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Look up
Carrying around a camera gives me license to look at things most of us walk past without noticing. The camera seems to give me permission to linger, to observe, to look around and behind, to look down and up. One rainy afternoon we took shelter in a portico. There in the shadows I noticed stairs leading up. I walked over and pushed gently on the ornate wrought-iron gate. It didn’t yield. Standing there in the…
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Look down
I tend to spend the fall looking up at the trees to see the autumn colors. I particularly like the early fall as the leaves form a sort of autumnal spectrum of colors, ranging from deep burgundy in the upper most branches of a tree through flaming reds and oranges, to yellows, and on to greens in the lowest branches. The maples put on a particularly lovely display. But I also look down for the…
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Yellows in November
The arid forests of the Southwest are beautiful in the fall. Against backdrops of blue-gray junipers and piñons the vibrant yellows stand out. Cottonwoods are the iconic fall tree, and for good reason. But look past the cottonwoods and you’ll see explosions of color everywhere. Hikes and walks through these forests present chaotic scenes, often without a clear subject. In this way, they offer less popular photographic compositions—given the current vogue for dominate subjects—but call…
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Falling and Fallen
Autumn is here, bringing with it the drizzle of falling leaves and the carpet of those already fallen. Greens, yellows, reds, and browns, sometimes crowded together, sometimes by themselves. I wonder if they get lonely?
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You don’t have to …
A personal trainer was cleaning up his equipment the other day in the park. He was wearing a shirt that said: “You don’t have to train today. The world needs average.” An odd combination of snarky and motivational. Nonetheless his shirt is a useful reminder that everyday is an opportunity to practice and through that practice to improve. So, to paraphrase: You don’t have to take a picture today, but think of all the photos…
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Fragment
It is common knowledge that a good photograph tells a story. Some go so far as to claim that “Every Photo Tells a Story.” More abstract photographs are surely exempted from this demand to tell a story. But what about other photographs? Do landscapes? Portraits? Astrophotography? Some, like street photography and documentary photography seem more like purveyors of stories. But what kind of story? And who composes that story? And for whom? I want to…
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Lonely Building (redux)
I really want to like this photograph, but something about it bothers me. It has nothing to do with what’s in the frame and everything to do with what’s not in the picture. Or more precisely: What bothers me is what I had to do to get rid of something that was in the original picture. I wandered around that corner for quite some time trying to get the right angle that would capture the…
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Lonely Building
I was wandering the city that overcast Wednesday afternoon. While not empty, as it had been in the early months of the pandemic, it was not bustling in any normal way. Most offices in the city remained closed or only sparsely staffed. So I took the chance to look for scenes that would capture the emptiness. Glancing up at one corner, I noticed a table next to a window in a low-rise office building. Nine…
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Postcard Archive: October 2020
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month’s postcard comes from a local park where I spent much of my childhood. If you want a copy, let me know. How many times as kids were we chased off these bowling greens? More often, I am sure, than they were ever used by actual bowlers.
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Nostalgia and Photographs
I recently returned to the Park (the proper name is the Arcadia Community Regional Park, but to the hoards of us who marauded around it as kids, it was just the Park) where I spent so much of my pre- and early-teen childhood. Especially those long summer days. The sun, seemingly stuck in the sky somewhere just past noon, burning down with particular intensity, baking the metal merry-go-round and the rocket ship to a skin-searing…