Rocco Has Left The Building

My buddy Rocco was born May 5, 2004. Last May the vets found a mass growing in his left chest and recommended it be reviewed in August. He began coughing last Monday which got him a trip to the doctor.

Rocco Byrne 5/5/04-8/14/15

Comparing new x-rays with this from May... The doctors seemed startled that he was still alive! They gave him maybe a week to live and suggested I quickly consider euthanasia.

Words escaped Rita and I.  Doggies, like Autumn, lack a happy ending. But both are so richly wonderful...

Rocky's Autumn's ended Friday. But at least until last weekend he was virtually symptom free. We walked every day since Spring... He picked our routes around Lancaster, always winding to our doorstep... He was  a great little city guy - my best buddy.

Rocky was a Lhassa Apso, 25 pounds of furry affection.
I'm remembering when he' d first moved in, a tiny visitor then but already guarding his very favorite place at the foot of the bed. He was about twelve pounds and glad to escape the farm where he was surrounded by sisters who stole his food. It took months till he realized that meals were his, and that he could graze leisurely, usually eating half at dinner time, and finishing each night before bedtime.

Last Sunday was the first time he passed on his second course of food before bed. Monday he stopped eating his goodies. And then completely stopped eating.

Monday the doctor wondered if I thought it was time to end his dis-comfort. But Rita's just had her knee replaced and she's recovering from that pain. When I left with Rocco last Monday morning, we both believed he'd merely gotten something stuck in his throat - the first symptom of anything unusual. No way I could go home without our guy. And while he coughed some, his spirits seemed normal so I had to bring our buddy home to say goodbye. Which we did until Friday morning... August 14th at 11.

Putting a dog down... When they live to trust us and will trust us even as their little eyes cloud and close for a last sleep is: Well, I've been there before with my doggie friends. As the doctor's administered the drug, I've asked, "Give me your paw..." And we've held on... held on... And Friday I asked  Rocco for his paw, and I got it with all of his trust as he closed his eyes and cuddled to his final rest... closely in my arms.

DAMN THIS IS MAUDLIN!!! Yeah, Rocco's just a dog. But Damn It! If there ain't dogs there... IT AIN"T HEAVEN. I want him to live. He couldn't and I could see the puzzle in his slowly closing eyes...To get the sleep that evaded him as his chest obstruction caused his breathing to grow labored.

He knew, even as he drifted off that I wanted something, but he couldn't figure out how to give it to me. That's what dogs do, they give. You know what? I hope I gave him just a tiny bit of what his eleven years added to our lives.

Rocco's left the building, at least physically. But he's still all around the house. I just can't seem to find him.

May 2015 • Hilton Head

Last May we visited Hilton Head over the Memorial Day weekend. Our little city fella liked adventures that left him off the leash to sit on the back step and peer into the early morning glow. Maybe he saw the rainbow bridge where furry friends wait, tails thumping, for us to join them? Maybe... Maybe Rocco, that thing newly growing in his breast last Spring, understood that he was older than his years. Older than me in relation to the end? Maybe. And when I think of Rocky - perhaps waiting up there on his glowing bridge -  and its much that I do for the moment... It's a nice maybe, huh?

I'm Lucky to have loved him

Aug. 13, 2015 • Rocco's Last Adventure

Underneath

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KatelynRose and Rocco. Sweet stuff, babies and doggies. Too easy?

Ben Again

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I started with a clear idea of how I wanted to present Benjamin. Every now and then you hear an author claim that the characters took over the story. And that's what happened here. Benjamin decided that this is the he way wanted me to present him. No, I don't mean the boy who stood in front of that flag. Nope, I mean the character Ben in this image. As the process developed, this is the story arc we mounted. So much of art emerges in the process, huh?

Enjoy....

Thanks Flo

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Yesterday I uploaded a couple of images that I put together for a friend's jazz group. Take a look at Flo's comments. They were as precisely good as advice gets. The things needed more grit and smoky-jazzy feel. She pointed out that the guys were dressed oddly for jazz. That the drum's backlight was distracting. That It probably needed some wording. She wondered why I straightened the original image when the original cockeyed shot gave it more presence. Yep... all terrific comments. Which sent me back to the beginning... as it should have... Even the typeface I'd chosen wasn't JAZZY enough. And the text colors, while cool as that drum, weren't hot. And even cool jazz is HOT!

Right? Of course right.... Here's take 2. Comments? Lemme know.

The Jazz Tones

Last week my business magazines celebrated their tenth anniversary. Yippeee! And we had a reception at the Penn Square Marriott in Lancaster. My friend Art Lumsden is a super successful CEO, he has another buddy who's a prominent attorney, and another who's heavy into IT selling. But... but just incidentally on weekends they are The Jazz Tones. They were the entertainment and Art asked if I'd snap a publicity picture for them. From the choices he selected this one.....
Which after straightening and color balancing looked like this.....
But of course I could not leave alone. Thought it might be useable as a poster. So? Wuddaya think of the final image on the bottom here? <- Click here
Incidentally, I did not use a flash... all natural light with my D70 at f4 and 1/13th/sec at ISO 3200 through my Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6. Is their grain? Uh-Huh. But I wanted a sense of nightclub grit so I really dialed up the ISO. Thing is, I had to add some grain to the final image since even at ISO 3200 these images are very acceptable even at large size!

Benjamin - Act Two

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On July 9th, I posted the first picture of Benjaimn from the Fourth of July picnic. Here's two.

Geek stuff....

My Canon 7D through the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens, Post? PS4, Topaz, Bokeh2, and Alien Skin's SnapArt oil.

Remember Chris?

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Once, you might recall, before Apple flummoxed away years of my carefully stored images (see the link on the right "Rotten Apple Explained"}, I posted a portrait of the many personalities of my friend Chris. Chris the writer, Chris the photographer, Chris the media mogul.... And I still think it's the image which should illustrate his story when New Yorker, Esquire, or Fortune Magazines finally get around to writing it. But, time has passed, and now there's Zach

Zach is Chris's grandson. And if you look reeeeeeeel closely... I wonder... Can you see three personalities coming into focus? Can you see the mark this guy's going to make? Can you see the strength of his genes? Hello Zach.

Hangin In Manhattan

Guess where I was last night... K?
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Rocco & Me

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My buddy isn't happy about cameras, even on - or maybe especially on - timers.


***


OKAY Andreas (see comments).... Here's some wisp of color... sigh.... I hate to break too much with tradition... why, the entire foundation of my political philosophy would shimmy, huh? Enjoy...

Candid Woman

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Tammy is camera shy. The lighting was a soft, dim, restaurant stew . Which meant cranking up the IS to 1600 and grabbing the shot with the lens zoomed to max. A problem with quarter frame sensors is that they generally make it hard to narrow the depth of field and consequently tossing the foreground and background distractions into soft focus is impossible.

So what to do with a wonderful image that's steeped in noise with a scatter of eye grabbing stuff littering the plane? Why Alien Skin's Bokeh of course. And PhotoShop's native lens flare filter to discipline the nasty light patterns. And, of course, a bunch of adjustment filters to wrestle the dynamic range away from a glaring tungsten cast toward a more intimate color temperature while holding onto the dark puddles of shadow.

Tammy's a photographer and graphic designer with a sensitive eye for detail. That's what I want to capture here. Not so much a photograph as a feeling about my friend. Wuddaya think.

Then...

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We lugged all of that stuff from the college darkroom up on the second floor behind us. It was the middle of the night. See the big thing right in front of me? That's a Korean War aerial camera. My buddy Jim Furlong found it somewhere, got us some film and found a single engine, three seat plane with an overhead wing. We took the door on my side off so when the plane banked I could dangle right over the city held only by the seat belt. BTW, that monster camera didn't have a neck strap so I held onto it hard as the ground sped ay below.

We've got those odd expressions because we'd created a timer for the big ole 4X5 Speed Graphic camera. We just sat there waiting and waiting until PHWUMP! Flashbulbs popped all around us. Yep, flash bulbs! Funny, that one shot took all sorts of planning and set up (not to mention break down) and yet, who cared? We were young and time and muscle was what we had.

Jim Furlong was the most important photographer who ever lived. Because he infected me with a graphic obsession that's never gone away... that's why. I always wonder as my work comes together, what Jim will think. He created hurdles, and rewards.

Late last month Jim died. But I always wonder as a new image happens, "What will Jim think about that? You've got to have a standard, right?

Furlong

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So the guy says to me, "Ted, who's the most important photographer who ever lived?"

I scrunches up my face, the way you do when you're digging way deep into your idea piles and I says back, "You mean who do I think did the most for the way I wonder about image making? The one guy who opened my feelings to the possibility of this stuff?"

"Well, yeah," He says, looking all out of patience and like that....

"Simple," I says.... "No contest. This guy."
***

Ever noticed how crackling memories are vividly colored, but... but.. the details kind of bleed into one another? Like when you recall a spring afternoon when the sun was hot as a friendship and when you yelled to your friend... "Jim! Freeze!" And your mind and your camera fixed an instant... the latter in black and white, the former in the sizzling palette that the sun had washed away.

***
I was eighteen when we met. I'd taken some box-camera high school pix and lessons from a camera-happy priest. But the darkroom overwhelmed me. Still I got the rush of seeing images "come-up" in Dektol. Jim already knew all that tech stuff. And he had a Kodak Retina 35mm fixed lens folding camera that he insisted I borrow. He was more than an enabler to a kid with a passion, he was a pusher. We spent three, four, sometimes six nights a week and a lot of the weekends in the college darkroom.

We brewed our own chemistries, burnt through tons of war-surplus paper and film, and tried every trick and stunt the camera mags yacked about. The college had a couple of 4X5 Speed Graphics and a ton of fixed bulb lighting equipment. We lugged the big cameras to sports, car wrecks, politics, and flash-bulbed-out candid pix of our friends. The editors we free-lanced for back then still insisted that we use the old 4X5 150ASA, f4.5 monsters.

But we were young and strong and didn't much care. It did teach us a lot about framing, tripods, lighting, and carefully controlling the instinct to shoot. Even with young muscles we rarely lugged more than eight cartridges or eight potential shots.

Ahhhh... but Jim had a Canon, range finder, interchangeable lens, 35 mm (bought during his AirForce stint... he was the older guy), and until I bought my first Miranda SLR, I used his f 2.8 Kodak. We rolled our own, over-packing each 35mm film cart with 40 shots of Tri-X that we casually push-processed to 1600 and even 3200 ASA.

It was a monochrome world since the critical chemistry demands and expense of processing our own color were unthinkable. Our fixer-turned-brown-fingernails off-put some girls, but the pictures we caught of them somehow seemed to make us more exotic than grungy.

We studied all the periodicals, pestered the library to order all of the classic art and photography books, debated visual art, and of course, whether photographers could ever be artists. Jim and I became drinking-buddy close, dark-room close, obsession-close. And along with Guy, Mark, Lenny, Harry, Jimmy, Santo, and Bebey ... we walked through the door where our feeling-about-ideas lived (or was that ideas-about-feelings?).

Jim graduated to go off to media school and a career in photography and cinematography. I considered that, decided, "Nope, too damned hard" and enrolled in economics graduate school. But Thanks to Jim's little folding Retina camera, the stink of darkroom fixer, and the wonder of feelings "coming-up" in the magical developer baths... photographic art has been my refuge. A place to go where the only deadlines and tensions were my own. Where either darkroom doors or computer monitors could erect force fields that held in pleasure and escape.

And all because of the most important photographer who ever lived, and who died last month. My dear friend Jim Furlong. He made me so lucky.

What a debt.