Storms Number Two & Three... Feb. 10, 2010

<- Click here

The storm's halfway through it's number two following the big one last weekend. This picture was taken at 1:30 pm about fifteen minutes after I shoveled that pathway. The blizzard's kicked in full power and will end around 7pm this evening. I'm upstairs now in front of the fireplace, listening to some Hayden with a hot drink as the wind roars out there. Interesting winter in Lancaster. Good to sit here in a home built in the mid 19th century that's worked its way through a bunch of weather. The snow flakes are tiny outside the window, like salt being shaken... no tossed by the handful around the windows. Time for another drink.....

And later...

<- Click here

Actually this was two storms which came down the chute one after another. The first started last night, and the second around ten this morning. The second was the kicker. WHOOF! It's over now. Blizzard thing. Piles of snow and blasts of wind. Here's me. Rita sort of went into hibernation last weekend when the first storm exploded. I handed her the new 7D and she poked her head out of our nest long enough to snap me moving our little piece of this white from the back yard (Rocco needs his space) and then from empty N. Lime St. During rush hour - we took these two at around 5. Not a vehicle in sight.

Cool!

She didn't see her shadow. Hmmmm.... wonder what that means about the weather forecast?

TAH-DAH! – The Canon 7D

It snowed in Lancaster this weekend. 24"! So I walked my new Canon 7Doutside as it was tailing off and peered South along North Lime Street. That's my home there to the left. And here's the original.. first picture I took with the new camera. It's about 11am on Saturday morning.



And it shows that I made a mistake! For my purposes, the camera does NOTHING that my 40D could not do. There was absolutely NO reason for me to have shelled out hundreds of bucks more for this machine. More pixels? Well, yeah, but lots of new noise as well. Bigger blow up or more cropping options? Okay, but the 40D allowed me all that I wanted. The 7D images are hair less contrast (flatter) than the 40D - and simply don't pop as dramatically without a lot of post processing work. The camera will do, but I can't recommend it. Instead... buy a used 40D, or consider the Canon 50D.

Now... what about the sort of images that I finally enjoy producing? Okay... look at this...



As you can see, the 7D image allows me a bunch of information so that postprocessing techniques bite well. Frankly, I'm disappointed. I'd hoped for more vibrance and a greater tonal range and can't find them in the new images. Oh, it does allow video. And yeah, that's one of the reasons I wanted the thing for our Peruvian trip. But now that the trip's been postponed until at least next OCTOBER.... well I've got an option that I probably won't play with until this summer. By then who knows, perhaps there will be some super sales on the 7D and I would have saved some money... or maybe by then my lust for the new machine would have gone flaccid?

Oh well... I own it and it's no worse than the 40D. It wasn't a step backward... But forward? Nah....

The Accidental Century

<- click here
The Twentieth was the American Century. Why? As an economist I’ve read all the theories, mostly revolving around Yankee Ingenuity. Americans, they said, were a special breed bubbling out of a melting pot that assimilated the best of yearning emigrants. These were people who were enthused by a work ethic which was reinforced by a level of economic opportunity and mobility that may never before have existed. Okay, perhaps there's a hair of truth to the huddled masses theory of economic development. More probably it emerged from the rest of the world's lack of anger management.
When your natural competitors bomb the crap out of one another not once, but twice in the same five decade span, well it's hard for them to turn rubble into plowshares, rap music, or Fords. So, protected behind two very large moats, America became the only market to people too war crazed to provide for themselves. In return for Fords America imported the family jewels of Europe and Asia.
But over the course of the next five decades, the competition ramped down their nastiness, or at least relegated it to the noisy Balkans and the snarling Mid-East where they were sufficiently gracious to allow Americans to tend to the nasties with that large part of their budget that was siphoned off into police-protection-for-the-world.
And while the U.S. shifted taxed-away bucks into planes, tanks, and bombs, the old competitors shifted their savings into factories, machines, and education. Now they've built efficient new devices to produce far better stuff than Fords which wheeze out of fifty year old plants, produced under fifty year old work rules, by workers with benefit packages designed to be financed by the competitors' family jewels fifty years back.
Sometimes I fear that the accidental century is as over as the cog and lightning bolt on a rusting Ford medallion sitting unprotected against the snow.

Power OutAge

<-Click here
Question: Can we find art? Is it just a matter of framing something... Anything... That results in art? And, oh by the way, does art have to be beautiful? Is beauty even necessary?

Look at this old rusting truck. I think it's a Ford from the early 50s that sits along the decaying Lancaster stockyards. Suppose it was a work of art when it rolled off the assembly line. If I photograph it, am I merely replicating someone else's art? Or have I brought something else to the frame here? Maybe the streaks of snow? Maybe the tight composition? Maybe my interpretation of the tonal and color ranges? Can you or I make something we see through the lens into art?

If I bring you a bucket of water from the ocean, is that water art? If I photograph that bucket filled with ocean water, what then? Maybe there's a difference between good taste and art? I mean, what most of us... any group of us consider movingly beautiful will probably be in good taste. If it shocks us by it's astonishing ugliness, if it is innately vapid, if it is a mere reproduction of what is somewhere in nature... is the photographer who takes the picture an artist... or some sort of taker-of-visual-dictation?

I have manipulated this truck image. It is not true to the moment. By adding or subtracting, by shifting or recomposing... by any number of techniques including wholesale creation of parts of this truck... Is the whole greater than the sum?

If the photographer brings nothing more than astonishing craft to accurately capture great beauty in a moment, has he committed art, or is he a plagiarist of nature?

I wonder if art doesn't demand some subjective alteration that manipulates the original moment in order to do photographic art. I wonder if the "unaltered" image can ever lay claim to being art? Is there imagination in tedious replication through the photographic process? Or is there merely great craft?

I wonder if it's the alterations that make my truck here into art (not necessarily good art, or bad art) rather than the original digital capture.

I wonder... at the power this old truck once had... and now it sits there... Out in the elements... Out of power. Power left out and worn out... Power Outage as a double entendre. Are visual entendres, art? Hmmmmm......

Looking For Magic

I've been dragging for the past few days. Cabin fever. A talented photographer friend, Alistair, on a popular forum wrote that the snow's got me cranky. Hmmmm... S'OK, went out to grab something precious.

Hard though, bumping around over ice cragged roads, through hard puddled parking lots, over neck snapping ruts, all walled by mounds of murk stained shards. But you know, no one is really made unhappy by February unless they were at the minimum, from the accumulation of winter's body blows, a tad unhappy to begin with.

Sigh... If there was going to be magic, I was going to have to work for it. It's good artistic therapy to have to really look at the details off in the corner. Behind the piles. So I made up my mind that all of this was as real as I wanted it to be, that I could dissolve it at will. Perhaps had I stayed indoors and found a triumph like John Roberts' evocative violin - well it might have been warmer. But no... I wanted to crack through my cranky by going out there.

<- Click here

And that's where I found this guy, goose-bumped but patiently waiting for his load of happy toddlers to push him out of where he'd gotten stuck. Here's a character who'd be fun to dig out to get children giggling. And if they could giggle in February... why not me?

I found the magic, right?

City Snow

<- Click here
Photographers hunt for ways to romanticize life. Snow becomes a metaphor for virginity, innocence, sweetness - like that. When in fact it's been a traditional enemy of civilization. We are a naked animal, evolved in warm climes. Snow is not our natural habitat. We've adapted and make compromises with snow. We slow down, build cabins... ofttimes wheeled cabins.

Snow makes us cautious: makes us think about things which we'd otherwise do reflexively. Like walking. Or driving. Very few of our automatic actions are carelessly done in the stuff. And when its mixed with ice, we fear it the way vampires do sunlight. Snowstorms are lovely in romantic movies. Or in the countryside where a viewer watches it, drink in hand, through a crackling fire reflected in a large picture window.

City snow isn't like that. City snow snarls, makes things brown, freezes wheels to streets, packs then cracks into dirty ice shards which slash tires, and skin.
Click here ->
City snowstorms are the reason they invented hot chocolate with marshmallows.

Gloveless

<- Click here
The lad shoved at the slash
Of ice-pebbled wind.
Gloveless, he lurched into it.
Near home, I gave him
Mine.