On Preservation

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Michael Kimmelman in his fascinating book The Accidental Masterpiece wrote, "Sometimes it's useful to preserve what is wonderous to show us what is rare." Or something close to that.

Which is how I feel about how sunrise coats things like syrup. It appears to come filled with a kind of glowing peptide which fuzzes up the edges of things in golds and blues. It's hard to mess up at sunrise, don't you think?

Squalk!

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At the Carney last week in Lancaster there was a game-table where the barker could attract no attention. She pleaded with passers-bye, cajoled, and finally insulted them. Called a grandmotherly lady the sort of names you expect to hear from a rapper on crack. Nothing. People rushed on past. The odd thing was that her loudspeaker was hidden under this bird. You got the impression that the penguin needed anger management rehabilitation.

Short Term Memory

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Once upon a time I took baby pictures for $$s. Mothers taught me what they'd pay for. It was labor intensive and price sensitive. But school bills had to be paid, so the little darlings' images got churned out the way Hershey makes Skittles. It was one of the reasons I came to hate photography. Weddings were another.
Now I refuse to charge. If mothers or brides or mothers of brides don't like what I see... I don't really give a damn. Frankly, my baby and bridal pictures have improved explosively. Odd when you won't put a price on your pictures, people will offer you large prices. Go figger...

Zippered

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Why do we love these things? This carnival oblong ride has ferris wheel seats swaying along its outter rim. That rim slides fast - sometimes clockwise, sometimes counter clockwise – splaying its chairs wide outward . Then the oblong spins in a direction differently from the chairs. Girls squeal, boys yowl. It clatters in a coating of raucous 50's Rock N' Roll. Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers mix all through the screams'.

I've always wondered, even though I do them... Why we ride these things? Why we eat jalopenos? And "Why," as Frankie ponderd, "Do Fools Fall In Love?"

Rails Scraped White

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The sons of Pullman porters ride their father’s magic carpet
And the rhythm of the rails is a gentle heal….
The Warren F. Bennet sways along a metal highway that once lashed America together with a tenacity tighter than politics, entertainment, revivalism, and the greenback dollar all mixed together and baked in a Bessemer oven. There are still patches of glimmering steel scraped white by the Warrem F. Bennet’s wheels. And inside there’s still the air they breathed when Lincoln rocked along toward Gettysburg to tell about forefathers, nations, Liberty and equality – and to remember how some short distance to the west from Lancaster a great cause – caused so many to bleed. When the Warren F. Bennet rode a younger magic carpet made of steel.

Downtown

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I'm intrigued by the city shots friends send back from their European travels. Apparently everything they see is quaint. Well we've got quaint right here. There are facades which get quaint all over your image. See here? See the colors? The stone? The artfully trained leaves? The windows. Even the texture along the sidewalk screeeeeeeem out "Lookit me... I'm just as quaint as anyplace, anywhere, anytime... " Got that?

Spooky House

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Spring along Indian Marker Road seems to speckle the place with a sort of ominous color. Everywhere else in the world, Spring elates the spirit... but here... it pokes at it a tad. Even pricks it in a way that's just the tiniest amount discomforting. Can't quite put my finger upon why... Can you?

Shell

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For the eighth torrid day, Lancaster sweltered. And on that August morning, as I passed under the Amtrack overpass, this was on the side. The car parked, I walked back to see this hardened shell of leather, perfectly formed as if molded onto a body. But, as if a crab had left its shell, the body was gone. Why a winter's jacket during the tropical heat? What'd happened here the night before? Was the person sucked away into some alien's ray, leaving behind only his exoskeleton of tough leather? There's got to be a reason for its appearance and two days later for its disappearance... Leaving behind only one record that this jacket-shell was left on an urban beach.

And this is that record.

Urf City

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Okay... so there's this creature who's a part of a foamy time bubble in Urf City. And he's either dissolving into, or emerging out of, the clamorous color of a carney ride. And it's really noise, rumbling and sqeeeeeeeking around in a circle there in Urf City - from where it never escapes but runs and runs and runs... against the currents in the river of life.

Innocent Fun

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Look at these faces. You can't fake that wildly happy excitement. These girls are well... look... look how you can look at them and see ten year old joy. Feel it! Love it. I'm so pleased that I was there tonight. That they were so delighted in that moment. And that their sheer loveliness got captured for all of us to grin along with their squeals. How very, very fine. Carnivals belong to the kids... inside each of us.

Silly

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Listened to an inspirational speaker tonight. I guess I am inspired. Not sure about what though. This is what came out after the inspiration of the speaker took hold of me. Hmmmm.... Maybe you are in a better position to judge this inspirational mood than I am?

Twi Light Knight

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The carney's come to Buchanan Park. Each year it arrives during the first week of May. There used to be something called the Loyalty Day Parade. It got so expensive the committee brought a carnival to town to raise bucks. Still they didn't get enough, so the parade died. But the carney comes every year to raise funds for Buchanan Park. And as they set up tonight I saw this guy, protecting the children from the oncoming night.

BTW: My enhancements to this image were made in CS2. I contacted one of the filter makers today. I was told that upgrades won't be available until the Fall. So, while I've installed CS3 onto my PowerBook Pro, I still haven't installed it onto my G4. Frankly I don't expect a speed augmentation on that machine, and I don't want to lose the availability of the filters I mentioned in yesterday's post. Oddly, this image, which I think expresses exactly what I sought when I took it, did not involve the use of any of those filters. Still, it's good to know that they're there.

A WORD ABOUT FILTERS: I've found that filters are relatively useless as stand alones. They scream out that the artist has taken short cuts. They dominate the image... and when you start noticing the makeup, the actor is in trouble. Moreover, filters quickly become clichés as soon as everyone begins to slather them on. However... they allow an artist to work on pieces of an image, especially when applied multiple times with different settings to tease out the details. There is no filter that I own which creates an effect that I couldn't do without using it. BUT... why take all of that time (this image took just less than an hour from downloading into PhotoShop to the final uploading of this written blog posting)? I see them as tools to be used in combination with others... just as lenses, lights, lens filters, and the like are tools. If you are dependent upon a filter to affect your style... well.. I wonder if you have a style... or whether you've simply purchased it. And if you have... then anyone else can as well. Not the sort of vulnerability an artist should have, eh?

CS3

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Got my birthday present today. Rita bought me the PhotoShop CS3 upgrade. Figured I wouldn't post tonight... you know, learning curve and all that, thought I'd not be producing anything new for a while. Then I discovered the new B&W adjustment layer. "Hmmmm," I says to myself. "Wonder what this do..... especailly when I blend it with the high pass filter." And here's what it does to yesterday's last image.

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"Ahh!" you reply. "But what about that black and white adjustment layer by itself?"
Well here's what it does with one click. Which makes me wonder what's left in the challenge of doing monochrome. I predict that we shall see so much artsy monochrome in the next year that people will outlaw it. When there is NO challenge... where there is no challenge. Why the hell do it? Eh?

Now something else I noticed to my horror. I no longer have any of my third party filters. I have hundreds of dollars... no maybe well over a thousand dollars of purchased filters. This could be a not nice thing. I guess I now have to check with Lucis and F/X and Alien Skin and.. and... I'll bet they'll all be selling upgrades eh? This could be expensive. Anybody know a short cut (Don't remind me that they'll work in the Rosetta format... I bought the new CS3 principally to take advantage of the dual cores in my MacBookPro - want speeeeeed)?

Suspense

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I sensed an unmet need. Something elemental which perhaps patience and a largeness of time might either create or restore to this place. As I stood there I could feel some mystery, perhaps a human moment suspended against... What? An original wildness? Sometime in the past people scratched gashes into a primitive veneer. And nature is erasing them. It's her job.

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Okay... so I looked reeeeeel carefully at the image above. And i tried to like it. But it just didn't capture the feeling of ... suspense... which I felt as I peered through my lens. I wanted more tension to recover a sense of that instant. Here's a rethink. Or rework. Or wuddever. As usual, I'd appreciate input. Does this second take reinforce the sensation of nature's impending erasure?

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Darn... can't leave this image alone. As I return to this moment, I'm realizing it's the tree and not the building/road which is the star performer in this cinematic thingee. Or maybe it is. And when she gets to fan out in center stage, she does dazzle against the sky, no? Hmmmmm.... This whole thing is becoming a puzzlement. I've gotta' let it go! Grumble.... Good night.

Invited A Couple Thousand Friends

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As I type this the parade is passing by. It's Lancaster's annual Race Against Racism Event. Things start off with a 10k race/walk through the east and south ends of the city. North Lime street is closed in front of my house for the staging. Later the parade winds its way down E. Orange Street and into the city square. I can hear the bands and horns as they pass about fifty yards away.

Actually the police awoke us this morning at around 7 to let me know that my Beetle was blocking the kiddee's raceway along E. Marion St. While the run starts at 9, there were already a couple hundred people milling about and PA systems were getting their "Testing! Testing! 1, 2, 3.... TESTING!" We take diversity seriously in Lancaster City and county. I'd say at least thirty-five percent of the people in these pictures are from the county. Every year a group of Etheopian professionals win the prizes. The thing is... for a photographer, you'd think this thing would be a bonanza. Truth is, I have trouble exploiting crowds. It's a special skill which I've not mastered. You can possibly look at these images and see hundreds of opportunities to do portraits or whatever.

Oh BTW the small arrows? Those point to our home. The sky is darkening now, but it looks as if the promised April showers will hold off until after the parade ends. Racial harmony doesn't need rain.

Shiny Gems

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Recently at an antique store, the sun's ray fell across a clear plastic box of tangled old jewelry. Inside the stones were alive with refracted colors. I wondered if I could make that effect. So I looked back in among my old neglected files for something I'd never printed and found this image. Taken some years ago before tort lawyer jackals forced Armstrong World Industries to close the gates on its production plant, the thing was mottled with primary hues baking in the summer sun.

So here's an attempt to capture the memory of a moment that spun off glimmering jobs for a lot of people. I like the flashy bike in the foreground and the way it announces the way employees could afford terrific toys. It's more a metaphor than a photograph... painted in the colors of those gems in their clear plastic box. And both the gems and this place are now memories of happier times, eh?

Steeple

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As you can see this is a straight shot right out of the camera with no manipulation, enhancement or intervention. It's so nice to just post a picture as it happend in front of my lens so that visitors can see how organic I can be and... and.. er, wait. Maybe there were some tiny touches. You know, just slight spiffing with the saturation, and well maybe with some texturing. And, oh yeah, the sky is a bit altered. Hmmmm... the borders are maybe worked on some. And then I did crop it and added some selective noise. And the F/X fim frame thingee was an after thought.

But beyond those little manips... I can't think of too much else beyond subtracting all of the color information and adding it back and then drawing the clouds. Surely though those trifling additions wouldn't count for anything signifcant. After all this is what happens around the corner from me ever day in the sky over the church where this famous steeple lives. So...

Here's an absolutely organic posting with those few changes I've mentioned. And, well, wuddayathink?

Textures At Sunrise

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For a nation with such a short history, we seem to cherish it. Maybe it's our cultural insecurity? Is there an ethnic American? If not, is there at least an ideosyncratic culture that is so distinctly different from all the rest, that we can feel some sort of national identity? Some kind of belonging that's as strong as the roots that the Germans, Japanese, Hmong, Zulu, Navaho, or Indigenous Australian peoples feel?
Is that why we lovingly preserve these 270 year old constructions of the long extinct Shaker movement? Of course they removed their seeds from the gene pool, but not their craft, whose influence lingers on particularly in fine furniture. Dunno.... Thoughts?

Correction To April 19th

I'd appreciate it if you'd take the time to look at the posting I made last Thursday, April, 19th. I've made a large aleration in that graphic. But is it saveable? Dunno.... Your thoughts?
It's my birthday and 3:24 in the morning. Not sure I'll post anything more today. Let's see what happens.

Ted

Okay, here's what happened...

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Hmmmm.... April 19th got a lot of attention and prompted a bunch of email. Not so much about the image quality, rather interest in the widow arrangement on the side of that barn. Well, if you thought that image was a tribute to asymmetry... well take a look at the back of the barn. I guess I have to ask my friends at the Lancaster County Historical Preservation Trust about the why's of the indulgent window/door/hole makers. But if the barn's front was unnerving... Hey... enough doorways for you here?

Not Done This Before - Hulp!

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Here's a second in the Ephrata Cloister series from yesterday morning. This is the first time I've attempted a pastoral image. I was after that sort of dreamy look you see when, through sleep misted eyes you peer out upon the sun rising's first rays sparkling from the grassy morning dew. That early heat generates wispy fog which glows with the light's earliest color.

At least that's what's there when a good pastoralist makes it happen. I tried to hush the sun's worst glare with the orchard's limbs. And the entire image was intended to represent the very earliest spring painting the scene. Now... How could this be done better? Suggestions?

Whoa! Lookit this
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I posted the original above on the Canon Photography On The Net forum. JSimonian suggested these changes. I think they are terrific. Whoa! Who would've believed that a sunrise could look better without the sun? Plus you will note the suggested crops, particularly on the left where a small amount of useless information simply distracted the eye. I'm really so pleased with this. Any comments?