Personal Images

I had friends over yesterday for the feast of Todos Los Santos. Ostensibly we gathered so Audrey could learn to make pie crust. She had talked before about wanting to make peach cobbler and a pie was a step-up.

I was so focused on making things flow that I didn't think about taking pictures until late afternoon in a break in the frantic activities. I set the Blu-Ray player to show Journey to the Center of the Earth while I washed the pots and pans, finished the pie, and put the kitchen back into manageable disarray. I could have used the Canon 20D and checked out the pop-up flash since I got it back from repairs but instead used my cheap, generic flash with the Canon 5D. The picture of Audrey was the best of the lot.
There is an opportunity to prepare photo images for an actor who had paid me to shoot head shots. He has signed up for a local agency that wants him to submit a CD of 30 to 40 images the agency will use to print various comp cards. I am still deliberating whether to take the job.

I point myself in the direction I want my life to go but I am much more open to what actually happens. I continue to enjoy taking photographs.  I believe enjoying the work activity is the most crucial part of work. I also believe work will create its own design. My sole responsibility is to take responsibility for each day.

Broad Ripple Color

Friday was an energy-high day, and warm - 69° by four in the afternoon. I took time off from office work to pick up mail at my Broad Ripple office and then shoot pictures along the White River and waterworks canal in the area. 

The sun was already low in the sky when I started shooting presenting some interesting shoot dilemmas. Where it still shone, the light was yellow, the last rays of the "magic hour."

Imaging Light in Autumn

Optimism ebbs and flows. Sometimes I feel I'm on the right track with digital imaging; at other times I feel I am deeply deluded. 

On Tuesday, after fixing lunch for Tony, I did not shoot the photo images until after he left. I prepared the plate with food, set up the table and the lighting and took shots in what I think was a more professional way. The following day, I followed up with more studio shoots of fruits in a woven basket to which I added whimsy in the form of an Indonesian salamander crawling among the apples.

I have lately been aware how change comes very slowly. I have always told people that losing weight was a matter of changing your lifestyle. I am learning the truth of this as I begin to pare away the weight I have gained recently.

The same holds true for learning photography and digital imaging. It took me three weeks to experiment and gain confidence manually adjusting aperture on the Canon D5. Now I find myself implementing the little I know about studio lighting. I need to study lighting even more and still life is right now accessible for me to learn this.

On public TV the other day I watched a landscape painter talk about Paul Cezanne and how he changed visual art and moved it from impressionism to modernism. He set his easel at the same spot outside Aix-en-Provence to paint the various lights that bathed the Sainte-Victoire mountain and the wild valley below it. Cezanne was religious about trying to capture light. Light, too, is at the heart of photography, certainly at the heart of the images I want to capture and display.

Fall Apples

When the energy is high, the mind feels overwhelmed with stimuli. Images appear significant, probably way beyond what they mean. Details heard sound profound. And there are dozens of options for how to use the time and not enough time to do them all.

Yesterday, after purchasing my balsamic vinegar from Trader Joe's, I crossed the street to T. J. Maxx. I wanted to get some ramekins to measure and mold rice on my platter. I want to lose the weight I've recently gained and also work on improving the quality of my daily living. There on a stainless steel shelf were many-colored bottles and containers of balsamic vinegar, and other goodies my mind lately has been wanting to use in the kitchen again. Specialty cookies from Italy, France and even Greece, wonderful vinegars, flavored or aged. There were sachets of herbs and tins of teas. I dreamt of the lands I have visited and want to visit them again. These products from across the Atlantic seem richer than anything I could find at Marsh or even Trader Joe's.

At lunch today, watching Travelscope on public television, I was struck once again by what global village means nowadays. Joseph Rosendo, the host, took viewers to the Christmastime markets of Northern Germany. I had not wanted to visit Northern Europe before. I loved the summer scenes of Southern Europe along the Mediterranean - olive trees, sun-kissed tomatoes, orange and lemon trees, cypresses and eucalyptus trees, ceramic planters full of impatiens, begonia and geraniums, outdoor markets, outdoor cafés, village churches in the shade of giant plane trees, etc.

What 20th century prophets forecast is now our reality. Through travel, not to mention numerous television shows and DVDs we can now visit the remotest corners of the planet and see how people there live and enjoy their lives, master catastrophes and celebrate survival.

Back in Indiana, this is autumn as I have not enjoyed in many years. When my friends, John and Dottie, were still alive, we drove all over the state drinking in the images of autumn but in the last ten years my world has gotten smaller than the Po Valley of Don Camillo. Watching Rosendo's program this afternoon I thought I might put up a Christmas tree this year. I had already told my friends I was going to fix Thanksgiving dinner this year, something I had not done for two decades!

My readings on time, what it is and how we subjectively and objectively experience it, shows the triumph of the concept of linearity. One event leads to another and neither will nor circumstance will move the hands of the clock back so we can live this minute again, that day again, that lifetime again. But within the compass of our short lives we can see cycles, the ebb and flow of perhaps a handful of elements that dominate our lives. Sometimes we forget a few but they come back again and they seem more precious then. 

We grow our appreciation of the small and large details of life with time.

Lake Macatawa, Michigan

These are images from my trip to Saugatuck with Tony in July 2007. I still have not resumed doing Photoshop tutorials but just from processing at least 10 images every day I am learning the effects of various adjustment tools in the program that I have already learned. 

Learning is a continual process and cumulative. After I found out about washed out details from too little or too  much exposure, I have corrected these before doing anything else. Now I find out that while increasing fill light to reduce the no-detail blackness improves the image (unless I want to leave the black areas dark), correcting from too much exposure sometimes is not necessary depending on whether I want the details to show. It all depends on what the image requires. The way the image looks in the end is what matters. Now if I was to print these photos I might take a different approach to restoring washed-out details.
For posting on the Internet, images tend to look better when I really push up the saturation and add to the clarity in Adobe Raw editing. Somehow, posting the images tends to wash out the colors, maybe because I have chosen white as background for Flickr and this blog. Compare these photos, for instance, with the photo in the previous post from Sorrento.

Torna a Surriento

All the years that I took pictures when traveling to Europe, the Philippines or cities here on the North American mainland and the bulk is hardly worth processing. The images I shot my first digital camera, a Sony, are awful and those shot with my next camera, an Olympus were hardly better. I really moved into serviceable images when I bought my first Canon SLR but I didn't consistently take Raw Files until this last trip to Naples, Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast last May.

La Spezia and the Italian Tour 2006

Three years in a row, Merma and I traveled with Go Ahead to Italy. These photos were from the trip to Northern Italy and the Italian Riviera in 2006