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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 the 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!

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 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 marked "Elevator Machinery" room. 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. This 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!

Landscaping

Washington DC, 21 June 2024   A color version of the sort of found in-the-open infrared still lifes I've been taking and posting for a while. The bright light green of the new growth against the older leaves provides the desired contrast.

This is a bit of city landscaping not so far from where we live. I took the photo with my cell phone. In the day I carried a small point and shoot camera so I'd always have something with which to take a picture, and nowadays the improved cell phone camera does that for me. I get a lot of questions or comments about why I still use the big, expensive, dedicated, cameras for much of my work. One of my friends takes it as an opportunity to needle, hoping to get a defensive rise out of me. Fortunately I know them well enough not to give them the satisfaction and they get the same answer I give everyone, which is that modern camera phones are very good, and absolutely enough (or more than enough) for most situations. Capturing images I see by chance when I'm out walking is definitely one of those situations.

Why not all situations? Well the really tiny pixels of the camera phone introduce a certain ammount of electronic noise, which is always visisble if one looks close enough and very visible in marginal light. My beloved urban night shots, for example. The big cameras have more pixels (not why I uses them!) but because the pixels are so much bigger, the organized image information tends to overwhelm the random noise. And, even in the high sensitivity night shots, I'll swear the noise is crisper, cleaner, noise than you get with a phone camera. The shots are sharper than the phone camera, but in good even light (like this shot) you have to look very closely to tell. But most people won't be thinking of what the picture will look like on a wall blown up to (say) two by three feet. I think this one will do well as a big print, though I'm not sure it would go that big.

And then there is the question of flexibility. Though I do almost all of my work with a single type of lens (the glorious Canon 40mm F2.8 pancake lens) I have lenses from 16mm (nuts wide) to the 400mm at the end of the range of my big telephoto (not nuts, but very long!) and I use them all on occasion. And, the big camera bodies have all kinds of bells and whistles, which come into play from time to time. It's worth it to me...

Nameless Park, Phoenix

Washington DC, 15 June 2024   One of the last pictures I captured before I returned from Phoenix last weekend. It's a public park not far from where my nephew and his family live, but it Google Maps does not give it a name. It's an extreme panorama, two rows of photos combined with post production software. I didn't quite cover the whole rectangle with images, but followed the taking of these pictures with a sky-only panorama so I was able to patch the upper right corner of this photo with one of the frames from that series.

It's a work in progress as there is some mis-stitching, where clouds don't quite match up from photo to photo, and I need to work a little with the contrast of the whites in the trees. I may repost this photo after I've done the work.

Phoenix, Late Afternoon

Phoenix, Arizona, 7 June 2024    The house next door, in infrared, as the sun is going down. Not the first time I've shot these two palms. One of my first successful infrared photos, ten years ago, featured these very same trees. That one was great deal more formal. I think this one is more evocotive... This is the Phoenix I've come to know. A bit gritty... There are softer, greener, richer parts of Phoenix, but this is the northern tier where I spend my time when I'm here.

It's been an intense couple of weeks. Spending time with my family has been a blessing and a delight, but dealing with my sister Vicki's stuff has been very hard, both the actual stuff, and the bureaucratic muddle. Leave your heirs money, leave your heirs property, but don't leave them an incompletely constructed trust, and don't leave them a house packed full of three generations of random possessions. There are treasures mixed in, so we have to sort even if there is a dumpster in the future. Do your own döstädning. Your survivors will thank you!

But, I just finished up at the house and am headed home. Goodbye stuff. Goodbye house as it presently exists. Goodbye museum of my nephew's childhood, and of my own childhood. And, Vicki, stressful as this has been, I love you very much. Goodbye...

Stop

Phoenix, Arizona, 31 May 2024   Sunset walk the day before yesterday. With my cameras, of course! This photo is infrared, taken just after the sun went down.

Back in Arizona helping to deal with the estate of my sister. I'm spending a lot of time in probate court...

The Hidden City of Rosslyn

Washington DC, 24 May 2024   Another infrared panorama from Roosevelt Island, this time looking down the access bridge towards Rosslyn, a distinct neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, right accross the Potomac from Georgetown, an easy walk across the Key Bridge. Rosslyn is so close to downtown DC that it could be a neighborhood of the District but it's in a different state, so the rules of the District don't apply. Once you could find things in Rosslyn you couldn't in DC, like pawnshops, and then, later on, skyscrapers. Modest skyscrapers, but still taller than anything allowed in the District.

It's always been special for me, as it was the location for the Foreign Service Institute, so it was where I went the morning I reported for orientation, joined the State Department, and became an American diplomat. FSI was scattered throughout Rosslyn, most of a building here, a couple of floors there, and so on. I twice lived within walking distance while attending longer term training. And, that clutch of buildings was so distinctive, and (then) unique in the environs, that I took to calling it The Hidden City of Rosslyn, a play on Tolkien's Hidden City of Gondolin from the back story of The Lord of Rings. I'm still fond of Rosslyn, but FSI is now in a very nice campus down Route 50, and the neighborhood is much less quirky, more blandly normal, than before.

Bridge Rail, Roosevelt Island

Washington DC, 18 May 2024   The photo is one the the infrared shots from my walk on Roosevelt Island a couple of weeks ago.

I'm a day late with my Friday blog post. Sigh! Visitors. Some truly involoved bureaucracy. And work on the boat...

Dry Wetland, Roosevelt Island

Washington DC, 10 May 2024   I do believe I'm going to have to start educating myself about the botonical envirionment on the East Coast of the United States! I'm taking a lot of landscapes and closer up photos of nature and I don't know the names of any of the plants and trees I'm memorializing. And "Dry Wetland"? Is that even a thing? This is a fairly common sort of landscape here, where it seems it must have been wet, or is wet at certain times of year, but isn't wet while I'm looking at it. The bare standing trunks of trees in the middle of a very flat field of grassy weedy stuff are things I have often seen as I travel up and down the coast. Very photogenic, but how should I label and describe them?

So, a week ago, on a sunny morning I went to Theodore Roosevelt Island, a bit of nature in the Potomac River between Rosslyn, Virginia, and the Watergate Complex on the District of Columbia side. It's hard to access, as you can only drive to it northbound on the George Washington Parkway, and the little exit is easy to miss. One can also walk from Rosslyn, though I've no idea how. So, it's this little island (actually an island!) of tidal wild in the middle of urban Washington and one of its closest suburbs. I'd been meaning to go with my cameras for some months, and it did not disappoint. What a great walk, and a great photographic day! Eighteen photos I'm pleased with, perhaps this one most of all. It's a six frame infrared panorama.

LKJ's Walls at Artomatic 2024

Washington DC, 3 May 2024   This year's Artomatic has run it's course and closed at the end of the day last Sunday. This indoor panorama documents my two thirds of a room right before I took the installation down and packed it up to come home.

A good experience! It was sweet to be able to hang the bigger prints and I got a lot of affirmation from the experience. I sold a couple of the smaller prints in the Marketplace, met many fellow artists, and got a sense of the wild world of art we have in Washington. Too much competition, but so much good work!

Stick Season 2

Washington DC, 26 April 2024   I will admit I'm coasting on out trip to Vermont, But, it was a good time photographically!

This is a four frame infrared panorama. There's a part at the top that was really hard to get to stitch properly...

Stick Season

Washington DC, 19 April 2024   A week ago last Monday in Elmore, Vermont, very nearly to the border of Canada, there was still snow on the ground. The New England term for this time of year is "Stick Season", what with all the dry vegetation visible through the snow or gracing the ground where the snow has just melted. Down South here in Washington we're in the middle of high green Spring.

A completely straight, unmanipulated color photograph. I'd love to blow it up really big, as the individual crystals of ice are clearly visible at camera definition.

Elmore Copse

West Swanzey, New Hampshire, 12 April 2024   Like many others, Julee, her parents, and I went to The Great American Eclipse of 2024 last Monday. It's been in the plans for about four years, ever since we realized that the Path of Totality passed over a corner of Vermont only about two and a half hours drive from the family homestead here in Swanzey. Last year the calendar reminder popped up and we got serious. Julee found an AirBnB in an open area, surrounded by fields, for a good view, and all on one level on the ground for the not completely abled of our party. We built the time and place into our plans. No control over the weather, of course, and that was a nail biter. It was overcast, but the best sort for the circumstances, a thin, even, high overcast than didn't cover the whole sky (so there was plenty of pretty blue sky) and didn't obscure the sun in a way that that made it hard for us amateurs to see and enjoy the show. And it was a great show! To quote from an email to relatives:

As the occlusion started, I joined the family in the plastic Adirondack chairs in front of our rental. A couple of months ago I’d bought a half dozen good (not cardboard!) eclipse glasses, so we were able to comfortably watch the occultation of the sun’s disk. What was unexpected for me was the slowness of the whole event. The edge of the moon started covering the sun’s disk forty minutes or so before totality. Mind, at first, you could only tell by watching the sun through the glasses, as it wasn't until a good part of the sun was covered that it became noticeably dark. Not dark like night, a different, more luminous (yes, a weird adjective for the circumstances, but it seems most apt to me) dark. And then, totality, with the disk of the moon completely covering the disk of the sun, and we could take off our glasses and look directly at it. Totally cool! I do believe I could see a couple of solar flares at the rim of the sun’s disk. It was very dark, but not nighttime-needing-a-flashlight dark. A very strange and unique atmosphere. We had about two and a half minutes of totality, and then the sun started out from behind the other side of the moon, and over time the world returned to normal. I didn’t have any sense of any of this being wrong or dreadful, but then it was an expected and fully understood event for me.

Well worth the trip!

My second eclipse. I'd experienced one as a teenager in Mexico City, but wasn't then anywhere near the Path of Totality. It got a bit darker, and I saw the bite taken out of the Sun using an open pinhole device I made (eclipse glasses for amateurs weren't a thing then) but it wasn't the kind of awesome we experienced this week in the center of the event.

Did I take picture of the eclipse? No way! That is specialist work, and, honest eclipse photos tend to all look alike... I could have brought the full camera bag (which has the long zoom telephoto in it) and a tripod, and perhaps bought a couple of telephoto extenders, and, of course the camera filter equivalent to eclipse glasses. But I wanted to experience the moment rather than fussing with the setup to get pictures that other, specialist, photographers could do, probably better. And of course the high thin overcast didn't affect our enjoyment of the moment, but would have smoodged a photograph from the desired sharpness.

So this week's photo was taken the day before the eclipse of the little stand of trees next to our lodgings. It's infrared, and a two frame vertical panorama in lieue of changing lenses, as is my custom. A photo of opportunity, like most of my images.

Artsy Artomatic Corner

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 5 April 2024   In the late afternoon on the 8th floor of the vacated building that houses this year's Artomatic exhibit. Same view, but further back from the window, as the photo from last week's blog post. The sunlight refected off of the windows of the building across the street throws these abstract rays across the raw concrete floors.

Techically, a three frame vertical panorama, captured with my cell phone in color, then rendered to black and white in post.

Conference Room

Washington DC, 29 March 2024   The view (or one of the many views) from the 8th Floor of Artomatic, where I did my second to last volunteer shift today. It’s downtown Washington DC, so of course it’s offices, and in the wake of Covid, no surprise that the offices are under-occupied. The most recent rumor here at Artomatic is that this eight story office building will not be renovated into apartments (A very reasonable use, given the current shape of economy, but challenging from an engineering point of view.) but instead completely demolished in favor of a new twenty five story edifice built from the parking garage up as an apartment building. (Also a very reasonable use, but a bit fraught given the energy and material that went into this building. I’m not against either path, given the crying need for more housing in American cities.)

A target of opportunity photo, shot with my cell phone. I’ve always been a target of opportunity photographer, but recently I’ve been doing more with my cell phone. Not as glorious a camera as my Canon R5, but quite good, and always in my pocket!

Artomatic Marketplace

Washington DC, 22 March 2024   The Artomatic Marketplace (read below for background!) last Sunday, when a bunch of artists were selling their wares in one of the not-just-abandoned-but-gutted floors of the big building on 21st Street. I was there, my table is the one with the black tablecloth right behind the gentleman in blue walking to the left on the left side of the photo. A happy, low key, afternoon. And I sold two prints! O frabjous day!

The photo is a slightly more than 180° panorama stitched up from four frames from my cell phone. As always the best camera is the one with you. And, honestly, modern cell phones have pretty good cameras...

Duck Pond Tree

Washington DC, 15 March 2024   A recent photo of a minor SW Washington DC landmark, the Duck Pond at 4th Street, though I'm doing what I can to mess with reality in more than one way. It's a color photo, rendered to black and white and the contrast bumpfed up. No different than what I used to do with my Tri-X negatives when I printed them on #3 Brovira paper at higher contrast than the #2 product.

Artomatic is having it's moments... It was shut down for a couple of days for bureaucratic reasons. Opened on a Certificate of Occupancy, but to stay open it needed a Building Certificate... Which they got this morning, so I was there this afternoon doing one of my volunteer shifts. I'll have a table at the Marketplace, ready to sell prints tomorrow and the day after. More as this rolls out!

Anachronistic Contrail

Washington DC, 8 March 2024   Artomatic opens today at noon. 2100 M Street, with the front door around the corner on 21st Street NW in this fair city. My photos are up in room 4081 on the 4th floor. Do come and check them out! Here are the dates and times.

I should put up a little interior panorama of the room which I'm sharing with Roshani, but while the pictures are hung, along with the little shelf for my guest book, I don't have all the plackards and labels up. So the room is not quite ready to be presented in prime time. Next week!

I took dusk photo of a nice sharp contrail in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. I thought I'd put that up, but it wasn't quite up to standard. But, it reminded me of this infrared photo that I took six years ago, in Normandy. I like the juxtoposition of monuments from different agos.

Artomatic Venue

Arlington, Texas, 1 March 2024   It is a large building, isn't it? I speculated last week about how it came to be vacant and available for a large art festival and I really don't have anything (yet!) to add to that. This is the front entrance on 21st Street, even though the official address is 2100 M Street, around the corner. The photo is a five frame panorama, stitched up from pictures I took with my cell phone.

My part of this big event has been hung. I have two thirds of an office, good sized, but not big, in the former offices of The Urban Institute, a think tank that is now located in L'Enfant Plaza, not far from where Julee and I live on The Waterfront. I have a fair bit of wall space, but my big prints take up a lot of territory, so it's a very tightly curated small number of photos. The event opens on 8 March and runs through 28 April, and I certainly invite everyone to come! There's going to be a lot of art on display, seven to eight hundred artists by one speculation, but come to my room on the fourth floor, 4081, first.

Today we're in Texas, visiting relatives before heading down to Austin where Julee is attending SXSW EDU, an educational conference on the margins of the big South by Southwest media festival. I don't know what photographic opportunities this might bring, but of course I always travel with my cameras.

Artomatic Announcement

Washington DC, 23 February 2023   I'm going to take part in a big art event! Artomatic is a bit of a Washington DC tradition, originally organized in 1999 and held annually until Covid overtook all sorts of public happeings. It's up a running again this year, and I grabbed the opportunity to hang some of my bigger photos where I and others can see them on the wall. One will be Reaching Tree, above, in the flyer. I'll have three others, including one of the very big prints, nearly five feet wide, that I no longer have room to hang myself no longer having diplomatic housing nor an embassy section chief's office.

Artomatic takes over unused spaces for its events. In this case, it's an unoccupied seven story office building on the corner of M Street and 21st Street Northwest, a very central and fancy location in the Nation's Capital. I'm not sure of the exact history of why this very nice building is empty and partially gutted, but internal evidence indicates to me that it was the result of those two years of working from home during the Pandemic. Beloved Spousal Unit Julee's organization actually sold a large building in a equally cool location and is now running their Washington operations from a much smaller footprint of swing space nearby. In all events it's a lot of space, but I think they're going to fill it up.

It's a non-juried event, which is to say the organizers don't act as gatekeepers to keep out the artists who don't rise to the level of their taste. Anyone can reserve a part of a room and curate their own show, so being part of it isn't by itself an arrival for an artist. That said, when I was there a couple of days ago, a lot of what I saw going up was very good indeed. Artomatic will run for seven weeks, and I think an afternoon or an evening there would be a great use of time.

And while there, check up my work on the 4th floor...

The Seen Unseen

Washington DC, 16 February 2024   So... I had a pocket camera converted to infrared. That is still a work in progress, but I did manage to do a little testing with it a couple of weeks ago, and while I was walking along this Washington Waterfront looking at the screen on the camera I saw these splashes of light on the paving blocks, splashes of light reflected off of the glass of a nearby building that I could not see with my eyes. Infrared can be trippy! Though admittedly this sort of thing doesn't happen that often. But, many years ago, when I was first starting in infrared I very inadvertantly caught the image of an invisible infrared rainbow. Also trippy!

Untitled

Brooklyn, 9 February 2023   I haven't titled it yet because I think I may wait for another very sunny day, and go back a little later in the afternoon and see if I can capture an image without the bulbous shadow of the street light. That might make it better — or might not, but in any case the winner will get the title. I also have some color images from this little shoot, and I suspect (and will confirm!) that it may look very much like this infrared version, because there is very little color in the picture. A little bit of red/brown in the leaves stuck along the edge of the fence. If color gives the best image I'll still desaturate it for the biggest graphical punch.

There's a little story behind this one. When I was in Italy with Julee last October I found myself wishing I didn't feel the compulsion to carry the big heavy cameras when we went out into the rain. I don't do a lot of photography in gloppy conditions since my style works best in sharp sunlight, especially when shooting infrared, but in passing through a location I won't revisit soon, or perhaps ever again, I can't bring myself to foreclose the possibility that there might be something not to be missed. My iPhone makes a fine color backup, but something else is needed for infrared. So I bought a Canon S100 on eBay, a fine pocketable point and shoot camera ten or twelve years old, and a close match for the twelve or fouteen year old S95s I already own, and sent it off to LifePixel for conversion. It took a call to the LifePixel tech to figure out the custom white balance needed for infrared, but the day before yesterday I took it on my afternoon constitutional, and it failed on me. The final press of the button to take the picture won't work. The world wide web hive mind tells me that this is a known problem with this model. The fix involves some special solvent oil marketed to sound engineers for use on mixing boards. Some disassembly required! When my can of oil arrives and I have a couple of hours for some nervy and precise work I will give the repair a try. This was one of the pictures I missed because of the failure, and I went back the next day in simularly bright late afternoon sunlight with the big cameras and brought the sucker home.

Peak Milan Tourism

Washington DC, 2 February 2024   Reaching back a bit for today's photo. This was taken back in October, when Julee and I were in Italy, when we were flocking to the Piazza Del Duomo, or Catherdral Square, in Milan like thousands of other tourists. I don't know what you'd have to do to get an uncluttered photo of this iconic space in this day and age. October shouldn't be high season, but there wasn't a time of day or night when the square wasn't crowded. Fortunately, the tourists add their own interest to the scene. I find it charming that tourists come from everywhere now, and I do like the couple on the left with their selfie stick!

Infrared, and an eight frame stitched panorama... You can tell it's a wide panorama because the straight lines of the paving blocks are curved.

Ground Fog

Washington DC, 24 January 2024   A six frame infrared panorama cpatured on the drive home to Gloucester from the beloved inlaws' home in New Hampshire on the day after Christmas last year. Western Massachusetts...

It took a while to post this picture, because I was trying to make it better. The thought was that it would be improved if the foreground was a little lighter, a little more readable. But a lighter foreground reduces the snap of the contrasty sky. If I make a physical print of this I'll consult with my master printer in Hong Kong and see if there is any there there, but for the moment I'll be content with this pixels versions.

Parkway Puddle Panorama

Goucester, Massachusetts, 19 January 2024   There's been a lot going on, so I missed my blog post last week, and I really don't want to miss another, though there is still a lot going on! Major kitchen renovation, and that corner of the building is gutted to and beyond the studs, with implications throughout the house. Chaos! Well not really, but it does seems very disordered, and it's been a huge amount of work, even for those of us who haven't been actively demolishing and rebuilding.

The photo is something I captured in Connecticutt by a rest stop on the Merritt Parkway when we were driving up a week ago. It's infrared, a five frame stitched panorama. Needed wide, and didn't bring the wide lens with my on this trip, but probably wouldn't have used it anyway, since stitching is so easy and normal for me.

Ravenswood Reflecting Swamp

Washington DC, 5 January 2024   Another in a series... Water, with the water itself and imbedded elements, overlaid by the reflections of the surrounding landscape. Taken just over a week ago in Gloucester's Ravenswood Park nature reserve. Ravenswood contains a delightfully swampy little tract, whence this photo. Technically it's very similar to last week's photo, taken just over a month previously. Both captured with my iPhone, and rendered to black and white. This one is amazingly crisp. The image looks very sharp, even full size on the giant graphic arts monitor. The tech gets better and better... Of course, this image is much reduced in definition, for ease of posting on the web and to deter pirate printing of my images.

I was going to post a brooding panoramic image of winter skies, but that image still needs some work. Twiddly selective lightening of raw images prior to converting them to tifs, and then stitching them up into the wide image. Maybe next week?

Swanzey Puddle

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 29 December 2023   Another, more modest, study in the depths and reflections of water, taken a few steps from the driveway of Julee's parents' house at Thanksgiving last month. This one is a black and white image developed (which has a different meaning for me now that I'm a digital photographer) from the color image taken with my iPhone. It's a relatively simple and low key photograph, but I really like it.

Inverse Redwoods

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 22 December 2023   Not quite a week in Santa Cruz, and I didn't do a lot of photography, but I did do some. I've been working on this image, taken from the bridge over the actual Boulder Creek at the north end of downtown Boulder Creek for a very long time. I first saw and photographed the redwood trees reflacted in the water of the creek some years ago. The first attempt was interesting, but hardly definitive, and I've back every time I visit trying to fully realize my vision. This may be it, but I may go back again next time!

It's straight infrared. There's no sense of the depth or light in the visible light versions I've made this time or times before. I may have to think about that... I'm also wondering if the first look on this latent image was the trigger for my fascination with the depth and reflections in water.

I worked in Boulder Creek for a few months in the late '80s, and I'd always thought the town was a little bigger, the anchor metropolis at the top of the San Lorenzo Valley, but it's really quite small. I walked up one side of the main street and down the other in less than ten minutes. Of course, like all the towns in the San Lorenzo Valley it bleeds into a much larger area of houses tucked into the redwoods covering the higher areas off Highway 9, but these towns are still very small.

West Cliff Drive

Santa Cruz, California, 15 December 2023   This is Santa Cruz today, or, actually, yesterday. I'm visiting on a sort of unofficial Home Leave, even though this is no longer my home, visiting with my dear friends, and checking out the familiar landmarks, noting what remains, what is gone, what has changed, so that I'm not dealing with the deep sense of dislocation I would get if I spent many years away and had to deal with the changes of decades all at once. It's still very much the town I left to join the Foreign Service in 1989, but of course not absolutely that long ago place. But I'm really here for my friends, who are lovely, and, like me, 34 years older than they were 34 years ago.

This is an infrared photo of the clifftop drive on the west side of town, looking past the edge of the cliff over Monterey Bay to the Monterey Penisula on the south side of the bay.

Moody Santa Cruz Evening

Washington DC, 8 December 2023   Another traditional photo from my twenties, in this case a little evening cityscape shot from the Soquel Avenue Bridge looking towards Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz' main street. This neighborhood is much changed, partly because it was badly damaged by the Loma Prieta Earthquake a few years later in 1989, and partly because urban style has changed. Still love Santa Cruz, and will be visiting next week to see my friends from this part of my life.

This print is cropped to the 4 to 5 aspect ratio of 8x10 photo paper. I don't remember why I did that. In those days I generally stuck pretty closely to the thought that one composed in the camera, and cropped rarely, if at all. Some photographers filed out their negative carriers so that the black margin of the negative image showed on the print, proving (or "proving" as it could be faked) that they were printing the full image from the camera. By this part of my photographic career the enlarger companies made 35mm negative cariers that showed the full image, no filing needed, and I had one, but I printed right to the edge of the image on the negative, not past it. My normal paper easels (the devices that held photo paper flat under the enlarger head) were the same shape as the full 35mm frame, with an aspect ratio of 2 to 3 and a wider margin top and bottom, like the photo below. But, I would crop if the composition called for it, and perhaps that's what happened here.

Youth

In Transit, 1 December 2023   I keep my negatives and vintage prints in Gloucester. It's a large body of work, and there's much in it that I'm very proud of. (And of course, much that is trite or no more than personal documents, but that's true of most any body of work!) This photo comes from my second wind as a photographer. My first wind was the work I did as a teenager, mostly using a motley, but very good, stable of borrowed cameras. That never really tailed off, but was supercharged the second or third year I was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Looking back, I'm not even sure how or why.

I fell in with the photographic subset of the aristic sorts at UCSC. I think it was through a housemate of mine, who got interested, took a course with the wonderful Norman Locks, and introduced me to the group. I used the cash wedding present from my parents to choose and buy the first camera I chose for myself, rather than one that was borrowed or given to me, and allied myself with one of the esthetics of the time, images captured on the fly, 35mm Tri-X black and white film from Kodak, Brovira cold toned photo paper from Agfa, sometimes warmed a bit with selenium toner. And there I stayed for a happy decade or so, organizing my life around the art. (My third wind came much later, in Vietnam, but that's another story for another post.)

These two are part of the in photo group. I had great respect for their work and learned all I could from them. I felt myself their peer (or at least catching up quickly) in the art of photography but was a bit intimidated by them as people. They were so tough and self assured! The further one, seated on the arm of the chair, had hopped freights and ridden the rails all the way across the country, like a Depression era hobo. Whoa! I wasn't that tough, nor that imaginative. (I'm much tougher now, and more imaginative, even in my later sixties, but also much wiser!)

I definitely see the roots of my present photography in many of the photos I took then, but this one is a little different. I don't take nearly as many serious photos of people as I used to. Partly I've a lifetime of my family making excuses for me ("Oh, don't mind Laurence, he's always taking pictures of everyone!"...) but mostly the ethics of using people's images have changed. We didn't ask, unless we were working indoors (legally one is fair game if one is in public) and we never asked each other because we were all always taking pictures of each other or using each other as models. That may have been assumed to be okay in the '80s, but it's definitely problematic today. With the exception of the nudes I'm not going to bury my photos of the time, but I don't now work with quite that abandon.

This image is scanned from the large (8X10 inch) proof print I made at the time. I'd been thinking of it recently, and ran across it while looking for something else, and was happy I could throw it on the flatbed scanner and get it digitalized. Might there be some more detail in the shadows? Maybe... At some point I'll track down the negative, make the best scan I can off of that with the film scanner, and see how much better I might be able to make it. But it's not at all bad as is, and it's a pretty good representation of a lovely moment of intimacy between a couple of close friends.

Spiky Alien Plant Portrait

West Swanzey, New Hampshire, 26 November 2023   This little plant has been very good to me. How many times have I posted pictures of it on this blog? (Five, including this time.) In infrared and bright sunlight and shadow it's very photogenic, isn't it?

Fittingly for Thanksgiving week in America, I'm with family, Julee's parents and sister, and her sister's husband.

Prickly

Washington DC, 17 November 2023   An Arizono photo from my trip last year. Unlike the most recent trip I took a lot of serious pictures. This is an infrared portrait of a delightful clump of cacti in the Desert Botoanical Garden.

Heroic Tourism

Washington DC, 10 November 2023   A random visitor to the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace in Florence last month. I don't know the model, but I couldn't resist... Infrared, but otherwise a very straight photo!


We're back from Arizona. I feel like we've buried my sister. Not literally... For one thing, my family cremates. But, emotionally, that's how it feels to me. The initial round of business has been done, and we've had a very nice, albeit very small, event for the immediate family. There's a lot still to do, of course, but that would be true even if we'd had a trip to a cemetery. It's a very strange time for me. There's a lot of grief, of course, but also big periods when I just feel extremely odd, and as if there is something big is missing, which is appropriate, because something (someone!) is missing, and will always be missing going forward. I'll adjust, but haven't yet.

This was the first time I've been to Arizona, and didn't need my big cameras to do serious photography. I took them, but used them very little, mostly for record shots.

Morning Reading

Phoenix, Arizona, 3 November 2023   Reaching back a bit today, to Julee's and my last day in Canada in July just before we drove out of New Brunswick and into Maine.

We're in Phoenix today because my sister had a respiratory crisis a couple of days ago and died in the ICU on Wednesday afternoon. Her son and I have a lot to do, and everyone is in mourning.

The Arno From the Ponte Vecchio

In Transit, 27 October 2023   I'm being a little cadgey about where I actually am when I'm travelling, a habit from many years in the world of diplomats, spies, and potential malefactors... But, we're no longer in Italy and Julee and I have had a truly wonderful visit, spent really quality time with dear friends from my last years in the State Department and from my high school years in Mexico City so long ago. And quality time with the magnificent art and architecture of the Renaissance, and a lot of delicious food... And of course many, many photos. I'm okay if some or many are souvenirs and post card shots, but I try to make every one as good as possible. The shot above is a three frame stitched panorama. This was a lucky day for weather and the sky. A couple of days later it rained deluges on us and we got quite wet, in spite of buying an umbrella from a sudden hawker for five Euro. One takes advantage of the light and the sky when they're good!

At Milan's Duomo

Milan, Italy, 20 October 2023   On the road again, and not, this time, for a family emergency. Julee and I have planned this trip forever, very specifically because we have dear friends in Milan, and they have been so kind as to put us up in their downtown apartment. I've captured hundreds of frames in both color and infrared, and three of the infrared frames make up this vertical stitched panorama. (As always, easier for me to stitch than to carry and swap out a wide lens on the fly.) This is the wild gothic-but-not-gothic pastry of Milan Cathedral, or Duomo, in Italian. Lots of tourism, lots of photography, some time for post processing, only a little time to write it all up, though I have a lot to say. Maybe by next week...

Urban Sunset

Washington DC, 13 October 2023   The Phoenix that overlays The Great Sonoran Desert. A different kind of place. Big skies, even in the city! I took this with my cell phone. It's a three frame panorama of the sunset looking along Dunlap Street in the Sunnyside neighborhood, close to where my family lives.

My sister had her shoulder replacement surgery on Wednesday, and it seems to have gone well...

Scorpion by Kallan Kent Morrow

Phoenix, Arizona, 6 October 2023   My nephew and his family live in the Sonoran Desert. Mind, their corner of the Sonoran Desert is thoroughly overlaid by the American city of Phoenix, but it's the Sonoran Desert for all that, and one of the things that comes with the Sonoran Desert is scorpions. Since Kallan has children and pets he goes out into his back yard at night on a regular basis and hunts scorpions, for safety. It's surprisingly easy, because, it turns out, scorpions are extremely fluorescent, so easily findable with an ultraviolet flashlight. Yes, such things exist and are amazingly cheap. He shot this picture of a doomed arachnid with his cell phone when he was out on a hunt a few evenings ago.

I'm happy to report that my sister is better. Shoulder surgery schedule for next week...

Phoenix Sunrise

Phoenix, Arizona, 29 September 2023   Change of scenery: I'm still in Phoenix while the medical issues resolve. Fortunately, there are photos to be had, even if the moments have to be stolen from the back and forth of caring for my sister and supporting her family. Here's a five frame infrared panorama of the pending sunrise over the Phoenix Mountain Reserve from the street in front of the family home where I'm staying, taken the day before yesterday, pre-dawn as I was getting ready to find breakfast and visit my sister.

Lobster Cove

Phoenix, Arizona, 22 September 2023   The third of the panoramas from the wonderful day of photography on 2 September. This is from the deck of the wonderful Talise Restaurant on Lobster Cove, looking towards the mouth of the Annisquam River between the Island of Cape Ann and Wingaersheek Beach on the mainland. It's a seven frame infrared panorama.

Sudden trip to the Southwest to help take care of my big sister, who's had a fall. I'm not sure I'll be doing any photography on this trip, though (of course!) I brought my cameras.

Essex River

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 15 September 2023   It was a great day for photography! In the morning, breakfast at Talise in Annisquam and a panorama of the anchoring field in Lobster Cove. Then, in the middle of the day at the Methodist summer camp, which gave me another set of panoramas, including the one I posted lasted week. And, in the evening, we went to Woodman's in Essex. (It was my father-in-law's birthday so there was a lot of eating out!) Woodman's always has line for dinner during the season, and while we were waiting I slipped across Main Street and captured this image. Happy time!

There's still a bit of big wooden boat building in Essex. The pinkie schooner Ardelle was built within sight of where I was standing when taking the seven frames that make up this infrared panorama. I had somehow gotten the idea that the USS Essex, one of the first six frigates of the U.S. Navy was built in Essex, and was intemperate enough to say that to a local a few weeks ago. But I was wrong. The Essex was built in Salem, not far away, but not here. Mind, Essex County incudes the whole northeast corner of Massachusetts, including Salem, Gloucester, and the Town of Essex, and it turns out the ship was named for the larger unit, being built with money raised by subscription in Salem and Essex County.

Cottages

Washington DC, 8 September 2023   A quiet afternoon at a Methodist summer camp in the North Shore of Massachusetts, taken just over a week ago. Julee's family has been associated with this place for four generations, and it's special to her, and, quite frankly, it's just plain special, even if one is not Methodist. All the people who were here as adults when she was little are her aunts and uncles, regardless of the lack of blood ties. While the people in her generation don't refer to each other as cousins that's their emotional meaning to each other.

An infrared panorama, stitched from six individual photos from my converted Canon R.

Low Tide at Stacy Boulevard

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1 September 2023   Sudden Art! This morning Julee invited me on a morning walk before she started work, so I grabbed my camera bag and we droved down to Stacy Boulevard on the waterfront of Gloucester's Outer Harbor. Here's one result of the stroll! I'm feeling a bit professional, in that I captured these images at 7:00am and here at 10:00am they've been downloaded, processed, stitched, and I'm in the middle of posting the resulting image. Fast work, that would beat the deadline for a newspaper. This one is singular because the tide is so low. The effects of Hurricane Idalia? I have seen such before, twenty five years ago when a hurricane swept twenty feet of water out of the Potomac.

Infrared, of course, and a five frame stitched panorama. Given my recent picture of Yarmouth Sound (below!) I have to admit I seem to be building a portfolio of infrared panoramas of harbor approaches with single boats in the middle...

Portrait of Laurence Kent Jones by Anonymous

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 25 August 2023   It's a pretty striking image, isn't it? Found Art, for sure, as it's a diagnostic X-ray of my mouth taken as part of a routine periodic dental exam. But I find interesting because it is striking and beautiful, albeit in a rather disturbing way. (Hey, not all art is easy!) I also found it interesting because it's an inside out panorama, taken with a specialised low dose x-ray device. You can see my spine twice, at each edge of the picture, from different sides! As anyone can tell from this site I'm very big on panoramic photography, and find this use of it and the inversion fascinating.

X-rays as Art have a long, but thin, history. I have a wonderful book, Dr. Dain L. Tasker that collects a whole series of beautiful x-ray images of flowers and plants taken by a pioneer radiologist. You can see some of his work here. It's really lovely. Two notes: First, he didn't have to worry about overdosing his subject with radiation. Second, interestingly, he disavowed extreme skill with the x-rays, saying that what was required for making such images was abiding patience and a knowledge of flowers and their habits. I've worked in stereo (3D) photography at different times, and I have for years been fascinated with the possibility of a stereo x-ray portrait of a person, which I mentioned to my dentist as I was talking about this image. I'm not sure he was all that taken with the concept, but he was polite... This morning I got curious and asked Larry and Sergey (founders of Google) about it. Turns out it is a thing, though not a big thing, both because it's hard to do (x-ray imaging doesn't involve cameras, so you can't make the stereo pairs by moving or doubling up on the camera setup), and, secondly, it's problematic dosing someone with radiation for art. Or even Art... It is done using weird and arcane techniques, for diagnostic purposes. I'm glad I'm not the only person to have thought of it.

I offered the dental paramedic photo credit for this post, but they refused it, partly, perhaps, because they had trouble thinking of the image as art, and partly, perhaps, because they didn't want to go public even in this low key way. But they did give me permission to publish!

Point Forchu Beach and Rock

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 18 August 2023   I had a good afternoon on Cape Forchu between the views of the Sound, the tidal pools, and the beaches. This one is one of the beach shots.

I really like working with sand. It's so granular... The photo is infrared and I bumped up the contrast a lot to give it graphic interest.

Yarmouth Sound

Swanzey, New Hampshire, 11 August 2023   A panorama from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, taken on our recent trip to the province. I really like the little fishing boat coming out of the fog bank. We'd landed from the car ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, the day before, ghosting through this very channel, the Yarmouth Sound, on our way to the harbor. It had been foggy then too. (Yarmouthians we talked to said it's recently been much foggier than usual, with the fog lasting all day.) I took this four frame infrared panorama with my back to the Cape Forchu lighthouse.

Patan Durbar Square, Last Day


Washington DC, 4 August 2023   Recently, for random reasons, I needed to know when I moved to Washington DC. Five years ago? Four? (It turns out to be right about in the middle.) I name and file my photos by date, so when I need a date it's generally easiest to scroll through the pictures and pick it up that way. The arrival in DC is, of course, very shortly after the departure from Kathmandu. These photos were taken on a short walk from our apartment near Patan Durbar square as we were in the final moments before the cab arrived to take us to the airport. The big temple to the right of center is the Vishwanath, sacred to Shiva. The building to the left of center isn't a temple at all, but a part of the public space. It's a raised and covered platform where people can sit. I never sat there because I'm a stiff westerner who has trouble sitting on the floor, but I really appreciate the spirit of it! We lived only a couple of blocks from this point, and I took the photo to the left walking back to our apartment at Ombahal Chowk. Not a bad closing image to an important part of our life.

Curtains, St John

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 30 July 2023   Just back from a long swing around the southern half of Nova Scotia, starting from a drive off the Bar Harbor Maine ferry in Yarmouth, driving up to Halifax, then across to the neck that attaches almost-an-island Nova Scotia to the mainland, and down along the coast of the Province of New Brunsick and State of Maine. A charming road trip, hung on research into my mother's history. She was born in Halifax in 1917, departed for the U.S. under what have turned out to be unclear circumstances a little less than a year later. She left a raft of related and unrelated mysteries behind her when she died at 78 (young, but she smoked like a chimney) in 1996. I now have a much clearer image of her family history, but the mysteries themselves remain firmly in place.

The photo is the window of our lodging in St John, New Brunswick, our last overnight in Canada on our way south. I've made a lot of images of windows and light and shadow over the years, but I like windows and light and shadow and can also credibly claim that no two windows are exactly alike, and that even the same window changes with the light and the lack thereof.

Rust Island Wetland

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 21 July 2023   A shot of one of the marshy branchs of the Annisquam River, a four frame infrared panorama, taken from a favorite place on the Gloucester mainland.

IR Mall

In Transit, 14 July 2023   My apologies for running the picture from 12 May again. But it's not really the same picture... When I had the earlier version displayed on the big graphics art monitor some time ago I noticed the horizon wasn't level. Off by very little, maybe half a dozen pixels or a bit more, but enough to notice at big sizes. This is a print that I want to print large and have a product that I could conceivably sell, and such a thing needs to be as perfect as possible. I figured the best quality would come from starting over, restitching the 5 frames and adjusting the horizon to straight and level at that stage. But then I have the very fiddly and unfamiliar work of lightening the Capital to stand out from the background all over again. Sigh! I wasn't sure that I remembered much of the technique, and certainly remembered how hard it had been to figure it out and get it to work properly. So I dithered, easy to do as I had a lot else on my mind. Last night I pointedly ignored all that, and set to work. I did have to relearn but it was a lot easier the second time around, and I did half the work last night and rest this morning, and it wasn't even that stressful. I just looked into ordering a proof print from Printique...

Glosta Squall

Washington DC, 7 July 2023   A postcard shot, but I respect postcard photography. Photographic postcards predated the wide use of color film, but when I think of postcards I think of the racks of bright, happy, Kodachrome or Ektachrome images for sale in stores all over America and much of the world mid 20th Century. This one is a little muted, but captures the moment a couple of weeks ago for me. It's the outer harbor in Gloucester looking south over Massachussets Bay. Downtown Boston is behind the little squall in the middle. On a clear day one could (just) see the tall buildings on the horizon.

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