Summer Grass

Winter has arrived to Indiana. Cold overcast skies.  Time to spend indoors working in the darkroom and the lightroom.  Reviewing, selecting, printing/finishing previous work.  After a brief morning walk, time listen to music, read, and  to work with still life images.  (click on image to enlarge)

60's Signage

                        Oberlin, Ohio.

Somethings never change.  Taken in the 60's and valid today.  (click on image to enlarge)

Monday Morning Coffee: Take 3 - It's About Time

"In a still photograph you basically have two variables, where you stand and when you press the shutter. That's all you have."
-- Henry Wessel

Shutters, like seducers, have two basic techniques: the stare and the wink.  Photographs occur at the precise moment when a person, a camera and the world interconnect.  Each part of the collision has its own reality, its own set of times: our personal lives move along, the world paddles its own canoe, and the camera shutter blinks and blurs.  All three times can mark the final image and produce images uniquely photographic in their feel and form.

Photographs might dance with Faulkner's sense of art: "The goal of every artist is to stop movement, which is life, by artifical means and to maintain it fixed so that, 100 years later, when a stranger may gaze at it, it will once again move, because it is life."

 The shutter question, "How is this moment different from any other?"  Cartier-Bresson: "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."  Not only can shutters hold the jetsam of life in meaningful visual balance, they can also suggest relationships that don't really exist.  Strangers in the night can meet, not just pass, in a shutter's flash.  Forever framed, their passage acquires a weight we flesh out with our fancy.

Shutter graphics have nearly infinite possibilities.  It depends on the direction and speed of the subject's movement (if any), the shutter's design and speed, and the direction and speed of a jiggle of the camera (if any).

What people love about photography is the chance it gives them to preserve some moment in their lives so it can be savored and re-savored in furtue times.  All moments, public as well as private, can be photographed.  Every choice of what and when to photograph reveals self, but photographs of private moments are directly about one's actual life.

A shutter can be a tool to make reality visible, to see the unseeable, and to expand the duration of a millisecond to a millennium  The most timeless photographs, those which endure the longest, may actually be the most timely, the most full of time.

Monday Morning Coffee: Take 2 - Why Are You Standing THERE?

 

Every camera image makes use of a lens somehow.

Photography's problem is to make beautiful photographs of what is there, rather than to photograph what is "beautiful".  One "chisel mark" a lens can make on photography is acceptance - of the world, of the medium and of oneself.  Nothing has to change in order to be photographed.

Photographs can contain more than light, tones, texture, color and realistic detail; they can also convey a personal feeling about the mood of a place, the feel of a texture, the lightness of a tone, and the flip side of a soul.

Find a place to put your lens.  When you find it, you will be comfortable there and your images will seem right.

                                New Paris, Ohio

Here a viewer is presented with a direct head on view of the subject.  Yes, we can determine the name and nature of the business. However the presentation seems simply to show that and not much else.  Raises few questions.  Provides little information. A closed image - no avenue of escape. Stuck within the frame.

                                New Paris, Ohio.

Moving a bit to the right, allows a view beyond just the face of the building while continuing to allow a determination of the name and the nature of the business.   Information -  entrance to upper floor, roadway on the right, hint of what lies beyond the building.  Questions - upstairs , roadway, neighborhood.  An open image - wander over the face of the building, walk down the roadway along the side of the buildings, and explore the reality beyond. 

Any photograph should answer the question, "Why was the lens placed here rather than somewhere else?"  The answer will probably reflect an effort to walk the tightrope between image and reality, and to give photographs an interest and life of their own without violating the life of the reality itself.

P.S.  Will be off line for a bit.  Should return in about a week.  Check back for the next Monday Morning Coffee:  Take 3

Lost in the Midwest: Antiques

                                        New Paris, Ohio.

A village with a population of about 1650 in west central Ohio.  (click on image to enlarge)

Lost in the Midwest: Church of Christ

                                                London, Ohio.

.  Another closed and boarded London church.  (click on image to enlarge)

Monday Morning Coffee: Take 1

Changes are coming to Today's Image. Monday posts will be more about photography rather than more photography. Reasons for this include the coming Indiana Winter. Indiana winter weather is a messy cold collection of rain, snow and dark overcast days. Once in a while the sun makes a brief entry, but for the most part it seems to have moved elsewhere. Not that you can't photograph in such weather, it is just I would rather not! This is a time to be working in a wet and/or dry darkroom. This is a time to edit, plan, and produce hard copy. A time to review old work and begin to think about new projects. Time of closure and moving ahead.

Changes that will allow a discussion materials, tools and ways of working.  Discussion that permits reflection on the who, what, where, and why of choices made.  Discussion of how to present these choices.

Please feel free to take part in the discussion.  Would welecome your thoughts and suggestions.  Always seeking different points of view.  Like a turtle- we make no progress unless we leave our shell.