find my edge. 

Dappled Street Art

Musser Park, the Green Heart of Lancaster, sits fifty feet from our front door. It's the city's only central green space. Weather permitting, it fills with lunch-baggers, free-range kids, rallies, pick-up games, family picnics, music groups, holiday events, sunbathers, young loves or readers on benches, chess players, dog walkers: like that.

Sometimes it's where people assemble to do politics in the sunshine. Then, thousands come to learn and share beliefs. It's a civics place that allows for loud and quiet reflection. Over the last handful of decades we've renamed parks, now they're public spaces (as if they weren't before). Even among public tumult, even when hundreds or thousands of people swirl around... A man can sit in the grass, and try to figure out a moment in time. 

In Musser Park, more than sunlight dapples. 

Bernie Came To Town - 4

So? Is Bernie Sanders controversial or mainstream? Izzit possible to be both? Who decides whether something is "controversial". To some President Trump is controversial, other find Mrs. Clinton leads their list of controversial folks. By the way, is there something wrong with being "controversial"? Is that a negative label? Miriam Webster defines controversy as, "a discussion marked especially by the expression of opposing views." And "controversial" the dictionary define as, " Of, relating to, or arousing controversy." Are these bad or even dangerous things? 

I'm going to guess about this happy mother and child that, even if she finds Senator Sanders, controversial, that she neither finds him bad, nor dangerous. Mothers rarely expose their babies to hazards. In fact, to the degree that she finds the Senator's views to be in opposition to others, they don't seem in opposition to hers. Hence - there's no controversy here. Yet, someone has defined this Senator, the present President, and the views of so many others to be controversial. Who are the labelers? 

A supporter of AFSME vigorously supports Democrat Congressional candidate Jess King.

Yessss... there are people strongly invested in Senator Sanders and Jess King's views. And frequently they represent groups to which they belong. For example the enthusiastic lady above wears a tea shirt sporting the emblem of the American Federation of State and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union which feels changes in legislation or the courts might be difficult to deal with. 

Nobody likes change. Many hopefully endorse it, yet find its disciplines uncomfortable. Hope's a fragile business plan. Now I'm not writing about trends here... Trends are like the ocean's currents that move things along in a kind of predictable way leaving lots of time for, well, assimilation to a trend's dynamics. It's when people notice changes in trends that they go like, "Huh"?

Where's Waldo? Is Democracy lost like Waldo, or has it found it's
setting among the large  audience in  Musser Park, PA?

Then they wonder where their world's going... or went. Irving Kristol, wrote "The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can ... twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape." Which is when people wonder, "Where's Waldo?" What's happened? 

A random grab shot of about a dozen of the thousands of faces listening to
Senator Bernie Sanders speak  in  Musser Park, Lancaster, PA. 

Political rallies can be about groups or individuals... Forests or trees. It's the trees that I like. The emotional waves that beam from faces: each telling a separate story. Here's an exercise, click on the image above then plumb each expression and let it plop you onto a story arc. I  learn the most about forests when I pay attention to the trees. 

Niccoló Machiavelli, the father of modern political science, taught his Prince, "Whoever wishes to change the government of a city to his whims and wants it to be accepted and to maintain it to everyone's satisfaction, will have to retain at least the shadow of the ancient ways, so that to the people nothing will seem to have changed although in fact the new laws are in all respects completely alien to those of the past." 

When  "reform" changes things - politicians aren't above faking a tradition when necessary. The appeal to tradition is useful both to sustain a social experiment or to destroy it. Think of the phrase so many politicians are quick to tell us when they oppose opponents of the impact of their experiments, "That's not what America is about." 

Waldo is about the forrest, faces tell the story of the trees. 

Bernie Came To Town - 3

Once I read a guy who wrote, "We regard politicians as self-interested opportunists and nothing else."

At 7am noises began for the 10am event. Sanders fans began swirling onto Musser Park's quadrangle.  The media likes contention. But most political gatherings in the U.S. are filled with happy, enthusiastic people which dials down chances for unpleasant, click-bait, stuff. So the average rally doesn't get much coverage. See this fella below? He came to hear Bernie Sanders, but happily waggled a Jess King lawn sign at me. That's the deal, Sanders is the headliner and opening act, the local Democrat candidate follows up as the main event. Point is that the campaign trail for every candidate is lined with believers and audiences who love a parade. Regardless, the price is right and most folks are in a great mood.

Speaking of signs.

Along the edge of the crowd, a critic of the Senator and the local Congressional candidate hefted his argument into the sun. It seemed to me that the lady was in kindly debate mode. Cynics say we have lost belief in politics as a source of betterment in our lives. Believers who pack into Sanders or Trump rallies haven't lost faith in politicians' interests in their dreams. 

Bernie Came To Town - 2

And the beat goes on.

Street portraiture's a bit like fishing. I cast my lens into a pool hoping to catch a prize... Something worthwhile. There are two kinds of artistic images. The first is a question, the second an answer. Oh, ok... maybe there's a third - the image which both asks then answers. Frankly, answering questions is above my pay grade. Personally I feel that asking questions is what the best art does. Answering can too often become a polemic.

So I look for questions that each visitor to my work answers alone.

The first in this series set the tone for the questions that occurred to me on May 5th. Here's another, more will come and perhaps the entire set may contain an answer. Synergy happens when the whole becomes greater than its parts. When each sentence is a question, perhaps the impact of the essay is what Sextus Impericus invented maybe 2,200 years ago? You know, a set of questions which while each is seemingly unrelated the whole allows inductive insight?

Truth is revealed from the bottom up. Now don't get me started on "truth" - OK?

What can we conclude from this man and young woman? He wears a wedding ring. They each carry signs... His read, "America Is For All Of Us", and her's "Jess King For Congress". Each of the signs were given to early arrivers, but no one had to take them. Bernie spoke as I grabbed this image. They were rapt, nodding to his points. Can we tell more? He wears a fashionable stubble. Her ears don't appear pierced. I'm imaging that this is a father/daughter pair, their jaw and cheekbone lines suggest a familial relationship. Can you find more clues? Their expressions are serious, attentive. Awaiting Senator Sanders, they'd stood and squinted into the sizzling Spring sun for hours. 

GEEK STUFF: Same equipment as the first in this series. However the afternoon's sunny contrast pulled me to use Alien Skin's Exposure 4's powerful emulation of Kodak Ectachrome EES to take advantage of its saturated palette and low contrast. It's was a workhorse film with a tiny grain structure and reasonably wide tonal range at low ISO (ASA) settings. Plus my 300mm lens permitted a sufficiently narrow depth of field to pluck my subjects from the large crowd surrounding them.

Bernie Came To Town - 1

Democrat Congressional Candidate Jess King addresses a large
crowd in Lancaster's Musser Park on May 6, 2018

Last Saturday May 5th, Senator Bernie Sanders, a previous Democrat Socialist candidate for President of the U.S., arrived in Lancaster to endorse a local Democrat candidate, Jess King, for Congress. Some 2,800+ Sanders' followers joined him in Musser Park which is about 500' from my home. With press credentials hanging about my neck I did street photography of the crowd. It was a warm sunny Spring afternoon with the audience in a happy mood. Here's the first of those portraits.

Geek Stuff: Agfachrome slide film presented my favorite color palette. Thanks to Alien Skin's Exposure X3, I can approximate both that palette and its grain structure. Of course my Canon EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens was easily hand held on a Canon 7D MrkII producing needle sharp images. I guess I was, on average, about 50' from subjects - but I made no effort to hide: The park crawled with press photographers. 

Incidentally: I estimated the crowd's size at 2,800 by breaking the lead pano in this post above into 21 quadrants and meticulously counting the people in each. I then similarly analyzed two other panos I shot from different angles - angles which revealed the additional numbers to the left and right of the pano atop this posting. 

BTW, Lancaster has about 55,000 residents and Lancaster County (where few homes are more than 45 minutes from Musser Park). 

Medium Tech

Musser Park, July 4th 2016 • The Red Rose Honor Guard presents as the Malta Concert Band plays the anthem.

Technology is how we... humans... extend ourselves. Take media for example. I'm sitting in a media room looking at 60 inch flat screen immersed in surround sound while typing into this blog as it appears on my 27" iMac. Both the cable system powering the TV and the mega-speed internet hookup that I'm feeding are portals. The let me peer into places scattered around the globe and then push back at them. Last night I Face-Timed some friends in Texas. Soon I'll interact with my home desktop from Spain.

Symphonic orchestras and classical musicians are experiencing huge difficulties attracting younger audiences who find that sitting in a concert hall only satisfies one of their senses. While the video games they left at home allowed them to interact with at least three... sight, hearing, and touch. No matter how expert the musicians, those hours in symphony halls are to them so flat in comparison. Even movies are flattened by their inability to permit interaction or to allow something other than a linear experience.

Linear? Well sure. Try to jump ahead in a movie theater to "the good parts" Look how the music "album" is dying as iTunes buyers or Pandora listener are  freed from purchasing collections of an artist's music, and instead can graze through vast cafeterias choosing where they want to wallow.

And then there were parades. Remember them? They were multi-media sure, but linear. People increasingly reject the tyranny of parade organizers who mix the mediocre or shamefully commercial into the stream... Once again forcing watchers to accept their judgements. Even the large holiday celebrations are finding it hard to compete against competitors for time. Competitors who have cut markets into tinier and tinier niches. Suburban 12 year old females with an Asian heritage can build their own community networks of people like themselves who will allow them multi-entry non-linear interactive, surround sound experiences that they can access spontaneously 24/7.

Mass cultural battlements will not survive those assaults. Instead they will increasingly appeal only to the nostalgia of aging groups. We talk about the death of distance, when it's the death of traditional glue that's even more existentially transformative.

High tech has destroyed a sense of long term planning. And medium tech's the fuel only of nostalgia. It's what good aging people put into museums and holiday celebrations, while they still exist.

Tell Me A Story • #5 - When to say, "Done!"

Runner • Lancaster Race Against Racism • 4/16

There're novels behind every face. 

Every artist understands the challenge of when to say, "There. That's finished! Now I can turn to another work." While we all know that a work is never finished. Nor is any one interpretation or conceptualization adequate. But the composer enters a last note, the poet a last word, and the novelist a last feeling. So do I. You? Do you know that anything ends sufficiently to write "Finis"! after a work? 

Anywayzzzzz.... You'll recall I wrestled with this man's image in late May. Then I had run into tech problems, which never did resolve themselves. But his story continued to haunt me... And then it occurred to me to think that he was best "penciled in". Uh-huh, that his story was difficult to capture and is best rendered in zillions of strokes. 

In this "Tell Me A Story" series, I'm interested in your thoughts/feelings re. this man's thoughts/feelings. Faces trigger us to wonder, then tell ourselves their story, right? So? If you found this as the illustration above a serious magazine's short story... What would it be about? Hmmmmm? 

Tell Me A Story • 4: Madonna

Race Against Racism runner(a)  • 4/30/17 • Lancaster, PA

Mysterious eyes. 

When color's surgically cut away, is there more or less identity... More or less story... More or fewer clues? I wonder: Do blind people understand others at a deeper or more shallow level? Is radio in anyway superior to video in communicating the depth of personalities? 

There's a resistance to digital post-processing, dismissing it as inauthentic. The word manipulation is the common verb that describes digital post work. I prefer augmentation, even revelation since manipulation sounds what? Dreary? Calculating? Callow? Shallow? Never mind that painters, for example, do nothing but manipulate... augment... reveal... the realities they imagine. Ditto poets, novelists, and composers. Can you imagine someone charging a symphonic composer of manipulation? Playwrights routinely manipulate the emotions of audiences, don't they? Is that a bad thing?

Yet somehow describing digital post processing as manipulation is dismissive, even insulting. But that's not my real point here. Those most likely to critique the idea of augmentative post processing argue that purity lies only in the image which comes out of the camera, right? Now I've written about pre-processing (lens choice, lighting constructs, filters, makeup, wardrobe, scenery, POV... and like that), and even what I guess you could call immediate processing involving the manipulation of panning, framing, and DOF. All of that manipulates what comes out of the camera. And that doesn't even begin to touch the things camera engineers have built in to manipulate sharpness, color and dynamic range, Etc. 

But none the less, purists who reject digital post processing as in-authentic have no memory of the wet darkroom where printmakers first selected among radically different developer chemistries/timings/heat, then chose between diffuser versus condenser enlargers, contrast/texture/pigment of papers/substrate, developer dynamics, hold-backs, burnings-in, solarizations, and on and on to create a one-of-a-kind final print, even in monotone. The opportunities to create one-off darkroom prints in color increased exponentially. The fact is that there never was a final print that was not processed heavily by at least the photographic artists and perhaps different darkroom technicians, and retouchers (both on the negatives and prints). 

Is all of this sounding defensive? Okay.... look at this:

Race Against Racism runner (b)  • 4/30/17 • Lancaster, PA

As I roamed the park next to my home here in Lancaster on the morning of this year's Race Against Racism run - I consciously looked for a series of faces to speak to you dramatically in monochrome.I could have set my Canon 7D to bleach away all color and make captures only in monochrome. Why do that? Why not allow all of the information possible to reveal narrative arcs? 

So first I processed this image above as a square (you'll note that this and the next images will all be square-cropped, since my Hasselblad days, that format's been a powerful challenge to me). And I processed it for the most haunting dynamic range and sculpting, adding a touch of glow to offset the overcast lighting of that morning. Then finally worked in monochrome to release the image at the start of this essay. 

But the geek-stuff all involves focusing powerful tools to carve out a narrative arc that allows the lady to tell her story. So, what is it? Once again, Tell Me A Story - THE story which you read from faces. I'm convinced that every street portrait needs to trigger at least  a short story - and perhaps a poem, novel, or epic. Hell, maybe even a sonata, if you won't accuse the composer of manipulating the notes - or the mysterious eyes :-)

Tell Me A Story • 3: Cryptic Moments

Philosophy Unbounded?

Shard-sharp

Lens glass

Slices life

Into

Cryptic

Moments.

Ambiguity: To the artist it's a window, to the craftsman it's a wall.

I try to make my pictures about something, y'know? I'm searching for images that resonate some thought and feeling. Anne Leibowitz once wrote, "A photographer hangs frames around pieces of life. In every direction I look, I'm framing." Works of art are about something, but where to find the answer to their questions? In the artist's mind? I don't think so. In fact when the creator supplies an unambiguous answer to that question we modify his title... We call him a commercial artist, right?  Which is a lot more craft than art.

And what about interior designers? Are they artists? Is decorative art - art? When we buy an image to coordinate with the couch, have we purchased art? Or does the art exist independent of, the couch? Should  a professional artist care? Uh-oh, when someone adds, professional to their title, that means they expect to augment their income from their work, right? So they are driven by some market's interest.

Which brings us back to the creator supplying an answer to a market's question. Of course there are situations where a market finds an artist's work which was created without an expectation to specifically answering someone else's question. But once again I've got this niggling question:
What is the difference between creativity and adaptability? Does the weight of survival inexorably shape the meaning of a professional artist's work toward answering some market's questions?

Art, they say in art school:Art lacks constraints - it is philosophy unbounded. And yet the product of art schools are artists who want to survive through their work. Which is one hell of a constraint, huh? No wonder we call 'em starving artists.

Oh, the picture up there is another in this year's Race Against Racism 2016. I'm enchanted by the beauty of this woman. Her face is a portraitist's dream and this slice of life is about... about... Well okay... What's the answer?

Geek Stuff: Another hand-held capture through my Canon 7D's EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. It's razor sharp... perfect for slicing life into cryptic moments, huh? 

Tell Me A Story • 2: Suspending Disbelief

Runner in the April 30th, 2016 YWCA Race Against Racism

We live across the street from Lancaster's YWCA. Since the turn of the century the Y's held a Saturday April morning Race Against Racism attracting thousands of runners. Nice of them to flood the street out front and the park we adjoin with a sea of puzzling faces. And As I wrote in the last post... "A face ignites its own explanation: Which is a dramatic narrative." So wandering through the crowds with my long lens (Canon 70-300mm) lets me pluck out wondering, y'know? 

Take this young guy. Someone said he's a 16 or 17 year old high school student. Hmmmm.... He looks like a movie star, no? It's hard to pry out tales from young faces, particularly when they are way attractive. Still, although it looks like the young man's won a lot in the gene lottery, I'm guessing that those shoulders and arms took a bunch of discipline to pump, right? And his caramel skin and curly hair seem latin? About thirty feet from this guy sat a collection of food vendors where he could have grabbed candy, fries, pretzels, and pastries. Instead he chose that apple. 

Uh-huh, there's discipline there and add the 5 kilometer run he just finished the guy's got an athlete's instinct. Do we instinctively trust handsome or pretty faces? It's like attractive people have a unique muscle that works emotionally. But it also defends them like an armor... protects them from probing. Maybe that's why lead actors are so good-looking: so that we'll believe whatever character they'll pull on for a performance? 

Does beauty make it easier for an audience to suspend disbelief? Hmmmm.... 

Grabbed the shot hand-held with my Canon 7D at 160mm (perfect length for portraits, huh?), 1/1000 sec and a low noise 400 ISO. The morning was slightly overcast and still early enough for sweet light. 

Tell Me A Story

A face ignites its own explanation: Which is a dramatic narrative.   

Street portraits capture what? Maybe the first words, of the first sentence, of a story. They’re about portents. They’re like keyholes. We plug our imaginations into them to create a dramatic narrative. We expect a face to have more meaning than what it communicates. Its first jolt to our imaginations is processed by our emotions to hunt for collateral messages. We’re programmed to find order that creates meaning. A face ignites its own explanation: A dramatic narrative.

A face sliced from an infinite number of instants at 1/500^th of second is like an onion-skin-thin slice of tree. The texture and rings give up some knowledge of age and maybe species, perhaps gender… It gives back something about the tree’s experiences with physics, biology, and even how it leaned against nature’s propositions. But we’d need to see a lot more of the tree to release secrets of its coping mechanisms. It tells of the way life’s winds and weather whirled about its location. What stunting or enabling happened as it aged.

Street portraits trigger speculation. The best of them are purées of nuanced ingredients which fuel then steer the engine of wonder. And art without wonder is merely craft.

Who is this man? What a tantalizing hint he gives us both with his fleeting expression and with the way he’s allowed years to chisel his face. See how he’s chosen to permit and resist life’s propositions?

My take? Here’s a strong, alert guy… A skeptic but not a cynic… He knows there’s enough evidence to make decisions. Learned to cautiously seek it. And learned to learn from it. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. 

About a century ago, the now forgotten journalist and humorist Ambrose Bierce wrote, “Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum… I think I think, therefore I think I am.” And I think that the man I pictured up there, would think carefully about that joke… and smile.

On the last Saturday of April 2016  Lancaster’s YWCA held its annual Race Against Racism right outside of my home. For the past 16 years I’ve hunted among the many hundreds of runners and spectators who participate for these storybook faces. This year I gathered them through my Canon 7D’s EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens, then tried to decipher their stories. 

Thinkin' About This Stuff. 1

Okay... There's this thing called "Color Management". And it's all about sliding what you see on the screen into a different-sized envelope.  Only the dimensions of the original are defined in color numbers, and a unique set of metrics Like pushing a hot dog into a cube.

Gamma is a term that defines the dimensions of different spaces. So gamma defines different work spaces like sRGB, or RGB, CMYK, or my favorite RGB (Adobe). There are others. My Canon 7D is set to create RGB images. But net images are usually contained inside of an sRGB box. And each printer/paper combination has its own unique envelope that shapes colors that will be reproduced.

So... Color Management has to do with a series of moves from Camera envelope to monitor envelope to printer/paper envelope. I think of each of those envelopes as gammas. And they just don't overlap. No matter what, it's almost impossible to match a monitor image to final print. 

The cheaper the monitor, the less likely that the process will be predictable. And even with the best monitors, if their screens aren't identically calibrated, both with themselves and standards for other gammas, then what you see you really won't get into a printer and onto its paper.

Three are so many variables here. It's terrifically complex and discouraging if you're printing test prints while changing values of the transmitting gamma. 

Oh... and then there's viewing light. I replaced all of the lights in my studio so that they'd mimic daylight. Tungsten lights darken the dynamic range while shifting the perceived printed image toward red/magenta. I can now hold my print next to my monitor and actually compare the range of colors.  

I'm using the image above as my first level test. The palette is vivid but they fall within a narrow color range. I'm tweaking my computer/monitor combo and working to get the monitor's gamma as close to the Epson P-800/chosen paper gamma. I'm about 90% there.

Sometimes my mind changes. Yours?

I like alleyways. They're where time leaves the most dust. Y'know?

Ordinary Late Summer Afternoon

8 Blocks From City Center • Lancaster, PA • September 2015

There are still dirt streets in Lancaster. This scene's unchanged since these small carriage houses were mildly converted for autos in the early 1920s, Here's where middle class working people keep vehicles. That's what this is. What it isn't is any sort of formal garden or the rigorous creation of inspired architects. But isn't it beautiful?

Once again, it's the ordinary detritus of humans. There's no graffiti here, nor is there any garbage or trash strewn about. The buildings are coated in protective paint. the vegetation's manicured by use. Yet isn't it beautiful? 

This is a public alleyway where I bike occasionally. Anyone can abuse it. They don't. Why? Because neighbors won't allow it. Users won't allow it. Is it policed? Uh-huh, but not by the police. Is it secure? Uh-huh, but not by security forces. Conscience is an endoskeleton. Police are an exoskeleton, along with schools, courts, legislators, and churches. The more a society shares one internal culture the less any of the institutions police from outside.  Political "freedom" is checked internally or externally. Freedom - in every useful way- is what culture allows. 

Culture trumps everything. 

The charm of this summer moment is the result of what conscience won't allow. It's what a stone looks like when the ugly stuff gets sculpted away. Isn't it beautiful? 

Don't Drink And Thrive

Wall • W. Chestnut & N. Queen St. • Lancaster, Pa

This board is gone now. I don't mean the ad, I mean the board, the installation... The whatever-you-call-it that holds the message. Which doesn't surprise me since this is like an alley and the traffic on the street to the left up there is one way... Toward the camera! Meaning that city traffic would see it only in rear view mirrors... So... Backward. And there are no lights on the thing. 

Why would anyone have spent the money to erect it? Why would anyone purchase its space? What goes through the minds of people who make decisions to spend money? Since this is a marketing decision, perhaps they advertisers were merely told that they were getting space on a board in the very heart of Lancaster's downtown? Maybe that's the way the owners promoted this thing? 

But if you'd rented its space, then later tried to find it from your car, well, do 'de expression, PizzedOff spring to mind? A friend of mine recently bought that building and he's turning it into a posh series of down-town condos. I wonder if he has plans to paint this wall? But then again, like that billboard, I'm not sure anyone will care. You?

Dos Vecinos

These young guys live around the corner. They've been friends for years. Best buddies since they came to Lancaster six years ago, maybe a little longer.

Come the first fall breeze they'll pull out their parkas. Most of a lifetime in the Gulf's blue water islands leaves their buffers to chill not quite as hefty as mine, or other North Eastern lifers.

But while the afternoon sun thickens my body-motor oils, it perks the energy of these fellas. Last week while the August heat melted me into a park bench, I watched them kicking their futball. They kidded me puddling in the hot, humid, hazy high-summer. It was revenge for my giggles at their early Fall and late Spring parkas.

Odd isn't it that heat is a byproduct of solar energy, right? So why's it suck mine away? I've got a buddy who wonders since heat rises, why not vacation on Mt. Everest? After all we think of the Caribbean being "down south" right? So how come with that heat rising thing...  it's colder up here? :-)

One thing though about the afternoon summer sun... it channels the golden tones of the renaissance masters particularly when it glow-coats Latin skin-tone patinas. A lot of my friends despise image gathering in the afternoon glare. Okay, I like the blue hours around sunrise, and the red moments at sunset... but since necessity's forced me a zillion times into the midday sun, I've found that today's; RAW imaging, super-sharp laser-coated lenses, and pre & post processing power've opened all sorts of opportunities to sculpt the high and low key moments of hot contrast.

Okay, it's harsh light for wide angle landscapes, but that just demands we're more careful. I understood that this was going to be a low key portrait. That's what I metered. Consequently the shadows smothered away background distractions. Yeah, you can do that with bokeh. But contrast is an alternative tool, right? Besides, it's not the impenetrable shadows that cause us to reject mid-day imagery as too harsh... It's the transitions... Soften them and... well see the results up there? Noon-time softness that makes personalities dance.

You agree?

Blog Sites?

Maybe I'll break down and lease me a website service? But which one? It'd be cool if this image expanded to fill the top of this page. So much research exists to show that on every printed page, the visitor's eyes go first to pictures, secondly to their captions, next to headlines, and lastly toward body copy like this. 

So I'm leaning to the conclusion that a page dominated by a strong image will grab eyeballs to that graphic and then immediately to the text below as its caption. Thus with no distracting headline the process of image to copy is reeely improved. Here, with that weakly sized image up there falling way short of page dominance, visitors have so much less to pique their imagination and to drive it downward for answers. 

In other words, blogger.com is not an artist's best blog platform. Which brings me back to the impetus to think about a leased website service, one that's affordable and whose learning curve won't distract me from spontaneously using it.

Expanded significantly, that image up there is full of questions, right? Don't you want some explanation? Which is the challenge of conceptual art, it needs to be filled in with meaning. OK, I understand that it's the viewer, not the artist who carries the responsibility to give art meaning. Still, I want to give my interpretation for whatever it's worth. What I felt, and concluded when I took, then processed this image.

So two questions for you...

(1) Any recommendations from you re. the perfect blog service for photographers (including costs, or at least directions where I can discover them easily) which will allow me to curate a gallery of ideas led by an image? And,

(2) What's your emotional reaction to that image up there at the top of this posting? Does it ignite a question (s) that either you can enjoy answering, or a question re. the meaning of this image tat will stimulate me and everyone else who stops by, toward a thoughtful answer? 

Anyone?

Buddies

Spring morning. Buddies. Hanging in the park. Doing whatever. Nice guys, no drama at 11... Not quite yet. Here're boys who haven't learned to slide on attitude with their sneaks.

On the other side of adolescence they'll remember this summer's sun, and how they didn't need to do anything, but could still do everything.

What'll it be today? Something forgettably memorable. And this summer's blur will be there somewhere in memory storage. Like a rhinestone, they'll pull it out decades from now to peer at the glow of a long-ago summer's that's all around this park bench with their best buddies ever.
I caught the boys with my Canon 7D's EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens cranked out to about 150mm. The stabilizer on this glass keeps it sharp enough to prick balloons. Sharp enough to slice off a hunk of boy-memory. Sharp enough to capture buddies who touch in a shared personal space... Remember?