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.

34 Main St. • Killarney, Ireland

How to mute Killarney?

It's a tourist town of about 12,000 permanent Irish residents, yet it seems to have more hotels than people. The city streets evoke Disneyland - or Disneyland evokes them. Their colors make for squinting.

And then there's the smooshing together of decoration, both around, on, and inside the store fronts. Killarney shops are shameless as showgirls in their efforts to grab attention. Blocks are eye-exhausting as Vegas in their palettes. Of course Vegas boasts performance architecture that's imploded, what? Weekly? Daily? Vegas won't tolerate history, or even nostalgia, much less antique.

Killarney, OTH, has a patina-of-shabby that seems as carefully adhered to its surfaces as the layers of paint which are probably  inches thick. And see how at first this image seems as if the camera was canted? but look closely, the lens was straight as a nun in a gay bar, but it's the shops themselves that are bent by age.

Now see this late afternoon sidewalk? While the blinds in the upstairs window boast mid-last-century dust, the sidewalks are surgery-table clean. Killarney's kept like a retro set for WWII soldiers, back when the photographs were black and white, but the memories were full-on chrome.

Killarney works at being a memory. But one that's hard to mute.

Geek Stuff: Shot with my Canon 7D, worked with PS the processed with Alien Skin Exposure's Kodachrome II to tease out the rich antique late-afternoon reds and memories that my grandparents and my mother brought to America.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot...

<- Click here
Soon the bells will start
But the wonder-filled sight that will spring
Is the glow that will quietly ring
Deep within your heart.

Sometimes they cloy… but we can’t help it because… Darn… we clutch at hooks to which we can hang an order, a map, an understanding…. a life. Here’s my moose-ical hook.

I found this little orphaned-guy on the shelf at a Goodwill shop years ago. He was tattered... stained here and there... but his grin was so optimistic. Look at him, and like a switch, you smile, right? Someone had breathed that into this ball of wrapped stuffing. I wonder where he is today. Wherever, his aura's here... and there with you, right? Okay, it's corny but still... still... Magical, don't you think?

Canon 7D, PS4: AlienSkin: Bokeh 2, SnapArt3: Watercolor, Custom textures & brushes.

Whuuuump!

<- Click here

Okay around here
Once a year
We go to hear
And peer
At things that go
Whump in the night…

Lancaster, Pa
Canon G10, PS4, Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, oil paint, Custom brushes and textures.

The Line's End

<- Click here








She still stands there waiting
A whistle or smoke,
She still stands there waiting
Her lines thronged with folk.

But her tracks now are rusting
With weeds grown to choke
Off the chance to leave searching
For dreams that aren’t broke.
*
New Columbia, PA
Canon 40D/Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5): PS4/Topaz, AlienSkin:SnapArt2, Watercolor, Custom brushes/textures (Thanks, Distressed Jewel)

2011 - Merry

<- Click here

My little buddy Rocco suffers through New Year's Eve. Lancaster has a midnight fireworks show atop a parking garage a block or so away from our home. We usually sit out front and watch it explode above us - adult beverages in hand. Unfortunately my fuzzy guy is NOT a hunter. He's been bread to be a watch dog, suspicious of the odd noise. He suffers from fireworks overload. Which leaves him an exhausted fur ball. And maybe that' the best metaphor for 2010, it's left us... thank Zeus... exhausted with a "Good Riddance!" taste. Like Rocco... I'm tired of it and looking forward to awaking in 2011.

Wish you a mellow one.

Melancholy

<- Click here

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

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

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

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

Barn Wall

<- Click Here
Wandering around north county. In a barn there were some old pictures hanging on the wall. Discolored, faded... you know. Found some water damage but this one was under glass in its frame. Fun to watch it pop back out.

The D70's got a great processor in the dim florescent light. Great capturing color balance in the auto white mode. Oh yeah... I did cheat and add a texture screen and diddled in both Topaz and Alien Skin's Snap art. And, um, maybe I usedCS4's warp tool to create more of a 3D feeling. Okay...okay... I repainted the colors and altered the palette to make the feeling explode. And yeah, I warmed up the exposure a bunch.

But other than that... nada!

Fun, huh?

Nostalgic Or Historic Or Fabled?

<- Click here
Does nostalgia belong only to the living? Are fables only as real as an imagination? And where does history fit between the two? I'm just sayin'....

***

Geek stuff: Canon 7D, texture, Topaz, AlienSkin SnapArt Oil, Table Top Art.

Then...

<- Click here

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

<-Click here

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.

Jim & Lenny and Battles

<- Click here

In 1962 the guy on the left up there was 26. His name? Jim Furlong. The other guy was also one of my college roommates, Len Freiberg. Like Lenny, I was twenty years old and behind the 4X5 Speed Graphic triggering the shutter. Jim wanted to comment on the idea of subjectivity. You know, how opinions are all a matter of perspective, where you stand, how you view stuff. How people can see the same thing and one guy comes away thinking, "Hey, nice picture of a couple of men commuting on the subway." But someone else goes, "Holy dung! Those characters are dangling from the ceiling!"

Jim kept coming up with ideas like that, and talking us into risking our asses to make them work. He's the guy who taught me photography. We spent a bazillion hours together in a small darkroom at King's College where we were, I guess, the photography departments for the school paper, the literary magazine, and the yearbook. We also freelanced and sold pix to the local papers and some mags.

Lenny sent me this diptych last night. The originals had faded and frankly I was pretty sloppy back then, losing the battle against the dust storm that swirled in that darkroom. It was nice to have a second shot at them after forty eight years. I'm a lot more meticulous now and I've scraped away most of the lint, motes, and dribble that covered the images like a Spring snow.

Judging by the St. Patrick's Day Sale in that paper, it was early Spring when we did this thing.So there was probably as much white stuff on the ground outside as I left on these pix. Still, try as I might I couldn't restore one aspect of that cool evening. There was no real way to bring Jim back. He died recently. At least his body did. But that smile... that cheer... those ideas and feelings... They're just as real as my memories of two friends dangling from that ceiling and the way we laughed and still do... all three of us. Len and I here and I'm sure Jim somewhere else.

If it's a battle between death and Jim's warmth... Death runs a poor second.

Exploring

<- Click here
For a little while yet, there are those who can mount expeditions to the golden age … which will exist until their memories don’t. When time will not check wither… nostalgia can try.

Cape May In August

<- Click here

Cape May's a city that hangs on New Jersey's southern point. A piece of it faces the ocean, another piece the bay. And between the two edges sit Victoria's houses. Something about the deliberate way people present their homes hits my illustrator button. The town's pieces look like magazine covers, don't you think?

***
Hey... now you can follow me on Twitter!! Tweet me at http://twitter.com/Editor_Ted

***


And here's sort of the virgin image, well seven images... pulled from my FlashCard and stitched together in PhotoShop. It should be easy to see where I went from here, right? Not sure if you'd call this assembled images pre or post processing, but they're what my Canon EOS 40D saw through its Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5). After this assembly I cropped, then warped it into acceptable shape. Of course there's extensive tone mapping then both Topaz and Alien Skin's SnapArt finished the job.

Potter County #6: Gene Kelly?

<- Click here

Hey, that's pretty cool! Downtown Coudersport sitting in the August saturday sun. Looking like... like... Looking like this image here. The way it's looked for what? A century? More?


You know how people say, "New York City? Yeah, it's a wonderful place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there."??? Well to a whole lot of people who remember a time that they learned about in history class... Coudersport's the sort of very small town where they'd like to visit and live.

Thing is though, it's not real easy to find, which is why maybe it's been preserved. Wasn't there a vincent Miinelli movie once about Scottish village that disappears into the Highland mist and returns for a day every century? Hmmm... Not sure but odd how the woman dancing just off to that park on the left there... Just beyond the frame... Odd how much she looked like, what was her name? Cyd Charise? Pity, I thought I'd caught her... Wonder why you can't see her?

You don't think???
.
-
.
PreProcessing: As you probably realize by now, the only lens I took out in Potter County was the EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) I screwed onto my Canon 40D. Here I pointed it at Coudersport's main street and shot a series for a panoramic. PostProcessing: Stitched them together in CS4 and turned to Topaz to even out the dynamic range from the extreme light then AlienSkin's SnapArt's Impasto to build up paint into a three dimensional texture. And why... It's Almost Like Being In Love... eh?

Potter County #4: The Coudersport

<- Click here

Ever seen a glimmering hunk of amber? You know, a translucent glob of ancient resin which collected around a seed, a bud, or an almost forgotten bloom in its center? And as you twirled it around, did it trigger memories that you didn’t really have? Recollections of a time before you should remember?

Coudersport is the county seat of Potter County, Pennsylvania and about 2,700 of the county’s 18,000 people live in the town that was formed in the early 1800s. Young, even by American standards, still it’s collected the ambitions of the turn of the twentieth century along a main street of shops, parks, and small office buildings. The streets hold memories of marching bands, and loggers. It is not a land that time forgot, rather one that time remembers lovingly – even longingly. If Coudersport did not exist, Disney would imagine it. In Coudersport you expected Mickey, Pluto, or Cinderella to skip out from door and alley ways.

On a sunny Saturday last week, it glimmered within its resin of amber time.
.
-
.
PreProcessing: Again through my Canon’s EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) in Coudersport’s main street where I found their working movie house. PotProcessing: Lots of things going on here. I want to create a series of square format images that will hang among the various panos I created in Potter County and at the hunting lodge I posted a few days ago. To create the Edward Hopper mystique here I first turned to Topaz, then teased in two effects from AlienSkin’s SnapArt2. First the Comics filter, then I stroked in Impasto to deepen the nostalgic sense while reinforcing the palette that could have been washed out in the mid-day August light. Happily, I think it worked well.

The Race Is Over #6 & #7

><- Click here
I sense by the traffic to this site that this Race Against Racism series may have imposed itself beyond your tolerance. Okay, so let me end it with a fireworks display.. K? Out of the six images that I haven't yet posted these two were always intended to be the final act. The blazing rockets. I love each of them. But then, I'm a sentimental mush-ball when it comes to image making. I just can't seem to reach in and pull out the dark stuff. Maybe there isn't any darkstuff? Hmmmm... gotta think on that since darkstuff seems to be what critics want artists to do, right?

Okay, I will think on how to make gritty statements about the human condition's inevitable overheating of the earth, inhumanity toward one another, tendencies toward senseless savageries, and of course its trigger for wars and ancient obsessions for revenge. Sigh...



But before I go off to do dat... Howzabout we ponder these last two images- the end of this posted series - together. Yeah, they're sweet enough to make your teeth fall out... so clamp them tightly together... hopefully in a smile? K?

---

Tech stuff? As before the photos came first through my mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens onto the 40D's processor. I used Topaz, and the AlienSkin Bokeh + SnapArt filters to tease out the thematic style that held this series together. If you'll click on the word IMAGEFICTION in the masthead way up above, you should be able to scroll down and look at others in this series along with the virgin photographs that I pulled directly from my FlashCards. Questions about technical details for this series? Leave them in the comments, or like most people, drop me an email to the address you'll find in the column there on the upper right. Hope you've enjoyed this series as much as I have making it.

Bill Died

<-Click here

I'm tired tonight.

Sometimes life wears us down,huh? I missed Billy's funeral this morning.He died quietly in his sleep last weekend. The mass was in Palm Beach and there was no way to get down to Florida in time... too many balls in the air here. And that's my point about life... it's exhausting keeping all that stuff aloft.

You may recall Bill Manson. Click here to see the original posting back on December 9 of '07. It remains one of my favorite portraitsr... because I can find Billy in there. I can see him in those eyes and the slightly pursed iips. I can feel the dash of the memory he wafted the way a clearing in the April woods tingles at all of your senses.

I miss Bill even though we rarely saw one another... and to be fair, as he unpacked his memory's baggage, he long ago forgot me. But inside my mind are the times that he and Gerry made my parents laugh. The way he'd show up from somewhere in the world with stories and charm... the way he made a young boy dream that things could be wonderful way away... and yet come back here - so that the farthest part of the world was only days away from home. And as I sit here now remembering all of that... I realize that we're all links... his was a strong one.

Men are like that.

---
Incidentally, his daughters Lisa and Amy chose this picture as the front of Bill's funeral card. I'm glad they also find him in there.

Boys Dream Of Angels

<- Click here

There's a myth about Victoria's Secret angels. They're supposed to be the fantasy of healthy young boys. When in fact the angelic dreams of the healthiest boys I knew had nothing to do with jiggling women in sparkly underwear. YUCH!

Nope, we dreamt at a time when things like cars were made NOT to feed the nightmares of grim governments obsessed with sanding away anything powerful, dangerous, wasteful, or romantic about them. Uh-uh. Then they were sleek, muscular, responsive, and melodic angels gleaming squint-bright through our boyhood night-times.

They let us drive a glowing enthusiasm that's somehow dimmed.

Ahh… but those were childish times when leaders preached optimism and its reward was angels that glimmered in a boy’s sleep.

Brandywine Mist

<-Click here
Andrew Wyeth died this week. We were there again... at his place... the Brandywine Museum, a month or so back. We go there often. The river is really a creek, a wide one though. And it overflows into the museum a lot. The permanent collection of the Wyeths' is all on the upper floors. Oh, it's quite nice. So is Chester County. And thinking about Mr. Wyeth, I thought of those mists that tailed around your ankles and the benches and ferns. Ghosts from the Brandywine, and great people who lived nearby.