What I Saw

No Homemade Pies Today

2012-01-27T06:30:00.000-05:00

Homemade Pies, 2012

One of the sad things about photographing old places is that when you go back again some of the places you photographed before will be gone. Or closed, as is the case with the bakery above.

I first photographed this bakery in 2003. It probably had a name, but I never knew what it was. I was photographing the church across the street and looked over and noticed people coming and going from the bakery. Once I noticed it I also noticed that sweet smell that hovers around bakeries.

I’ve been back to the neighborhood on a number of occasions since that time. But it was only this past Saturday that I happened to walk by the old bakery and discover that it had closed several years ago.

It looks like all the equipment a baker would need to re-open the place is still in place. Even the glass display cases looks no more than a little dusty for having been last wiped in 2009. The signs touting “Homemade Pies” and “Best Coffee in Town” are still in the window. It’s not a big place. Lots of people live nearby. You’d think someone could make a go of it.

But the truth is this is probably not a neighborhood that can support an artisanal baker selling $9 loaves of bread. So the bakery will probably join the list of other businesses—the grocery store, the book store, the bike shop and so on—that were once a lively part of the social fabric of this neighborhood but now serve no one. There are no homemade pies today and the coffee urn is cold.

Bakery, 2012

Closed, 2012

Free to Shoot

2012-01-26T06:30:00.001-05:00

Bistro Vivienne (at mig cover) , 2006

It’s funny. There are places I know not to be casual about taking pictures, or at least not to be conspicuous when taking pictures. You don’t get close to or take close-up pictures of U.S. Navy ships. Airports security people are touchy, too. Some museums don’t allow the taking of pictures. You don’t take pictures inside retail stores.

The military stuff is defense-related. I figure the museums are just trying to get you to buy art cards in the gift shop. The retail stores, on the other hand, are concerned about industrial espionage, which is a fancy way of saying that retailers don’t want their competitors taking pictures of their store layout, displays, merchandise, prices, employees and all the other kinds of “intellectual property” that make up the art of their retailing. This might seem inconsequential. After all, you’re not photographing something that isn’t already being viewed by thousands of shoppers every day. But seeing something and making a photographic record of it are two different things.

You get the picture; you have to be mindful not just of what there is to photograph, but where you’re doing the photographing. It never occurs to a lot of people who are new to photography that a lot of the places where you might see things you want to photograph are private property.

Most businesses are pretty reasonable if they realize you’re not trying to be unlawful. But some are. A friend who recently carried his camera into a local mall was asked to leave because, so the security guy said, “our store managers are complaining.” There’s an antiques shop in Smithfield, Virginia, that asked me to leave after I tried to take a picture of a window display I’d admired. Last summer a private security guard intercepted me on a public street in front of the New York headquarters of JP Morgan Chase and told me I couldn’t take pictures of the building.

I mention all of this because there are other places, many of them commercial, where I don’t think twice about taking pictures. It almost never occurs to me to give a second’s thought to taking pictures in restaurants, though when you think about it they ought to be just as concerned as retailers are about their competitors coping them. The picture above, for example, was taken in a restaurant in Paris.

This past Saturday I had lunch in a pizza place in Portsmouth, Virginia. It’s a small place. There were other people dining when we walked in. I saw a few interesting photo angles and started taking pictures without it occurring to me that anyone would have a problem with it. (The other diners wondered what I was doing, but didn’t object and weren’t, in any event, in view.) It was the old guy with the gray hair who wouldn’t get out of the way.

Portsmouth 42, 2012

Portsmouth 54, 2012

Rainy Day Lines

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Scott’s Creek 13, 2012

This past Saturday was cold and rainy. It’s easy on days like this to just roll over in bed and catch a few more winks, or get up and read by the fireplace. This past Saturday, though, I instead decided to get out and take some pictures. That’s the attitude you’re supposed to have if you’re a halfway diligent photographer. Photographs don’t take themselves and light and weather conditions wait for no man (or woman).

Besides, rainy days are great for certain kinds of outdoor photography. The even light of a rainy day can be great for photographing things that have detail that gets lost in the contrast on a sunny day

Rainy days also beg black-and-white. In the old days black-and-white was the default, your starting point. Now you simulate it digitally after you’ve taken the picture “in color.”

By late morning I found myself at the end of Constitution Avenue in Portsmouth, looking at some of the old piers on Scott’s Creek that have been heaved around by storms and ice. The combination of gray sky, marine timber lifted asunder and water made for some greats lines.

Scott’s Creek 17, 2012

Scott’s Creek 20, 2012

Where You Least Expect Them

2012-01-24T06:00:00.001-05:00

Cow, 2012

A friend who’s recently taken a greater interest in photography commented to me the other day that this new interest has made him much more cognizant of his surroundings. This comment was a bit surprising to me because the aspiring photographer is also an illustrator who, when he isn’t tilting at windmills with his editorial cartoons, is thought to be a pretty observant person already.

In any event, unless you’re one of those photography enthusiasts who just wants to fiddle with dials and argue over f-stops, photography’s all about noticing things.

It’s not like pictures just reveal themselves to you. No, I’ll take that back. I have met people who only take pictures at official “scenic overlooks” where some expert has previously determined that “approved pictures” can be taken.

I’m not one of those people. Rest assured, too, I would never argue with you about f-stops. And as for taking pictures at Scenic Overlooks, I’m one of those people whose car will be pulled over to the side of road blocking traffic somewhere farther up the mountain where you’re not even supposed to park if that’s what it takes to get a more interesting picture.

Unless you’re one of those tortured souls who’s got some original artistic message to get out into the world through the eye of a camera or you’re doing this for a living, the whole idea of photography is to have fun. The neat thing is that you can have fun every day because there are opportunities for pictures everywhere.

Don’t believe me? I had to take something to the city dump a few weeks ago. Taking something to the dump isn’t as easy as it used to be. At the outer gate, they check your driver’s license to make sure you’re actually a resident of the city. Then you have to go to another area where you drive onto a truck scale to assure another attendant that you’re not dumping off a load of radioactive anvils. Then you’re directed to yet another shed further down the road where they assess exactly what it is you have to dispose.

Eventually you find yourself further down the road in a place so muddy and desolate that it looks like something out of Mad Max or maybe a place where the thugs in a Guy Richie film would take someone who couldn’t pay his gambling debt to be eaten by feral pigs.

Speaking of farm animals, just as I was finally headed to the section of the dump where they accept old tires, I happened to look over toward the landfill and find this cow.

At first I marveled at how out-of-place this plastic cow was in its carefully mowed circle at the side of a landfill. But then I grabbed my phonecam and chuckled at the realization that this was just another example of how there are picture opportunities even where you least expect them if you keep your eyes open.

Birds do it, bees do it

2012-01-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

Let’s Do It! 2012

Even educated fleas do it

Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.

I’ve long been a fan of Cole Porter’s songs and lyrics. To call them standards sells them short. They’re classics, institutions even. You have to admit the man was gifted. Years ago some people I knew from college created a showcase of Porter called “Red, Hot and Cole.” There was talk that it would make its way to Broadway. But I gather the serendipity of the entertainment world—deals, options, financing, stars, New York, LA, etc.—prevented that from ever happening. Still, it was a great show.

Since songs like Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) were intended for the stage—Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) was written in 1928 for a musical and used again in another musical and after that a motion picture—and since revivals make up so much of the Broadway musical lineup these days, it doesn’t take much of a leap of faith to envision an updated Cole Porter review back on Broadway.

But something tells me Porter would have never expected to find the line Let’s Do It! on a banner in front of a Southern Baptist church in Portsmouth, Virginia. Given the context, one assumes this is a call to faith. Maybe the person who had this idea didn’t even know about Cole Porter—Southern Baptists being a bit shy around songs suggestive of It—and was instead trying to channel a little of the directness of Nike’s Do It.

All I know is that I had a hard time stifling a giggle when I saw this banner in front of the church. I guess my mind was just trolling in the gutter.

Free Love, 2012

I’ll give it to the folks at this church, tough. They’re a generous lot. The day I took this picture they were having a free yard sale. They were also—and, again, maybe I’m getting this all wrong—pushing free love.

Let’s let Porter’s lyrics play us out.

And that's why birds do it, bees do it

Even educated fleas do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it

Even lazy jellyfish do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

I've heard that lizards and frogs do it

Layin' on a rock

They say that roosters do it

With a doodle and cock

Some Argentines, without means do it

I hear even Boston beans do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

When the little bluebird

Who has never said a word

starts to sing Spring spring spring

When the little bluebell

At the bottom of the dell

Starts to ring Ding ding ding

When the little blue clerk

In the middle of his work

Starts a tune

The most refined lady bugs do it

When a gentleman calls

Moths in your rugs they do it

What's the use of moth balls

The chimpanzees in the zoos do it,

Some courageous kangaroos do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

I'm sure sometimes on the sly you do it

Maybe even you and I might do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love.

Excerpts from Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love), 1928 by Cole Porter

What the Engineer Saw

2012-01-20T06:00:00.002-05:00

The Engineer’s Cab, 2012

Finishing out this week of railway-themed images is this shot (above) of the engineer’s cab on the locomotive I explored last weekend.

A switch engine is a small locomotive, meant for moving cars around a switch yard or short line. This particular yard locomotive was built in Schenectady, New York, in 1925 by the American Locomotive Company. Judging by all the different colors on this locomotive, my guess is that it served more than a few railroads before ending on an desolate siding in Virginia Beach.

I’ve always been amazed that locomotive engineers’ cabs have been located at the back of locomotives rather than at the front. Seems like they’d want to be able to see everything in front of them rather than having to peek around either side of a long locomotive engine. But I guess this dates from the days when you had to have an engineer and a couple of strong crewmen at the back of the engine to shovel coal from a second car into the engine stove. By the time diesel electric trains came along no such stoking was required. But the design stuck and continues today with modern long haul railroad locomotives.

Alco Yard Locomotive, 2012

Another thing that struck me about this locomotive was that it has amazingly simple controls. There are two horizontal steel bars—presumably a throttle and a brake—and a crank wheel (like you’d see on the end of an old hand brace drill) that pivot on a sturdy steel pillar. The control box is about the size of a medicine cabinet and has just a few buttons, dials and gauges, considering the complexity of the diesel electric engine. There’s also a large, vertically mounted wheel at the rear of the cab that I’m thinking might have been used to open and close the coupling link that attaches the locomotive to other cars.

The more I think about it, maybe two steel bars are enough. A locomotive engineer has only two choices: which direction to go in and how fast to go there. As far as directions go, there are only two choices: forward or backward. Everything else is pretty much determined by the layout of the track.

As a photographic subject, this locomotive would have been easier to photograph on an overcast day. As it was, the high midday sun made for a lot of contrast. Getting a clean exposure of the outdoors as well as the detail of the interior of the cab was a challenge, achieved only with a little cheating.

What the Engineer Saw, 2012

Operating Instructions

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Do Not Hump, 2012

I don’t begin to know all you’d have to know to operate a train. Old-fashioned featherbedding notwithstanding, almost every job is important and carries a lot of responsibility. It’s probably hard for some young people today to imagine the role railroads once played in creating upward social mobility in America. Becoming a train driver was once one of the most prestigious jobs to which a working class guy could aspire. Becoming a Pullman conductor or Dining Car cook or waiter had the same meaning for young African American men.

These guys were professionals. They were proud of their work and knew what to do. Everyone else got reminders.

There are safety instructions all over rail cars, though as the photo above demonstrates, some might seem off-color at first blush.

“Humping,” it turns out, refers to a surprisingly simple and efficient method used to sort freight cars. A yard locomotive pushes a string of cars to the top of an incline (the “hump”). On the other side of the incline the rail splits into lots of individual tracks on which trains are assembled. A worker in a nearby tower activates switches, the car is uncoupled and given a nudge over the top of the incline. Gravity pulls it down the other side and onto the right track.

Think Safe, 2012

“Think Safe” and “Home Safe” are a little easier to figure out. They’re two parts of a famous Norfolk & Western Railway safety slogan that goes “Think Safe. Work Safe. Home Safe.”

Home Safe, 2012

Art is Everywhere

2012-01-18T06:00:00.001-05:00

Little Creek 12, 2011

When I’m out taking pictures I frequently become so occupied looking at little details of what I’m photographing that I sometimes forget to take establishing shots of the big picture.

Such was the case with the 1925 yard locomotive I saw the other day. I didn’t think an establishing shot of the whole locomotive was very interesting. But the locomotive was full of all kinds colors and patterns that make up little moments.

Little Creek 78, 2011

Little Creek 35, 2011

Little Creek 77, 2011

Like Finding Family

2012-01-17T06:00:00.003-05:00

Sidelined, 2012

I don’t make a habit of trespassing. Okay, that’s a lie. I don’t know any halfway serious photographer who hasn’t trespassed once or twice to get a good picture. So there was no way I was going to leave the open door of an abandoned railroad car uninvestigated.

If I get called to court I’m going to call it entrapment and blame it all on my friend Walt. If he hadn’t told me about his friends who were out painting by the old southern terminus of the Eastern Shore Railway, I wouldn’t have been exposed to this temptation. Instead, I was up to my knees in weeds snooping around a string of abandoned railroad cars.

Among them were a couple of railroad cars that had once been used to move construction, repair and wreck recovery teams around the line. If a section of track was being replaced or repaired, cars like these would be stationed along a siding to provide on-site support. There’d be an office car, a dining car, a sleeper or two and specialize cars for cranes and other equipment.

The first car I went in was an old crew dining car. The glass in the windows had been replaced with sheets of plywood. The floor was so fragile that a single misstep would have dumped me onto the ground below. I dared not step too far into it.

Crew Dining Car, 2012

The other car was an old Norfolk & Western Railway office car. It contained seating, a conference table and chairs and a galley kitchen. Regulatory paperwork posted on the wall indicates that the car was in service until at least 1990.

A brief digression: In 1984 I had a chance to go on the old cruise ship USS United States. She’d been taken out of service abruptly and mothballed for fifteen years. The day I went aboard, though, it looked as if the crew had just stepped away. There were unfinished letters to family members on desks. The chef had already posted the menu for the crew’s dinner. The ship’s official logs were still on a shelf behind the helm.

I was reminded of that visit to the United States while walking through this old office car. Piles of paperwork, maps and other ephemera were all over the place. It looked like a crew of railroad workers had just left the place and a strong wind had rearranged all their papers.

Office Car, 2012

But that wasn’t the big thing.

Another digression: When I was little, my father was the VP of sales for a small railway called the Atlantic & Danville. In 1962 the A&D was acquired by the N&W and renamed The Norfolk, Franklin and Danville Railway Company.

The NF&D hasn’t existed for decades. But here on this old abandoned office car on a siding in Virginia Beach was a trove of NF&D history. Stacks of blank freight invoices, envelopes, weight records, maintenance schedules, bridge repair reports and all sorts of other forms were all over the place. I can honestly say I hadn’t thought one minute about the NF&D since my father worked there in the 1960s. But here was enough unused material that you probably could outfit a whole new railroad if you wanted without having to order any paper forms (so long as you wanted your railway to be called The Norfolk, Franklin and Danville).

I may trespass occasionally to get a good picture. But generally speaking I never destroy property and I never take anything except for my pictures. But on this occasion you’ll have to forgive me for taking one of the old NF&D envelopes.

NF&D Invoice Envelope, 2012

In Plein Sight

2012-01-16T06:00:00.004-05:00

Painting En Plein Air, 2012

Leave it to the painters to take something that’s perfectly simple and obvious and make it sound highfalutin!

When I asked my friend Walt the other day if there was anything interesting worth photographing in his city, he answered that a few of his art group friends were going to be painting en plein air out on Ferry Road at Little Creek.

Walt’s part of a group of artists who get together one night a week and chip in to pay for a model. Like many followers of Walt’s blog, I’ve enjoyed his illustrated recaps of these session, though to be honest I get the distinct impression that some of the members of the group go through the ritual of pulling out their easels, arranging their tubes of paint and throwing a few lines of color on the canvas just so that they can get to the part of the evening when they pack everything back up and go out drinking.

Still, I was intrigued by the idea of watching painters work en plein air. This is probably because I had a romanticized notion that I might watch a group of our own local Seurats paint their own interpretations of an après-midi on our own local Grande Jatte, albeit on Samedi instead of Dimanche.

I should mention that although I have photographed there before, Ferry Road is a minefield for photographers. It was once the bustling southern terminus for the car and railroad ferries that until the mid-1960s ran back and forth across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Today it’s a desolate little industrial road nestled between a Coast Guard station and a U.S. Navy amphibious base. In other words, most any direction you look there are lots of big gray ships and guns and lots of security-minded eyes looking back at you. (Believe me, all you have to do to get in trouble with these guys is look like you’re taking a picture of one of those big gray ships or even of something that has a big gray ship in the background.)

But that’s not the big revelation of the day. Let me tell you a thing or two about en plein air. Turns out it’s nothing but what we photographers do every day when she shoot outdoors. Doug and Bernard dutifully assembled their easels and arranged their brushes and paints. It being very cold on Saturday—temperature around freezing with wind chill well below that—each started with a little jumping and dancing around to warm up and keep their hands nimble. But aside from that bit of artistic gimmickry, painting en plein air didn’t appear to me to be any different than painting à l'intérieur or, as we less pretentious folk would say, indoors.

I’ll admit it was very interesting to watch how two different artists approached painting the same scene, in this case a string of old abandoned railroad cars in a field of tall grass. Despite Walt’s years of portraying his fellow drawing group members as drunken esthetic inferiors, I admire both artists’ work. Doug built his layers lightly, almost like watercolors. Bernard, on the other hand, applied thick dabs of primary colored pigment to the canvas.

By far, though, the most valuable service Doug and Bernard provided to Walt and me was distracting the railroad dick who drove by to see what was going on while Walt and I rambled all over the abandoned rail cars taking pictures.

Bernard’s Painting, 2012

Critters

2012-01-13T06:00:00.004-05:00

Garden Bandit, 2005

There’s marsh and river both behind our house and across the street from it. This makes for beautiful views, but living here does require a little more than the usual tolerance of nature and wildlife. I try to remind myself, as a friend reminded me recently, that "we live in their habitat."

Last summer I described the army of turtles and the occasional snake that dined in my vegetable garden. But they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Ivy will quickly grow into the brick foundation of our house or up into the siding if I don’t cut it back to the ground every month or so. An invasive common reed known as phraigmite has overtaken much of our lawn. Birds nest in all sorts of inconvenient places. Raccoons and opossums get into anything and everything. Snakes slither up gutters and woodpeckers destroy fascia boards in search of wood bees. There’s even the occasional fox. And this doesn’t even get into the wildlife that comes out of the river.

Lately we’ve sensed there might be critters residing in our attic. The main part of it is a large and high space. At our last house we had snakes in the attic. We didn’t like that and were able to finally keep them out. But at least they didn’t make any noise. Here it’s not unusual in the colder months to hear the wee squeaks of rodent love or the pitter patter of teensy feet across the attic floor at night. There are so many squirrels that use our roof as a shortcut between trees that often we can't tell whether they’re on the inside or the outside.

After learning recently that there are roof rats hereabouts, we thought we’d better get a handle on the situation. Roof rats are a little like head lice in children. You think they’re something that only happens in poor neighborhoods. But in fact, they can thrive in any suburban neighborhood, especially in neighborhoods like ours where the lots are large and heavily wooded and there’s lots of water nearby.

On the advice of a friend who’d had a similar problem, I rang up Critter Control. A young man came out that afternoon and after crawling around the attic concluded that we might have either a roof rat or an infestation of flying squirrels.

“Flying squirrels!” I responded. “Like Rocky the Flying Squirrel?”

Indeed, the Critter controller said. He reached into the back seat of his truck and pulled out a small cage containing a frisky little flying squirrel he’d just liberated from another house in our neighborhood. They’re actually kind of cute little fellows, what with their flat tails, and this one actually did look a little like Rocket J. Squirrel, minus the goggles, of course. But just the same, I don’t want to meet one in the hallway or bathroom.

The critter getter left a variety of traps up in our attic to see what he’d catch. The first night was quiet. The second morning we heard muffled bumping around in the area of the traps. Although not a flying squirrel, we did catch a full size female squirrel. Lest we be accused of operating a revolving door operation here while we wait for the roofer to come seal up the gaps through which these critters are crawling, she’ll be released in a less populated area.

I'm not sure about the logic of relocating squirrels is, given that there must be hundreds of them around here. It's not like one less is going to make a difference. Do squirrels have memory? I guess we'll just have to wait and see what we catch tonight.

[Update: Last night's catch was a flying squirrel and a regular non-flying one.]

Quite Enough

2012-01-12T07:54:00.000-05:00

There are no pictures in it. But the memories it will raise in your mind, especially if you’ve ever seen the author, will be more than enough.

I’m talking, of course about the latest collection of essays and rhyme from Calvin Trillin. The book quite fittingly, is called “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin.”

This is one of those books that I bought to give to someone else for Christmas but planned to read myself before wrapping it. I never got around to that, so I was tickled when someone bought the book for me for Christmas.

If there’s a modern writer who more than anyone else deserves to be dubbed the Mark Twain of our time, it has to be Trillin. He’s long been a staff writer about food and American culture at The New Yorker and considers himself America’s only “deadline poet” for his regular contributions to The Nation. His books are many; I was first introduced to Trillin in Alice, Let’s Eat. Later on he described the lessons of his Kansas City upbringing in Messages from My Father and the lost potential of a “most likely to succeed” college classmate in Remembering Denny. In About Alice, written just after the death of his wife, Trillin told the sweetest story of love and marriage I’ve ever read.

You can’t—or at least I can’t—read Trillin without chuckling, and who couldn’t use a few chuckles every day? There have been other collections of Trillin’s writing through the years. (The Administration of George W. Bush alone, for example, yielded a bumper crop of columns and poetry.) But at least for now, Quite Enough is the best of the best.

Magnificent Obsession

2012-01-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

Bedside iPad, 2012

Last year I received an iPad as a Christmas gift. I’d been wanting one, so I eagerly looked forward to filling it with lots of neat “apps.” I started with Flipboard, a terrific aggregator of web sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and other media. If you could have only one iPad app, this would be it.

I'm told people get obsessive about iPads. One friend says he turns on his iPad and checks the news, weather and previous night’s sports scores before he even gets out of bed in the morning.

I was determined not to be like that. But before I knew it, all kinds of extraneous information gathering and entertainment applications came to reside on my iPad. They included apps for keeping track of the weather, shopping, mapping, livecams all over the world, newspapers, magazines, public radio stations, movies, Fedex and apps for restaurant reviews and reservations. There are apps for showing my photographs and for converting currency. If I need to find my way around most any mall in America, there’s a guide for it. If I need directions (and even a picture of where I’m going), there are apps for that, too. When all else fails, there’s even a level and a compass.

I guess I haven’t completely jumped into the new generation fray, though, since the iPad apps I use the most (besides e-mail) are merely new platforms for existing media. Netflix brings a huge library of streamed movies and series. Hulu and the CBS “60 Minutes” app bring television to my iPad. Medici.tv brings arts and musical entertainment. Zinio brings a rich and excellently produced variety of magazines at less than mail subscription prices. And the iPad version of Kindle quickly replaced my regular Kindle reader for all but beach use.

Among the various Apple products that crept into my life—Okay, I’ll confess, I wanted them all—I still think the classic iPod is one of the most elegant and useful inventions of modern times. I’ve never been happy with either of the iPhone or iPad versions of the iPod as music or podcast players and shudder to think how I’ll cope if and when my iPod dies.

But there’s no question but that the iPad has been transformative. Besides, I ask, what’s wrong with checking the news and weather before you get out of bed in the morning? Some days you might just want to pull the covers over your head and go back to sleep.

A Ride in the Country

2012-01-10T06:00:00.001-05:00

The Red House on Morris Neck Road, 2012

This is the time of year I seem to find myself without anything I specifically want to photograph. I usually have all kinds of ways of generating random photo destinations. But sometimes even they fail to get me motivated. Faced with such a situation, the better me would pick someplace close by and just go there and see what I could find to photograph. But the lesser me sometimes seizes control and screams into my ear, “Let’s go waste some gasoline!”

That’s how, this past Sunday afternoon, I decided to make my semi-annual pilgrimage to the southern precincts of Virginia Beach. For those not from this area, I should mention that Virginia Beach covers almost five hundred square miles, extending southward along the Atlantic coast from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to the North Carolina border. About half of that area is land and the rest is water and tidal marsh. The northern part of the city where I live has the highest elevation above sea level—“elevation” being a relative term since unless you live atop a sand dune hardly anyone’s more than a dozen or so feet, at most, above sea level. The southern part of the city is mostly rural, flat and rarely more than a couple of feet about sea level.

Drum Point Road, 2012

Most of my Bonney ancestors came from that lower rural area. In fact, I’m part of the first generation of my family not to have lived at least some part of my youth in the country. (Which is no biggie, if you ask me, since those low country marshes are home to water snakes as big around as your arm.)

But I still go back from time to time to visit, even though almost all of the places where my ancestors lived are long gone. There are still Bonneys there, as well as Whitehursts and Ives and Ayres and some of the other old family names that show up in our family tree.

I know where the old wooden schoolhouse is that my grandfather attended as a child. The farmhouse where my great grandmother raised my father and uncle is still there. Down near the Carolina border they’ve never straightened out the dangerous bend in the road where my uncle once ran his car into a tree.

But even if I don’t see any of these Bonney touchstones when I travel the narrow country roads along Back Bay and Muddy Creek, or if I don’t stop by Charity Church to check out the headstones, there’s still enough unspoiled nature—and let’s not forgot those big water snakes—to draw the eye and remind me of how just being twenty-five miles away from my current home can seem like being in another age.

Closed for the Season, 2012

2012 Fashion Outlook

2012-01-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Look, 2012

Even if you don’t observe Christmas, you can tell the seasons are changing when all the Christmas ads are replaced on TV by weight loss program ads. This year we saw the first ones on Christmas Eve. But New Year’s they were everywhere.

This can only mean one thing: namely, that we’re once again obsessed about the shape of our body and eager to know what we’ll be wearing to cover that body come spring.

I’ve shopped on the stylish avenues of New York, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and Rodeo Drive in LA. I’ve been to Saville Row in London and the Champs-Élysées in Paris. I have ascended the red staircase at Valentino on the Via Condotti in Rome.

But for the most up-to-date fashion pour tout le monde, one need look no further than the stylish merchants of Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach. No Middle Eastern souk can hold a candle to the international bazaar that lines this magnificent mile of resort retailing.

Regular readers will recall that my personal fashion style locked in sometime around 1968 and, according to most of the women in my family, has only gone downhill since. But that doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention to such things. I once had a job that required me to be a regular reader of Women’s Wear Daily. I scan The Sartorialist web site every other day or so. Just because I don’t wear it doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on in the world of fashion.

That’s why this particular view (above) caught my eye the other day while I was driving down Atlantic Avenue. This time of year most of the oceanfront retailers have closed up shop for the winter. But there on the corner of 26thstreet in the old Thunderbird Motel coffee shop—actually not the real old Thunderbird grill; that used to be across the street—were these manikins and the sign affirming that I was indeed witnessing “THE LOOK.”

This particular shop doesn’t trade in men’s wear, as best as I can tell. But since I know that my female readers will want to be completely up on fashion, I quickly jumped from the car and snapped this picture before the shopkeeper came out and yelled at me. I don’t know if he was more worried about me rushing a copy of this picture to a factory in China so that I could get knockoffs onto the streets by next week or because I wondered what the old milk jugs full of sand were for.

Marie Antoinette had her petit hameau built at Versailles so that she could play milkmaid. I’m supposing these jugs of sand might be necessary to prevent “shrinkage,” as theft is referred to in the retail trade. I’m not sure these outfits could stand to be shrunk any tighter.

Sweeping the Decks

2012-01-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

Sherwood Forest, 2011

This is the time of the year when I go through last year’s files and create a clean slate for this year’s work.

Preparing the “day job” business files for the new year is the easy part. It’s the unresolved photographs that are the hassle. There are hundreds of them, bunches from just about every day I went out shooting. Looking through them is like walking back through the year, from a snowy January day at Virginia Beach to a sunny August afternoon at Venice Beach, California. From stylish New Yorkers strolling down Fifth Avenue to old white men in Shriner sequins brandishing scimitars as they parade down Atlantic Avenue. From Louis Kahn’s elegant Salk Institute in La Jolla, the avant-garde architecture of Eric Owen Moss at the Hayden Tract and elegant store windows in New York and Washington to humble country churches and work sheds in rural Virginia.

I don’t get sentimental about these pictures. But just the same it’s time to sweep the decks clear of last year’s work and start looking ahead to what I can see through the lens of 2012. Let’s take a few last looks at last year.

Providence Forge, 2011

Mid-Atlantic Shrine Association, 2011

Salk Institute, 2011

Conjunctive Points, 2011

WallyWrapping

2012-01-05T06:00:00.003-05:00

WallyWrapping 1, 2011

A lot of families take in their single friends on holidays. Holidays can be tough on singles, and having experienced more than a few ourselves, we know how dreary it can be to have macaroni from a box by yourself while everyone else is enjoying the company of the holiday dinner table.

Here at the Bonney house, we believe the more the merrier. We’ve always believed in sharing the oblige of our noblesse with our unattached friends. We always have Cook prepare an extra pheasant. The footmen place extra foot stools around the drawing room and extra seats – folding, of course; we don’t want the invited to get too comfortable, if you know what I mean—at the children’s table in the front hall. The downstairs maid irons a few extra napkins and the driver is sent out to collect the lonelies who will view our wonderful family day and wish it were their own.

For the last several years one of the regular attendees at our holiday table has been the imminent artist Wally Torta. He’s good company. He’s been spending holidays with us for enough years now that our most cynical relatives no long suspect that because he hails from Ohio he must be a Republican. He goes along with our rituals and never complains. He always brings something to share, though I thought the year he came with the Hong Kong flu was a little much.

This year was no exception. Wally brought illustrations for everyone. All are wonderful. At least one brought tears to the eyes of the recipient. At dinner Wally wore his paper crown with such pride that I fear he would have worn it home had we not pulled it off at the last minute lest those neighbors of his in Norfolk get jealous of the rich life he’s lived for a day and mug him.

As cherished as Wally’s gifts are—and despite my protests, he is good company and always welcomed—the surprise of this year’s gifts was their wrapping, two examples of which you see here. The guy’s a genius, I tell you. I do wish, though, he’d quit going on so about Café Stella. You’d think they were giving him free stuff.

WallyWrapping 2, 2011

I'm Feeling All Right Myself

2012-01-04T06:00:00.001-05:00

Boboli Palace Passage, 2002

I’m done with all this dying stuff.

I don’t know if death is like when a woman finds out she’s pregnant and all of a sudden it seems like there are pregnant women wherever she goes. It has sure seemed like that for me lately with death. It’s been everywhere.

Mostly, I’ve been steeling myself for my mother’s death. Since late November she’s teetered at the edge of death, at times given no more prospect than a few hours.

But then, just before Christmas, she bounced back. She’s not strong, nor out of the woods, so far as death is concerned. Some days are still dreadful for her. But her condition now seesaws back and forth enough that I’ve let my guard down and no longer expect every moment of clarity on her part to be the last or every phone call from the nursing home or hospice team to be “the call.”

This is a very consuming experience. I didn’t realize how much I’d gotten worked up about this until the other day when I walked into my mother’s room and found her sitting up in bed feeding herself breakfast. The night before she’d been out for the count. But here she was, somewhat alert and thoroughly confused, but clinically speaking no worse for the wear of her ordeal than an achy back. For a moment I was even angry at the thought of all the energy I’d wasted worrying about her death.

I told myself right then, “She may die today or she may die tomorrow. But I’m not going to stop living as if it’s coming any moment.”

It’s funny how a simple affirmation like that can make all the difference. Years ago I realized that I was bothered by someone who’d been unkind to me early in life. I’d never thought much of it, so I thought, until after the person died. Then the experience gnawed away at me in insidious little ways. Finally, it all came together one night as I was trying to go to sleep. I could think of nothing more to do about it than sit up in bed and say, “I forgive you.” And that was it.

The other morning while walking down the hall at my mother’s nursing home I happened upon one of the older gentleman who was rolling his wheelchair to the dining room. He lost both legs to diabetes and a stroke makes it difficult for him to communicate. His appearance can be a little off-putting to people who don’t visit nursing homes much. But I always speak to him. I don’t even know his name. After I greeted him he asked how I was doing. I answered and asked him the same thing, to which he responded, “I’m doing all right myself, young man.”

And that’s about how I’m doing, too. Life’s testing me in a lot of ways. But I’m doing all right myself.

Regaining My Senses

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-05:00

What I Saw, 2011

The sky is such an endless source of inspiration. That's bound to be why the sky and clouds are such easy pickings for artists and photographers. Musicians, too, I suppose, if you count Debussy's and Django Reinhardt’s respective interpretations of Nuages.

I've been experiencing a bit of a creative drought lately. It’s been a season of distractions, so many that a couple of things had to go temporarily. The What I Saw blog was one. I wasn't hearing inspiration for blog posts. I was traveling some during this time and found myself seemingly deaf to the usually rich array of overheard remarks that can be such fun.

I wasn't "seeing" pictures the way I usually do, either. I didn't realize this at first. The thing that’s normally so special about this gift of sight is that it’s involuntary. Although I might point myself in this direction or that, I don’t go looking for specific things to photograph. Rather, they nearly always reveal themselves to me, whether it’s some kind of action, confluence of light and dark or just an engaging mixture of lines and curves.

But I wasn't seeing those, either.

The picture you take when you see nothing else, 2011

Some of the distractions have been eliminated, leaving space in my mind to again notice and find pleasure in the world around me. I felt like the blinders I’d had on finally fell away the other morning when in the course of taking out the trash I happened to look up and notice a thrilling series of views through the trees into the clouds. The sky was full of expressive clouds that formed the front edge of a cold front. The trees, free of their leaves, formed lacey silhouettes.

I quickly ran back indoors and grabbed a camera and returned to catch a dozen or so shots before conditions changed. I wasn't able to look at the photographs I’d taken until later in the morning. But when I did an interesting phenomenon occurred; namely, I came up against the difference between what my eye had seen and what the camera saw.

The thing about photography, and digital photography in particular, is that, as the old saying goes, "the camera doesn't lie." In this respect, the camera is more intellectually honest that we are. Our minds see what we want to see. They sometimes screen out things that don't fit our expectations or that experience tells our mind we don't want to notice.

In this case, case, I'd seen a dynamic sky made up of shades of gray. The camera, on the other hand, saw a lot of blue. It didn’t have any editorial or artistic biases. It only cared about accurately capturing what it saw, which was a lot of blue.

The problem is I didn't want the blue. I’d envisioned something more sepia-like, which is why I processed the photograph to end up looking as it does at the top of this post. The image below is what the camera saw.

What the Camera Saw, 2011

Where I've Been

2011-12-22T10:34:00.003-05:00

The View at 1801, 2011

I’d expected to be back here by now.

Several weeks ago my mother was rushed in the wee hours of the morning from her nursing home to the hospital. Her condition was such that she was not expected to last until lunchtime, much less the day.

But as it has on a number of occasions over the last few years, my mother’s body belied her desire for life to end and carried her not only through that first day, but every one of the twenty days since, including December 22nd, her 91^st birthday.

It seemed important to me for a while that she make it to this birthday, although she’s no longer aware of it and had no interest in attaining it in the first place. She's from a generation where children died young and seniors never gave a thought to surviving past their sixties. But now I realize this was a pretty silly target. She long ago reached the point of having lived longer than anyone else in her generation of her family. There was nothing to prove and these last twenty days haven’t been pleasant ones for her.

When she returned home to her nursing home from the hospital, my mother entered hospice treatment and became one of those people who actually improved when the medications she’d been using for her litany of chronic conditions was discontinued. But that was short-lived and for more than a week now she has teetered at death’s doorstep, made comfortable to the extent that she is by copious doses of palliative medications.

As you can imagine, a lot of time goes into keeping watch over someone in this condition. My mother’s death, whenever it does occur, will be seen as a release for her from earthly pains and anxiety. There’s not really much to be done, to be honest, and my mother has reached the point where she no longer recognizes me. But just the same you feel the need to maintain a presence.

Add all this to a couple of demanding client projects, a furnace and plumbing that have both decided to act up—and did someone say Christmas is coming?—and you don’t have much time left for creative outlets.

So the bottom line is that I’m not back yet. I’m hoping to be back by the first of the year. In the meantime, I wish you all happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous new year!

Winter's Break

2011-12-05T06:00:00.002-05:00

Winter Sky, 2005

The smack of the cold air on the cheeks.

The acrid smell of wood fires.

Owls hooting in the trees.

Geese overhead, headed south in their magnificent Vs.

Winter's coming.

[Work and other responsibilities are all-consuming at the moment. What I Saw is going to take a brief break. I hope to be back by December 15.]

Having an Audience

2011-12-02T06:00:00.000-05:00

Summer Dinner, 2008

I was talking to a friend recently, a serious foodie, who described how she’s stopped cooking for her husband.

“He doesn’t notice it and doesn’t care,” she said. The kids are grown up and gone. So why should she go the effort of cooking for him if he’s just as happy picking up fast food on the way home from work?

My friend can still cook for herself, of course. And she does from time to time. But it’s clear that in the absence of an audience there’s not a lot of motivation for her to spend time setting the table, arranging flowers, selecting wine, background music and such. My friend used to be known for her “presentation” of a meal. Now I get the impression she eats standing up in the kitchen or in front of the television.

Having an audience is important. When I started posting photographs at Flickr in the spring of 2003 I was just interested in seeing how my work would look online. I was curious whether it would attract any attention. But I was more interested, as I’ve noted here before, in seeing if having a place to post pictures online every day would give me the motivation of to stick with it.

Still, it’s nice to have an audience. Over the years I’ve come to know a much more geographically and sociologically diverse range of friends at Flickr than I could have found where I live. Today there are more than five hundred people who’ve elected to see at least a thumbnail view of my daily posts at Flickr.

Not everyone clicks on every picture to see it in a larger format, of course. But over time it’s interesting to see how different pictures appeal to different people. Sometimes pictures I thought were going to engage a lot of people don’t, and sometimes pictures I’d thought of throwing away end up engaging the interest of a lot of people.

I’d like to say I don’t care a lot about the viewing numbers at my Flickr page. But I do in fact look at them most days to see if there’s anything I can learn from what seems to capture attention and what doesn’t. So far, the only trend I can discern with any confidence is that there isn’t any trend. So I’ll just keep throwing stuff out there to see what sticks.

Oh, and by the way, I love my wife’s cooking. She gives it a lot of thought and I try to make sure she never thinks that thought goes unnoticed.

All the Creative Choices

2011-12-01T06:00:00.001-05:00

Walkers, 2004

Some people believe photography is just a matter of pointing the camera and pushing the shutter release. (They’re usually the same people who say, if they see a picture they really like, “You must have a nice camera.”) Any serious photograph, however, is actuallly the culmination of dozens, many even hundreds, of creative choices.

Those of us who are to any extent thoughtfully involved in the photography game discern between "snapshots" and "photographs" or, when we’re at our most pretentious, "images." Snapshots are what people who really aren't thinking about it "take." Photographs, on the other hand, are what more thoughtful photographers "make."

Those of us who take pictures know that if a dozen photographers went to the same place to take pictures of that same place or same event there'd probably be twelve different versions with twelve different interpretations, no two quite the same. Photojournlists are trained to look upon scenes in such a way that such bias is minimized. But even experienced photojournalists will tell you that this a goal rather than a quantifiable truth.

Among the variables involved in any photograph:

· The choice of camera.

· The type of film, the film speed or the digital ISO.

· The time of day.

· The time of the year.

· The day of the week.

· Where to stand.

· Whether to shoot from close to the ground or from an elevated position.

· What speed or aperture to use.

· How to use the light.

· What story to tell.

· What to show.

· What not to show.

“Walkers,” above, works in no small way and stands out because it was taken from an elevated position. Any number of people have taken pictures of people walking on the beach. But by varying the perspective, the picture has a slightly unexpected aspect to it.

A couple of my photographer friends and I used to talk about taking a road trip together. We were going to drive across a few states taking pictures. We've never quite gotten our act together enough to take this trip. And it's my secret suspicions that if we had we'd never have gotten any more than five miles down the road on any given day because each of us would be yelling to the driver to stop the car so that he could get out and make a picture of something he'd seen.

We may be thoughtful. But that doesn’t always mean we see things the same way.

From the Spam Dept.

2011-11-30T06:00:00.003-05:00

No One Has to Know It’s Not a Diamond, 2011

One of the nice things back in the days when we changed our e-mail addresses every time our Internet service providers changed ownership or domain was that you got to evade all the e-mail spammer who sent stuff to your old address. Unfortunately, we don't change e-mail addresses as much as we used to, and it doesn't take long for spammers to find their way back to you, especially if your e-mail address is out there in the business media.

I'm at the point where I get as many as five or six hundred junk e-mails every day. Most of them get caught by my spam filter. But I still have to scan through them quickly to make sure client mail hasn't gotten sidetracked into the wrong place.

Some spam is silly, some truly dreadful. Some is simply boring, and some is clearly intended for people with, let's just say, different tastes. It’s like those “starving artist” art shows they used to have at hotels; one gets the impression that there are sweatshops in Romania where there are hundreds of men and women sitting at keyboards trying to come up with spam e-mail titles that people will find intriguing enough to open.

Some of the titles clearly get lost in translation. But one thing you can’t fault them for is burying the lede. Here are just a few from a single day, the mere variety of which makes me wonder just how I ever got on some of these people’s radars:

“IMPORTANT ISSUES TO ATTEND”

“Christmas Pre-Approval”

“Customized countertops”

“Claim your Social Security check”

“Butts that look awesome”

“Literally put a glassy shine on any surface”

“Compare moving companies now”

“Obama endorses herbal remedies”

“Maria invites you for a chat”

“See the desire in her eyes”

“Find effective psoriasis treatments”

“With the education comes the uniform”

“You have changed”

“Propecia linked to bad injuries”

“This is not a myth”

“Get more out of your love rod”

“Wonder pills for thrills”

“Jailed because of skimpy wear”

“May God almighty be with you if you read this message”

“Want to do Betty Crocker?”

“Thanksgiving…Not easy”

“MPazar Öğretmenler Günü Kampanyası”

“400^th anniversary Starbucks coupon”

“1o Things women hate”

A crafty person could have a lot of fun mixing and matching all these titles. I’m too tired, though, so I’m going to bed and drift off to sleep wondering just what Betty Crocker would think of my “love rod” and worry about whether it might be one of the “10 Things women hate.”

I won’t be using any Propecia, by the way. One can’t be too careful.

Overheard in the ER

2011-11-29T06:00:00.001-05:00

Treatment Pod 36, 2011

At 2:15 a.m. this past Saturday I received a call from my mother’s nursing home. Her condition was dire and they were preparing her for transport to the hospital a few blocks away. I met her in the hospital emergency department a few minutes later and tried to stay awake and alert for the next three hours while a serious team of physicians and nurses addressed her declining condition.

It was, all things considered, a relatively quiet night in the ER. Doctors, nurses, aides, custodial and administrative workers were going about their business methodically and professionally. There were twenty or so patients in various stages of diagnosis and treatment. At one point a police officer herded in a cluster of young men with bloodied faces, their hands safely cuffed behind their backs. But there were no raised voices. The intercom was quiet. The young men were more anxious to be treated than to continue whatever dispute had called for police intervention.

Every now and then I was asked to leave my mother’s treatment area while things were done that a more conscious woman might have found undignified in front of her son. But mostly I just sat in a stiff chair at the entrance to her treatment area and listened to the sounds of ER life.

"We're going to draw some more blood."

"Sir, were you hit with a bat, a bar or just someone's fist?"

"I don't remember."

"Are you warm enough, Mam?"

"I need to run some laps, or something. I'm starting to nod off."

"Blood pressure is 64 over 29."

“Anyone going out for breakfast when we get off?”

"That sure looks like a purse, man."

"It's not a purse. It's a backpack."

"Sure looks like a purse to me."

"I just came out the door and they started coming at me. Dude, they were everywhere. I didn't even know who they were. They were just out there swinging at everyone."

"We've partied there for months. Never had a problem."

“I hear there were a lot of fights in that neighborhood tonight.”

"I was just back on a boat from Antarctica. It was great."

"BP is now 71 over 34."

"Dr. _____ said all this, and the patient's husband was standing right behind him. RIGHT BEHIND HIM! The doctor didn’t even care. He was so rude."

"72 over 27."

“Polar bears are the coolest!”

"When I was a kid in North Carolina they had a soft drink called White Lightning. I liked Tab. But I really liked White Lighting."

"We're not even from here. Our house is rented and we're staying at the KOA campground."

"Sir, let me put you in a wheelchair. We don't want you falling and knocking out your other eye, as well."

Living at the Edge

2011-11-28T06:00:00.001-05:00

Surf Series #9, 2009

I've long maintained that the real gestalt of living by the ocean isn't just a matter of surf and sand, but rather something bigger and more important. I've just not been able to articulate very well what that larger thing is.

I have always looked at the ocean as something that's bigger and more powerful than man, and that in being this way it keeps us humble against the world. A good romp in rough surf or an upending on a wave will remind you that you're not nearly as powerful as even the energy of the smallest wave.

But even more than that, the value of the ocean to me is it's openness, its limitlessness and it’s uncertainty. One day it’s calm, flat and lapping quietly at the shore. The next it’s standing up tall and dangerous and pounding anything it touches. An enduring part of the soundtrack of my youth is the roar of the surf on windy winter nights.

But on even the roughest of days there's still nothing but the curve of the earth to limit your view across the ocean to the horizon. It’s like a giant infinity pool with nothing ever on “the other side” to interrupt your view.

I like to think that the ocean is the great psychological expansion valve for those of us who live year it. When things seem tight and close, the boundless expanse of the ocean is there to let our minds wander and be free. I've wondered if the ocean is to us today what the American West was in the 1800s, a great, wide open expanse of new things and opportunity.

I’ve lived within a few miles of the ocean for most of my life. I once considered a job in St. Louis. But standing under Eero Saarinen's magnificent Gateway Arch and beholding the mighty Mississippi made me realize that even a great wide river does not an ocean make.

Now comes some more considered research that suggests that there's something to this "psychological expansion valve" theory of mine. In Dan Beuttner's new book, Thrive - Finding Happinesss the Blue Zones Way, a Danish school principal explains the exceptionally high level of happiness in Denmark, compared to other countries as follows:

"I think that part of the Danish happiness is that we're never more than 60 kilometers from the sea. That creates the sense that there are no obstacles and reinforces the freedom we Danes feel over our lives.“

Well said. Maybe I was switched at birth with a Danish baby?

On Thanks

2011-11-23T06:00:00.001-05:00

The Fall View, 2011

Isn’t it interesting how over the last several years Thanksgiving has picked up a little additional energy? People who used to reserve their appreciations and best wishes for the new year for sharing at Christmas, Hanukkah or on January 31st now send their sincerest greetings at Thanksgiving.

I like this. Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have the baggage of Christmas and Easter. It's not a birthday. You don’t have to worry about stepping on anyone’s religious rituals. In some families you might have to monitor the booze and stifle smoldering domestic tensions. But so far as gift giving is concerned, the only gift is the giving of yourself, and what could be cheaper and yet bigger than the fellowship that comes from that? All in all, arguably the most anxiety-free of the holidays.

Well, maybe a little anxiety. Thanksgiving 1963 marked my debut as a boy soprano. I stood up in front of the congregation of the First Lutheran Church in Norfolk, Virginia, and sang “We Gather Together.” I don't remember much about it other than that both of my parents were there, that both encouraged me to just relax and go with the music—they were both accomplished singers—and both claimed afterwards that I'd done a good job.

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;He chastens and hastens His will to make known;The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing;Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Every now and then I come across someone who doesn’t have it in them to be thankful. Such people are easy to dislike, but more often than not I end up feeling sorry for them. Maybe I’m just a sucker. I’m reading a book about the elements of happiness, from which I’m learning that one of the most important elements of happiness, regardless of the nation or culture, is the sense of being connected to other people. In my experience, people who can’t be thankful tend to be socially isolated. I suppose this could be one of those chicken-and-egg quandaries: are people without thankfulness that way because of isolation or are they isolated because they are so without the capacity for thankfulness?

All I know is that I have much to be thankful for in my life. That includes being sincerely thankful for my friends, including those of you who follow What I Saw. I wish you all a wonderful day of thanksgiving. Whether you celebrate as we do in the United States or as it’s celebrated in Canada on a different day or whether it’s not even on the calendar where you live, I appreciate you and the richness you bring to my life.

Another Look at the Zone

2011-11-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

Smithfield Alley, 2011

Early on in my study of photography I read about the Zone System. No matter how I approached it, though, I never quite got the gist of it. It’s not surprising, therefore, that it took me a long time to figure out how to make good exposures in my photographs.

Ansel Adams and Fred Archer developed the Zone System in the late 1930s as a way for photographers to learn to recognize all the shades of light in any given scene and use this knowledge to make exposures that accurately reflected the way the photographer wanted to interpret the scene.

That's a very simple way to describe a much more thoughtful and complex system. It goes without saying that photographers always have to be cognizant of light and shadows. The value of the Zone System is that it conditions the photographer to be cognizant of not just the direction of light and purest blacks and the purest whites in any scene, but to recognize the eight other gradations, or zones, in between. There are ten zones in the Zone System, with each step in the process not coincidentally one f-stop more or less than the one before it (depending on whether you’re going from light to dark or dark to light.

I understood that much of the Zone System. But photographers like Adams were famous for being painstaking in setting up their shots. They’d spent hours setting up their giant box cameras. They’d wait weeks for the weather or clouds to be just right. They had all the time in the world to think about the light. Unfortunately, that wasn’t at all like the observational and street photography I was doing.

I wasn’t the only one to find the Zone System cumbersome and time consuming. Lots of photograhers felt that way about it. Instead, they "exposed for shadows and printed for highlights," which means they set their exposures for the darkest part of a scene in order to capture details in the dark areas and then adjusted the exposure of printing and alternately dodged and burned to accomodate the details in the highlights. The beauty of this system was that if you did it correctly, you not only had good exposure, but also excellent balance of light.

These days, between intelligent cameras and tools like Photoshop, it’s a lot easier for the layman to get a good exposure. The automatic exposure features of most cameras take reflected exposure readings at a number of locations in the frame. You can still play with exposure manually, but most people don’t. The technology covers a multitide of sins, and I have the sneaky feeling that photography teachers who tell their students they’re slackers if don’t do everything manually are just being pretentious, making something that should be fun and enjoyable into something that only makes you feel bad about your performance.

Still, I do believe it’s a good idea and a fundamental aspect of getting good exposure—whether you do it in the camera or in Photoshop—to be aware of the lights and darks and all the gradations inbetween. I took the picture above with the idea that there might be a story in it. But it turns out the only story is about all the shades of light and dark in it. How many zones can you identify?

A Fall Day in Smithfield

2011-11-21T06:00:00.002-05:00

A Fall Day in Smithfield, 2011

It's fall, which means that we observational photographers are obligated to do something with colorful leaves.

I love fall. Growing up as I did near the ocean, where pines were about the only trees that would thrive in our sandy soil, I didn't really experience fall at its fullest until I moved a hundred miles west for college. It's safe to say I was smitten by all the things leaves do in the fall. I even made spending money in college raking leaves for people who lived near the college campus. So you could say I not only enjoyed watching the leaves change colors and carpet the ground when they fell, but made money picking them back up again.

It's always seemed ironic that nature puts on one of its most colorful shows as a prelude to moving all the action under the ground. While roots stretch out and make plans for next spring's rebirth--there's even a fair bit of literature about how what draws so many people to gardening is the annual cycle of birth and death--for the next several months it'll be nothing but bare limbs. In photographs trees will become dark, densely patterned shapes to use as contrast against gray/white winter skies. Tree trunks will be photographed in hundreds of photography classes in response to assignments about “texture.”

But for now many of the trees around here are still full of colorful leaves and we photographers will just have to cope with that. I make it sound bad; colorful leaves can be so awe-inspiring that you'd wonder why I might look upon this as a problem. But the truth is, most photographs of fall leaves are so hackneyed that after that first second or two of awe, you'll forget you ever saw them because they look just like the thousands of pictures of colorful leaves you've seen before.

A situation like this ought to be the inspiration for taking pictures of fall leaves that are new and interesting. But sometimes, like this past Saturday when I was taking a walk in Smithfield, Virginia, while my wife was doing some Christmas shopping nearby, I came upon the scene above and couldn't begin to think of doing anything more interesting or unexpected than letting my jaw drop at the sight of nature's glory and capturing what I saw.

So if you happen to follow my daily picture posts at Flickr, you're just going to have to endure some cliche shots of colorful leaves until I get this bout of "expected" pictures out of my system.

Cue the falling leaves! I'm ready.