Visual Haiku

Something Old That's New

2011-11-07T18:25:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I finally tracked down an old Canon AE-1 for a reasonable price. So I've been having a little fun with it. Here are a few photos from the first four rolls.....

A rather promising start with a new camera....

The Clarity of Fog

2011-03-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

For the better part of the winter, we've had intermittent moments of dense, almost cloud-like fog. Every so often, I'm in a position to stop and take a few photos. Here are some of the ones that came about from a few different moments.

Taken at the Sunshine Skyway bridge:

A different Skyway fog photo from a different day:

Longboat Key in the dead of night:

Signs of Spring

2011-03-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year.... The beginning of the seven to (hopefully) eight months that I keep myself distracted from reality with baseball. By the end of the week, I'll have been to three Spring Training games and will be looking forward to Opening Day on April 1st.

I had the pleasure of bringing my daughter to her first outdoor baseball game last weekend - she's only seen games at Tropicana Field - under the dome. So I felt it was a moral imperative that she get to at least one game under the sun. Unfortunately, it rained three times and the bugs were swarming - so her comment was "I wish this game was indoors"..... But check one thing off of the the Fatherly Duties list!

Here are a few photos from the first couple of Spring Training games. The square ones are from the Hipstamatic application on my iPhone, the rest are from my Canon G7.

New Favorites.

2011-02-14T19:40:00.000-08:00

Well.... It's been a while. Such is life, I guess.

But.

I have a new favorite "camera" - the quotation marks are because it's both ridiculously remarkable and ridiculously lame that the "camera" is my iPhone. Using the Hipstamatic app.

Haters are gonna hate - so go ahead if you feel the need. Otherwise, I rather like these.

The first three are from the Manatee Viewing Center at the FPL power plant in Apollo Beach:

Random dinner photos @ Macaroni Grill with my daughter:

South Jetty at Venice, Florida on a cold, windy day:

(My daughter took this one....)

An interesting 36 hours or so - the fog was amazing for a couple of days:

Five Years of Octobers.

2010-10-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

October is an interesting month to me..... The weather in Florida finally begins to release its brutal grip on us a bit. There has been post-season baseball here two of the past three years. Halloween lurks at the end of the month with the promise of candy and ghouls.

But October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month and for the past six years, my family has been an active participant in the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer event in Tampa.

So rather than post a bunch of pink themed photos, various themes on ribbons or even a classy collection of art nudes - I thought I'd go a different direction....

The photos that I've chosen all have one simple thing in common. They were all taken during the MSABC walk along Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa over five years worth of events.

I have no doubt that I'll be dragging a bunch of cameras with me on the walk again this year...

Lightning Crashes.

2010-08-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

June 2009.

I'm fascinated by the lightning storms we have here in Florida. There can be incredible displays of nature's fireworks for an hour and there may be no rain at all. Other times, you're in a downpour appropriate for the Old Testament and you can barely see the lightning strikes. Of course, if we're lucky - we avoid the hurricanes of category 2 and above.....

But this was just a night. A random June night. Probably a Wednesday, as I'm guessing that I drove home watching this display (as happens often in the summer along I-75) and then I became motivated to try to capture "lightning in a bottle" (so to speak) once again.

Yes, this means that there is an earlier set of lightning photos..... I'll dig those up soon enough, I suspect.

The big difference between this set and the earlier attempts? Pure luck.

These were shot on the front balcony of my place using a tripod, my Canon G7, 30 second exposures and a healthy dose of karma.....

The other big difference?

I didn't edit these photos. They are straight off of the camera. So... Yes. You can do a lot with a camera that doesn't have interchangeable lenses and a zillion settings.

And yes. This time I ripped off the title of a song that's less great from a band that is certainly less great. But the song is still pretty good....

All that aside.... The curls and loops in the lightning in these photos are amazing. At least to me.

E.

The Downtown Lights.

2010-08-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

December 2009.

It was just a typical Wednesday, actually. I had driven up to Tampa to spend the evening with my daughter and was driving home on the Crosstown Expressway - where I found myself paying more attention to the low cloud cover hovering over Downtown Tampa.....

So I took the next exit, turned around and looked for the first free parking deck I could find.

Once I was up there, my attention was split between the lights in the clouds, the nighttime traffic and the utter bleakness of the parking structure. I used the Holgas (plural, as one is loaded with color and one black and white) for a couple of photos of the structure. (They are the square photos, btw.)

The Holga exposures were done by holding the cameras on a low wall and manually holding the shutter open for about 10 seconds (I think) - the rest of the images were on my Canon G7 which was also stabilized by low walls and exposures in the 1 second range. Yes. I should keep a tripod in the truck. With the exception of the conversion of one G7 photo to black & white (I like the coldness of it in B&W better), none of the images have been modified in any way.

Sometimes it's a good idea to stop and smell the roses. Or to quote the famous philosopher Ferris Bueller - "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it..."

E.

(And yes.... I shameless ripped of the title of this post from a great song from a great band that you've never heard of....)

Holga, B&W - C41 Process

Holga - Color

When Things Changed.

2010-08-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

Key West. June 2004.

A very short return to Key West with someone important to me both personally and as a photographer. We ran around like idiots with cameras for a couple of days. I used my DSLR, she used her 35mm and threw random filters on the lenses that were on sale. Both approaches were pretty great. Almost immediately upon returning to Key West, I realized that how I looked at things in terms of how I'd take a picture had changed. For the better, I hope.

As much as it might seem that I go down to Key West all the time to take photos, it would be over five years before I returned after this trip.....

A couple of these photos (the cemetery cat, the cemetery water well and the house with the funky wall) were buried on my hard drive until tonight. All of the cemetery photos were shot through the fence - we were too late to walk through. And the photo of the Afterdeck sign is still one of my all time favorite photos of anything.

I included both the original camera image and the tarted up one that I've used for years of the broken angel statue. I think I prefer the original now. We'll chalk that up to evolving tastes....

And the photo of the girl? Well. I had forgotten that existed until tonight. So I'm including it for purposes of nostalgia.

I think I'll start jumping around a bit more in terms of chronology now. I hope you enjoyed the ride so far....

E.

Seeing The Future Through The Past

2010-08-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

May 2004.

These photos have a different feel to them and I realized that when I took them. Since the evening that I took those sunset photos and the evening that I crawled over and through salvage debris, things had changed. I met someone that was very encouraging and enthusiastic about my photography. Oddly enough, she's a very good photographer of landscapes and architectural subjects - things I wasn't so sure about.... But these things get you thinking. So as I was on my way to work one morning, crossing the south bridge onto the island - I looked at the growing pile of wreckage on the side of the road and saw potential. They were destroying the existing drawbridges and replacing them. All of the salvage debris was just tossed to the side. In other words, opportunity was knocking.

And this is about the time that I started to think about myself as some sort of photographer. Of course, I kept that to myself for fear of laughing out loud if I claimed to be one.

These photos are still hanging in my home and probably always will. Particularly the first two - I was very fond of the "orange gear" as when I took the photo, I was the President of the local Rotary Club....

E.

Venice Beach.

2010-08-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

March 2004.

Here is where the obligatory (and I believe to be legally mandated) set of "sunset photos" taken at a Gulf beach reside. I'm sure that I was on my way home from the office and just turned the other way. And no - I don't know who the couple is in the one photo. I just like it....

E.

Ferdinand Street.

2010-08-21T20:43:00.000-07:00

February 2004.

One of the things that I love about South Tampa is that there are moments that you can just look around at things and see the beauty in the imperfections. Without moving. These three photos were taken as my daughter and I were just hanging out outside. I moved no farther than a 15 foot radius to capture these.... And yes. The lizards were amusing me that day.

E.

A Day In The Backyard.

2010-08-21T20:32:00.000-07:00

March 2004.

I really have no recollection of the reason that we all got together at Mom & Dad's house. But at some point, all of the kids were in the back yard doing what kids do and I took the opportunity to get some photos of them. This was back in the time that I could actually catch a photo without them either acting shy or like a miniature jackass mugging for the camera (I'm talking to you JD....)

These are my three favorites. Including one of my all-time favorites of my nephew, JD.....

E.

Valentine's Day. 2004.

2010-08-21T20:18:00.000-07:00

Little did I realize when I was taking some random photos of my daughter and one of her beloved (at the time) Elmo dolls, that my photography was going to take a turn for the better in the not-distant future. It has never ceased to amaze me how the effect of meeting someone new and having someone appreciate and encourage you can so positively impact your desire to improve.

It was true then. It's true now.

These aren't anything special. Except to me.

September. Even longer ago.

2010-08-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

In September of 2001, we took a trip back down to Key West with a bunch of our friends from Illinois. It was the first time that we had been back since moving north almost a year earlier. We had a great time and I'm still convinced that we took home a souvenir from the island that gets cuter every year....

Rummaging through the old hard drives, it was clear that I was using pretty weak equipment (an old Olympus point and shoot) and didn't have much else going on for me photographically. But I did find a few from the sunset cruise that we took that didn't suck. I'm putting them here as a historical benchmark. If I was a real glutton for punishment, I'd also post the cemetery photos - particularly as that is a favorite photo stop for me on the island. These are just the off-the-camera files - no editing has been done.

E.

October. A lifetime ago.

2010-08-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

Staying with the idea of beginnings.....

Sometime in the late summer/early fall of 2003, I purchased my first (and so far only) DSLR. The Canon 10D. I still love this camera, but don't drag it around as much as I used to.

It seemed that in October of that year, I took some photos that I still really like. Partially for the images themselves. Partially for the reminder of the massive changes and upheaval in my life at the time. Each of these photos tells a story to me, but they are ones (for the most part) that are very private - and as such, I'll keep the details to myself. I hope you can understand.

One thing that is clearly evident in some of these early photos.... I really relied on using photo-editing software to get the images to look like they worked in my mind. Although the photo of the flower is just one that I ran across this evening and didn't mess with at all. As time has gone by, I'm much more interested in capturing the image directly on the camera and editing as little as possible.

The bunny costume photo is one of my all-time favorites. It's certainly not that impressive from a technical standpoint and I didn't give any real thought to composition - in fact, I'd probably go back and change some of the levels in this image, but.... It was my daughter's first Halloween that she wasn't being carried around and there is something about her baggy bunny butt that makes me smile every time.

E.

Beginnings.

2010-08-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

If this is your first visit here, I'd highly recommend reading this entry and then working your way from oldest post to newest post via the Blog Archive on the right - otherwise the narrative (as conceited as this is) might not make the most sense. Other than that? Welcome, thanks for coming and in case I don't see you..... Good afternoon, good evening and goodnight!

I've admittedly been on the fence about creating a photoblog. This is for any number of reasons, including it seeming to be a bit more ego-driven than I normally tend to be regarding photography, some concern about my real talent level and most probably just good old-fashioned laziness.....

But I was "dared" to do this by someone that should have a pretty good idea of the value of sharing these photos - because that someone is a pretty damned good photographer. There wasn't (fortunately) the dreaded "double dog dare" involved, but before things escalated I thought it best to avoid further trouble and start posting.

So where to start....

I was considering starting with some of the first photos that made me wonder if I would be any good at this - but I think I'll hold off on those for a bit. If for no other reason than if I have to dig up photos off of the external drives, this will just be put off for a while longer.

So we'll start with a weekend last January. I was given a Holga camera by someone very special to me and we were escaping to Minnesota to visit some friends and get a mental break after my Mom's death. I loaded the camera with film on the flight up and I guess the rest is history of a sort. I couldn't wait to see the images and had just hoped against hope that maybe 2 out of the 12 potential photos were going to not be horrible..... I say "potential" as it seems that I somehow get between 10 and 12 images back from the photo lab each time.

The first roll had 11 photos and I scanned them all. I don't use any photoediting software on my film photos as I really like to see what the camera does to the exposure. In the case of the Holga, it results in accidental double exposures, light leaks, funky lens flares and assorted weirdness. The night images were made with the camera on a shaky tripod and a handheld 10 second or so exposure on "bulb" mode. It's a miracle they came out....

Here are the first 11 photos that I ever took with my Holga. Getting them back and looking at them was the first time that I felt like I was a "real" photographer. Whatever the hell that means....