man & nature # 272 ~ the opportunity just slipped by

Moose River and old mill ~ Adirondacks/McKeever, NY • click to embiggenNot every picture I made this past weekend was part of a triptych.

This picture could have been a perfect candidate as part of a man +- nature picture, but, to perfectly honest, I just wasn't seeing / thinking that way at the moment.

man & nature # 271 ~ dumb animals?

Browsing Old Forge residents ~ Adirondacks - Old Forge, NY • click to embiggenSpotting deer in and around villages and towns here in the Adirondacks is not that unusual. That said, these deer and about 7-8 of their relatives seem to have taken up permanent residency on Main St. in the central Adirondack village of Old Forge.

Main St. in Old Forge is also a section of the primary, in fact, the only highway that traverses the Adirondacks. Consequently, on my 100s of trips through the park, passing through Old Forge is just part of the trip. I been through there 100s of times, both night and day, and the number of times that I have seen groups of deer - at times as many as 8-10 deer - just browsing on Main St. is just down right weird.

This picture was made around 9AM last Saturday just before I went into the diner for my wide-and-fat short stack (see civilized ku # 263 below). The deer were just browsing and paid little attention to passersby. The somewhat humorous thing about this is that it is the middle of deer season and these deer seem to have discovered that the safest place to be is right out in the open on Main St. where, quite obviously, no hunting is allowed.

man & nature # 267-70 ~ roadside attractions

Aluminum storm door on weathered structure • click to embiggen
Deer boar hunts / ostrich/emu farm ~ Adirondacks - Otter Lake, NY • click to embiggenEven though my weekend roadtrip picturing objective was Taughannock Falls, I certainly knew that I would make as many other pictures as possibilities presented themselves along the way. As it turned out, I took advantage of those possibilities only between the hours of 7:30AM - 3:30PM on Saturday. My intention was to not only picture my way to Rochester on Saturday but to then picture my way back from there to Au Sable Forks on Sunday.

There was no picture making on Sunday due to a long lunch with Paul Maxim and, consequently, a late start back to Au Sable Forks. On the ride back I was thinking about my Saturday picture making and, for some reason, my conclusion was that I had not made all that many pictures. However, after transferring my picture files from Saturday to the digital darkroom and starting my initial processing, I ended up with about 70 pictures worth processing.

Many of these pictures, in fact, most of these pictures ended up as triptych presentations. With the exception of the triptych found in the ku # 645-49 entry, none of the eventual groupings were intentionally created.

This is nothing new for me. I tend by nature to explore a given referent from differing POVs, not so much to find the "right" POV but rather to tell a more complete story about the subject at hand. Inevitably, this picturing MO ends up leading to, at the processing stage of things, the unintentional creation of diptychs and triptychs.

So, stayed tuned, there a quite a few more Saturday, November 14th triptychs to come. And, within a week or so, I'll be putting on offer a Saturday, November 14th POD book with an accompanying 15 print folio.

man & nature # 266 ~ chilly nights and warm(ish) days

A very frosty morning • click to embiggen

man & nature # 265 ~ and the good pot too

A hint of blue on an otherwise grey day • click to embiggenUntil I came across the following Letter to Red States by Lady Bunny, I had no idea who Lady Bunny was. Now I know - from ladybunny.net: With her glitzy outfits, sky-high wigs, and false eyelashes long enough to embarrass even Tammy Faye Baker, multi-talented drag artiste Lady Bunny would turn heads even if looking glamorous was her only talent.

That said, LB's Letter to Red States is not only rather hilarious (conceptually) but actually contains quite a bit of interesting information that helps explain why so many of the citizens of Red States buy into the nonsense being spewed by the Far Right.

DEAR RED STATES,

We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms. Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Peace out,
Blue States

Thank you, Lady Bunny.

man & nature # 262-64 ~ push 'n pull

Jay Range ~ Jay, NY • click to embiggen
Leafless tree with red berries • click to embiggenIf you click to embiggen the leafless tree with red berries diptych and let your eyes shift back and forth from the foreground focus picture to the background focus picture, there is very interesting / disconcerting push/pull effect that results. At least for me there is.

If one were into this effect, and perhaps this is where I am headed, narrow DOF-wise, there are undoubtedly quite a few possibilities out there for picturing with this approach. And, I really like the idea that this approach works with one of the medium's inherently unique characteristics.

man & nature # 259-61 ~ golden-amber light, Adirondack style

Indian Summer day ~ along Lake Champlain, NY • click to embiggen
Indian Summer day # 2 ~ along Lake Champlain, NY • click to embiggen
Indian Summer day # 3 ~ along Lake Champlain, NY • click to embiggenWeather-wise, we're bouncing around all over the place - yesterday was a high of 73˚F. Friday, on the other hand, was a high of 34˚ with light snow.

As mentioned most recently in civilized ku # 256-259, I do not "chase the light" nor am I a "light stalker". However, it does seem that at times "the light" does chase me. When it does so, I will make pictures with "the light". Some might think that I would not do so because, disliking the work of "light stalkers / chasers" as I do, I would refuse to picture with "the light" based on the tenets of the Photographic Purity Act or some such nonsense.

As far as I am concerned, re: "the light", light is light. Or, as Brooks Jensen states:

There is no good or bad light. There is just light.

Now, to be fair, some of you who are paying attention might be inclined to remind me that in a recent entry - still life # 10 ~ making the light - I touted my ability of being the guy, back in my commercial photography heyday, who was the " go-to guy when a subject needed to be bathed in a 'perfect' light." A statement, which on the face of it, might seem to be a contradiction to my belief regarding Jensen's statement about light.

Well, I'm here to tell ya that that is simply ain't true. Ya see, if one's intent is to make a "picture with a message" (or a series of pictures, or even an entire body of work), there are times when "the light" might be very important to the "message".

Like, say, if one were intent on making a picture that illustrates the idea that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in sunny Florida, the light that one encounters on a cool overcast grey day would not really get it done. Quite obviously, the light encountered on a sunny day at high noon would be much more suitable - one could even say, "perfect" - to getting one's point across.

That said, for me in my quest to picture the everyday / commonplace world that I see all around me, there is no perfect light, there is just light.

man & nature # 258 ~ vroom vroom

new car on a sunny day • click to embiggenI got up at the crack of dawn-ish this AM so I could drive down to Albany (140 miles) to pick up coma-college girl (where she had stayed last night so I could pick her up) and then turn around and head back to Glens Falls (50 miles) to pick up our new car and then give coma-college girl the car we rode in on so that she could head on back to college in Philadelphia and I could head back home so I could post some pictures that I made this past weekend in Montreal .... but ... when I got home the internet connection was down and I had to spend about an hour on the phone with the cable company tech support in order to get back online and now I am so within short order I'll post some pictures from Montreal.