Thinking In Black & White

Sometimes it's easier thinking in black & white.

It's a lot less trouble to get things right

At times it's better being color blind

And much less taxing on my mind

You can't see clearly late at night

When nothing seems very bright

It's not about a subject all the time

It's always about chasing the light


I took this shot in passing as I walked across the street in a moving crowd of people. No time to pause or think, just react to the scene and the light. Actually I took three shots in the space of a second and I couldn't make up my mind which one I liked the best from a compositional view. All three images had their merits but this one was the sharpest of the bunch so it got the nod.

It's a handy skill to be able to take photos on the fly without really taking aim. The truth is that the percentage of success is pretty low. The odds can be improved by shooting at a higher ISO sensitivity, fast shutter speeds and using a wide angle lens. Practice may help as well. I spent most of the day using my Tokina 12-24 zoom lens to take photographs of buildings and people. The people shots are mostly at the 24 mm end and the building photos are mostly at the 12 mm end of the zoom range. Sometimes I walked around looking for people to include in my photos and other times I found a scene I wanted to photograph and waited for people to come and go through the frame. It seems like most people will ignore you if you stay in one spot long enough.

Sometime in the afternoon I remembered being back in gradeschool and learning to use a microscope. It seems the correct method is to have both eyes open even on a single element instrument. I figured out that I could take photos with both eyes open (I'm normally left eye dominant) and keep an eye on people who might be moving into frame from my right side. This allowed me to frame a scene and then predict when the action would happen. Of course having the ability to fire off five or six frames every second also helps your odds of getting an interesting shot. Sometimes everything comes together to form an interesting image (interesting to me at least). It's not all about luck but having luck helps.

Friday

I wanted to write in my blog today but I am running out of day and have not come up with much to say about anything. I didn’t win the lighting package from http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/ so I guess I will have to keep saving for additional flash units on my own.

I have a lot of photos to work on from my two recent trips to Chicago. Hopefully I will get caught up by the time my day off comes around again. I finally got the film developed from my Brownie Hawkeye and Sawyer’s Nomad cameras. I’m getting those photos scanned and edited at the moment and trying to work on the rest of the Chicago images as time permits.

The kids are having a party tonight but I have to work. I thought about going over there after midnight but truth be told I am sort of tired.
Walking around Chicago wore me out but not as much as sitting over a computer keyboard for eight hours. I’m all aches and more aches tonight.

I noticed that I managed to capture quite a few orange subjects on my recent trip. I’m not sure what that means but it was interesting. I also have a whole slug of bicycle photos to work on. I guess that means that I will take advantage of whatever tired cliche crosses my path. I think they will be of interest when viewed as a set. Maybe…

I have lots to do and very little time to do it. I hope I can manage to do at least one or two things well.

Time Gets Swept Aside

It has been eight hours since we left our apartment in the city. I am sitting at the table in the main room of a small house that is the summer home of a friend. A cool steady breeze is coming in the open windows and there is a view of the lake made better by the spring storms that came this year and cleared the tangle of branches and vines across the road.

The bead-board ceilings glow with the warmth of the diffused afternoon sun coming through the canopy of trees surrounding the house. There is a warm patina to everything that speaks of many years and many memories. There is also the quiet and unspoken promise and hope for many more to come.

I glance towards the kitchen with its collage of different cabinets added over years. They reflect the abandoned trends of past decades but find perfect contentment and order in this small summer place.

There are in fact many things here to evoke a fond past. Artifacts of lives well-lived and cherished fill the walls and spaces. They speak of relationships to be preserved like the bounty of a summer garden.

I sit here alone with the past for a moment waiting for the rest of my own tribe to arrive. We will make memories of our own in this time we spend together. There will be big breakfasts, bigger dinners, bonfires at the beach and lots of laughter. I will sing and cry, play the guitar, ride my bike, go on walks, stare at the water and the waves and count the stars at night. I will come home with new treasures and many memories.

Note: This post is from some scribbles I made back in July. In fact, all my posts this week are completely out of order. I tend to work on the most recent things first and then work my way backwards until I have run out of work to do, especially editing photos. Sometimes I don’t get everything done and when things slow down I might go back in time a month or more to things I didn’t have the time or energy for at that moment. Real time gets swept aside in a tide of thoughts and feelings leaving only the time that exists within our own individual minds. Don’t try to set your watch by it.

Weekday Weekends

Chicago, IL. August 2009.
The phone rings beside my bed and jars me into a state of fuzzy semi-consciousness. Up way too late last night (this morning) sorting cameras, socks, film and batteries; then up again way too early and trying to think of what I am forgetting. Daughter number four is already up and babysitting today. She has already made us breakfast, which is something I had not even considered yet. When breakfast is finished, the daughter naps on the couch while her tiny customer naps in the chair an arm’s length away.

I drive to the airport parking lot where a plump bus driver struggles to get in and out of his seat each time someone boards the bus. Other (more physically fit) people usually just sit there instead. He’s not lazy but he does like to eat. When we stop at a traffic light on the way to the terminal, a man runs up to the shuttle bus and the driver hands him a folded twenty dollar bill.

Inside the airport the lines are long but I have time to spare. The load is light on this flight and the seats next to me are empty. Once again I marvel at the wonder of leaving the ground as I always do each time I fly on an airplane. It’s a short flight with no time for a nap and soon we will be landing in another city. Scattered clouds float above green patches that resemble an old quilt from my childhood. Now the engines throttle down and the patches of green turn into suburbs with rows of homes, warehouses and shopping centers.

A simple lunch of soup and bread at the airport finally brings me into sync with the rest of the world. The soup is warm but not hot which always makes me a little disappointed. I guess I would rather be burned once in a while rather than suffer anything lukewarm. After lunch I ride the train downtown and listen to my iPod. I debate which stop to choose and eventually arrive in the financial district to chase the afternoon light to whatever subject it chooses. Find the light and the subjects will wander along.

My biggest problem today was with people who refused to wander along and would sit in one place ruining a perfect composition. That is not to say that I did not want any people in the photos but that there were people standing or sitting exactly where I wanted to take the photos from. After a long afternoon and evening Debbie called and said to meet her at the train station because we are now going to stay at the Hyatt Hotel instead of her and her room mate’s crash pad. Now as crash pads go, theirs is pretty nice with only four people. A crash pad is basically an apartment that is shared by a group of airline employees (as many as twelve people in a two bedroom apartment) who need a cheap place to stay when they forced to work away from home in order to keep their jobs, seniority and pensions.

This particular crash pad had been so thoroughly trashed (or crashed) by the previous tenants, that the landlord (Jerry) had to gut the bathroom and re-carpet the whole place. It’s nice (and mostly quiet) now but so are the King sized beds and flat screen TVs at the Hyatt, plus it’s hard to say no to a complimentary room when one is offered. In fact, it would be really rude not to accept.

So we went to the Hyatt, which is massive and there were the usual clusters of loud people attending conferences at the hotel who were doing their best to pass the time by getting good and drunk before they had to get up and go to another meeting in the morning. We ate in the bar because the restaurant was closed by that time.

We had an odd room in the back corner of the hotel that was off of a circular hallway that reminded me of a set from the Star Trek Television series. The room was sort of pie-shaped and the bathroom had a shower rather than a tub. The room was nice and fairly large (and free) so I had no complaints other than it always take me a while to wind down and quit trying to find something worth watching on the big TV. We had cranked up the air conditioner before we went to dinner but it had some sort of energy saving thermostat that turned itself off before finishing the job. So we turned it on again and eventually the room cooled off and I went to sleep. There was no phone ringing in my ear in the morning so I slept until I was ready to wake up on my own.

We got out of bed, got dressed and walked over to the Intercontinental Hotel and had the expensive breakfast buffet. I was hot from walking and that was made worse by eating way too much food but you have to get your money’s worth out of that buffet. Breakfast is served in a nice room though there are no windows and no view other than the room itself. Next to the dining area there is a library with lots of art and photography books to look at. We talked of going back downtown or to the baseball stadium but there were plenty of chores to do at home so we headed for the airport instead.

On the way to the airport we were the only passengers on the shuttle and the driver began to give us his life story and medical history. Then he happened to mention his occasional uncontrollable rage. He seemed pretty happy at the moment so we prayed to ourselves that no one cut him off or that we got stuck in traffic on the way. We arrived safely at the terminal but he was only up to chapter three of his psychiatric prison hospital memoirs and still going strong. He didn’t open the door to the bus right away and kept on talking as I gingerly stood up and moved in that direction. When we finally got off the bus I was afraid our new friend might follow us into the terminal.

At the airport there are more funny people in front of us in the security line. There was a party girl in a black evening dress (sales rep) with about a hundred cords and adaptors hanging out of her open bag. Zip it honey! Of course she gets pulled aside for a bag check, because she has a thousand bottles of beauty products in her other bag which is bursting under the load. Her exasperated look of frustration is priceless as the TSA agent pulls out one banned substance after another, all of which will have to be discarded or returned to the ticket counter to be put into checked baggage. Either way she is not making her flight. In contrast, we make the flight ahead of the one we intended to be on and will be back in St. Louis by 1 pm with plenty of time to do some laundry and to take a little nap so I can continue with my Brownie Hawkeye Flash, night photography after it gets dark.