Lines

1949 Ferrari Barchetta, 2003

Lines tell stories.

I've never taken a studio art class in my life. But I'd be willing to bet that right after they take the roll and pass out the easels one of the first things they tell you is that lines are important and that the least wrinkle in a line can change the whole meaning and lead to all kinds of artistic mayhem. And who doesn't like kicking up a little dust like an artist? Or at least that's what I gather from my reading of books about the lives of artists; that the ones that weren't syphilitics or drunks or hopelessly depressed or bipolar were just trying to kick up a little artistic mayhem.

I was reminded of the importance of lines the other day when I happened to see one of the new Honda Odyssey minivans. Mind you, I don't usually pay much attention to Hondas or minivans. Both tend to be bought by people who value practicality, simplicity and dependability much more than design, those three first characteristics being things that Honda does exceptionally well and the latter one not. I mean, really, when was the last time anyone got really excited about the design of a Honda?

Nearly all car designs involve using lines to achieve one effect or another, whether it is to convey a sense of speed, class, comfort or durability. The problem with this new Honda van is that the side profile—what auto designers call the "beltline"—makes the Odyssey look like a hearse, which makes me think that this vehicle wasn't designed in the United States or by an American. Or an Englishman, for that matter.

 2012 Honda Odyssey (Honda promotional photo)

Making products for world markets has always been a lot harder in practice than it is in theory. Who, for example, was manning the marketing department at Chevrolet when they introduced one of their most popular models to the world without realizing that "Nova," which I'm sure they selected for it's breezy space age connotations, translated as "No go" in Spanish, Portuguese and who knows how many other related languages.

And how about the Japanese electronics giant that didn't care to hire a good translator and consequently thought nothing of proudly proclaiming in every headline promoting its new line of vacuum cleaners that they "Really Suck!"

I dare you to look at one of the new Honda Odysseys and not be reminded of a hearse, especially if the van is black or in another dark color. The first couple of times I saw these new Odyssey vans I really did think they were hearses.

Lines tell us so much. In every visual art, lines lead us. They give us clues to the intent of the artist. They tell stories.

If you want to talk about some good lines, how about the lines of the red Ferrari shown above. It’s a 1949 Ferrari 16mm (for “Mille Miglia”) Barchetta. Its designer, the late Carlo Felice Bianchi Anderloni; now there’s a man who knew something about lines!

What If We Went to Italy?

Tuscany, 2002

We went to a performance by Mary Chapin Carpenter last night. She’s long been a favorite and her show last night was terrific.

I also credit Carpenter with a lot of my appreciation of Italy. We’d been to Italy before I heard her song “What if we went to Italy?” But after hearing the song I considered Italy in a more relaxed, contemplative way.

“What if we went to Italy

A suitcase of books and one bag a piece for the summer

I don't speak a word of Italian

Except for Campari and soda for two, how much is a Lire

Yes, a villa will do and a breeze, in Tuscany please.”

After hearing this verse (and checking to make sure there was money in the bank), I made plans for my wife and daughter and I to return to Italy for two weeks in May. We’d stay in just two places and spend some days touring and some days just wandering.

“What if we spent all of our days, improving our minds, learning new ways to be lazy

It wouldn't be too much of a strain

Relax after breakfast till lunch comes around

Can't wait for dinner, oh, I need to lie down

And refuel, out by the pool.”

Our trip was glorious not only because of all we did, but because of all we felt we experienced by not being driven to fill every moment with “enrichment.”

What if the ancients were lazy like us

Too blissed out to paint, to sketch or to sculpt

Just as relaxed as the tower of Pisa

Not ever missing that old Mona Lisa

What if we never got back on the plane

As summer turned colder and then warmer again

Losing all track of the passing of years

Till it no longer mattered how long we'd been here

What if we went to Italy

Maybe next year, just you and me for the summer

I still can't speak any Italian

But words are replaced under Siennese skies

By nothing so much as a nod, and a sigh, and a wish to be always like this

(What if we went to Italy?, by Mary Chapin Carpenter)

My thoughts, exactly.

You've Got the Light You've Got

Scottsville 05, 2011

One of the challenges of being an opportunistic photographer is that you frequently can't wait around long enough for the light to be right. You are where you are when you are, and that means that sometimes the light's good in all the right ways and sometimes it's just not working with you.

Professionals shooting on assignment approach things a little differently. They're hired to shoot specific things or places. They’re expected to get it right. My friend Dave does terrific architectural photography. But to do this work he’s frequently up and out of bed in the wee hours of the morning in order to be on site to catch the first warm rays of sunrise light on whatever structure he’s shooting.

I’m pretty lazy when it comes to getting up before the sun. I do get up at 5:30 a.m. most days for a five-mile walk. But that’s done out of health necessity and it’s a real battle some mornings not to reach over and turn the alarm clock off and sleep in for another hour.

Very often the time I have to take personal pictures is dictated by some other activity. So there are many times when I’m not shooting in optimum light.

I should mention here that although I do know my way around a photo flash and have a good one, I vastly prefer shooting in natural light. When you get down to it, all we photographers have to work with is light and color. So it might as well be natural.

This past weekend we drove through the little town of Scottsville, Virginia. Scottsville’s a hardscrabble little place nestled along side the James River just south of Charlottesville. Until they built a levee around it, the river routinely flooded Scottsville. Because of the flooding, very little has been built in Scottsville in the last seventy-five years. (Actually, such is the sad fate of Scottsville that very little of anything has been built in Scottsville in the last seventy-five years.) So what survives in Scottsville tends to be worn smooth by age, use, disuse and the river.

If I was shooting photographs of Scottsville on some kind of assignment, or merely wanted to do a thorough job of it, I’d arrive before sunrise and not leave until after sunset. But I wasn’t working under those conditions this past weekend. We weren’t in a hurry, but we were up driving through Scottsville on our way to somewhere else. So after parking the car and walking around for a few minutes, we were back on our way.

What made me stop the car in the first place was the scene shown above. I was drawn to the shadows in the doorway and windows, particularly the range of tones, from very black to very white. The building is painting a dull putty color that didn’t look bad in a color photograph. If I’d been there at sunrise there might have been a warm golden tone to the light and I might have had a very different impression of the scene. But the warm glow of sunrise had passed by the time I got there, and I decided that the impression I had of what I saw was better portrayed in black-and-white. 

Working with natural light can be satisfying and frustrating. But it’s also means that the same scene can be seen in hundreds of different kinds of light throughout the day, which just gives us more opportunities to see things in different and interesting ways. 

Eyes, Ears and Memories

Detroit Metro Airport, 2003

I have a friend who is a fully responsible adult, business owner and employer, conservative in most social and political matters, but who also cannot take a vacation that doesn’t include serious gambling. We’re not talking about rolling the dice with the rent money. But neither are we talking about hanging around the cheap slot machines. Such is my friend’s compulsion that he can’t imagine taking a vacation where, as he puts it, “I don’t stand at least a fighting chance of making back the cost of the trip.”

I used to think that was a sad condition. Then I realized that I’m just as obsessed about traveling with a camera. For me, it’s as if the travel is altogether wasted, as if I wasn’t even there, if I can’t take pictures.

I hate to thing what a trained mental health professional might say about this. It’s not like there aren’t perfectly beautiful books full of photos of these places or that my photographs will set a new standard. (My defense, by the way, is that the pictures I take will be my personal interpretation of the gestalt of a place.)

I suspect this compulsion of mine dates back to a transition in my life that occurred about twelve years ago. It’s when I went from a period when my eyes didn’t recognize photo opportunities to a time when I couldn’t not see photo opportunities all around me. (By the way, my gambling friend is also a former English teacher who would certainly wag his finger at me for using that double negative.) Once this transition occurred I felt that my restored gift of “vision” might just be my one great crack in life at genuine creative expression and, as such, was being wasted if I didn’t act upon the opportunities.

And so it has come to this: I have to have some kind of camera with me when I travel. You’d think traveling without a camera would just heighten other senses. But in my case it’s as if holding the camera in my hand is the physical notice to my brain that it’s time to turn on all the senses and become hyperaware of my surroundings.

(I am also, not surprisingly, a huge advocate of always having my camera actually in hand rather than hanging off my shoulder. Too many good pictures are lost in the few seconds it takes to move the camera from the shoulder to the hands.)

I’m a different person if I travel without a camera; miserable, in fact, that I’m seeing things I want to photograph and not being able to capture them.

Just so you won’t think I’m a complete nutcase, let me assure you that I don’t completely decompensate if I happen to be traveling without a decent camera. The quality of cell phone cameras has improved considerably for occasions when no other camera is available. So like a junkie, a smoker trying to kick cigarettes or a compulsive gambler, I have a fix. But like my high stakes gambling friend, I still can’t imagine taking a trip where there isn’t at least a fighting chance of bringing home a few good pictures.

 

Both Feet Planted Firmly on the Ground

Fork Union, Va, 2011

Mrs. B. and I were in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend to take a ride in a hot air balloon. (You don’t do hot air balloon rides near the coast where we live lest an unexpected change of winds send you careening across the Atlantic Ocean to North Africa.) The balloon trip was originally scheduled for several days earlier, but that flight was cancelled because of rain.

The hot air balloon trip was a birthday present to my wife. It’s something she’s always wanted to do. I, on the other hand, don’t do heights well. But I’d been convinced that this wouldn’t compromise my aerial anxieties and signed on for the ride.

In preparation for the flight I packed two cameras and lenses I thought would be useful from the vantage point of a couple thousand feet above the ground. (One fisheye lens for wide close ups and a zoom for everything else.) I'd also booked a hotel on the edge of town so that we’d not have to drive far for the 7:00 a.m. scheduled take-off. This put us some distance from the University of Virginia campus, where I'd have normally wanted to walk in the morning.  “The  lawn,” the original Thomas Jefferson-designed campus, is one of my favorite places in the built up world. Under normal circumstances I’d have spent some time trying to get a new and different photograph of Jefferson’s grand Rotunda building at the top of the lawn.

But for this trip there’d be no time for a sunrise walk. Besides, there was a U. Va. football game taking place on Saturday afternoon and we wanted to be well away the campus by the time traffic started getting crazy.

The flaw in this carefully planned trip was that our flight was cancelled yet again, this time due to high winds.  So on the one hand we were able to sleep in. But on the other, I was unprepared and too far away from campus to get down there, find a parking spot and get to the Rotunda before the best sunrise light was gone.

Instead of fretting about it, I turned over and went back to sleep.

The day wasn't without some fun, though. My wife and I decided to stay off the Interstate highway and instead took what we refer to as the "scenic" ride home along the country roads that hug the northern bank of the James River. That's how we happened to come across this quiet scene, above, in the little village of Fort Union, Village, proving once again that when it comes to photography, you sometimes have to take what you can get when what you wanted isn’t available.

 No Flying Today, 2011

The Thrill of a New Printer

Printing Fun, 2011

You could say I'm easily pleased. I tell you what, though, when you get hooked on this photography thing, getting a new printer is like Christmas and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one.

For several years I’ve had a good photo printer. But I didn’t use it a lot because it wasn’t capable of making prints larger than 8” x 10”. Anything that needed to be larger, say for a show or for sale, had to be sent out to be printed. There are plenty of good places for sending photos out to be printed in larger format. The problem I had was that the price of printing pictures that didn’t fit into neat traditional size formats was, well, getting to be formidable. You could instruct them to print to the cropped dimensions of the file. But if you weren’t dealing with knowledgeable people you ended up with images that had been stretched or compressed to fit a standard print size. And although the better labs—a funny term, “labs,” since we’re talking about digital images—are very good about getting things turned around quickly, you were still usually talking 3-5 days from start to finish.

I recently needed a couple of larger prints for a show.  Two local photographer friends offered the use of their large format printers. But it occurred to me as I was trying to get some time scheduled with them that I really shouldn’t be freeloading that much. They were very nice and I am very grateful for their offers of assistance. Instead, I used this show as the catalyst to finally step up to a printer with a larger print format capacity.

When you get a new printer capable of larger prints there’s a temptation to print a lot of things just to see them larger. Fortunately, I’ve been able to largely resist that costly temptation. But I was able to submit three photos to a show this week that I learned about at the last minute and wouldn’t have been able to submit if I’d still been sending printing work out. And I have photos floating around at a couple of competitions that will need to be printed if accepted.

The neatest thing about this so far was that in the course of looking for photos to include in one of the competitions, I came across a photo I’d taken a few years ago that I always loved, but had forgotten about. (It’s the one at the left in the photo above.) I did, I’ll admit, print a large format copy of the photo because I was going to frame it for my own office. But then this new show came along and the photo was a good match for the theme. So unless it happens to sell, I’ll have to wait a month to get it back and hang it. 

Today We Celebrate Color!

Tucson 14, 2005

Enough of the gloomy memories. Today we celebrate color!

I don't know if psychologists have some explanation of why some people are drawn to primary colors and some are drawn to more subtle shades. Maybe it's a vision thing, or of the contrasts between adjacent primary colors. Whatever the case, I'm a sucker for primary colors.

Old Town 28, 2009 

Old Town 95, 2009

 Oak Bluffs, 2008