A Sunday Bike Ride

About ten miles outside of Lancaster City into the southern end of Lancaster County we can really see the legendary rolling hills of central Pennsylvania. Spring's come, the seeds are in, but the trees haven't fully budded. Soon all of this will be corn, much to fill that finger pointing into the sky. Life's good, huh?

Oh… I did adjust the dynamic color range here to emulate my very favorite slide film… Agfachrome 100. It was my trusty light little  Canon G10 that caught this feeling. It's all pretty magical, eh?

How magical? Here's the original sort of. In fact this image resulted from stitching together five panels in PS4, then cropping it down to this square.

The challenge this time was to create an out-of-the-camera reality in the final version at the top of this posting. I wanted to avoid any sense of "manipulation" or "augmentation". One of the real challenges was the lack of balance from that horizontal horizon. there is too much weight on the left side of the original. I needed more mass on the right. That led to two pieces of process. First a weighting of the tonal and palette range to augment the appearance of more heft on the right bottom. The secondly to grow the hill there on the south eastern quadrant. 

but the weight was designed to compliment a setting for the main feature, the silo… To draw the eye, and feeling toward that finger without battling it. Of course I eventually added vignette to once again spotlight  the silo. 

Great fun and I'm thinking if the trick's not revealed like I now have, that it sells belief. Right?

Sunday Morning Breaks

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I took a bike ride up PA222 this morning. Here's Lancaster County spring. Not shabby, huh?

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Took it with the Canon G10. It fits into a small bag on my bike rail. Don't even notice the weight. As they say, "The best camera possible is the one you've got with you."

Street Portrait

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Wandered through the crowd at Saturday's Race Against Racism gathering together in Musser Park, just next to my home. I had the feeling I was hunting in a herd... a flock... a field of opportunity. An American moment... Read in faces. Sweet.

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My new Canon 7D and almost exclusively my Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. So? How do they work together? You tell me...

Stormy April

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There's a storm overtaking the capitol. Things have prematurely hottened. One senses that the world's oldest democracy is hunching its shoulders against a series of thuds. It's as if the air's charged with static sharp enough to sting like spitting dust as you lurch into the headwinds of a maelstrom.

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Once again in this series, I'm working through the challenge of mid-day glare, on a summer hot afternoon. Impressionism? Well, yeah.

Blossom Time

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Drove down to the Capitol last Tuesday. Cherry blossoms and tax day - both come in April. Pretty day last week... next week comes April 15th and the death of Washington's blossoms.

Bowers then showers.

Gesture

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Photography is acutely sensitive to gesture. I look for it, emphasize it wherever possible. Not just human, or animal gesture. Culture can gesture. History can gesture. Feelings.... feelings can gesture more than anything else.

Here's a man who stood in that halfworld that exists in the city. Have you ever noticed that space by the ocean's edge that's half covered by tide and half not depending on the clock? Cities are that way around the mouths of buildings. During some hours people and things tumble out onto stairwells, porches, entranceways, porticoes, alleys, and entranceways. Technically people are outside since there's nothing really between them and the open air. Yet they're still within, under, atop, things that are parts of buildings.

Those places pull at my camera lens, and later at my imagination. People there are like the hermit crabs who move into the shells of others. Many simply stay there. They're not passing out, or into a facility but holding a place in that antechamber. During certain hours it is where the are supposed to be, then during other hours, like the tide... they are gone.

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Interested in the virgin photo from my FlashCard? Here it be. Again it was taken through my mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. I processed it carefully into the squares I seem to be momentarily obsessed with. In this case the bokeh belong to that terrific lens that I fired wide open (ISO 80 on my Canon 40D). In this stage I wanted a max contrast between the colors. I copied that layer and then applied my own custom version of AlienSkin's SnapArt pencil filter, bringing out the rough paper texture. Then, I used a B&W adjustment layer in PP to remove the color, added a layer above where I created a useful dark sepia tone (applying a blending mode to it) then finally I took the first adjusted full color layer, brought it to the top of the stack, and used a pinlight blending mode which I reduced in order to return the strong suggestion of a full color palette to the image - yet the pinlight blending mode allowed me to condense the color range so that it complimented yet set off my subject's gesturing.

Other stuff? Yeah, probably... subtle things around the image to bring out the most useful dynamic range so that the image will pop.

Does it work? Does for me... I wanted to discover a denizen of that city half world I described above. A man who stands in the partial shade of a building's awninged entrance way... to watch life pass by... and to comment upon it as it happens. Sort of like me, huh?

County Road

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Sun-stained road
slicing through
farm flat
county.

Going to or
Coming from
Home.

It depends, huh?

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The craftsman says, "look, here is what you like."
The artist answers, "Look, here is what I like."

The commercial artist says both of those things.

The academic artist says neither of them.

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Picture by the Canon G-10. Image with AlienSkin Bokeh, Lucis Aperture, AlienSkin SnapArt.... but mostly with... Ted.

Just Flowers

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Longwood Gardens is about forty miles from my home in Lancaster. It's in Bucks County not far from the Brandywine Museum we visit frequently. A legacy of the Dupont Family the gardens sprawl both outside and inside. Last week we stopped by and while the March air was still frigid... well, the arboretum encapsulated what's just about to happen outside the house here in Lancaster.

I don't do flower pictures. If you scroll down to the keywords below this post you'll see "Flowers" and if you click there, well I don't think, of all the images on this blog, that more than about five are actual flowers. There are two reasons I don't do flowers..... (1) they are too damned easy. I mean after all you aim the lens click the shutter and there's a flower picture. And usually it's colorful and all that but (2) They are too damned hard. It continually amazes me to see terrific artists who make flower images that resonate with a new intensity. My flowers are so... so... booooring. They simply don't ROCK!

But still, when I roam through Longwood gardens it's as if my camera fires by itself. And I come away with discs crammed with bazillions of boooooring flower images. There's probably some secret to it. Sigh... But nobody's ever told it to me.

Anywayzzzzz.... just as I only posted one Fall picture last year... here's my one spring flower thingeee.... Suggestions?

April Sailing #1

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Went sailing on the Chesapeake last weekend from Friday through Sunday. My friend Steve Cornibert chartered a 36 foot something or other yacht. He hired Jeremy, a master seaman, to teach him to master a boat of this size. So this was a training voyage for Steve, work for Jeremy, and for me... manly leisure.

Saturday was sunny and almost hot. Here I am on one of my few appearances above decks. Hmmmmm.... Actually Saturday I spent a lot of time up there mostly picture taking. Tried my hand at the wheel, and dropping anchor. Did my best to avoid pulling sheets and mucking with the sails. Mucking of course is a nautical term, along with luff, jib, and head. Speaking of heads... here are a couple of mine that I took myself with my wide angle lens. Behind me in the first is Jeremy and Steve in the second.

Pennsylvania Primary #1

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Some 150 years ago on this corner they may have heard cannon fire rolling in from Gettysburg to the west. Or perhaps an odd calvary troop or supply train meandered along these streets. Four score and seven years before that the British were garrisoned all about keeping their horses in private homes just up that street to the left there. A year or so before that the Continental Congress of the United States declared this place the nation's capital and held session about two blocks off to the right of this spot.

History has a way of passing through the city of Lancaster, stopping for a chat and a meal, then swirling on its way.

It's garrisoned in store fronts today. Here's one just across North Queen Street. Fitting this one's on Queen Street, eh? I tried to walk my dog Rocco past the other as well this afternoon but couldn't find it. Maybe next weekend.

The thing is, Lancaster has a way of putting history into perspective... Calming it down. Then sending if off to do whatever it's going to do... Usually somewhere else.

Um, yeah I know that's the Clinton HQ and yes I know which way the sign is pointing. Y'godda problem widdat? :)

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Here for those of you who are interested, let me plunk the picture from my camera.

Grainy Romance

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J'ver notice how memories get grainy, contrasty, and misty all at the same time?



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Tah-Dah:The original local couple along Sausalito bay looking West to Oz.

Change

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A bursty breeze stuttered across the Sausalito docks last Monday evening. The swirly air shook tiny-light dotted tree limbs and heavy-tilted a piling-tethered flock of metal balloons. Both the lights and balloons were meant to change that place, and how quickly the unexpected Spring wind changed them.
Like in life where our best efforts to alter the future are altered by whatever it contains.
Sometimes the results are lovely... but even then, they can be frantic, eh?

Sausalito

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We spent last weekend in and around San Fransisco.

Sausalito is a sort of fantasy spot. I'll never live there, which is probably a good thing. I've only visited a dozen or so times and each as a day-tripper over from San Fran there on the other side of the Bay. Which means I have surface knowledge: Know what I mean? It is for me what I want it to be. So it is the place I'd like to live, because that's the way I want it to be, a town that overlooks the glimmer of Oz as the sun fades into the west. It is at the end of the world... or its beginning.

Yeah, it's a fantasy.

St. James

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As Christmas nears, collectors have begun to ask me to prepare prints to their specs for gifts. How flattering, eh? A long time ago I posted an image of the steeple of St. James Episcopal Church, one of the four most historic towers in Lancaster. Someone asked me about it, and then wondered if I'd done any other images of that structure. Well, yeah... last Spring, just after a storm, it looked like this.



For those of you who might have missed the original post... let me repost it here.... okay? You decide which would look best on your wall, eh? I like them both. But then, I could be a hair prejudiced, eh?

Gated Despair

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At first I only heard sobbing.

It was as if there was a hole between me and some other-place which let the deep sobbing moans escape. I whirled in a circle and then, through this long-rust-frozen gate I saw him at the table. See… see how hard he is to make out at first?

Abruptly there came a voice from an unseen partner hidden from us on the right side. There were words: hushed, reassuring, confident. But this man in blue still shuddered and maybe those words were sealed out by those earphones he wore.

I stood there on the public sidewalk: What? Twelve feet away? When it caught my eye like pliers grab a nail… The blood! See that crusted oozing patch by his ear dripping down into his white beard?

What to do? Then there were sirens, and an ambulance lights-a-blare screaming down the street. And I took this one image. And worried about it.

In the months since I clicked that shutter, the thing’s niggled at my conscience. You cannot make out his face. It’s not truly an invasion of an individual. Right? Right? And I’ve since seen him - healthier outside the mission waiting for the charity breakfast.

The yard behind that gate is a private abandoned space. The two people had trespassed. And I fear, I’ve trespassed here as well. Or maybe not.

What I want is to tell a story, or start one. It’s a “Once-upon-a-time” opening, or perhaps it’s an open that needs a back-story? Or a beginning that needs a resolution? Perhaps it is both of those things… or an ending? This moment, in the middle of Lancaster City, on a beautiful spring afternoon in May… that I still hear whenever I look at this image of gated despair - hear the sobbing.


GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5),1/100@f/7.1 exposure Bias value: -1.33, ISO: 100, Focal Length: 22 mm, Date/time: 5/27/06, 3:10 pm, Metering Mode: partial, Camera RAW

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?

Window To Nothing

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Here's a memory. Well it will be quite soon when the one guy on a mini bulldozer finally gets around to tearing this part of the Lancaster Stockyard down. Only rot demolishes things slower than this guy. Maybe it's already a memory in a way. It's what's left of a shell around this building. For the moment it's like a fossil, an imprint in space which looks sort of like what the painted and bustling place must have appeared fifty or eighty years ago.
I crank awareness up in my images. In fact that's what happens when each of us frames things. The choice we make in moving the borders makes for memory boxes. In this case, nothing outside of these borders will exist soon. Only what I've imagined in this cubicle. There's a difference between art and life. It has to do, I think, with the way life passes through memory to become the image. Just like this window, which is now not what it was, and might even be as you read this, no longer anything.

Jiggling Lines

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Optical truth reveals the lie of nature's perspective. You come across this settlement through a field - and as you see it up there on the hill it's all right angles, yet through a 10mm lens it falls off differently ... like in an imagination's snapshot of this cluster above you in the gold/blue first light. Lines seem to have their own mind jiggling to some crazy gravities. Who's to say which reality is "real"? Wait... wait... I'm to say it... and do, here. This is what I saw. I swear. My memory's my source, my authority. And after all, pictures don't lie. They aren't fluid, like say taste, or… or … romantic fantasy. Right?

Zippered

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Why do we love these things? This carnival oblong ride has ferris wheel seats swaying along its outter rim. That rim slides fast - sometimes clockwise, sometimes counter clockwise – splaying its chairs wide outward . Then the oblong spins in a direction differently from the chairs. Girls squeal, boys yowl. It clatters in a coating of raucous 50's Rock N' Roll. Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers mix all through the screams'.

I've always wondered, even though I do them... Why we ride these things? Why we eat jalopenos? And "Why," as Frankie ponderd, "Do Fools Fall In Love?"

Spooky House

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Spring along Indian Marker Road seems to speckle the place with a sort of ominous color. Everywhere else in the world, Spring elates the spirit... but here... it pokes at it a tad. Even pricks it in a way that's just the tiniest amount discomforting. Can't quite put my finger upon why... Can you?