Sunday Morning Breaks

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I took a bike ride up PA222 this morning. Here's Lancaster County spring. Not shabby, huh?

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Took it with the Canon G10. It fits into a small bag on my bike rail. Don't even notice the weight. As they say, "The best camera possible is the one you've got with you."

Andreas & Me

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Early one morning I met Andreas Manessinger outside of this place. I went clockwise, he went the other way. We met back at the front doors. Yeah, doors. There are a bunch of them.

I cannot imagine how many photographers have sucked pieces of the place onto their film or flash cards. And yet... yet... she seemed to be able to present herself to us as if those others had never been there. She made us both feel as if it were her first time. What a gift, huh?

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Hmmmm.... You know it is hard for an artist to decide that the work is done. Of course you know that. And you know that we run a risk of turning a perfectly competent work into bovine dung if we don't say to ourselves.... "Self, you have diddled with this enough. Put it out of its misery. And yet... yet... we wonder if another thought might tease yet more feeling out of the things. And.... well, that's what happened here. Wuddaya think? Should I have quit while I was ahead (or a foot, a leg or ... )????
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Canon 20D w/ Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5) - Hand held and shot at 10mm, f4.0-1/8, ISO=800

WHY THIS BLOG IS A MESS!

It's said that Steve Jobs has a life view that goes, "I'll like you until I don't." And as Adobe knows, it is not good to have Steve fall out of like with you.

Well, sometimes, and they aren't often, I find my like for Apple is not unconditional.

This blog is a mess right now. If you scroll backward you will quickly notice that hundreds of postings are now missing. Why? I subscribed to a .Mac and for my money received a website service. You can find what is left of it by CLICKING HERE!

And you will see that you can page through scores of empty URLs. All of the graphics have been trashed by Apple!

Yes, they warned me that they would no longer allow postings to that site when they arbitrarily notified users that they were ending the service. BUT... they also wrote that posted graphics would remain. And then after about a year of supporting those postings, WUMP! They dumped all of the graphics.

And mostly all of the postings on this blogspot prior to a few months ago were linked from those postings on hompage.mac.com/byrneprintmaker. And without those links, all of those graphics here on ImageFiction, were extinguished.

Do I have backups? Sure. But... to replace the broken links, I shall have to tediously go to each of the previous postings, figure out what the linked graphics were named, Find them among my old files. And then reload them... one at a time. It will take countless hours.

I'll try slowly to replace some of my favorites, but I fear that visitors to this blog will not graze page, after back page, to find the few that I repost. Nope, unless I do them all, or develop some alternative system... all of that work is gone with the Apple.

And so, in spite of the many things that Apple has done to make me like them... I am falling out of like. Sigh.....

And I guess the moral here is, if you can't trust Apple to protect a service that they charge you for... How much faith should you put in any of the "cloud" services which promise to store your valuable backups?

To see what I've fixed look at the ROTTEN APPLE - REPAIRED POSTS FROM THE PAST link on the right hand column. I will try to slowly add my favorites over there.

This Sucks!

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Everyone runs into the great suck. And it seems that no matter what you do... Suck City!

Is there any thread that I could have pulled to find meaning in this mess?

I captured this image along the Arno river in Florence Italy a couple of years ago. Our apartment was in that first building to the left. The day was glorious, there was a photographer's sky. But... but... but... I failed to find the idea or feeling that pulled me through this frame. So I ladled on craft... and ladled... and ladled. And the thing wound up as a grotesquerie. Which is another way of saying.

This sucks!

And it drove me nuts. And I couldn't stop ladling. So I've revisited it over the years... and... and... AAAARGH!

Grumble!

Up There

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See? Holy Moley!

And what's up there? Anyone?

Triptych Against Racism

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I think this was the twelfth race against racism last Saturday. 3,300 runners entered. They close N. Lime Street in front of my home for registration and the starting line's the next block down. Someone said it's a 5K race. Since I never ran one of those things, and certainly don't know my Ks from my Ms... well.

The racers were determined. To run, and to make it clear that they were against racism. Odd thing though. It took a lot of looking among the 3,300 people to find runners whose race wasn't caucasian. And most seemed to have come in from the suburbs for the event. I didn't see any of my African-American or Hispanic city neighbors from around these blocks among the crowd. The male winners though were from Ghana.

There are four or five African guys every year who are running-gypsies, moving from prize-money-run to prize-money-run all around this country. Hard life, huh? No one asks them for their green cards. They just outdistance everyone else, collect the prize money and leave town... on to the next. Is there an irony there for the Race Against Racism idea? Not sure...

What do you think?

Above?

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Have you noticed that it's above that we look for inspiration? Why not down? After all we find water and food below. Down is what supports our every step. It's where we play with kids, sit, lie, and sex. What do we do up there anyway? And yet somehow it's assumed that the good stuff that nurtures the spirit is all overhead. What's up with that, huh?

Look down, you're a pessimist... but look up, wide-eyed and smile... Well that's where hope lies, huh? The problem with always looking up is, well, you could so easily step in something stinky.

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Once again a capture from Saturday morning's Race Against Racism. Once again taken through my laser sharp Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens into the Canon 7D. Now, let me ask, suppose I'd called this image, "Epiphany", or "Inspiration", or how about "Communion"? I think it'd have lost a lot of its power to the cliché, don't you? Nope, nope.... the light, color, and expression are story enough, huh?

Street Portrait

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Wandered through the crowd at Saturday's Race Against Racism gathering together in Musser Park, just next to my home. I had the feeling I was hunting in a herd... a flock... a field of opportunity. An American moment... Read in faces. Sweet.

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My new Canon 7D and almost exclusively my Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. So? How do they work together? You tell me...

Windows

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How much of us sprays out through our eyes? How much of a story does a look tell? And whose story is it? Hers? Mine? How much fact? Fiction?

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Pretty morning. 3,000+ people gathered outside of my house for the annual Race Against Racism run through the city of Lancaster. I went out to gather feelings. It was colder than I'd thought and my light golf shirt and shorts couldn't ward off the shivers. It's not good to shake a telephoto lens ( Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens). BUT... oddly, the faces that fascinated me left their magic in the blur. In fact, the lens shake may have helped me in post processing to tightly focus upon what it was that magnetized my feelings out there in the field.

Or maybe I just like turning lemons into lemonade? Your call.... Here's the virgin image direct from my Canon 7D's flash card.

Florentine

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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

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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....