I believe most men my age will have a memory of the scene in the film “Dr. No,” where Ursula Andress walks out of the ocean in a white bikini. It definitely got the attention of this hormone-laden 15 year old boy.
Forty two years later, Barbara and I had a small cabin on the southeast Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, with a short path through the woods to this isolated beach. As she came back from a swim, I remembered the movie.
Get eye-level with your subject! With animals or kids, your photographs will have so much more impact and better catch personalities if the viewer is looking AT them instead of down on them.
In some cases it’s also important to use as long a lens as possible, from as far away as possible, like the 500mm I used here.
When I was there the Anhinga Trail was a narrow paved path with a guide rail of sorts along each trail side, about 12″-18″ above the ground. I’m shooting under both rails from one side of the path. On the opposite side, the small grassy area between the path and the water was a nice sunning area for alligators, including this one.
As I was getting in position to shoot this, on my belly like him, I noticed a couple, apparently non-southern tourists from the look of their pasty white skin starting to glow pink. They walked down the path and then one sat on the rail almost over the gator while the other backed up to get a photograph. I started to tell them how quickly an alligator can move, but then realized if something was going to happen it would be over before I could explain.
So I waited to see if I would get a different picture. Everyone was fine, but there is an argument to be made for natural selection.
One of my mother’s favorite soap operas was called, “The Edge of Night,” and the opening montage was a dark, diagonal band slowly moving across a city skyline (Cincinnati), turning day into night.
Photographing sunrise is a favorite thing of mine; I just wish it would happen later in the morning. A wide variety of tones, colors, and shapes can come at you, changing fast, and it’s a challenge to see what you can catch. One thing usually, though, is everywhere around your working space gets light about the same time.
But, every once in a while, I feel like I’ve caught the actual line that separates day from night. It’s a little fuzzy, but you can kinda see.
The term “negative space” in the visual arts likely has an agreed upon academic definition, but for me it’s just “The Other.” The stuff that’s NOT the physical subject. The image of the subject tells you what it looks like; the “other” tells you something about the subject, or distracts from it.
“The perception of beauty is a moral test.” Thoreau
People often ask me what I like to shoot, and I’m never quite sure how to give a pithy answer. I started out as a photographer on a medium sized daily newspaper with a small photo staff, and we shot everything–mug shots, boring (visually) meetings, handshake ceremonies, groundbreakings, sports, fashion trends, debutante parties, traffic accidents, murder scenes.
You had to be a generalist and that has stuck with me. Instead of looking for a certain subject, I’m trying to find the picture in whatever is in front of me. Some times are easier than others.
It was a little over a year ago, and we were in Mexico, at a horse ranch. There had been a heavy shower in the afternoon, and the sun was filtering through clearing clouds and rising mist.
There was a wildflower field between the guest rooms and the stables, usually navigated on paths around its perimeter. Just then, the middle of the field, with the tall wet grass and large puddles, was the right place to be.
Our tented encampment was in the middle of the Serengeti and hours from anything except more camps. Still, the dining tent was impeccable. With a wine list. And a full bar. And a view of the bush in every direction.
We were some of the first visitors after the pandemic quarantines and they treated us like long lost friends. Barbara and I were on safari with another couple and when we got to this camp they had a sort of tent duplex set up for us, with separate bedroom tents, joined by a common seating area tent. Each bedroom wing had a subdivision petitioned off for a lavatory, toilet, and shower.
“Shower” is not an appropriate term for what we had. In three days I was never able to get more than a trickle out of the nozzle, and that was ice cold.
But then every night there was a big campfire at twilight, outside the dining tent, sitting watching an infinity of stars appear, gin and tonic in hand. Even with a crowd around the fire, moments of silence just happen. Except for the shower, this could be heaven. (I’m probably forgetting the bugs.)
I looked the site up recently and photos indicate it’s a lot more of permanent installations now. I think I like the tents better, but the plumbing is probably much improved.
In the beginning…(please continue with your preferred origin story).
When I saw this solitary iguana making his way from the ocean inland, it reminded me of an old poster about evolution, with a fish coming from the water, growing feet, and becoming a land animal.
Observing the animals and landscapes in the Galapagos, and looking at my photographs from there, the specter of Charles Darwin and ideas of evolution are unavoidable, but it’s more than that.
The tectonic plate activity on the western edge of the islands makes the archipelago one of nature’s birthplaces and nurseries. Much feels primal, visceral, an ongoing Genesis.
My life would have been much more complicated if I had married someone uncomfortable with being photographed at any moment, often with little primping time. Fortunately for me Barbara is usually fine with any impromptu, “Hold that,” or, “Look here,” or, “Stand right over there.” If mainly just mugging for the camera, her first instinct is to wave.
So when I saw this art installation, I had to have this picture.
Courtesy of the City of Savannah Municipal Archives
“A wormhole is a hypothetical structure that connects disparate points in spacetime.” Wikipedia
A friend, doing some research on properties in Warren Ward, a neighborhood less than a block from our home (Washington Ward), came across this old newspaper clipping from March of 1967.
I do not remember that assignment. I was 19 years old, working full time as a staff photographer at the Savannah Morning News-Evening Press (two different newspapers, with two separate editorial staffs; I swear). I was also a full time student at Armstrong State College (now Georgia Southern University), trying to hang onto my 2S Selective Service student deferment. I dropped Calculus, lost my deferment, enlisted in the Army, and reported for active duty 6 months later.
If you had told me then I would live in the next block, the idea would have been so alien to me I wouldn’t have even bothered to pooh-pooh it.
We lived downtown when I was 3, mostly because that would have been the cheapest rent my parents could find. Our family was part of the “White Flight” movement from urban to suburban, except we went a little farther, to countryside, where we were surrounded by forests. Mom and dad were country people and wanted enough land to have a garden. City living was not in my experience nor on my radar.
Also, the preservation/restoration movement was only about a decade old then and downtown Savannah was another 1-2 decades from approaching the kind of popular appeal, and sometimes magical beauty, it has now.
Ann and Mills Lane were early proponents of reviving downtown, investing in the area just east of the central business district. They moved this house across the street from it’s original location, and had it restored. Lane also restored the building our home is in, with one of the workers finding an old gold coin while doing the roof work.
Now my parents’ little acre is just part of the metro area, surrounded by a large school and tract housing; the neighborhood is bisected by the Truman Parkway. And I have fallen through a wormhole, living down the street from the Carswell House.
