“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind The answer is blowin’ in the wind” Bob Dylan
Ghosts are real. For this old man, they often take the form of fractured memories.
I know I saw Peter, Paul, and Mary in concert, and have photographs to prove it. I have always remembered it was while I was stationed in DC, and that the event was at DAR Constitution Hall.
That would stick out to some of us of a certain generation. PP&M could not have been a favored act of the DAR, and them performing there seemed such a contradiction. It was a confusing time with lots of contradictions. I was a budding hippie peacenik who was starting to forgo haircuts, but enlisted in the Army in 1967.
“How many roads must a man walk down….”
I looked online to confirm they had actually been at the Hall, and they had, in 1967, according to the World Wide Web. I was not in DC in 1967, but I have photos? Fractured memories.
They were a big part of the soundtrack of my coming of age journey. When “The Times They are a Changing” was playing the other night while Barbara was making dinner, I made the melancholy observation that we had believed it then. Barbara said, dismissively, “They always are.” Which is true.
I can’t remember if it was in middle school (we called it Junior High way back then), or high school when we were introduced to the idea of “figures of speech.” Thinking about this recently, it seemed like it was a list of 10 or something like that. Apparently the adults simplified things trying to not stress us with TMI. I searched for the list and got back options for a list of 8, 10, 12, 18, 20, 50.
Remembering the difference between Simile and Metaphor took a little practice; I’ve come to see some photographs as Metaphors. Hyperbole was cool; you could tell your parents your sibling was being “hyperbolic.” Onomatopoeia got special attention because of the odd spelling, and the easy illustration, “Buzzing like a bee,” which is also Simile and Alliteration, but we were not encouraged to think about this multi-dimensionally, as I recall.
In the several years I’ve been doing this blog I’ve discovered I have a natural affinity for Alliteration, to the point where I police my use in an effort to not over do. A college writing instructor gave me Oxymoron, which turns out to be a lot more useful than I would have expected.
But it was becoming a newspaper photographer/street photographer, and beginning to pay attention to the ordinary, everyday things around me, that taught me about Irony.
It was so long ago I’m having trouble remembering details, like trying to remember specifics from a dream that become more elusive the harder you try.
I was working as the staff photographer at a small daily newspaper outside of Atlanta, and my photographer friend Michael was freelancing in the area, often stringing for Time magazine. Our recent Governor was ramping up a campaign for U. S. President, and Michael suggested we go down to Plains for a day or so to see what was going on. We drove down, told someone we were press, and, BOOM!, we were on the media bus. No ID, no credentials even asked for. Welcome aboard.
It was a whirlwind tour, from peanut fields to Capricorn Records. In looking over the photos I had mostly forgotten about, I am struck most by the complete access to the candidate, not just getting on the bus so easily, but the way crowds clustered around him, no rope lines, no phalanx of security guards. I know it was a different time, when bullet-proof glass was not de rigueur on every speaking platform, but even then, I think some of it was the man, who, in all my photos, seems to be having fun.
The power of childhood mythologies seems unremitting. My mother’s favorite secular Christmas song was “White Christmas,” by Bing Crosby. It had to be Bing. In all my 77 years in Savannah, I only remember one white Christmas, but that Currier and Ives winter landscape of the northeast US was the defining visual for the season. So now, a photograph I made 3000 miles from home feels more like a seasonal picture than anything I see at home.
I wish you a great holiday season, and a fabulous New Year!
A friend, Spencer Lawton, died recently. At a regular “guys’ coffee” session on the morning of the day before he passed we were talking about many random things, and one of those was a book series I had been reading, and how brutal and cruel the legal “punishments” had been in early human history. I am glad to remember one of the last things Spencer said to me, “As a people, we are getting better.”
Losing a friend abruptly, in what felt like an extended and ongoing conversation, is a reminder of how temporary everything is.
Getting old may not automatically convey any special wisdom, but it does give one perspective, simply because you have more lived experience, if nothing else. And with that reference point to history you have witnessed personally, it’s a little easier to see progress on many social issues.
I grew up with Jim Crow; public schools in Savannah were not integrated until I was in high school. Conversations about transgender participation in women’s sports, or who uses what bathroom are difficult and necessary, but we didn’t have to have those conversations when I was going through adolescence because leaving the closet was rare, socially risky, and sometimes dangerous.
For much of my life I saw that glass as half empty, but these days I am constantly reminded of things to be grateful for, and I aim to take that attitude with me into this next trip around the sun.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ended a 1963 speech with, “I say goodnight to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, ‘We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we want to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.'” Amen.
“Well, now if I ever live to be an old man I’m gonna sail down to Martinique I’m gonna buy me a sweat-stained Bogart suit And an African parakeet” from “Migration” by Jimmy Buffett
I have sometimes thought how interesting it would be to travel by tramp steamer. Roaming from one random exotic port to another, exploring lesser traveled places, I romanticize it into a Bogart movie. Can you even do that sort of thing anymore? Even if so, I’m sure there would be many long spells of idleness, edited out of Bogey’s 90 minute script.
Still, the notion of running away (from what I don’t know) tantalizes.
I am thankful for all the spectacular sunrises I’ve seen, many and varied.
For 25-30 years Barbara and I have decamped from Savannah to Tybee for Thanksgiving weekend, for a little getaway that does not require airline travel, or a long drive. It is, none the less, a serious production. On the Wednesday before, we load up my Jeep with a couple of coolers and several bags of food, wine, and whisky for a big turkey dinner, and feasting the rest of the long weekend, shared with various family members over the years.
Thursday morning this year we woke early and noticed the first light in the sky portending an interesting sunrise. We dressed quickly and headed to the beach. As we walked the boardwalk crossing the dunes this scene came together. A quick two frames and it was gone.
Granted, sunsets can be pretty, but sunrises require more commitment. Anybody can be out at 6, 7, 8 PM to see a sunset. Getting up really early and going out in the dark is an act of faith. Sometimes it’s good; sometimes less so, but I heard two different pieces of advice at a couple of different photo workshops long ago, that work as a couplet I think. “If you just get up and get yourself out there, good things will happen for you,” and, “So what if the hoped for photo doesn’t happen. Isn’t it nice just to be there?”
This bird photo was shot with a 300 mm lens. I was standing on our hotel balcony looking into treetops and could not get as close as I would have liked, so I cropped the original shot to frame it in a stronger way. This is about 3/4 of the original image, and still with enough resolution (pixels) to make a print from 15 to as much as 30 inches wide. Since this reproduction was for screen use I reduced the resolution to about a quarter of what was available even after the crop.
(A brief tutorial, for anyone less versed in the lingo: Resolution is simply pixel count. A pixel, picture element, represents a single tone/color, the most basic information in a digital image. A digital photograph is essentially Impressionism. Resolution may be presented in one of three ways–1) total pixel count, like my camera being 40.2 megapixels, 2) width and height proportions, such as the 7728×5152 pixel dimensions of my sensor, or 3) pixel density, for instance the traditional ask for printing a digital photo was to have 360 pixels per inch {ppi} for best quality, by which criteria an 8×10 print would want 2880×3600 pixel dimensions, and my sensor would produce a 21.4″x14.3″ print. Screen viewing needs far less resolution; a 4K screen would need half of my sensor’s native resolution.)
A question that came up regularly at the beginning stages of digital camera development, when new features and capabilities were coming rapidly was, “Should I get the highest resolution camera?” The answer then, and now, was/is, “Maybe.” My answer to all photographic questions is, “It depends.”
It’s a lot more complicated question: what are you going to do with the photos (screen or print), more pixels mean smaller pixels which increases noise (graininess) in the image, higher resolution reveals poor camera handling more quickly, what’s your budget, etc. You have to balance those things based on your real life conditions and needs, but “resolution,” (horsepower) was the easiest marketing spec, which needed the least amount of explanation, so that’s what the ads and promotional materials highlighted.
If you are only going to look at photos on a screen, or make small prints (like most people) a camera in the 10-12 megapixel range is more than enough resolution. The nominal reason for having more pixels is to make really big prints. Yet, although I seldom make prints, and very seldom make large prints, I’m now using a 40 MP camera, for two other ways to utilize horsepower:
Better detail–a sensor with more pixels has the potential for recording more tonal and color variation in a given space; and,
Cropping–retaining enough resolution to still be usable for whatever output I need or want.
We were walking through a large food market–some brick and mortar buildings, some tented stalls–and someone was photographing this man in the doorway of his shop. As that photographer finished and turned away, I asked if I could also take his picture. He said no and turned to go, hesitated, and then said OK. A couple of quick frames, “Thank you,” and I walked on.
There is often something magical in the way a quick grab of a composition can turn out to be very formal, and clean. In this shot I like that he is “framed” by the doorway, and again by the glass door, opening to the spotlit wine bottles. And all the repeated rectangles. And his relaxed comfort because I did not give him time to think about posing. It all happens too fast to preview the three dimensional aspects and layers of the composition, and I sometimes wonder how much of my response comes from some subconscious “seeing” and how much from dumb luck.
The first photograph of a Marine Iguana I remember seeing was in a book published in 1971. “The Creation” by Ernst Haas, is a visual telling of the Genesis origin story. I wanted to see such a prehistoric-seeming creature. I finally did, this year. Fascinated by the book’s pictures, I absorbed much more about composition, visual story-telling, and seeing beyond the literal than I realized back then. Some things need a long maturation period.
Haas is a name anyone serious about photography should recognize. Several elite level photographers and their work have served as role models, heroes, and inspiration to me, although they would not generally be known to the world outside our industry. Haas was one of the most important.
He was one of the first photographers to work seriously, rather than dabble, in color, but with technical limitations which might be impossible for most smart phone and digital camera users today to appreciate. Haas’ film choice was Kodachrome, first with an ASA (ISO now) of 10, and then 25. With those slow emulsion speeds, anything moving in less than very bright light was going to be blurred. You just could not get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the subject. So…”when God gives you lemons….”
He would photograph rapidly moving subjects at intentionally slow shutter speeds, creating stunning, story-telling images of blur and color (rodeos, bull fights, rushing animals) that expressed so much more than a traditional rendering. They have an energy and mystery most photographs never achieve. (https://ernst-haas.com/)
