OuttaDaGate - Kayak Scramble

A salty inlet • June, 2019

Trigger warning... This tiny essay may distress a swath of readers. Sorry.

Pre-teen boys racing. Families yelping. Girls ready for the next heat. Hot-June summer morning. Squinch your eyes so color streaks against salty air and life is giggling, screaming, joy-filled fun. This is the sort of image these kids will access from their memory storage bins 20, 30, 60 years from now.

As winds of age scour my memories, well... So will I but... um... well... maybe next year?

So we're in an election cycle right now and so many of the candidates seem determined to paint things with an "awful" brush. They explain how we're neck deep in a dystopian pool of cess. Not to worry, they've got plans, strategies, policies that will drain away some of the stinky shit that's stained everything. And yet... Boys and girls play in the sun... colored streaks against salty air and life's giggling, screaming, exciting fun.

Hyperbole's selling all sorts of contention. But that image up there's not grabbed from some legend of a distant time. Unless we've already forgotten the summer that's right now turning to the dazzle of kids wallowing in piles of jewel-colored leaves. Uh-huh there are places where things aren't as charming... I know that. And I confront that in every news story streaming across my monitor.

But maybe... just maybe... a footrace, a ball game, a kayak scramble, a young couple swinging their hands ought to, just on some rare occasion, come out of the media gate?

GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D Mk. II through its EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens. I'd switched on follow-focus spotted on the boat. Post processed in PSCC 2019 to expand the dynamic range then finished in both Topaz Impression together with Alien Skin's Snap Art 4. Oh, Alien Skin's changed their name to Exposure Software.

Tack-Sharp Enigma

Explaining Amsterdam

After my fourth visit, I'm thinking that Amsterdam's one of my favorite places. 

It's like everything I understand but isn't. The city's infrastructure seems comfortably similar to my world, yet it's in a culture-bubble that's puzzlingly different. Its people have a methodology that seems so like mine but which just doesn't crunch and chew at life as I've been taught. 

Amsterdam's like San Francisco without the hills. 

GEEK STUFF: What's to say. I roam streets with my Canon 7D and look at them through my default 17-85mm lens. Afterward the serious image making began in PSCC-2018 where I tried to puzzle through the feelings of a moment.

Look here... where land meets the sea, but nowhere beneath the sky is there anything remaining of "The Natural" world. Even the water's engineered to behave lest it spill over everything the Dutch have created. And in the very center of the corset-tight control, there's an equally precise piece of black and white art that's drawn with the same precision in a monotone that leaves no room for subtlety and yet no clear room for interpretation.

It, like its city, is a tack-sharp enigma.

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. 

.

Reconsolidation

Reconsolidation: Some profession, maybe the psychologist's, created that word which means, "the moment you remember is the moment you forget." Here's a promontory poking from Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway into the gush of the North Sea. Immovable object slams into irresistible force. Or maybe the other way around? 

The camera stops time in sharp focus... but reality does neither of those things. Impressionism explains memory from a stream of glances. It's been written that, "an artist's vision is centered in wonder rather than in an eye." Art pokes into recollections to pluck out what we cannot see. Never saw. What we remembered or felt. Feeling's what impressions are about. 

Art without wonder is merely craft.

The Giant's Causeway's southern end sits here on the Northern Coast of Ireland pointing toward it's other side eleven miles to Scotland. It is one of Britain's most visited natural site. See that sky, only minutes before it drove a May hailstorm hard at us.

Canon 7D, EF-S17-85mm, ISO 150,  Triple image pano knit in PS4 for dynamic range adjustments.