Take more photos

There was a movement in the 1920s – 1930s which sought to find art in the common everyday occurances. Some of which included collages of materials found on the street.

As a photographer, I sometimes seek out common sights in the home or around the home.

Here is one from my ‘fridge. Not intentional juxtaposition: just happened.

My uncle was married to his wife for over fifty years: that is staying power.

He was lucky to die before the Altzheimers took her memory.

She couldn’t even recognize her children. She did talk to dead people – but that wasn’t much of a consolation to my cousins.

My parents generation endured the depression and the world in gratitude followed up with World War II.

No wonder they think we are wimps.

They are tough old coots.

Aunts and uncles
dying
cousins
sharing photographs
kodachrome 64
vibrant blues
forty years
boxed
still smell new

A friend of mine once said that the answer, the true answer, to any question lives at the end of the “five whys”. What she meant was that for any question you have to dig down an additional four layers to uncover the truth.

Q: Why do we take photographs?
Why 1: To capture a moment.
Why 2: To remember something special.
Why 3: Because we want to remember.
Why 4: Because we love the person or the scene.
Why 5: Because we are finite.

It certainly could be other “why’s” depending upon the person but the 5th why is never the same as the first why.

For me: it is the realization that we are finite and that I love the people or the scene that I photograph that forces me to keep a camera handy.

What are your five whys?

Everyone has heard of “writer’s block” and I wonder if there is such a thing as “photographers block”?

For the past couple of months I have found photography to be a burden rather than a joy. For years, I’d cheerfully tell my wife that I was going to “find some pictures”. I’d go for a walk or a drive until something caught my eye and then I’d shoot it from many angles.

Last weekend I went over to Ocean City, Maryland and planned to shoot people-scenes on the boardwalk, but nothing looked interesting.

I have been an avid photographer for almost 40 years and this is the first time I have ever felt uninterested with the art.

As a recovering audio-visual geek from high school photography has always held my interest. My high school journalism teach always carried a camera with him – under his front seat as it turned out.

I generally carry one of my older film or digital cameras in my trunk. You’ll never know what you’ll miss if you don’t have a camera handy.

I almost always take my photos in Nikon RAW format which results in huge files. The advantage of which is that I am able to review the photos later and extract small portions of the image and get reasonable quality.

Doing this, I am able to use a wide angle lens and huge file and reconstruct sometime interesting images out of a file which didn’t seem worthwhile at the time.

Give it a try!

I love my D-300. I love my F3-HP. And…I also love my Polaroid camera.

December was the last month of production for Polaroid film and it is expected that the film will be widely available through the end of this year. Doubtlessly there are those buying up what film that yet exists.

Photography is like music in that faithful reproduction does not always make the best product. CDs reproduce music more faithfully than does an LP record, yet there is something special about listening to a crackling album (best with a vacuum tube amplifier).

My D-300 does a great job in faithfully reproducing reality. In fact, it can make scenes look better than reality. The Polaroid in all of its fuzziness and curious creaminess has, to me, the attraction of a a Bidu Sayao aria on a turntable.

For all of its technical faults a Polaroid photo was beautiful.

Sometimes it is hip to be square.

Visited Raleigh a few weeks ago and took a few photos of the unpretty parts of town including the industrial area near downtown.