Deck Chairs - July 4th Morning on the Magothy

Unfinished words
flying like birds

high in the sky

above my deck chair

Mattress Dominoes

This one is from a visit to our cousins in Virginia Beach last July. I was going to it with a title of Mattresses in the Wind. That's what I thought the filename I saved it as was.

Fortunately, I thought about it for two seconds and realized that it didn't make sense. It turns out the the filename column in Windows Explorer was just the right size to hide the remaining two letters of the filename... "ow"

Translucent Green Leaf

A really big leaf, photographed contre-jour.

I always wanted to say that!

Contre-jour, not big leaf.

Grate Expectations

After a morning of purposeful picture-taking in Annapolis and Eastport, went off to do some of the day's errands. As I was walking back to my car in a parking lot, I stumbled across this scene.

All morning long, I was composing images in mind - beautiful images of beautiful places in the harbor on this beautiful morning. Yet, even though this one came outside of my picture-taking session, I think it's the best photo of the day.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

Fishy Abstract

Last month, we had a wonderful time visiting our cousins in Virginia Beach. We stayed with cousins Marcy and Paul Terkeltaub and also we all got together with cousins Lisa and Murray Rosenbach, who live nearby.

Marcy and Lisa are enthusiastic photographers (and pretty good, too!) so we decided to head out to the actual beach at Virginia Beach early Saturday morning for some picture-taking. Cousin Murray came along, and proved to be a first-rate picture spotter, gull-chaser and cheerful companion.

Since I've gone all-digital-all-the-time, one of the things I've found useful when I go out to purposely take photos is to just start taking them right away, even if I don't see a strikingly "keeper" image. I find that I need to warm-up my photo-eye, just like I would need to warm up before exercizing (if I were to ever exercize.)

One of the first things we came across along the boardwalk was this set of whimsical fish sculptures. I took a sister-and-brother photo of Marcy and Murray, and then, along with Marcy and Lisa, started to crawl around the fish, looking for interesting angles. This fishy abstract is one of the images I came up with.

Unintentional Art

Lime Shadow

Proteus Bicycles is a well-stocked, well-equipped and friendly bike shop in College Park, Maryland. This is a very old building by College Park standards, built in the 1930's as a car repair garage. The stucco exterior now sports a flourescent lime paint job that screams to be photographed. I had passed the shop on other sunny days camera-less too many times to let it happen again.

Casing the joint, I did find several good images. My favorite one is this one, the most simple imaginable - just a little pipe vent, it's shadow, and that maginificent lime stucco

I call this a "Seinfeldian Image," that is, it's a photo about Nothing. Just light, texture, and shadow.

Trashcan Lid

Early-morning sunlight on Portland Street is the key to this image.

Doorway Shadow

Taken during an early-morning stroll up Pinkney Street in Annapolis. Pinkney is an old, narrow lane full of colorfully-painted houses. You can always count on something worthwhile to photograph on Pinkney.

Fleet Street Abstract

Portland Street Abstract

Taft Memorial Shadows

West Side Story - That Afternoon

Here's that same garage as in yesterday's post, this time as the late afternoon sun shines down Pratt Street. Since the sun is in the opposite part of the sky, the shadows are different, and since the sun was lower, actually almost ready to dip below the buidings in the West, the light is redder.

Other than rotating the camera while taking the shot, no funny tricks this time - just some cropping and levels adjustment.

West Side Story

I started a new job last week at University of Maryland (Baltimore) in the Department of Psychiatry. My wife is tickled pink, because she says that's exactly where I belong.

After three years of walking eastward from the Light Rail stop at Batlimore Convention Center, I now walk west from that same stop. No more Inner Harbor, but of course, you can find good photo opportunites anywhere.

If you look for it, you'll see that here's what morning sunshine does to the Pratt Street side of UMB's Medical School parking garage.

Full disclosure: Although the brown metal fascia at upper left looks fine in real life, I wasn't crazy about it for this abstract, so I used the color replacer function in Photoshop to make it red.

My Photos Are In the Toilet!

Last month, we already established that most of my photos suck. And now, it seems, some of my photos are in the toilet!

Actually, I walked into our powder room last Sunday monring as light was squeezing through almost-closed blinds. The light made an interesting pattern on the toilet; I especially liked the multiple ways the alternating bands of shadow and light curved.

So natch, I grabbed my Canon XSi and started snapping some pictures, as my wife once more looked on bemusedly. She's long gotten used to me taking photos of seemingly mundane and unbeautiful things.

No potty-mouthed remarks about this one, please.

Happy Mistakes - Digital Style

This article was originally posted on The Lost Blog
on May 10, 2004.

Since I've been shooting almost all digital for the past year, there have been a few times when I've made what I call a happy mistake. By that, I mean that I mistakenly did something wrong, like moving the camera during exposure, but it came out right, or at least pointed me in a right direction.

Because I was using a digital camera, I was able to see my "mistake" instantly on the LCD screen, and that got me thinking about experimenting some more with the same "mistake."

In this first photo, Grate Expectations No. 2, I was shooting some colorful autumn leaves on an aluminum grating when I accidentally moved the camera during the exposure. "Hmmmmm... that's interesting!" was my reaction a second later when the swoosh of color showed up on the little display. I took about 30 more exposures, moving my camera this way and that, trying to get different effects. This is one of the two that I think came out well.

The second photo is one I made just recently at BWI airport when I took my Uncle Joe to meet his flight home to Birmingham. With time to spare, and being overgrown kids ourselves, Joe and I headed to the observation lounge, where there were all kinds of aircraft parts and displays. I spotted the backside of one of the displays, black pegboard with light shining through and a jet-black, modernistic trash bin in the lower left corner. I thought the pattern of holes was pretty cool, so I figured I'd try an exposure. The shutter speed indicated 1/15 sec, so I held my breadth and snapped the shutter ... but in another "mistake", I forgot to stop chewing gum. Whoa! the movement of the camera made each row of holes look like a caffeinated cardiogram. I tried a few more shots, and came up with this image, Half-Specs.

I don't think all this would've happened in my pre-digital days. First of all, I wouldn't have seen the "mistake" until days, weeks, or months later. Then there's the effort of having to schlep back to the scene of the accident to try to recreate or improve upon the first shot - all the while, not being sure of what I was producing. And in some case, the original scene would no longer be there - like the colorful autumn leaves on the grating.

Let me know if you've got some "Happy Mistakes" that you're proud of!

Gesture

I admit it. I'm just not all that good when it comes to photographing people. Lines, shapes, patterns, colors ... boats, buildings, windows, tableuax - that's my thing - I can take my time and compose to my heart's content. Nothing is moving too fast - or at all.

But people are a lot more dynamic than that, and I find it hard to keep up and catch that decisive moment that divides an interesting people-photo from a not-so-interesting one.

Something I've mentioned several times before in this blog is the wonderful photo workshop I took with Karen Gordon Schulman five years ago. Karen taught us about the special qualities of early morning and late afternoon/early evening light, something I've used again and again in my photos since then.

One thing I remember learning about shooting people from Karen is to look for gesture in the image. A body position, a lean, a pointing with the hand.

Well, walking to work one day along the Inner Harbor waterfront, I came upon a scene that I thought would make for a nice image. There was a device with the politically-incorrect name telescoping-boom man-lift. The machine was adjacent to a big glass wall of the National Aquarium, and there was indeed a man, lifted well into the air on the platform at the end of the boom. He was caulking the large window panes making up the wall.

I liked the abstarct feel of the scene, with the big panes forming a Cartesian background for the chevron-like design element of the man-lift boom and it's reflection. The little bit of color in the man-lift and the man himself added a nice touch, I thought. As I watched, I saw the man lean well to the right while reaching out to caulk a window joint...and there was my gesture.

I composed my shot and waited for him to do it again, which he obligingly did.


National Aquarium, Baltimore

I don't think this photo is one that will ever sell, but I find it very, very satisfying.

So Karen, thanks again! You've been a great teacher, and what I learned from you keeps coming back to me.

One West Pratt

Here's a closeup view the newer, western section of the Baltimore Convention Center. The repeated triangular truss design elements make it a very strong-looking building. Another exception to Baltimore's unfortunate dearth of fine examples of modern and post-modern architecture.

Taken with Ben's Canon A630 digicam. This is from this morning's walk to work from the Light Rail. My stop is right across the street from this part of the Convention Center. It was a dull morning, so I bumped up the saturation, which also bumped up the noise in the sky. So even though this is an 8MP sensor and the exposure used ISO 80, noise can still be a problem in these little cameras.

I pretty much cropped in-camera for this one, but then I cropped just a little more to get the little blue (sky) triangle as negative space at upper left. See all the positive and negative space triangles in this image? Do you think it worked here?

Found Pattern

Yes, it's a found pattern, but is it worth anything as a photographic image?

I really liked it when I saw it on the LCD of my Canon A620 digicam. I think I still like it, but I'm not so sure anymore.

I'd appreciate any of your thoughts.

By the way, this is the corner of a metal tree grate within a nicely-paved stretch of East Pratt Street in Baltimore. I was inspired a few years ago to look for photos like this by Carl Root's rust and paint folder on Photo.net. You should check out all of Carl's amazing photo.net photos here.