Picture Notes

Here are spring flowers to remind me of the change of seasons, and you too, if you need a reminder. Spring is the best time of year, it’s rutting season on the ranch and in the mountains and storms roll across the US heartland creating some pretty interesting situations.

Once again we had little snow this winter and it was mild. I sound like the Farmer’s Almanac or something but what I really want to write about is love. I just finished season 1 of The Tudors and I want to understand Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. How did they become the people they became and why was Henry so interested in killing all his past wives. Anne kept him waiting for sex for 7 years, or so the story goes, that just seems crazy. Chopping someone’s head off is a kind of an extreme solution to a fairly simple problem. But this is just me speaking and I don’t live in the 16th Century.

We still have many of the same superstitions but they have been lessened by technology, mass production, science and health care. I’m glad the church isn’t still up in our grill the way it was then. I wonder if there really are any diseases that bleeding a person helps. I recommend the series even though it’s a bit salacious in spots.

And, oh yeah, America has reached it’s 4,000th battlefield death in Iraq.  These are just the American professional soldiers and it’s not a count of the contractors and mercenaries or Iraq civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Hey, the photograph, it’s behind you!

In the interest of brevity and making good travel time I photographed this road from the rear view mirror. I’m hoping I didn’t break any laws by doing this, because here’s the evidence right on my website. There probably aren’t any laws about camera use in the car, there are far fewer cameras than cell phones and there aren’t many people who try this kind of crazy stuff. I really liked the light on the road behind me.

I spent a few hours helping my son move out of his house in SW Virginia and when we went to get the U-Haul I was amazed by the characters who were working in the gas station. None of the men who came into the gas station while I was there stood up straight or had healty looking skin, they may have spent too much time in the coal mines. There are mountains of coal under the mountains in SW Virginia and if they could figure out a way to use it as automobile fuel it would be the richest section of the country. Right now there are miles and miles of empty roads and people who’ve seen better times. At least I hope they’ve had better times.

It would be hard for me to live in the mountains down there. Anywhere you stand you are surrounded by peaks that block the sky and the sun and make you wonder if there is a way out. I prefer the flat land or rolling hills where there is more sky and less shadows.

I heard this term the other day and I’m still wondering who thinks this kind of stuff up. Come on, do we really have to worry about virtual terrorism? Virtual is not real, it a computer simulation. We all have more relevant things to worry about.

“Virtual Terrorism” is a Roll Your Eyes term. I hope to someday publish a list of things others have said and rate them on the roll your eyes scale of 1 - 10 with 10 being laugh out loud as you roll your eyes, 1 being quick flick with your eyes to the upper right. Virtual Terrorism would be over a 9.0 on the scale.

So here I was working on my computer sitting in a coffee shop in York, England getting my email from home. It’s not virtual email, but the real thing. I know it’s real because I can delete the spam, I just don’t know why it keeps coming back. York can be cold and wet during March and I would recommend somewhere more south in the UK at that time of year. The coffee was good and the internet connection was just fine and it was warm inside.

Absolutely everything needs to be translated.

This photograph was made at Plasmawr in Conwy, Wales a few years ago. It was a display of some of the things this merchant may have had at his dining table, this being his portrait made out of cookie dough. I have photographs of faces to post but I’m not ready to and I have lots of things to say about current events but need to back off and relax for a few weeks until I decide on the imagery. Things have changed in the past few weeks and I’ve picked up some other things to do and made a few new friends.

For the past 5 years I’ve been collecting email addresses from people who would like to be notified when the contents of this site has changed and even though I’ve changed it and moved around a few things and added new images and new technology I’ve never emailed anyone. The reason being that there is so much else going on in the world and we all get so much spam I thought changes to my site aren’t really very important and I didn’t want to bother anyone. I’m really just a click away. I recently added a copy of a 14 minute promotional movie I made for a boys camp in Maine and now I’m in the process of cutting it down to under 3 minutes, just because no one seems to have 14 minutes anymore, including myself.

I was thinking about my headline about everything at work needing a translator and how much better we would all be if we understood what people were saying to us without having to ask for clarification.

What’s it like to be in Los Angeles? This pedestrian bridge connects office buildings in West Los Angeles and I was visiting there for the first time with my camera a couple of years ago. This is another one my Omakasi selections. I don’t think this has any value in the commercial market but might have value in the editorial market with the right art director. It’s one of those images that I can’t throw away and forget about because it speaks to me about business and working late. There is a planet rising in the dark blue sky. It’s hard to complain about a city with perfect weather most of the time.

Partisanship?

I made this photograph several years ago when the house and the senate were both controlled by the republicans and at that time it had no further significance and didn’t even think about any political symbolism. But today there is a new wind blowing and I like to think of this air as cleaning out some of the stale smoke and anthrax dust that has been surrounding and choking up the country for the past 7 years. I feel a shift, a minor earthquake, a change in the economic fortunes of the country, an expansion from the narrow minded thinking that has stolen our resources and sent our money to foreign lands and I see a political landslide, a new reality in the political fortunes of many who will be sitting on the wrong side of the aisle during the next election.

I like this kind of change, it’s refreshing and invigorating. I also like to use old fashioned words like invigorating and conundrum, words that you find on packages of cough drops. So carry on America, make the world love you once again by electing a minority or a woman - take your choice but please leave the old white men out of it, leave them wondering what happened.

I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to give their loved one a chocolate gnome for Valentine’s Day, or maybe a white chocolate gnome. Of course these are Swiss chocolate because that’s where gnomes come from, don’t they?

I was wondering how this would look on line.

This is what I like most about digital photography, being able to use parking lot lights for lighting. I realize that this really isn’t much of a photograph - it’s just a bicycle locked up on a railing in front of a fast food place. It’s about 5:15 pm during the winter and I’m walking home from the metro with my digital camera. I like the confusion though and the negative space and the shapes that are created with the metal and in the middle of all this visual noise there is an orange diamond with instructions.  It’s kind of an over the top snapshot. Anyway, here it is. Another day in the suburbs. What a funny word, suburbs. It’s an old word - [Middle English suburbe, from Old French, from Latin suburbium : sub-, sub- + urbs, urb-, city.] suburbium is more fun to say.

I’ll get back to more faces next.

when the open door to a dark smelly metro train looked inviting. Just another ride in the tunnels and on some days you have to move to a different seat or a different car because of the smell. There’s nothing exciting anymore about traveling underground at 55 mph and in the last month my fare has gone from 2.70 to 3.75 for the same trip, the same delays, the same service and I’m still looking at the same tired people, but so are they. We all seem to have the same scars.