Florentine

Click Up There

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Seems to be some confusion here.
By popular demand, here's the virgin image from a shot taken in an open mart along the streets of Florence, Italy. What could be more Florentine, eh?

Handy

Click Up There

The hands of Abe. I guess you could say this is, um, hand painted?

Foreclosure

Click Up There, K?

Sold In The USA

Deep beneath the Jefferson Memorial is a gift shop. Inside they sell, like, trash. Trash pens, trash, tee shirts, trash, mugs, trash, busts. For example, here are two... see my point?

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On the left there's a cheepie statue of the Great Man himself (1.) and on the right you can see a representative cup (2.). And now... lettuce turn them over, OK?


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Here's the bottom of the cup sold by the United States Park Service from the Jefferson Memorial gift store (#2).. And its label? See anything, um. odd? Okay.. now let's turn Jefferson over (#1)...


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Sigh... in the entirety of America there was only one place they could find a bust maker. Um, well, a bust importer. The bust maker apparently lives pretty far to the west of Washington, huh? by the way, the folks who knit most of the store's shirts and "Washington D.C." golf caps weren't from Washington's west. Nope... Honduras - sort of to the south, right?

Yep, this is the Uited States government, using US. taxpayer taxes to buy the inventory for the store of the Jefferson Memorial. I didn't see that coming. Did you?

Tyranny

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In his temple, President Jefferson is stood to stare at his motivation... at the concept which ignited him to explode through history with a republic answer to the arbitrary collection of power into few hands. And now as it's being recollected at the direction of the legislature and executive offices his pen imagined... recollected into the pens of nine court justices, one wonders at the irony of Jefferson's enforced gaze. Or how his legacy has come loose from his idea.

Societies are made up of people. People age and die. Why not their cultures? I wonder if Jefferson's temple will survive his ideas? By how long? In Rome I saw churches and buildings built from stone that was quarried from the marble of the ancients' buildings. How do you think they will repurpose Jefferson's stones after they realize that his image and that word are no longer joined, even in memory?

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In the 1960s I remember that black and white was considered to be the most faithful way to present reality. And that was accepted even though black and white is inherently abstract, stealing away as it does an entire dimension of reality. Then came the 90s and the color dams exploded allowing the deeply felt component of its hues to add an emotional dimension to photographed reality that b&W just couldn't tap.

And now the digital artist can drop away the reaity almost entirely to distill out the underlying layer of feeling itself. It is a wonderful time to have photographic skills.

She Writes In Color

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Quietly there perched on the column she wrote swirls of thoughts and feelings. Jefferson's monument does that. Or the classical grandeur of the building's sweep makes your thoughts swirl through your feelings mixing together toward conclusions that are personal as your dreams.

"Have you visited the Pantheon," I heard her ask her friend. And of course it was clear what she meant. This building was imagined a couple of millennia ago by a Roman who put his name across its arch ("Agrippa LF Costertium Fecit" Agrippa Costertium made this). Coming to the Jefferson is returning... to the Pantheon, or to an ancient idea of classical beauty. And you don't need to have seen the one to feel the power of the other. Or to feel the tug of instinctual delight that makes your thoughts and feelings swirl mystically together - and your writing to swirl out colorfully.

Sweet...

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.

KatelynRose

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Hmmm.... Here's my grandniece in a snap taken by her parents last week. Now... how close to studio lighting can I achieve in post processing? And, given Topaz and SnapArt as additional tools beyond photoshop, how can a stylized rendering enhance the impact? Let's try this.

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So? Does it work? How better to approach the project?

I've been off my photo game for a while. Thanks for the letters and queries. Nope... I am fine. IN fact as I've written earlier, I' in the m iddle of a fitness obsession. They happen every five to seven years and for some months they expand to fill a bunch of my spare time. Since note of my time is really "spare" and since the only time I can effectively get to the gym is VERY early in the morining (5:30am), well three nights a week I'm going to bed in time to get up at around 4:45.

That together with a bunch of new reading, my intense study of video editing to utilize the video options in my new 7D, and a passel of opportunities for writing at my magazines... well... photography has become the account from which I've drawn time.


Add to that the photo funk I went into when our Peru trip got rained out and ... well... I'm recharging my photo creative batteries. Still, little Katelyn seemed like an opportunity to do some doodling. Kiddies are fun.

Oh yeah.... there is also this I guess. It just kind of happened, y'know?

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

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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...

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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....

Drip... Drip... DRIP!!!

Up There

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Still no time to take my new 7D out for a spin. Finally tried this afternoon, but it poured rain. Didn't have the time to work out a rain shield... so, still haven't checked myself out on the new machine. Since we fly away on February 5... I can hear the stopwatch ticking... y'know? I may have made a BIG mistake by purchasing the new camera before the Peru trip. Maybe after my deadline hurdles are leapt by Wednesday... maybe... maybe... maybe...

Here's a pretty girl riding on her daddy's shoulders I captured with my Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens, on the 40D which is no more with us. Again, city living provides so many spontaneous opportunities for street portraits, Still, it'd be good to get out into the countryside again.... The term "cabin fever" is resonating strongly inside of me.

Am I alone with a winter malaise?

Farmacia - Rome

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I was walking one night through Rome just as a storm rolled past. Only a half block away the traffic wizzed and honked. Unlike New York, nearby to high intensity Roman streets nestle eddies of peace. It's as if the city closes up in spots yet continues to thrum only meters away.

What's up with that, huh?

Geek Stuff

Took this with my 20D. Processed it first in PS/CS4 where I cropped it, reset the dynamic range and applied parts of several different Topaz filters to restructure the texture. I also re-crafted the palette. Then after sharpening the picture I applied a Snap3 filter (oil). Then once again I applied a series of curve layers and masked in the new ranges to again redefine the dynamics and I used a series of PS brushes to mask in the various curve layers and to create new brush strokes.

Oh yeah... sorry... I also used the PS perspective tool early on to rearrange some of the vertical and horizontal angles to create a structural flow to direct everything toward the cross. Um, maybe some small additional iterations. Okay... okay... here's the original - see if you can spot them.


This is all about atmosphere and mood. I see it framed large on the wall of an elegant room to compliment an expensive modern European mood.

Opening The 7D Box!

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Early Saturday morning it arrived. A decent sized brown box with a good feel to it. I was just finishing a workout, so I left it vibrating on the living room coffee table while I sweated out the last super sets. Yeah - vibrate - I could feel the things inside of that package ... their aura was buzzing me right through the wrappings.

Okay, showered, dressed, I Xacto-knifed the thing open in my studio. It was crammed with another box, two 8 gig storage cards, a spare battery with charger, and an envelope with B&H's three year warranty. Okay... okay... then inside of that Canon box were all sorts of cables, CDs, instruction manuals, a strap, another batter with its charger and a bubble wrapped white pouch.

And in the pouch? Heh... heh.... My brand new, black Canon 7D body. And just a tad of disappointment!

"Huh?" you wonder. Disappointment? Well, just the slightest amount. See, when I traded up from my Canon 20D to the 40D, the body was different. Not enormously, but more than subtly. The 7D though is 90% of the 40D body. The LCD is larger, and the buttons are arranged slightly differently. But the real changes are in the processors, the increase by 50% in the megapixels, and the button just above the lens mount... the button that turns this machine into a HDTV quality video camera. I kinda wish though that they'd restyled it a bit differently from the other D-Series cameras, perhaps a tad more like the Mark-series. Canon could use a good Italian or Macintosh designer.

And now for the learning curve. Canon's played a bunch with the firmwear of this baby. And I have to customize it for the different sort of shooting conditions I do. And there were a ton of chores to do today (Sunday) which left me with not too much time to read the new manual. And now it's late and I've gotta be up at 4:55AM for the gym tomorrow, so it's bed time. And the workweek looms full since we are trying to get a bunch of stuff finished before I leave for two weeks next month on the Peru trip. Plus I'm giving a big speech on the regional economy next week, and leading an executive webinar the last week of the month. So with the large feature piece for the February edition I'm writing on the changes in legal and accounting business law for 2010... things are mucho busy.

So... when to get out with this new thing? Will it be before next weekend? Darn, dunno... even though it's vibrating while I sit here and type this. Why is it the world intrudes upon our play? Sigh.... Stay tuned... I'll keep ya posted.

Just Ordered New Camera -WHOA!

Did it! Got off the phone just now with B&H Photo in NYC. Bought a Canon EOS 7D digital camera body, a spare battery, two Kingston 8GB ultimate CFCs, and the three year warranty. Affordable thanks to the bucks I got for my faithful EOS 40D and vertical battery pack.

Question.... does anyone else share the thrill of opening a new photographic toy box? Do you hoard your old boxes? Do you get grief for hoarding your old boxes? Do you care about the grief you get for hoarding your old boxes?

At any rate, the thing comes tomorrow... Friday. The weekend weather report for Lancaster County looks chilly but not grim. Maybe... maybe... I'll be able to go out without freezing my pixels off? Sure hope this machine lives up to my expectations.

They are way HIGH!


With this machine I shall only take brilliant pictures. With this machine my artistic work will enjoy a quantum leap forward. With this machine I shall abruptly be discovered by every gallery and museum in the known world (along with some in the unknown world). And with this machine all of those critics who have panned my work will be overcome with an astonishing epiphany.... understanding what I do and discovering a here-to-fore missing brilliance in each new image.

Okay, perhaps my expectations are a tad high. But, a man needs a dream, right?

Global Chilling.... Brrrr....

Yesterday my friend Andreas posted a comment to my bitterly cold ramblings on global chilling (please read it). Since his serious response to my lighthearted shivering deserved a serious response ... well I tried to post one, but it failed to fit in the comments box. So... how about this...

Hey… Hey…. HEY! I wasn’t the guy who PhotoShoped multiple hurricanes to the cover of his latest book (propaganda?), nor the same fellow who pointed to tsunamis and Katrina as evidence for “theories” of global warming. That guy’s named Gore (a Nobel Laureate by the way, but not in science… Hmmmm…. Wonder why that is? Of course he got that award from the same committee that recently gave one of those things to one of our Presidents who’d been in office two weeks before the nominations closed… so much for propaganda and propagandists…. Heh, heh, heh.) Incidentally, in Texas they are giving out Nobel Peace prizes with each oil change, but I digress.

As for things anecdotal… Theory to be useful must demonstrate twin necessary and sufficient conditions…. (1) It must be internally consistent, and (2) It must have predictive capacity. Scientific conclusions must have one necessary condition… they must be reproducible.

The internal consistency of global warming is thinner than a starlet’s tee shirt. Point in fact, when you take the computer models that the Climate “Scientists” are using to “predict” some future event…. And simply reverse them to “predict” some known point in the past… That is when you check their assumptions against known points… they are ALWAYS wrong and by amounts way beyond any tolerable levels of error. And they are wrong on the COLD side. I.E….. when they are focused forward, they are biased toward warming… way biased, every single model! And the weather stations used to collect their inputs are further biased by their positioning in or around toasty warm urban centers. The recent announcement by the Russians that the Hockey Stick Team failed to use any of their Siberian data is a wonderful case in point which makes most statisticians break out in giggles.

So much for internal consistency… as for reproducibility… Well it seems that after the ClimateGate revelations of climate “scientists” cooking their books, there were renewed outcries for their original data to see if their results could be reproduced. Oh, how unfortunate, the same guys who were coercing and defaming any and all critics and tricking out their methodologies suddenly can’t find any of the original data. It seems to have been lost. Not enough storage space. It got tossed out.

The dog ate their homework?

BTW-a... I am ashamed to say that I have a graduate degree from Penn State where one of these characters is diluting respect for my credentials. PSU had better crank up that investigation they are doing of this guy, his recently revealed emails, and the former debunking of his statistical competency are quite embarrassing.


Which leaves us with three questions, (1) is global warming occurring at all? (2) If so, does it differ in any degree from the previous cycles over billions of years, And (3) Have humans contributed in any significant way…. And a policy question… If (1) is true and (3) is true to whatever degree…. Are there policy alternatives available which will have any significant impact upon (1)? And what are the cost/benefit effects of that… those… policies?

BTW-b… some say that the polar ice caps on Mars seem to be melting along with those on other planets. Hmmmmmm….. the sun couldn’t have any part in this, could it?

Look, we shouldn’t foul our nests. I am a conservationist… even a modified Green. I drive a tiny car, always have. My home is super insulated and retrofitted. It’s a decent idea to find alternative and reproducible energy resources. In fact, nuclear makes sense to me even though I get some of my electricity from Three Mile Island which is a stone’s throw from where I’m sitting. Conservation is not an ideological issue nor a political power grab… Climate “science”, however is both walking and quacking like it is both of those things. It is, however, the perfect device to bring about central control of all decision making, something that a lot of people have been anxious to do in order to overcome the pesky irritation of democracy and rule by citizens, as opposed to rule by rulers over subjects.

As for the anecdotes… Given the state of research into climate…. I conclude that we are the first generation of any animal/plant/mineral in the history of history which demands a right to its own climate! How much hubris does that take? And isn't any theory based upon a few thousand years out of the many billions of earth history merely an anecdote? Can it really be taken more seriously than a few overheard conversations in a pub?

Hockey sticks are for ice rinks, of which we have more right now in Lancaster County than anytime in the last fifty years. Why isn’t a frozen pond also on the cover of Mr. Gore’s latest piece of propaganda? Hmmmmm…. Maybe because it would create doubt? Demand the funding of unbiased research? Threaten his income flow?

The future of the world remains a mystery to me and consequently I am a global warming agnostic… The case has been neither proven nor disproven. Which means that the human role in any of this is way far from being investigatable. Maybe this year we shall get closer? Happy 2010 :-)


BTW-c: Okay, don't believe me. I am merely a subject as far as the politicians are concerned and consequently unqualified to enter into this grand debate. Of course so is Andreas, and for that matter, Al Gore. So let us turn to a fully qualified expert, okay?(and one who Mr. Gore refuses to debate) Here.... Click here, check out this link I've posted and let me know what you think... Um, even if you are "only" a subject as opposed to a citizen and not an expert. BTW-final... have you noticed that in this debate, politicians forbid (or shame) their subjects from commenting because they are not experts? Spooky, eh? I guess they sort of figure that some of us are just smarter than all of us?

Copenhagen Agonistes

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Why hasn't it become balmy? They promised us BALMY! What are they? Balmy?

If Katrina and tsunamis were incontrovertible evidence that the planet was warning. What are three blizzards and a $465 December heating bill evidence of? Huh? It is all so confusing. Is it possible that Al Gore could be... um... wrong? How can anyone who's become so wealthy be... wrong?

On the other hand, there is a difference between weather and climate I guess. Odd though, even in October the weather forecasters couldn't predict the intensity of a season like this, I wonder how the climate forecasters can be so confident of their 100 year predictions?

Like I said, it is all so confusing... Sigh.

Seems to me that politicians fund scientific "experts" who legitimize their laws. Since only the "expert" can discuss those laws, the citizens have been turned into subjects of the scientific law-makers. Citizens participate in their government, subjects are commanded by it. Remember when some guy with a telescope was silenced by theological experts over his theories of planetary revolution?

Creepy the way that rulers use experts to dominate their subjects, huh?

How does it feel to be a subject instead of a citizen? From my place in Lancaster tonight as the wind howls around our home... it feels very, very.... COLD!

Teasing Baby

Hmmmm….. some interest in the mechanics of yesterday’s post. Folks want a how-to. I’m not much good at demos… but lemme try.

First off the challenge here was plucking an idea from a snapshot from my G10 on Christmas day and turning it into a feeling I could communicate. Fortunately the Canon G10 packs more than 14 mpxls into a snapshot allowing a bunch of information that leaves room to crop away as much as thirty percent of an image and still have sufficient material to allow traction in post processing. BTW…. I used an ISO of 400 to avoid introducing too much noise…. The downside of the G10's densely packed mpxls.

As you can see in the full frame capture in Image One… the lighting was contrasty tungsten which needed a bunch of adjustment in Adobe’s Camera Raw application. Fortunately I used a gray scale swatch in the first of this series to allow easy color balance.

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IMAGE 1

I used the auto rotate function of PS4 to rotate the image as shown by the arrows in the corners. Then I did a crop to get rid of the mass of confusion around the chair as I’ve shown with the orange squiggles. But even with tight crop, there was still a lot left to compete for the eye, when Katelynn Rose was clearly the subject. And the confusion was not just in a cacophony of shapes but also of palette and light. Sooooo…. I've suggested the final crop with the white outline in Image 1 and that's what you see below in Image 2.

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IMAGE 2

Now to get down to mood. With adjustment layers I saw that I had to not only create some mysterious drama but also burn away most heavily in areas 1 – 4. However, since I wanted to allow supporting visual interest in those four areas: How to do that yet not provide sufficient information to quarrel with the main story of the baby? Alien Skin’s Bokeh of course. After changing the over-all dynamic range with curves adjustment layers (six I believe carefully masking them in to different elements of the final image) I flattened the image, copied the layer… and applied Bokeh to it. Masked it away, then brushed back the creamy results into the four problem areas above and to a lesser extent to any of the chair’s fabric which continued to distract attention while introducing a dreamy sense consistent with the child's nap.

None of this is particularly challenging, but it’s all a matter of applying the right tool to the proper area to tease out the feeling I visualized when I took the photograph.

Does this transition from snapshot to moody image help anyone? Hope so….

Happy New Year….

Baby New Year - 2010

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Just a short nap now and then a whole new decade will happen for Katelynn Rose. And the murk of this decade fades in its light. Happy New Year everyone.

What Are You Doing New Year's?

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Here's a variation.... a touch of New Year's fun while I'm awaiting ordering my new camera. Some of you might recall the original of this babe I posted some time back. Here she is again, all dressed up... and ready to PARTY.....

BEST WISHES EVERYONE!!! Happy 2010, and thanks for all of your support, suggestions, and comments both here and the passle who continue to lemme know what you think exclusively by email. That's why I've posted an email address over there in the colun on the right. You're my buddies... and you've made 2009 a nice year. In Angel's lingo.... MIL GRACIAS!

Sold My Camera!

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Yeah... I've been quiet here. don't have my Canon 40D anymore. I sold it a couple of weeks ago. Well, I've still got my G-10, but no camera body to use my lens collection. I also sold the the vertical battery grip. I figured this was the best time to get top dollar, but not the best time to buy a new camera body. See, what I want is the magical red button on the Canon 7D. It's a portal into a new whirled. And it will open through my total collection of lenses, filters and stuff.

I'm guessing that prices will tumble in January on the 7D. If they don't okay, I still got top dollar for my wonderful 40D (like new in the box with all the documentation). But it explains why I've been so quiet (in case you wondered about the quiet here and why I've been working some of my archives).

I think I mentioned that we are going to Peru in February, so I want that cool new red button access to a whole new learning curve. I did take the G10 out into the blizzard that passed through here last weeend. Oddly, I've not even looked at the images. I think I'm in a space between just now. Still reading about photographic ideas, and visiting all fo the sites (although pretty quietly for me).

BTW, recently I commented on a posted picture on the The Mindful Eye forum. I commented upon a post (which requested comments and suggestions) with a visual that I'd spent lot of time working upon to show how I thought it might soar. The artist was incensed that I'd made my comments by working on his image. Odd, I've nevre had that sort of criticism. After all, we are visual artists and comments are best made visually, right? He's made me gun shy. I haven't commented upon any images since. Guess it will pass, but for the moment at least I'm startled. In all of the years I've responded to requests for comments that way, this was the first burst of anger that's come back. Sigh...

Don't need it.

Any way... You all have a Happy Christmas, and enjoy whatever other holiday you celebrate this time of year. My best to you all and thanks for your support over the past years. When I get the new machine, I promise, I'll become a lot more active.

Ted

Only

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It is what it is.





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And here is the magician's secret revealed.... Enjoy.

Rocco & Me

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


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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.

Maybe -Don't Buy The Apple Magic Mouse!

Okay.... you can read my rant below. The $%^%$ Magic Mouse I bought a month ago was maddening. Today is Black Friday (I'm writing this the day after I posed this original posting). You will note that Flo suggested I take the thing back before throwing it against the wall, stomping up and down upon its carcass, then setting fire to the remaining pieces.

Black Friday is NOT a good time to go to the Apple Store. It couldn't be returned without talking to a genius. I had to wait 90 minutes since both a salesman and a manager failed to find a computer which would recognize my mouse (not their fault really ...you can imagine how many mice are in a store). As always, they were very courteous and supportive and put my name on the genius schedule.

After the wait (I browsed the bustling mall), the genius listened to my story, explained that neither he nor his friends had comparable problem with the Magic Mouse, and offered to replace it. Actually, that was the only offer. I accepted - with the understanding that if the replacement failed to work correctly it could be returned either for credit or for some other company's mouse. They also noted that the price had been reduced on the Magic Mouse, re. the Holiday sale, so they gave me a $9 rebate along with the replacement (sale price $60).

Okay, I'm home now... the thing's hooked up and I'm going to give this new thing a try. So far so good. BTW, I bought my first Magic Mouse on the first day it was in stock at the Mac store. I did not do that on purpose, actually the old Mighty Mouse had gone down and I went to the store to replace. it. However, maybe that first batch had a bug or two?

Soooo.... go ahead... read the rant below. And I shall post something next week as a comment on whether all is forgiven. K?



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GRUMBLE! My mouse broke. So I bought the Apple Magic Mouse. Yeah... it's magic if what you want is to reach into the hat and come out with a snake instead of a rabbit. AAARGH!

(1) It is pretty
(2) It fits the hand well
(3) It is a piece of crap!

The "buttons" simply cannot be controlled. You right click, it left clicks. Whimsically. There's no order to it. I have reprogrammed this junky bluetooth thing a bunch of times. And of course the definition of madness is repeating the same action in hopes of different results. Well, it has driven me mad.

Moreover the programable options are stupidly limited compared to virtually every third party mouse on the market. How could this have happened? Worse yet, the speed ... when set at max ... tracks more slowly than a muskrat tethered to a fifty kilo dumbbell! If you can imagine a software design flaw... the Apple people have beaten you to it and incorporated it into this pretty (and expensive) paperweight.

I am going to have to buy a new mouse and flush away this fraudulently impersonator. Don't buy it. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't!!!!!!!!

Thing Over Seal Rocks

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On the edge of San Francisco
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There's a thing
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Above the seal rocks it sits there
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Looking out
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Which is what it does while we look
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Back at it.



Have you seen it? If not... so look. There it is.

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The thing tugged at my camera's lens. Look how pristine the place is. How sterile and bare. Scoured continually by Pacific winds. But out on this point poking over a cliff into the sea, against the sky hanging above the sand, is this human scene. And the mysterious thing just pokes at my imagining. There's a story here, right?

And this thing, by the way, sucks in light. Which makes it a lighthouse that works exactly in reverse to the way other lighthouses work. Now that's cool, huh?

Baby Picture Goes Here

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I'm very good at creating candid images of children. Not so good with babies. But, since KatelynRose is the first grandniece... Well, hadda try, you know? She's actually a lot cuter than this. Thank heavens! What is it with babies that makes them so hard to capture candidly?

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.

Jim & Lenny and Battles

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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.