nightlife in the Forks

Firefighting and picture making • click to embiggenLast night around 12:30AM the quiet of the night was drowned out by sirens which seemed to come to a stop a very short distance away. Sure enough, just around the corner, an unoccupied house was on fire.

As I was making the picture on the right (the fireman with a camera) , I started to laugh because it brought to mind scenes from The Fireman's Ball, a delightful award-winning and somewhat controversial Czech film from 1967.

four corners ~ it's a whirlygig kinda thing

four corners ~ Travy G's • click to embiggen
four corners ~ Travy G's # 2 • click to embiggen
four corners ~ Travy G's • click to embiggenYesterday at mid-afternoon I uncharacteristically set out to make some pictures with a preconceived objective in mind - uncharacteristically because my normal MO is to leave the house with my gear during the course of "normal" daily activities and make pictures as unplanned opportunities present themselves.

Yesterday was different in as much as my normal activity for the past 5 days has been to sit and/or lay around the house - hacking up gobs of phlegm and blowing copious amounts of snot out of the faucet in the center of my face (in better times commonly known as a nose) - in an attempt to get rid of a rather nasty cold. This has been an unfortunate situation because we are enjoying some the best weather of the summer - pleasantly warm sunny days without a hint of the rain that has been the hallmark of the past 3 months. So, I kind of needed to forced myself to get out and soak up some sun.

That said, I didn't want to just wander around in the car looking for picturing opportunities. Consequently, before I set out I actually gave some thought to what I might picture. The "pure" natural world has not been holding me in a picturing thrall for a while so I turned my thoughts and attention to things of the hand of humankind variety. As a result, picturing on Main Street seemed like the thing to do.

I left the house with thoughts of a slightly vague notion - ever try to think clearly with a head full of snot? - of four corners dancing around in my head. It seemed like a novel approach to picturing Main Street - pick a spot on Main Street with a cross street and picture the place from the POV of each corner - 4 corners = 4 pictures. That's how it started but that's not how it ended up.

It ended up as 4 corners = 8 pictures. As I was picturing, it occurred to me that on each corner I could look across Main Street and picture the front of the buildings on the other side (which was my original intent) but, if I turned 90˚, I could also picture the sides of the buildings as well, which I proceeded to do.

Now I had 8 pictures instead of 4 and after processing them I started to lay them out in groups of 4. My initial thought as I was picturing was to make a 2 groupings - 1 of the building fronts and 1 of the building sides and that is what I did.

However, the result just looked too, for lack of a better word, "organized" or "straight forward". So, as I began to play with the groupings, it became obvious to me that mixing the front and side views was much more visually interesting and intellectually complex. The visual and intellectual result became something of a mental mind-game / visual jigsaw puzzle that really appeals to my eye and sensibilities.

I really like the result and plan to start a four corners series. I am especially excited about the possibilities of this approach for my upcoming trip to Tuscany (we leave next Friday). IMO, the hilltowns of Tuscany (not to mention the city of Florence) will make for very interesting subjects for this four-corners approach to picturing.

I would very interested to read your opinion on the idea - do you find it interesting? Or maybe you find it annoying. Whatever your opinion, I'd like to read it.

And, believe it or not, there is a repeatable (and quite simple) pattern to the presentation that makes perfect "sense". Anyone care to take a crack at figuring it out?

FYI, I have given you 2 opinions for viewing the pictures - the top 2 pictures can be embiggened separately (for more detail which might help with figuring out the pattern), or, the bottom pictures which embiggen as a diptych (which is how they would be presented in print).

civilized ku # 203 ~ taking it one step further

Looking toward Main St. ~ Au Sable Forks • click to embiggenAs most who have followed The Landscapist for any length of time already know, the corner vignette on my pictures has always been a sticking point for many when it comes to viewing my pictures. And, as I have mentioned many times, it's only a sticking point for other pictures makers - rarely, if ever, is it mentioned by the general viewing public.

I mention this for just one reason. I recently came across the work of a picture maker who has taken the formative basis behind my use of the vignette, i.e. to draw attention to the idea of the eye's natural characteristic of blurred peripheral vision, and taken it to its logical conclusion or its illogical extreme (depending upon how one views it).

That picture maker is John Jenkins III and the work can be found in his book, Peripheral Visions, in which every picture is out of focus - one could even say, completely vignetted. A blurb from the publisher about the work states:

The lush color photographs of John Jenkins III freeze the moments that often happen in the corner of one's eye in peripheral vision. By using selective focus, Jenkins captures the color and light of a fleeting moment, the fuzzy areas of shadow and light that move just outside our direct vision. While the collection of photographs in Peripheral Visions are of the familiar and the everyday, these images show what is happening on the edges of the known and become impressions, moments of time and place, meditations of dreams and memories.

The primary difference between Jenkins idea regarding peripheral vision and my idea of it is that his pictures deal solely with "what is happening on the edges of the known" whereas my pictures include a sharp central area that includes "the known" (direst vision). That said, we are both using the notion of peripheral vision to create "impressions, moments of time and place, meditations of dreams and memories."

The idea of "dreams and memories" has been part-and-parcel of my picturing MO for about a decade. about 7 years ago I wrote this on my Adirondack Light website. That idea is still going strong and, quite frankly, I can't ever imagine it disappearing - it is quite literally and figuratively, the way I see.

man & nature # 227 ~ just wondering

Washington Street ~ Westport, NY • click to embiggenA few days ago, Don asked:

... what is the average time a viewer looks at a picture such as in National Geographic or even on-line as compared to someone viewing at a gallery?

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea. That said, my experience and intuition says that pictures in a book/periodical or in a gallery get a lot more viewing time than those viewed on-line. All I know for sure, is that I spend more time looking at a picture or a group of pictures when I am in a gallery or looking at a book/periodical. That may be so simply because pictures just look and feel "more natural" in print than they do on screen.

That said, I have a question regarding average time spent viewing a picture - how much time, on average, do any of you out there spend viewing any of my pictures here on The Landscapist?

And, as long as I'm asking questions about my pictures, how many of you would keep coming back if all I posted were my pictures - no words, just pictures?

FYI, this is not a scientific survey - nothing is going to change here on The Landscapist as a result of your answers. I'm just curious.

ku # 624 ~ I can't get no satisfaction

Tree branch w leaves overhanging Johns Brook ~ Keene Valley, NY • click to embiggenI have noticed (with a stunning degree of disinterest), that there has been a spate of new camera introductions of late. Canon, Sony, Olympus, and Panasonic (amongst others) have been dumping quite a bit of "new and improved" gear on the market over the past couple weeks. In particular, Canon has introduced a new flagship model for their "reduced-size sensor" camera line.

You got love the marketing wordsmiths (and their handmaidens in the gear review world) for their creative use of the language, i.e. - "reduced-size sensor". Now, in fact, with the surge of full-frame sensor cameras, APS-C sized sensor cameras could be considered to be a "reduced-sized" product, but ....

That nomenclature ignores the fact that, since APS-C-sized sensor cameras were once the largest sensors in the 35mm camera body segment, full-frame sensors are actually "up-sized" sensor cameras, but ...

There's nothing better for fanning the flames of desire than to label a product as "reduced-size" - a nomenclature that implies a sense of inferiority or, at the very least, not up to "full-sized" standards. The rather dismissive notion of "reduced-size" sensors, until quite recently, was reserved for sensors that were smaller than APS-C sensors - 4/3rds sensors, P&S camera sensors and the like. Now we have a whole new body of cameras (and a big body it is) that the soap sellers can label as "inferior".

Praise the lord and pass the ammunition, another fine way to separate the terminally unsatisfied from their money - what good news for the economy (please note that in the real world the phrase "good news for the economy" would be accompanied by the sound of a fart produced by sticking my tongue out between tightly compressed lips and expelling air).

Years ago, Henri Cartier-Bresson made a couple statements that are even more pertinent now than they were then:

I’m always amused by the idea that certain people have about technique, which translate into an immoderate taste for the sharpness of the image. It is a passion for detail, for perfection, or do they hope to get closer to reality with this trompe I’oeil? They are, by the way, as far away from the real issues as other generations of photographers were when they obscured their subject in soft-focus effects.

and

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.

Then again, those 2 notions are not all that different from that penned and sung by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards nearly half a century ago:

When I'm watchin' my TV
And a man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But, he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me

Please hep me, hep me, I'm drowning.

ku # 623 ~ the one-eyed man

Beaver pond with fallen trees • click to embiggenOn the whole Americans are intellectually a rather lazy bunch. We love and clamor for easy answers - it doesn't matter if the "answers" actually make any sense, it only seems to matter that, right or wrong, they be easy to understand.

Whether or not this propensity for easy answers is the result of decades of the dumbing down of the American public by the mass media and advertising industry, I'll leave for others to debate/decide. But, that said, those in the dumbing-down business have done their job well - they have managed to turn most of us into spodas, as in, what I spoda do, massa?

It has been stated that the purpose of the mass media is to "sell soap". The best way to sell soap is to attract as many moths (consumers) to the flame (the purveyors of desire) as you can. And the best way to attract moths is to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Is there anyone in the room that doesn't think that mass media has sunk into the abyss of the lowest common denominator when it comes to what they feed the public?

And, is there anyone in the room who doesn't think that the result of all of this is moths buying soap by the truck load?

Except, or course, what never seems to dawn on the spodas is that the real bill of goods that they have been sold is the notion that a good economy is one that is based on consumption and not production.

What got me to thinking along these lines today were 2 statements by Robert Frank:

To produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.

and

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions regarding those statements and my short bit on selling soap. But, that said, I'll leave you with this:

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. - Lycon - Seller of Black Inhalers / Blind drug-dealer in Minority Report

PS - it's all about pictures.