Majorette: PreSpring/PostWinter 1974

St. Paddy's Day • Holyoke, MA • 1974

Forty-seven years ago three boys climbed a tree. Today they're what? Late 50s? Forty-seven years ago a pretty red-head led her high-school band up the street beneath that tree. She was probably 17 then and they were maybe eleven? Did she notice them? Is this the only memory of that moment? 

Holyoke once boasted the country's longest St. Patrick's Day Parade. March in Western Massachusetts is brisk. St. Paddy's Day sits right in the crack between spring and winter. Temps that day were probably in the high forties with a medium breeze. Now those weren't ancient times. People had color TVs and there were games to watch warmly at home. And there were movies to see and malls to lurk. It wasn't a once-upon-a-time when parades monopolized BIG TIME mass entertainment. Even so, crowds still lined up to watch this majorette prance up Holyoke's main street behind a pick-up-truck float carting the High School's queen and court. 

A while ago I found a slide-filled Kodak Carousel. Most were Ektachrome or Agfachrome -  films that probably aren't made anymore. I grabbed this shot with my Nikon, a machine that did not focus itself. Uh-huh, I had to do that. And you can see how poorly. Plus I had to set the exposure for what I think was even in bright sun light a lazy-slow-cool-contrasty film. Nailed it, right?

Yeah, I wish this decisive moment was tack sharp, but what memories are? How well can you access mental memory cards? Better than that one up there? Congrats to you. This image was a doorway back to that moment. A bunch of us carted lawn chairs, babies,  blankets, and coolers of food and beer to a stretch of cracking sidewalk in a town that was old even then. Yeah, I remember clapping and hooting and dancing and singing and laughing. Then driving to someone's home to keep going into the brisk Western New England night.

Life is fine today. We're happy, my wife and I. We have new, if different friends. Those olden days of parade parties haven't happened in a long time. Like Ektachrome, their saturation's faded inside my head. But... while memories are soft as that image up there, the shapes are warm, and smile making. And for an instant, I can look at those boys, that young woman, and understand something about boys and girls and parades and friends. And realize that the hazy picture's not the only memory of that moment.

Nice.

 

The Water's Colored: Sunrise Near Osterville, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Just before the sun rose over Cape Cod colors almost became neon. The Cape's about water, and the palette seemed washed onto the frame with soft brushes. Alone on that bridge I felt as if I ought to have a tripod, canvas, and a large tin of watercolor pigment. 

Watercolors have a cellophane transparency as they wash across one another and sink into paper. The thing about this medium that really resonates with me is the lack of detail when colors are well diluted. I stood there and watched an abstract come to life along this back-lit tidal channel. About a quarter mile down the road to my right there's a tiny port where a fishing boat motor dieseled to life and the scent of sizzling bacon mixed with salty air. 

I hand-held five shots with my Canon 7D through an EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5) at 10mm. then merged the them into a pano in PS4. Then I sucked out the color in a layer processed in Topaz B&W Effects 2. Then I worked the color range back in from a layer I processed in Alien Skin's Exposure X starting with Kodachrome II then shifting it warmer. Each region of the merged layers was carefully processed in PS4 to bring the dynamic range into a dreamy mood. Then I worked the merged frame in AlienSkin's Snap Art4: Water Color, carefully laying in the brush strokes. Sometimes people ask how much time I expend in a final image like this. This one took about 11 hours to replicate how I felt standing on this narrow Osterville bridge at sunrise on a cool September Tuesday morning. 

Can you feel the breeze in your face?

What's the Magic?

Nauset Light (1877) • Cape Cod, MA

Nauset Light (1877), Barnstable, Mass, Cape Cod - United States

Once upon a time, - boys and girls - Nauset Light was a key part of the Global Positioning System. And from 1877 on,  if you were near Barnstable on the North Atlantic at night... it was a part of the Cape Cod 8-lighthouse Positioning System.

Today's GPS is a disruptive tech. It made this cone at daybreak only pretty. It's been decommissioned and the keeper's house was given, along with the light, to a preservation society.

It's one of the East Coast's least photographed lights, and hard to find sitting smack in the middle of a neighborhood of cottages that grew around it.

Now, here's the question... Why the hell do we feel driven to make images of these things? They were public utilities. So are dumpsters and fire hydrants. Have you got many dumpster/hydrant pix? Okay, maybe it's a supply/demand thing? Not as many lighthouses around... Does that explain it? If that's the reason, well then why don't we picture every old bridge? Or municipal hall? Or ... you get the, um, picture, right?

And yet... yet... I don't care what sort of art you're into, you gotta' admit that the itch to do something with a lighthouse tingles-right? What's the magic?

Here's what late summer looks like in Nauset through my Canon 7D's  EFS 70-300mm lens after I poke and sculpt it in PS4. And here's why people buy homes on Cape Cod and others travel so far to vacation here, or on the nearby islands. For a quarter of a century we lived in New England... And even thirty years later, as I sit here in Lancaster County tonight... I feel its tug.

BTW... How's this look on your monitor? Too dark?

So I Got This Problem...

Nature

The house teeters up there, its hope simultaneously resting behind boulders piled against the nature of the North Atlantic, and a cardboard sign against the nature of humans. But I wonder: isn’t the latter intended to protect the structure from the whims of taxpayers who erected the former?
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How fragile security seems when looked at from behind a pile of rocks that won’t alter the nature of climate, nor signs that can't change the nature of humans.
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The morning after a stormy night my Canon 7D's wide angle 10-22mm  found some steps rising from Corporation Beach in E. Dennis, Massachusetts on the bay side of Cape Cod. There's so much color smoldering to life at sunrise... Maybe too much? Perhaps this palette shrink-wraps reality behind a romantic patina that distracts us away from life's harshness? Maybe colors are the tools of poets and cynics while monochrome is a tool of realists and skeptics?
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Or maybe this is just a house perched atop a dune? :-)

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But that's not the problem in the title of this post. Well over a half century ago I started thinking about palette and photography. That meant struggling with all sorts of color theory and its aesthetics. The thing is that down deep I like a lot of chrome. I mean I want it cranked up to 11 on a dial that goes to 10! And now, thanks to technology, I can twirl that dial all the way... WHIP!

Looking back, you'll see a few recent posts here that got monochromed... FWUUUP! The sound of color sucked away to reveal the haunting underlayerment of feeling. But monochrome's a false choice in most cases. Kicking away everything but 50 shades of gray... Well, that'll make for a hot commercial novel, but the power of my original narrative here, in this image... Isn't best served by sheering away the color fabric, is it?

I've found that full-on color grabs attention, but it's like deep cleavage, y'know? It serves a certain, um, function, but it's hard to get the audience to look in your eye...

So I've got this problem... How to overcome an addiction to chromo-blasting? Wall space is so scarce. Without a story arc, there's no reason to return to an image... It has no aura. No wonder... And art without wonder is merely craft. If I can't get something new from an image each time I return to it, well, I don't want to live with it. Won't give it a piece of that scarce wall space.

As you climb the stairs to my office, the walls and the landing are filled with photographs wonderfully lit by indirect sun light. Some are mine, others are by resonant minds that make me VERY careful which of mine I dare hang near them. Increasingly I've found that the work which endures has the color cranked down to six or seven. Yet, first-time visitors invariably are drawn to pulsating color.

Okay, I should please myself, forget others. But that would wall off learning and growth. Nope, not a good idea. Any suggestions? As you scroll backward in this blog, look how blatant the image colors are. But would you... could you... live with those neon palettes?

What therapy do they do at a rehab for color addiction?Thoughts?

***

Here's the just-before-sunrise-original...

North Atlantic 1972

Jack, Maine, August, 1972

Irresistible versus immovable.

They were boxed in the attic closet. Thousands of slides along with color and B&W negatives. First time I'd brought them into the light in maybe twenty years. I need the room so I've got to toss the stuff that's tumbled into the black hole of obsolescence. So many dozen Kodak carousels. Each holding 140 slides. I pulled out an E-Z view illuminated slide sorter. You know, a slanted plastic sheet that holds about a 36 shot roll of slides in front of a light? 

So I went to B&Hs website and found the Wolverine, F2D Super Plas Film to Digital Converter... $99 delivered. The wolverine will convert slides mounted or unmounted, B&W or color negatives, and 16mm or Super 8 film to JPGs on either a flash card or through USB onto my hard drive.Problem is the Wolverine F2D takes the film one frame at a time - manually. 

The monitor on the F2D is about the size of the a camera's LCD, and it's very contrasty. However it has the ability to vary the exposure of a copy by ±2 stops, with s similar ability to vary the exposure of each of the RGB channels by the same about. Since color film seems to fade into either magenta, or blue... these controls allow me to restore (or enhance) some of the original color dynamics during the copying process. A scan takes three seconds. 

Back then I shot either a Nikon FTn or a Nikormat FTn through one or another of seven lenses capped with the dozens of filters I owned.  Unfortunately I have no idea which of the possible combinations went into the recipe that cooked up any image... Like this one.

My friend Jack Ricard was right up against the cliff face that stopped the massive waves. Judging by the slides around this image, this was a stormy morning with the winds coming ashore behind the slabs of water. 

Looking at this instant I've recalled the way the ground shuddered as the wave's fist slammed into those rocks. Jack, some forty years ago was roiled by both the explosion of froth and the gale. 

I've not talked with Jack in over thirty years. Jobs and moves have done what the North Atlantic couldn't  - swept us apart. But here's this memory from a box sealed by obsolescence. A window back to a morning when we were young friends. Now we're neither. 

Some memories though are irresistible and immovable. 

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I'm way behind... Soo... let's go huh?

I've been away, then working, then the dog ate my  homework :-) Soooo.... Howzabout I upload almost a dozen and hope someone likes something? Lemme know K and I'll tell ya the story around the image you might like.

A) Let me first return to Ireland:

1. Here's my major favorite... a street scene from downtown Dublin..

2. Wanna get stoned? Visit Blarney Castle..

B. I'll come back to Ireland in the next upload but I've also been shocked by a guy who wondered what he'd feel like after retiring from a senior management position...

D. Then there were the girls already set for their own job interviews at BoyFriends R. Us... 

E. I went back to the archives to look again at Hank's Love Shack in the now razed Lancaster Stock Yards which has become a job creating high tech industrial park. Love the sunset here...

F. Okay, while revisiting the abandoned Stock Yards some six years ago I wandered along what was, once-upon-a-time the main street of America's second largest stock yards at the turn of the 20th century.. The jungle returned..

G. Up in New England two weeks ago I visited my buddy Joe and his grandson Matt. Great moment, eh?

H, Sunrise on Cape Cod... The bayside after the storm... From a 3 panel pano..

I. My friend Andreas and I roamed the streets of Florence a few years ago on an early morning photo shoot. We got separated and I found an early morning market... Tried entering this image in a show a year or so ago. It got rejected... They didn't know how to categorize it. Wasn't art huh?

I. Since the Stockyard file was open, I decided to revisit an image that I originally worked in 2006. It's fun to see how much I've changed.. maybe learned. Regardless, it's also fun to assess the emotional change that the image now evokes in me...

J. Which brings me to a Sunday bike ride in the very early morning this month through the streets a couple blocks from my home here in Lancaster... This is where Grant Alley crosses Shippen Street. We're looking into the sun searing down Grant.

Okay, I'm kind of caught up. Unfortunately I've not yet reduced a small smattering of images that I've formatted for printing with dimensions way too large to post. I'll get them formatted soon. Comments anyone? Suggestions? 

Summer Brideg

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"What''ll it be when I grow up?"

The boy wondered as he hugged to the bridge.

"What's over there waiting?" he thought.

"What's on that side of the life's oddly shaped ridge?"

Did he want to go, he wondered?

Did he need to leave this summer place?

"Can't I stay here feeling a while?

Can't I just hold onto this glowing-soft space?"

Summer sprays its indelible inks

Upon memories of the moments we clung

To our first sense of the coming span of time

and the soft-warm moment of feeling so young.

Just Off Nantucket

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From boat-deck.

August, Summer, Hot, Night.

Canon, 7D, Canon EFS 17-85 (f4-5.6), PS4: AlienSkin: SnapArt3, Impasto, custom brushes.

Technicolor Sunrise

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The mosquitos were big as birds as the sun rose over Chatham beach here on Cape Cod... Well, that's how they felt. The buggers seemed to hit like bean bags as they drilled into me. I'd been out of my car maybe four minutes as I grabbed at this pano then dashed back ahead of the snarling swarm. I still can't decide if they resented my arrival or welcomed it like a hungry lion herd felt when they stumbled upon a lonely wildebeest. I think I've left less blood behind when I've donated the stuff at the hospital.

Anywayzzzz.... you can see from the virgin images which I tugged into this pano below that the photos could have used more time for color balancing, even straightening, huh? What's more the Coast Guard station there in Chatham (the Atlantic Ocean's on the other side of that dune the building sits upon) was way small thanks to the perspective of my wide angle lens. So, how to create a powerful image that didn't look enhanced?

Well, first off I stripped away the blue and warmed everything up by color balancing the image with the curves tool, then added a warming color filter layer that I first blocked then brushed into the appropriate areas. Then I teased the building larger and moved it a tad leftward to honor the rule of thirds. It took a bit of time to hide the seams from both that move, that enlargement and of course the lines where PS merged the three pano panes. If I'd had more time, I'd have balanced the three original exposures more carefully when I took them but those bugs were spattering off my body and worse... attacking my eyes. EEEEEEP!

Then there was the straightening problem. So I used the ruler tool and aligned the roof line to vertical, bringing the entire frame into balance. After that came the relative dynamic ranges needed to balance the lower half of the image with the sky. All done with adjustment layers of course. Additional adjustment layers allowed me to brush back in the highlights in the grasses so they both sparkled and pulled the eye toward the building.

What I was after was a classic sunrise image where the enhancements, while considerable, were invisible. Did it happen? Does the final image at the top create the illusion of authenticity? Hope so... One of the reasons I enjoy enahced phtographic art is that the tools let me reveal what my feelings want to find in an image. And sometimes create ImageFiction. Which of course is the um, clever name of this blogsite, right? :-)

Cannon 7D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5) Handheld three panel pano. PS4.

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?

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

Dawn At Whalebone Mansion

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Wealth from whales
They thought – was
Forever.

Hope unsullied by
Knowledge of
Scarcity
Or pain.

Momentary hope without
Maturity or experience
Is nestled upon
Ignorance.

Sunrise
The Penniman House
A captain’s mansion
Chatham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

We vacationed in New England last month, just before flying to Turkey on what was more a business trip. Of course dawn on Cape Cod always sings to me an hour or so before it rises. And it pulls me out to ride or walk the back roads, this morning in Chatham which is on the Atlantic side of the Cape. From the chanticleer above the Penniman House you can see the sweep of Chatham harbor behind me as I took this image.

Canon 7D:3 part pano, PS4: Custom brushes and textures, Topaz, AlienSkin: Snap Art 3, impasto

Composition

The world is sweet, mysterious, and beautiful. Sometimes.

Middelbury, VT.

Here's a second take on the image... I'm trying to find a 1920's feeling here in the stillness.

Got A Question For You

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I've been wondering... What is the use of art? Matching the couch? Covering a hole in he wall? I know that a large number of furry little rodents decorate their burrows. Ditto the way a lot of birds weave stuff into their nests. Hmmmm.... are some animals driven to decorate? How do they decide between worthwhile decorations and junk?Are there more, um, fascinating decorations? Do some decorations resonate more than others? Is there a collection instinct? If there is, upon what is it focused? How do collectors of decoration decide? Do they have advisors? Are there experts? Critics? Educators? Analysts?

Apparently all human cultures collect art just like those cute rodents. Even ancient peoples seem, well, driven to decorate their graves with shiny things, drawings and statues. Decoration seems to be almost a necessary condition of human-ness.

So what are the uses of art? Body decoration? Balancing the palette in a bathroom? Is the value the picture, or inside the picture? Is art an object or a package?

Okay... my head is hurting now. Think I'll go find a Rolling Rock.

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Oh yeah, the picture here: I took it at dawn in Wellfleet on Cape Cod as the tide gurgled in under my feet. It actually does gurgle and hiss, oozing seemingly out of the muddy ground. Charming though, and it makes the sort of picture that blown up and framed... Well it goes pretty damned well with the couch, huh? :)

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 1934 Ford Coupe

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It's been a while since we've visited the sand dunes of E. Dennis Massachusetts at sundown. Recently I got a new, old, car. Look at this pristine 1934 Ford coupe I bought this Christmas from a guy who owns a convenience store in Pittsburgh. It's a pale lemon/cream with two seats and a stick shift on the floor. Better yet, it was kept so perfectly since its manufacturing, and driven so little - that it's needed NO refurbishing. I was able to take it from here in Lancaster to the sandy dune road with no difficulty at all. It's astonishing how quickly we covered that 350 mile distance.


Okay, the sunset's a tad over the top, but it overcomes the chill of January don't you think?


Here's another view I took a few minutes ago where I keep it parked here at my studio. It looks, I think, more impressive on Cape Cod - don't you agree?



Ooops... the caption on this picture is wrong... should read 1932. Sorry!

Changings

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Should we love or fear the future.

The folks who live here on the Wellfleet Marsh on Cape Cod can predict that twice each day this place will flood, then drain. The future will be nearly as like the past as possible. Yet no present moment will ever hold. The swings of changing tides, coupled with the beat of changing seasons, coupled with the predictable changes in summer versus winter people... all of these changes result in...

Well let me try my wonderings differently. If nothing changed, would there be a future? If we were eternal... immortal... would the past have still happened? How, if nothing changed, would we compare the future with now, and now with then and.. and.. But if nothing changed, there'd be no sunrises like this one. If nothing changed... would there be beauty? How would we know it... if nothing changed?

How would we know anything? And if knowing is good. Then the first question.. in my first sentence has an answer, right?

Enhancement

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A visual idea often has a moment of life then dies, you know what I mean? Look, how often have you snapped a score of pictures but when processing time comes.... YUCK! What were you thinking when your finger twitched the shutter? It was even worse when you'd send away film and it took a week until two, three, even five rolls of slides came in the mail. You'd pull them out and always... always... always... your heart would drop. Oh there'd be a keeper or two, but overwhelmingly the idea died when the lens chute swallowed that burst of light.

Now we have tools to find what idea or feeling that other guy... the one who took the picture... the younger you... wanted to send to you when he clicked the shot. Look at this image for example. It was sunrise in the center of Middlebury, Connecticut. I'd never been there before and this mill race called me. It seemed so photogenic. And yet, when I looked at the images of the ruins of the old mill... There was so little there. Before. Now, after an hour of teasing the hues and textures here's the image the younger me filled the frame with. Now I can hear the roar of that water. I can feel the rumble under foot. I'm squinting again as the low morning sun gleams into my eyes. Is this really the scene as it was? Or is this image fiction? Know what? I don't care. You?

Naked Image

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So a guy, calls himself, "Lurker", sends me an email. And he asks, "Okay Ted, so I see that you need to pimp up your images in PP (um, that's Post Production techniques, for those of you new to the jargon). In fact, you seem addicted. Fine. That's what you do and you do it really good. But, what do your naked images look like? Take that Middlebury, Vermont series. Can you show us a virtually untouched image... or does everything you take need assistance? I dare you. Double dare you. Show us even one naked!"

Whoa... a double dare! I mean what self respecting boy ever welched out on a double dare? Um... alright... except for adjusting the basic values in this one... and of course cropping it for composition... And adding just one teeny touch. How'z this? Huh? Huh? Huh?

Can I go naked, or what?

1st Congo

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A pity, but some things have to be pictured - the visitor lacks a choice. Middlebury, Vt. is built all around its First Congregational Church which sits atop the highest hill in town. And they've built this atop that. Unfortunately I had only six hours in the area to take pictures, and no research. So from sunrise to about 1:30 in the afternoon, I drove, walked and let the hamlet's major features attract my camera's lenses. But unless you rode well out of Middlebury, the shadow of the First Congo's magnificent steeple drew down.

As many of you recall, I have often photographed the steeples of Lancaster, which meant that a novel approach to Middlebury's greatest tower was hard, particularly with such little time. So... here's the obligatory snapshot of their most prominent feature. I'd really like some suggestions. This is a conventional, "Wow!" image, but it just doesn't make me wonder. Doesn't appear to be a metaphor for anything larger. It's merely pretty.

Is that enough for anything beyond a calendar or postcard? Let me know, huh?