HOME

ARCHIVE

Glosta Tree, Governor's Hill

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 16 May 2025   A favorite local tree in a charming little park not far from home, on one of Julee's and my standard walks to Stacey Boulevard along the Outer Harbor. This place is also called Lookout Park, but the trees have grown up, and the city and harbor are only glimpsed through the gaps in the foliage. This picture, an infrared composite, was taken from the border of the park looking in.

Swamp Waterway

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 9 May 2025   Another one of the photos from the swamp tour a bit over a month ago. This one is a three frame infrared panorama of the waterway the tourboat we were on was following.

Not the best day for infrared photography, as it was very cloudy. IR does best when there is lots of sunlight. One needs a lot of contrast... So, while I captured about 250 frames, very few of the images are making the cut.

Swamp Ripple

Washington DC, 2 May 2025   One of the more pensive shots from Julee's and my swamp tourism in Louisiana just about a month ago.

Infrared, minimal adjustments...

Interview

Washington DC, 26 April 2025   Another wonderful photo retrieved from and for the archive. The only thing I know for sure about this picture is that the man taking notes is Irving Loewenthal. He was older when I knew him, but otherwise unchanged. He and his wife Mildred Loewenthal, who wrote professionally under her maiden name of Mildred Norton, were friends of my parents from the late '30s until the ends of their lives. I called them my quasi-godparents because they were childless and made my sister and I their heirs, which is why I was going through a box of their family photos a couple of weeks back. Everything except the fact of Irving is analysis and interpretation based on the image. There is no context from the photographic print itself. Image on one side, blank on the other!


42nd Street Movie Poster

As it happens I have a fairly deep take on both the artistic and technical history of American photography. This image has the look of large (well, in the day it was medium) format sheet film, and it's a flash photo, with the flash mounted above and to the left side of the camera, given the direction of the shadows. It is almost certainly a 4X5 Graflex Speed Graphic with a Kalart flash using #25 flashbulbs, the size of a lemon. Equipment that 95% of American journalistic photographers of the day were using. You've seen that setup in many, many, vintage and period movies! Given that Irving is taking notes, I would assume he was working on an article and that a photographer was sent along with him.

So, interviewing a chorus girl, with the stage mother supervising. Why do I say that? Well... If it was just the woman in the black two piece outfit (not quite a bikini, but close) bending over the journalist and his notes, this would be and even odder photo than it is. But, the women in the background wearing the same outfit say 'chorus line' to me. The backs of the flats, painted scenery, first said 'Broadway', but I'm thinking now that it's a sound stage in Hollywood.

By the sheerest coincidence, a few days before I ran across this photo I was reading a very good piece in New York Magazine by Frank Rich called How Broadway Became Broadway . Rich talks about his introduction to Broadway as a young person, but also in great detail of the history of Broadway and our perception of it. Quite reasonably he talks about the root of many of our beloved clichés and tropes as being the 1933 film 42nd Street. I looked it up, and there are the black two piece outfits, right on the vintage movie poster! Hm! Was Irving interviewing on the set in 1932? It's certainly possible. However, last week I streamed the movie, and not a black two piece in sight. So, where did they come from, and how did they get from there to the poster? Was a dance number shot, and cut from the final? Or rehearsed and never shot? Or was this a different project entirely? I’ve done a little digging but have no leads.

And what about the stage mother? Why would I so identify the older woman behind the dancer? Well…. I’m one of those people who likes to go to the originals whenever possible, and the original for the 1933 movie 42nd Street is the 1930 novel 42nd Street, by Bradford Ropes which is a really fun read. He had been a chorus boy, so he certainly knew the milieu. And he was gay, and a big chunk of the plot was driven by a gay relationship, too much for even a pre-code Hollywood movie. Especially a relationship that just is, rather than being a morality tale. But another big chunk of the plot is driven by the dreadful stage mother of one of the dancers. I was halfway through the book when I saw this photo, so it was pretty easy to say “Ah! A real stage mother!” The two woman share details of their appearance and the older one seems reasonably older enough to be the mother. She doesn’t seem dreadful at all. I would call her expression benign interest and concern. All stage mothers should be thus!

By The Way, I find Irving’s outfit just as interesting as the dancer’s. How wonderful that a journalist could get away with wearing such fanciful clothing!

The Diplomat

Washington DC, 18 April 2025   Found photo of me in my dinner jacket with my lover at the Marine Ball, The Very First Marine Ball in Hanoi Ever, in 1998. I was the first U.S. consular officer assigned to Ho Chi Minh City, and she was one of the section heads at the Embassy in Hanoi. A fabulous event. A bit on the discovery below, but I don't really have a provenance. I don't remember the moment, or who took this photo, and whether I'd handed them my wonderful Olympus Stylus pocket camera (in which case I will eventually run across the negative) or whether one of our friends shot it with their own camera and shared. In any case I have a excellent big print (color film processing and printing was very good in Vietnam!) that scanned well. The monocle is real, and I still wear it.

I just spent something over a week in my late sister's house with the family photographs in Phoenix. A horribly disorganized haystack! But, as you can see, there were some real finds, both interesting family album stuff and some very good photographs. Some both! I suspect I'll be posting a number of old photos by other people in the coming weeks. The process brought up a lot of emotional stuff, and will likely continue to do so as I do the second and third run through the first cull. I think it's time to read Lucretius and become philosophical.

Moonrise, Sunnyside

Phoenix, 11 April 2025   Around the corner and a few hundred feet from the door to my nephew's house here. I came to visit with him and his family and take some more steps in managing the closure of my sister's estate. For the first few days I was here I was going through a century of family photos. Every decade had it's bad and random photographers... And, of course, even the good photographers had bad days. I think we'll end up with a fifth, or less, maybe much less, of the pictures.

I wasn't feeling it for the photography this trip. Until Tuesday, when I turned on to the street near my nephew's house, and, with the sun strong in the west, I felt it. I took a number of frames for composite panoramic photos, and this one -- which is straight, aside from being infrared. For a photo like this I felt confident processing on my old Macbook (see last week!) one eye on the image in Photoshop, one eye on the histogram.

Untitled

New Orleans, 4 April 2025   A shot of the wetlands beside Lake Pontchartrain, not so far from the land routes north from New Orleans. I will admit to pure tourism, but, in spite of that and the dark sky and spotty sunlight I brought home 250 exposures. After all, when is this Northeast Corridor boy going to be back? In spite of less-than-ideal light I think I've got some good pictures from the outing a couple of days ago. I'm not going to process them any further, or even name this one until I get home and have a chance to look at them on the big graphics arts monitor. The delicate separation of tones needed - particularly in the darker areas - just isn't going to show on the twisted nematic screen of the ancient FrankenMacbook. So, more to come!

Marshall Field's Atrium

Chicago, 27 March 2025   On the road, a complex, four headed trip including Julee's professional conference here in Chicago. We did a couple of days of tourism together after the conference closed, but before that I did tourism on my own while Julee worked. One morning I walked the Chicago Pedway, an underground network of passageways that makes it possible to get around downtown without dealing with the worst of Chicago winter. I found myself in the basement of Macy's, took the elevator to the top of the store and then took pictures on the way down. It's a Macy's now but it started life as the flagship for Marshall Field's department stores in 1906, when local department stores, each based in their own city, dominated retail and were very big business in spite of being local. The scale of this building is evidence of how big. The successor Macy's store doesn't come close to fillng the space.

The photo is a vertical panorama, consisting of five frames captured with my cell phone. It went together surprisingly easily!

Great Falls

Washington DC, 21 March 2025   A sunny end-of-winter day on the Potomac. Not quite a couple of weeks ago, but the weather had a very different flavor. It wasn't warm, and it doesn't look warm in the photo. This is the absolute head of navigation for the river, though the functional head of navigation is a few miles downstream in Georgetown, now a neighborhood within the District of Columbia, but a small city before there was a Washington DC (or a United States) that made it's living on transhipment.

This is big infrared panorama, assembled from twelve individual frames. I took a lot of pictures that day. Much processing still to do. Perhaps even on this photo. The clouds could be brighter, though I note that clouds are very often much greyer than we see them if we really stop and look.

Post Ultimate Winter Day

Washington DC, 16 March 2025   A very recognizable Washington landmark, of course, captured in infrared five days ago. The photo has a small history, hence the title. I first took this photo in color with my cell phone on a very cold winter day a couple of weeks ago. Like this one, a mosaic of photos to be assembled into a panoramic view to cover for the fact I don't typically carry a camera bag full of many lenses. But, I hadn't quite gone wide enough, and those images didn't assemble into the image I wanted. So I had to go back, and I had to wait for a truly clear sky. There were high clouds on the 10th, so no go. I was nervous, as it was obvious the weather was changing, and that the 10th really was the last cold winter day. I had to hope that the next day would be totally clear (which it was) and that the trees wouldn't have started to visibly bud out (which they hadn't) ruining the stark winter look of the scene. Captured in both infrared and color. It was quite warm that day, so I declared it the first day after (Post Ultimate) winter.

Last week I posted a couple of days early, as I was gearing up to migrate this website to a new domain server company, and this week I'm a couple of days late as I was still in the process of the migration on Friday. Not easy stuff for a self taught webmaster taking care of a single website! What drove the change of services was the fact that the email addresses associated with this site were failing much of the time, and the technical support I was gettng in trying to clean that up was really poor. When I was looking at a second round of fixes, I threw up my hands (or at least sardonically raised my eyebrows) and started looking for a service that was reputed for excellent customer service. I think I may have found it. So far the support has been quick and very good.

There's still cleanup. Not all of the images are displaying, and I'll likely to have to add those files back in one by one. The internal links are glitchy. And, as I check links I've found one or two external links that are broken, probably not for technical reasons, but because the target organizations are no more... This is why the web master checks! Once I'm sure the email is up and reliable I'll need to revamp some parts of the site, along with revamping my business plan and approach. I'll almost certainly be building out with Substack. More as it rolls out!

Spiky Alien Plant and Social Circle

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 5 March 2025   Perhaps my last portrait of this beloved plant, my sixth posted in this space. After two rounds of consultation and healing with the Garden Committee at our boat club, Julee and I had to admit that life on a boat floating in fresh water was perhaps a little damp for a plant evolved in the arid semi-desert of Eastern South Africa. So, the poor thing was given up for adoption, and, after some further healing, lives as the centerpiece of this plant display in the middle of the meetings table in our boat Club's Library. I truly don't know if this plant is happier living in a group home, but it thrives, and I like to think that's meaningful.

I'd been wanting to take this picture for a while, and plotting a setup involving a black tablecloth and carrying the little planter outside. But last week's picture showed an easier way. Wait for the sunlight, and carry the planter into my Club's Captains Room and put it on the black table top. Straight infrared photo, like all my posted portraits of Spiky Alien Plant.

(For logistical reasons I'm putting up this Friday blog post a couple of days early.)

Brueghel's Revenge

Washington DC, 28 February 2025   It's about as traditional a 17th Century still life as you can get, isn't it? Captured the day before yesterday in the Captains Room of my boat club here on the Washington Waterfront. Given the all white flowers I assume that a member brought them back from a wedding. I don't know that I would ever have intentionally set up a still life like this, but I'm always happy to accept the gift of an image presented to me as I move through the world. So, an arrangement of flowers on a black table, illuminated by the bright sunshine streaming through the window. The Jan Brueghels, Elder and Younger, were Dutch masters who were fabulous at everything in Baroque painting, including wonderful still lifes of flowers.

A color photo, just as it came out of the camera, although slightly cropped to center the subject. Interestingly, I took this first with my phone, and then thought that it was worth the best effort I could make and went to the boat and got my big cameras and took it again, in color, and infrared. Hm... This is the kind of situation where equipment does matter. The detail, crispness, and clarity of the image from the 40 megapixel Canon R5 really does leave the phone image far behind. (It's not just that there are more pixels, it's that they're (no joke!) bigger, better, pixels...) The best camera is the one that's with you, but if the superior camera is close at hand one might as well go and get it!

Waterfront Sunset

Washington DC, 21 February 2025   I do seem to have a knack for living in pretty places. Hong Kong and Kathmandu are kinda obvious, but, even now when I'm unceremoniously retired and (with a bit of fuss) repatriated, things are still rather good looking and photogenic, both here and in Gloucester. I took this shot up the Waterfront from our boat and the Club last month during an earlier cold snap. You can see a couple of ducks walking around on the top of the water in the middle. The statue of the Maine lobsterman is to the left, and the back of the Fish Market to the right. Technically it's a three frame panorama, stitched up out of frames captured with my cell phone.

Used and Unusual in Winter

Washington DC, 14 February 2025   Happy Valentines Day!

A shot of my favorite bookstore, in Gloucester, taken from the second floor across the street where I was visiting with my favorite dental hygenist and dentist. Infrared, of course, and wide angle thanks to my habit of stitching up individual photos to mimic the use of a wider angle lens. One of the bookstore owners told me he'd thought about a picture from the second floor across the street, but hadn't disturbed the sanctity of the dental practice with his camera. And, also, that he liked the fact that the colors of the signs of the other stores washed out in infrared, underlining the name of his storefront! The photo section is in the very front, to the left as one looks in or walks in the door. It is a place of terrible temptation for me...

Domestic Drama

In Transit, 7 February 2025   So it's a photo of my kitchen window... No side eye, please! Target of opportunity this past Monday.

It's infrared, which makes the sky even more dramatic. An interesting side effect of that is the pitcher to the left. To the eye (and in a standard color photo) it's a deep, nearly opaque, purple. But to infrared it's completely clear.

Breaking Up

Washington DC, 31 January 2025   The light on the frozen Potomac and the patterns of the thin ice as the river was unfreezing looked interesting so I grabbed my small camera bag and went for a walk, capturing this single frame infrared image from the northern side of of the 14th Street Bridge looking towards Memorial Bridge, with Arlington Cemetery the Hidden City of Rosslyn in the background.

Glosta Prismatics 1

Washington DC, 24 January 2025   An indoor still life from our house in Gloucester. The houses there are close together, so we have privacy film on a couple of our windows, and the kind of privacy film we like throws these rainbows into the house in the mornings and afternoons. They're photogenic, so I may well be processing more of these pictures and posting them, thus the "1".

Tourism

Washington DC, 13 January 2025   Though to be fair, this young person is probably not a tourist, and may have been to the Eiffel Tower enough times to be legitimately blasé. Maybe her family brought visitors, and insisted she come along. As often, I don't know the full story! Or any of the specific story. So the picture is a starting point, like so many pictures in human history...

Taken from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, which has two levels, with my Canon R5, the kind of equipment one needs if one is going to be shooting handheld in the darkness of night, even in the City of Light. It's a three frame vertical panorama. I locked the focus on the landing below so that the view of Paris would stitch without problems. (For all that, this was a hard panorama to stitch.) And, of course, you want Paris to be obvious, but the interest is on the landing and the person, so that needs to be sharp.

Post Haussmann

Washington DC, 10 January 2025   Another shot from that wonderfull walk through North East Paris, documented over the last couple of months starting from 22 November. I'm still processing photos from that grouping.

Baron Haussmann, of course, is the creator of our image of Paris. But even his Wikipedia article says "His vision of the city defines modern central Paris." (Italics mine!) This neighborhood is far from central, being a stroll from the Porte des Lilas, named for what was a real gate in the Paris city wall that actually helped hold off the German Army for a while during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, just after Haussmann had been driven from his office as the Prefect of the Seine. It was likely farmland then. In the mid 20th Century it was the setting for dark movies of romantic seediness. Now, it seems to me a quite liveable middle class neighborhood, very Paris, even if the dominant architecture is 20th Century rather than 19th Century. It's not the Paris of Ernest Hemingway or Gene Kelly, but I could live there very happily! This is one of the parts of Paris that is hilly, and in those parts, these urban bridges are common. They lend an interesting topological aspect to the geography of the place, since givens, like being able to walk around the block, no longer apply.

On the technical side, this is a three frame infrared panorama. I had to lighten the dark shadows when I was processing the raw files, as the dark shadows were even darker than I liked.

Vishwanath at Night

Washington DC, 3 January 2025   Taken just before we left our life in Kathmandu six years ago. It would be fun to say this was our neighborhood temple, but that's not true, or at least it would be a great exageration. The temple closest to our apartment was the much more modest (but also wonderful) Walkhu Ganesh temple, just up the alley/goli and a left turn from the front door to our little apartment building. This is the Vishwanath, the big temple for Shiva in Patan Durbar Square, about two blocks from our place, a large feature in the ceremonial center of Lalitpur. It was beyond amazing to be living right in the middle of a special place like that.

The temple had just undergone repairs and renovation after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake and was lit up for the first time. Whenever I'm photographing a single created object (even a big one like this) I mentally give credit the the creator or creators of the subject thing. Here, at a minimum, to the architect and the lighting designer!

This is a night shot, with the camera (my Canon R, since converted for infrared) on a tripod for steadiness. It's a three frame stitched panorama, as often with me, simply to avoid carrying and changing lenses. In spite of the component photos being captured so long ago it was only last week that I assembled this picture. I have a companion oblique photo that I'm also very pleased with. A single frame shot that didn't require stitching. That was the photo on my business card for a while.

Upstream From the Ile

In Transit, 27 December 2024   'Tis the Season to be in transit, of course. On the way back to the home in Washington today.

I took the photo in Paris last month, on the other sunny day, the one I didn't expect and that caught me be surprise when I was out without my big cameras. Hey the best camera is the one that's with you, right? And of course, cell phone cameras are in fact pretty damn good, as you can see. This is a vertical panorama stitched up from five frames taken with my phone. The upstream side of the Ile de la Cité dead ahead on the left side, the Seine in the foreground, of course, with the Ile St. Louis to the right. We flew out a few days before the interior of Notre Dame was reopened after the fire. A quasi-cousin, a deep Francophile, just posted a photo of herself on pilgrimage in front of the cathedral.

This is a photo of opportunity, very much my modus operandi. If the phone camera wasn't good I'd have to carry a pocket camera all the time, which I did before cell phones got smart and acquired cameras. But, sometimes I do go hunting for the picture, like the recent day on the Jersey side of the Hudson, where I had a strong idea of what I was after, or the recent day in Paris on the Canal St. Martin, where I didn't have a strong idea of what I was after, but was definitely on a photo mission.

So, perhaps one of my goals (avoiding the word "resolution") for the coming year will be to do more intentional photography. Along with bringing some order to my back catalogue, and even to my current catalogue. Okay, I've think I've just given myself 730 days of work for the next year, and days when I don't do much of anything else, certainly very little of my signature move of staring into space and day dreaming. But life isn't open ended, so I will have to give it what I can...

Happy New Year!

The Emerald Forest at Christmas

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 20 December 2024   Something a bit more seasonal and current, especially as Christmas will be past by the time I post next week. The patch of wild land (the subject of many of my photos over the last four years) a couple of blocks from our house in Gloucester is, of course, bare, leafless, and open in this depth of Winter, but there are a trio of tiny pine trees growing up in the middle, and one of my neighbors decorated this one for the holiday.

So Happy Holidays! My next post will be after Christmas...

Witnesses at the Bassin de la Villette

Washington DC, 13 December 2024   From the NE Paris walk last month. It's the southern end of the Bassin, just north of the first locks on the Canal St. Martin. I don't know their story. Perhaps one of them was showing the other their beloved Bassin de la Villette? All speculation of course!

This a straight single frame infrared photo. Unilike a lot of others in this series I didn't build up a larger image by stitching together multiple shots in post-production.

Under Development

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 6 December 2024   A third photo from the wonderful walk through northeast Paris on the 20th of last month. Not an old or fashionable neighborhood, and showing a mix of more modern Parisian architectual styles along with the hilly aspect of the city as one gets away from the river. This neighborhood was so unfashionable in the early part of the last century that the great chanteuse Edith Piaf was born into a broken family on the steps of an apartment house, more or less in the street, near here. I did make a pilgrimage to that spot at the bottom of Rue Belleville this trip.

In Gloucester this week, as we're getting a solar panel rig installed as preparation for the Zombie Accapolypse. (Only half a joke...) Today the carpenters are making loud noises and shaking the house from a corner of the cellar where they're building an enclosure for the big lithium-ion batteries. While they're working, I'm going through pages of old negatives from the '80s, and transferring ones from deteriorated negative pages to fresh pages. Fussy and boring work, but the archive requires it! I have about forty pages still to go...

Every now and then I take a glance at the negatives themselves, and find that there's a lot of comunality with the work I'm doing today. I do hope that on the whole I've improved over the last fifty years but find I'm okay with being more or less the same person I was when young. And, as I've said before, I'm still very proud of some of the images I created in my twenties.

Upper Rue Belleville

West Swanzey, New Hampshire, 29 November 2024    Another shot from the sunny day in Paris on Wednesday last week. This is a three frame infrared panorama taken in the Northeast quadrant of the city, between the Part des Lilas, where I exited the metro and started walking, and the Basin de la Villette, where I turned left to follow the water and took the photo I posted last week.

For many artists, certainly for me, travel means so much. It's not as simple as going to fabulous places, though there's nothing wrong with that, except that everyone elso on the planet is going to them and they're getting a little crowded. Paris is actually better than many spots. Florence last year was packed, packed, with tourists. There are a lot of obvious tourists in Paris as well, but it's also a big city full of French people running their country, creating French media and culture, and generally living their lives. One of the things that was delightful about the visit was seeing all the kids and families running around. But, to circle back, the need is for someplace different and fresh. Paris is definitely different...

Bridge and Lock, Canal Saint Martin

Paris, 22 November 2024   Our second week in Paris. A dear childhood friend of Julee's has an apartment in the southwest corner of the city, and since she works and lives in another European city she was so very kind as to offer us the use of it. It's in a very comfy, but totally unknown, neighborhood, and it's been a wonderful visit. I pushed for this extended stay, because, looking at the photos of Brassai and Robert Doisenau, and the wonderful book Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clébert, illustrated with photos by Patrice Molinard, I realized there was a lot of Paris I knew nothing about, in spite of having lived in the city as a child. My Dad worked at UNESCO, headquartered here, and the Paris of his dreams was centered on the Latin Quarter and the northwest to southeast diagonal, which includes much of touristic Paris. There's enough interest there to occupy years of exploration. But, there is more to Paris, and I wanted to get a taste of it. So, we're staying in the southwest, and I'm spending time during the day in the northeast.

I knew that there is a big boat basin, the Basin de l'Arsenal between the Bastille Opera and the Seine, and was vaguely aware that it had to be connected, at least historically, with the French canal system upstream, otherwise why would it have existed in the first place? It turns there is to this day a nearly five kilometer working canal running through the northeast quadrant of Paris, the Canal Saint-Martin. Two days ago, the only sunny day of our visit, I walked the length of the above ground part (a fair length of it runs through tunnel, as the real estate got too valuable to leave uncovered!) with my cameras. This is the lock and pedestrian bridge at Quai Valmy and Rue des Récollets. Yesterday I went back and took a boat tour along the length of the canal and got to experience the locks in action. What a blast!

Staight infrared photograph...

Hotel Olaffson Lobby

Paris, 15 November 2024   Something reminded me the other day of a photo I took in Haiti many years ago. A collegue had at the time extragavantly praised it as "good enough for the National Geographic". Heady words! Hm... So I went and looked at it again, and I'm sorry to say I don't think it's good, at least not that good. Sigh! But I thought of other pictures I'd taken during that time, and I feel this one has held up. I took it one random evening from in front of the stage, looking through the lobby to the front doors.

The Hotel Olaffson was a real landmark, a turn of the 20th Century gingerbread house, large enough to be converted into a small hotel, and later a serious (small) music venue that was destination for visitors and locals alike. It was the original for the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's classic novel The Comedians and a large character in Herbert Gold's classic memoir of Haiti, The Best Nightmare on Earth. Also, for some time, my neighborhood bar...

Homage to Andreas Feininger

In Transit, 8 November 2024   From my trip to New Jersey three weeks ago. This is the kind of shot that drew me to the location. It's inspired by Andreas Feininger, a Life Magazine staffer when the magazine was in its heyday in the mid 20th Century. He was a wonderful photographer who went for the technical, supported by his training as a cabinet maker in the Bauhaus School in Weimar Germany. If he needed an unusual configuation in his equipment he simply built it, in those days of big wooden cameras. He was influential, both for his work and for the fact that he wrote popular and successful books on technique and aesthetics for the students of the art at all levels. I grew up with them because my mother, a wonderful photographer and teacher of the art herself, had them and they were in the house when I was first serious about photography in my early teens. Feininger was a great documenter of cityscape, and Dover Publications, a purveyer of inexpensive paperback books brought out his New York in the Forties a cheap but well produced paperback, in 1978, and it sold quite well. Dover very quickly followed up with Berenice Abbot's New York in the Thirties and Feininger's Chicago 1941

Empire State Building by Andreas Feininger   Here is one of the originals, scraped off the web, so I don't have a title or year for it. Feininger shot on 4X5 inch black and white sheet film in a custom made camera. I shot in infrared in a modified full frame (24X36mm, that is, approximately one inch by an inch and a third) camera, so much smaller. My photo is cropped down from that, so smaller still. There has been a little progress in the technology of photography in the last eighty years... My location is close to his, but not exactly the same spot. And, a lot has grown up since then, both trees and buildings! I'm happy with the day's work, but I may go back to this neighborhood and see if I can build on it.

Lothlórien in St. Marys

Washington DC, 1 November 2024   From our summer visit to Canada. I held it back because I sent a print in the way of a thank you to our hosts in St. Marys, Ontario, and I wanted them to see it before I posted. It was the husband who said "Hard to imagine we live here, it looks like Lóthlorien", giving the photo its name.

It is a different way of seeing the world. I do think the the word "seeing" is the right word, even if I have to use the modified camera as an intermediary. The term "elfeyes" just came to me. It's a little cute, but I think I'll keep it for future use.

Midtown from Hoboken

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 24 October 2024   A Big Picture from a Grand Adventure! Not The Big Picture, of course, but big enough... For a long time, perhaps three or four years, I'd been wanting to do some extreme telephoto work looking towards Manhattan from behind the Jersey Palisades, the rocky ridge that runs along the west bank of the Hudson. There are a lot of problems here. First, it's a neighborhood I didn't know, so scouting locations would be hard. Second, it's far from any base of mine so logistics is hard. Third, this kind of photography is completely weather dependent, which is really hard for a location far from home. Earlier this year Julee and I reconnected with a Foreign Service friend when she came to visit in Washington. My ears pricked up when I realized she had a home in Hawthorne, NJ, nearby, and she had the kindness to accept my request to stay with her when the photography appeared to be possible. So, since then, I've been looking at my calendar, keeping an eye on the weather, and waiting for the moment it would come together. That moment was the last part of last week. All set up, and I drove the four and a half hours from Washington to Northern New Jersey on Friday, spent the afternoon and all day Saturday driving around and searching for good vantage points and photographing. A really good, productive, energizing couple of days!


Untitled, by My Friend

And the Grand Adventure? My friend came with me on Saturday, and she'd been pressing me to try a location in Hoboken. I wasn't that enthusiastic, as I'd been fixated on the behind-the-Palisades vision, but we went. Good, but obstructed, views of Manhattan from the ground level. We ended up next to a tall building with an annex that looked like it might have an accessible terrace above the tree line. The building is a quasi-public space, but we weren't allowed to access the stairs that seemed to lead directly to the area that interested me, but were firmly directed to the elevators back in the tall part of the building. Once in the elevator, we looked at the button for the 18th (top) floor meeting rooms and pressed it instead of 4... We were stymied for a bit, since the meeting rooms with the views were locked, but there was a stairwell next to the elevator that went up as well as down. No placarding that forbade access... No signage at all, actually... My friend was very dubious, but I led the way into the dark, dirty, industrial, space through three flights of locked doors, all mysterious except for the room marked "Elevator Machinery". And, at the top, an open door to the roof. Also very functional in an industrial way, with power cables, bracing cables, all sorts of antennae, and glorious views, as you can see from this week's photo. My friend suggested that security would come for us, a reasonable thought since there were cameras in the stairwell, so I worked quickly at first so I'd have the pictures on my memory cards before we were thrown out. But security never came...

I'm really pleased with the work. My photo is a three frame infrared panorama of Manhattan right across the river from where we were skulking. I also took 180° panoramas up and down the river, and covered everything in color as well as infrared. I'll be working with these images, and others I took on the trip, for some time. Very big thanks to my friend who took me there, and then stayed with me as I pushed the boundaries!

Old Anchorage, Washington Channel

In Transit, 18 October 2024   Perhaps the very first infrared photo I made, certainly the first that was at all successful. A bit over twelve years ago! I'd sent my first generation Canon 5D to Lifepixel in Washington State for conversion to infrared and it was mailed back to me at the Capital Yacht Club while I was in Washington DC as part of my R&R from Hong Kong. It took me a year for the coin to drop on how to set the camera up for best results, but I did still get some decent images during that year, including this one. I reprocessed this photo from the RAW file a couple of days ago and was surprised and how little tweaking it needed or could take. I desaturated it and upped the contrast a little bit.

A friend had their boat moored opposite the then location of the Club in what was then the designated anchorage field for the Channel, and I took this photo of a visiting double cabin yacht trawler, also anchored out, from the deck of their boat. Today the designated anchoring field is down the Channel on the other side of the Police Pier (pictured in my post from 4 October) and now this area has a line of mooring balls for smaller boats that one has to rent. A good thing! It was a difficult place to anchor, very constricted, and fairly deep, a bad combination. And, of course, there is a lot more traffic through the Channel now, including the big steel river ferries and we need to keep the moored boats to the side.

Understory, Keene, New Hampshire

Washington DC, 11 October 2024   The third photo I've posted of the wonderful stolen, or at least snatched, 45 minutes I spent in the patch of woods near the home of my in-laws on the 15th of last month. I'm very happy with the way this one turned out.

It continues to be odd spending my mornings trying on some serious writing. A lot of my energy is going in to that, and I'm a bit concerned about splitting my time and energy between two creative endeavors that are so different, and each so involving. There is a man named Ctein who has achieved success as a science fiction writer and as photographer and as a top photographic printer. So it's possible... I will have to really work at parsing out myself.

The Washington Channel at Ft. McNair

Washington DC, 4 October 2024   A photo of opportunity from last week. I was walking home past the wall of Fort McNair and stopped at the Titinic Memorial and captured this photo with my phone. It's a nine frame double row stitched panorama.

Oh my, what a busy week. Not enough of that busyness (Is that really a different spelling and word than "business"?) had to do with photography. I have been writing up a storm, which is great, and a different kind of creative, but it will be a while, and much editing before any of that is ready for prime time. Regardless, onward!

Forest Floor, New Hampshire

Washington DC, 29 September 2024   Another image from the late afternoon session where I took the image I posted last week.

No comment on again being late with my Friday post...

Transcedent Forest, New Hampshire

Washington DC, 21 September 2024   A day late, on this week's Blog Post. Not a dollar short (I mean c'mon, I haven't come close to figuring out how to monetize this activity!) but it is Saturday already, and I do try to post reliably on Friday. Apologies to my legion of fans... The past week got rather busy, and it won't be over until tomorrow afternoon, as I'm having friends over Sunday during the day.

I took the photo on the last day we were in New Hampshire for a cousin's wedding last weekend. I suppose that counts as travel for photography, but it was close call, as the weekend was packed with, well, a destination wedding (not to the Bahamas, thank you Amber and Ryan!) and much family getting together. I snuck away for a couple of hours as things were winding down, late in the day Sunday, but early enough that the sunlight was still getting through to the understory of the forest.

Prospect Street Cemetery, Gloucester

Washington DC, 13 September 2024   Much smaller scale, perhaps, but another older color panorama, in this case a color portrait of one of the many small cemeteries in Gloucester, three frames captured with my phone when I was on an afternoon walk almost exactly three years ago. I've posted photos of this cemetery before, but in infrared.

It's been a quiet time photographically. Not that I'm not taking pictures, but flame of artistic holy fire isn't burning as brightly as I could wish. It's been an odd season altogether, with both very local, and very big and national, politics taking up a lot of the space in my brain.

And... I haven't been travelling in the last little bit, so my ability to do something fresh is a bit limited. I'm primarily a 'scape (landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes) photographer these days, with a solid side gig in intimate landscapes and still life, so not travelling, even locally, limits my ability to be original. But, when I scroll down my blog and blog archive I do feel good about my work over the recent months and years. I have a really good base to continue to build on! It will come, it will come...

Pacific Sunset, Montara

Washington DC, 6 September 2024   O!MG... Friday snuck up on me this week. This morning I was blissfully unaware that it was a blog day, and when I started engaging this afternoon I thought I would have to scramble for a photo. But, when I opened ACDSee (which is my beloved photo filing system), this photo was there. I've no idea how that happened, but I'll take serendipity when it's offered. It's a very traditional photographic landscape of a sunset, of course, but not a bad effort of it's type. It's a three frame stitched panorama, taken from California Highway 1 (the fabled Pacific Coast Highway) between Santa Cruz and San Francisco last December.

I find it interesting that it's now uncommon to take a picture like this without contrails in it. When I was a child in the early days of the jet age seeing a contrail was rare and noteworthy.

Gothic Manufactory

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 30 August 2024   Second Glosta Gothic image in a row. But Gothic Darkness has it's place... This is an infrared photo of a Gloucester landmark, the factory that made copper based paint for boat and ship bottoms on the north side of the entrance to the Inner Harbor. The copper paint was a very effective deterent to underwater marine growth. But, the product has not just fallen out of favor but is now actually illegal because, in this case, very effective = extremely toxic. Such is life... You can read more about the building and the history on Gail Welter's web site, My photo was taken from a schooner entering the harbor last week.

House and Sky

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 23 August 2024   A bit dramatic, isn't it? I promise The Adams Family doesn't live across the street from us here in Gloucester. Nor Stephen King, although I note that he's recently moved out of his spooky mansion in Bangor, Maine, custom built for him in the '70s - complete with the right vibe for a horror writer, including secret passages.

Lighting makes such a difference! It's really just a handsome big victorian, occupied by good neighbors, a very normal house though a bit grand. But, shot in infrared against a dramatic sunset sky it does loom, doesn't it? We used to use a deep red filter with black and white film to darken the sky and emphasize clouds (as in Adam's classic Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico ), and, of course, infrared is red-filter-on-steroids.

Lake George

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 16 August 2024   Julee and I broke up the long drive from southwestern Ontario with an overnight stop in Lake George Village in upstate New York. A bit of a photographer's and art lover's pilgramage, as it was where Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe spent their summers in the 1920s and '30s. Stieglitz' family had a property there and were serious summer people. It's still got a wonderful inland resort/beach town vibe.

I took the photo from the bow of one of the old excursion ships that ply the lake. It's an eight frame infrared panorama. Beautiful day!

Grand Trunk Bridge

St. Marys, Ontario, Canada, 9 August 2024   A local landmark, the pedestrian bridge that carries the Grand Trunk Trail over the Upper Thames River. Straight infrared photo, slightly straightened out in Photoshop.

Julee and I are far off my beaten track in Western Ontario, on a mini class reunion of four of the boys I went through most of secondary school in Mexico City with in the early '70s. These are the people for whom I was exuming the bad beginner's photos last week. They were well received, even with their uneven (and mostly terrible) quality...

It's been a great week with my peeps! And I had a little time and sunlight for my photography.

Weeds and Ripples

Gloucester, 2 August 2024   More of the littoral (and literal!) grasses along the Annisquam, with the ripples of the incoming tide moving through them. A good day photographically!

I've just had a sobering experience... I was going through some of the pictures I took as a young teenager. O!MG. What a terrible photographer I was! I don't think all of my work from that epoque was that bad (and there is a vanishingly small number of photographers whose contact sheets or folders contain more hits than flops, even at the highest levels, even when exposing film was an expensive act done carefully) but the stuff I was looking at was really embarrassing, both artistically and technically. Oy! But it won't go away because it's a unique record of my dear friends of the time, so I'll have to come to terms with it, and not be too discouraged. I've always been clear that I'm allowed to take family and souvenir postcard shots, after all! But, Oy! I do believe I got better, and relatively quickly, as there's work from my early twenties I'm still really proud of. Even in my sixties I've not dispaired of working hard at my art and continuing to improve.

Rockport Harbor Littoral Zone

Washington DC, 26 July 2024   The littoral zone is that place between high tide and low tide, the part of the seashore that is sometimes above the water and sometimes below it, containing plants and creatures that are uniquely adapted that bi-polar existance. I've been shooting the grasses along the Annisquam, once a tidal, marshy, river, and now a tidal marshy, channel, open to the sea at both ends due to the digging out of the Blynman Canal, which has a patchy history of near four hundred years of on again-off again use since it was first dug out in 1643. This shot is on the other end of the island of Cape Ann in Rockport Harbor. All built out of granite, since Rockport was aptly named, being where the products of nearby quarries were loaded for shipment by sea. The place must have had a much more working class vibe than it does now... Finns immigranted to work the quarries, and left their mark. One of their descendants did a lovely job of paving our driveway a couple of years ago, though not with native granite. Too expensive! So, as you can see, even the detritis of Rockport Harbor is big chunks of granite. The bright green is the mossy weeds that grow on the parts of the rocks that go underwater twice a day with the tides.

By the way, the writer Andrea Barrett wrote a kick ass short story called the The Littoral Zone. Highly recommended! It's in her collection Ship Fever and Other Stories. Sadly out of print, but definitely available at, say, Powell's City of Books in Portland.

Salt Marsh Weeds

Fryeburg, Maine, 19 July 2024   I'm on a quick trip up to Maine to visit with an old friend who I met in college forty five years ago or so. Forty five years... What an odd thought! But, not at all odd that we're still in touch, and still have an most intense connection.

The Gloucester Marina, close to our home there, is built in a bend of the Annisquam River over one of the salt marshes that line the river. There's a long walkway over the shallow part out to the less shallow part where the boats live. The marsh on either side is mostly covered by water during high tide, mostly in the air when the water runs out. These is the realm of these amphibious grasses, and they're wonderfully photogenic. One just has to wait for good light and the right tide. In the last weeks I've taken a lot of infrared photos from the walkway. This one is a two frame stitched panorama to get all of the pointed feature of the grass in.

The Illegalist Cover

Gloucester Massachusetts, 12 July 2024   I've been published! Last Winter I was in Gloucester's wonderful and iconic purveyer of used books, Dogtown Books, talking to one of the owners, Lucas Cotterman. He mentioned that he and his partner, Caroline Harvey, were putting together an issue of a Gloucester-oriented arts and literature magazine.

Hey, I've got photos of Gloucester...

And of course I offered them up. Lucas and Caroline picked the lead photo from the Amazing Day gallery on my website, and it's now the lead artwork in this wonderful first issue of The Illegalist. What a delightful thing, even if the printer/editor did mis-spell my name in two different ways on the contributors page... Aside from that it's good work from cover to cover. Proud to be included! If you're interested in a copy I'd encourage you to make the trip to Main Street here in Gloucester and buy a copy over the counter. (A visit to Dogtown Books is worthwhile in any case.) Or, buy it online through The Illegalist website. Link there, and to the bookstore in the text above.

And there's a launch party! The reception/soirée will be held at The Manship Artists Residency here on Cape Ann on Saturday 27 July at 6:30. Come! I'll be there, along with many of the other coolest people in the neighborhood. And you could buy a copy of the magazine...

2024 July 4th Glosta Parade

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 5 July 2024   "Glosta", as we pronounce, and, often, write, "Gloucester", is, interestingly, a July 4th Eve kinda place. Everyone was barbecuing in large groups in their yards the afternoon of the 3rd, and the big parade (very long, very local, very idiosyncratic) was that evening, and we all lined up for it over its serpentive route. Julee and I took chairs and drinks to Washington Street, which is very much done all along the way. This is an infrared photo of the lead element of the parade, the combined fire departments of Gloucester and Rockport (which shares the island of Cape Ann with Gloucester). Following the fire departments, a long, motley, and enthusiatic medley of marching bands, local civic organizations, clubs, school sports teams, potliticians running for office, and a small holdover group of Horribles in weird costumes. (This is officially The Fishtown Horribles Parade.) The mayor was tucked in there somewhere! Small fireworks all around that night in the neighborhood, and big fireworks over the harbor last night. Julee told me that Glosta would be dead the next day, and it was very quiet, though more businesses than I expected were open.

Found Art

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 28 June 2024   So, when we got to the house here, I walked around and got a couple of good photos of picturesque windows. I've since installed the the final venetian blinds to replace this sheet, and others in this room which we'd hung in the immdiate aftermath of the renovation...

Straight color photo with the big Canon R5.

I've been taking artsy photos of windows since my twenties. Not going to stop now!

ARCHIVE