Picture Notes

It’s nice to be in Florida and be reminded of all the good times I’ve had here. I think it’s the perfect weather of April and the open sky and the sea that brings it all back. This photograph is a great example of what I like about Florida. It’s people experiencing a part of Florida they may never see, although this is an artificial environment created by scientists and elected officials and people who see Florida as a way to make a living. I’m in the heart of of the City of Tampa which has Tampa Bay stretching out 30 miles to south until it reaches the open Gulf of Mexico. Tampa Bay used to be so full of fish that those who saw the area suspected you could walk across Tampa Bay on the backs of the fish. This aquarium was created and the water being used here doesn’t come from Tampa Bay but off-shore, in the deep Gulf of Mexico. It’s all good though and I’m sure most visitors don’t bother to snorkel or dive to see a reef and the diverse life that’s hidden from view. And now they can experience another alien world and not get wet or tired.

More time
And now
The memory of my awakening
has even left me
and I flounder, beating my
body against
A white page, with a pen,
In a desperate attempt to
Find a place where my memory
returns

Live Line Fishing

downward spiraling
luminescent spinning
silkworm threads of monofiliment
floating to the depths,
panicking life with
shimmering waves of
oblique memories,

finally settling,
a pillar of connectedness
between heaven and hell,
air and water, life and
death, within memories
of time - a riotous thing
living in someone else’s
memory,
scraping the bottom
of the world with bait.

I was born in Florida and spent most of my life there. I recently went through my files and found a folder called “Fishing Poetry” and it contained things I’d written when I lived there and spent all my free time fishing. Too much time in the sun, you ask? I don’t know, I thought I’d post the ones I like here. It’s part of the previous post, “Candy in our Lives”.

Another photograph of candy. I’m all about photographing things with color that are good to eat and these little guys are perfect. I put a photograph of gummy bears that I did in the 70s with a 4×5″ view camera in my istockphoto.com collection and am surprised by the sales. So I made this new one the other day with a Nikon digital camera. I know it’s spring and I should be outside photographing flowers. Yeah, like 2 million other photographers. How many bad photographs of daffodils are necessary before people quit taking snapshots of them? I’d prefer to try and fill photographic voids to concentrate on fresh subjects. Not that gummy bears are necessarily a fresh subject, but there are fewer photographs of colorful candy than there is of spring flowers. (That last statement was a guess.)

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.