Week 21 - 2015 in Photographs

Day 141

Definitely a landscape week. Rains washed everything clean and even the aspens looked more starkly white. I think I like aspens without leaves even more than when they are a glorious gold in the fall.

Day 142

Aspens in a grove are almost always one huge plant. So different groves will have different features. Those in the small grove pictured in Day 142 are very tall but not as straight as those in Day 141. I love the quirks in the trunks of Day 142.

Day 143
Coyote Creek winding its way south

The rains made everything green and they filled the streams and the wetlands and ponds. And the rains provided the noisy skies which I favor in a landscape photograph over the wonderful blue of New Mexico skies on most days. After several years of drought green is a wonderful color too.

Day 144

I have taken this view before but the clouds, light and green made it special this time. And I have taken and posted several pictures of the wintered over cat tails in this wetland. But the rains raised the water level more than a foot, and the clouds reflections in the water add an extra dimension.

Day 145

One of he first plants to bloom here in the highlands is the currant. I was drawn to the mix of colors between the aspen trunks, the adobe walls and the intense spring green of the current bush in blossom.

Day 146

And frequent viewers will not doubt recognize where the Montana scenes of Lonesome Dove where filmed. I do not know if there is a bad picture that can be taken of Black Lake cienega. The current Black Lake lake is off to the left in this photograph but I am told in prehistory all this meadow was a lake. And with our spring rains the Coyote Creek spills over and creates little ponds through this whole peat valley. The clouds cast wonderful shadows and even obscured Wheeler Peak which often steals the show.

Day 147

Great week to have a camera and the time to tour the neighborhood.

Left Behind, a Magpie Tale

Still Life 1907 by John F. Peto
Visual prompt provided by Magpie Tales

Left

this earth

Leaving behind

his hat

and umbrella.

He left us

the remains of his life.

We are 

what we leave behind

in others.

Left behind

a hat, umbrella 

and bag of memories

of the little things.

J. Binford-Bell

May 2015

John F. Peto painted still lifes.

He was largely unrecognized in his lifetime.

He died in November 1907 and this may well have been his last composition.

He left it behind.

Week 20 - 2015 in Photographs

Day 134

A few of us were debating about whether a photograph is always a moment in time or whether, like a painting, it can speak of the eternal of infinite.  Yes, the camera more than a pencil or brush can capture that moment in time and hold it still like it does the ripples in the water in the photograph above or the bubbles before they burst in the photo below. But if it touches a cord in the memory of the viewer than it transcends that snapshot of time.

It is one thing to digitally capture an instant and another to capture an emotion or speak of a time past. A pleasant walk at dawn along a still pond with a beloved friend or favorite dog.

And even the bubbles below can cause the viewer to remember a bath as a child or a party with bubbles blown into the air.

Day 135

Garden gazing balls always fascinated me as a child. Three of my aunts had them in their gardens. I thought they were what Alice must have walked through in Alice Through the Looking glass. I am not sure why I have never bought one for my own garden. I seem so drawn to them when I find them on my photography explorations. The photograph below is another SLR Selfie with dog and the aid of a gazing ball.

Day 136

And the photograph below is the same gazing ball but taking myself out of the picture as it were. A different angel and you get a different world reflected. Convex to concave arcs.

Day 137

The geese are back. No goslings. I do not know if they have made another nest or not. The pond's inhabitants seem all jumbled up this there. There are four male Mallards and no females. And today I saw six ducklings paddling like mad and not a parent in sight. Can ducklings make it without a devoted pair of ducks. Will the geese have a late set of goslings. So the photograph below is not just two geese swimming on a silvery lake but a bookmark in a disrupted season of water fowl.

Day 138

Where as the snow capped Sangre de Cristos are beginning to all seem a like. So many snows this year. So many opportunities to attempt to capture the ultimate snow capped photograph.

Day 139

But when I found these four chairs on a brick patio my mind began to work on the opening lines of a short story. Such nice wooden chairs but much in need of new paint. Used wooden chairs. Which four friends sat here and watched the rain in the pines. Or surveyed their work in the garden terraces below them. Have all four of them been used at once lately? When I first came upon them one was collapsed upon the brick. Unneeded or just blown by the winds of winter now retreating.

Day 140

Photographs should be more than I was here on this date. And yet there is much to be said for the posed family before the rim of the canyon. I saw a story where a couple fell off a cliff at Yosemite trying to take a selfie. My macabre mind wants to know if they snapped other shots as they fell.

Week 19 - 2015 in Photographs

Day 127

This week of photography is a hodgepodge. I went out with my camera with the only purpose being to see if I could capture something - anything - find a picture. Flowers, even in winter, are always available to pose.

I hate flowers - I paint them

because they are cheaper than models

and they don't move.

Georgia O'Keeffe 

I love flowers but not so much as something to photograph. They seldom make a statement about life beyond their prettiness. And sorry, Georgia, but they do move. The slightest breeze can make them tremble. But taking photographs of flowers was a challenge, and like I said always available in my studio or a friend's greenhouse or at a store for purchase. In fact, the first article I read about how to photograph a flower suggested buying them and setting them up in your house with just the right light. Actually the right light composed the majority of the article. In your house or studio you could also control the background. Flowers bloom outside in such clutter. Ergo focal depth.

Which becomes a bit tricky as flowers themselves often have such depth. The fancy geranium above has great depth. Which brings us to the other problem with photographing flowers; somebody always wants to know the name. This one is a pelagonium or more commonly a Geranium Martha Washington.

The photograph below is of a daffodil, which when I looked it up on Google to make sure it was not a jonquil, I found to actually be a Narcissus. They are all of he family Amaryllidaceae.

Back to the photography issue. The daffocil was outside and there was breeze. And just beyond the bed of daffs was the wall of the house. I wanted the flower and the feeling of the whole bed but not the house. And that leads to the eternal question of how much of a photograph has to be in focus?

Day 129

Landscapes are easier. Especially when nature adds a coating of snow to two Volkswagens serving as lawn ornaments and rabbit hutch. I didn't know the rabbit was there until back in the dry darkroom (computer).

Day 127

The melting snow created wetlands so I decided to capture a few reflections of lessor things than pines and aspens. I liked the delicacy of the grass and dried seed stalks from last summer. But it had the same problems as the daffodil - breeze and focal depth and how much of the photograph can be out of focus.

Day 130

Ponds and wetlands mean geese. The two below I have been trying to condition to my presence with camera before they have goslings. This isn't this pair's first season with me but they are always a bit on edge when they begin to lay. A coyote had gotten two of their eggs just a day before so they were even more flighty that normal. I took five quick frames to get this one takeoff shot.

Day 131

Day 132 below was a palm leaf tossed out. I liked its shape but it not enough to leave it alone. I photo processed it into a mirror effect of itself and came out with a pagan mask.

Day 132

The last photograph of this week was back to seeking the "little" reflections. And a natural mirror effect. This willow on the shore of a pond raised high by the spring melt had its feet in the water. And with reflections like this the question becomes if there is too much in focus. Should you ripple the water to provide a visual dividing line between the real and the reflected.

Day 133

Week 18 - 2015 in Photographs

Day 120

Spring time in the Rockies. One day snow and the next day melt. We have been in a prolonged drought so every bit of moisture, even if it is the white fluffy stuff, is welcome. February 7th our snowpack was 87% of the 30 year average, but since that date we have gotten lots of snow. And lots of melt. I have photographed both.

Day 121

It is nice to see ponds and wetlands full of water. A spring with a reduced wildfire risk needs lots of water to keep the remains of last fall damp and foster new green growth.

Day 122

Spring is a season of contrasts and the photo above of the dead aspen and the live aspen represents that to me. So does the first photograph with patches of snow and green grass side by side. Or Day 121 with hints of new green showing through the dried grasses of last fall.

Day 123

And then there is the contrast between Day 123 and Day 124 taken just a couple days apart. The heavy, wet foot of snow pictured in the photos below was beautiful even if it dropped power lines and put us in a blackout for more than twelve hours. But it melted within a day filling our streams and ponds.

Day 124

Snow works well with black and white. But I loved the gentle colors of the photograph below with the soft dawn rising through thinning clouds.

Day 125

Spring snow clings to everything creating sculptures and bringing down fences and power lines. The photo below is by back yard. One winter we had five foot drifts and the dogs could walk over the fence so I topped it with chicken wire. This snow clung to it and bent it into an interesting snake along the fence.

Day 126

Week 17 - 2015 in Photographs

Day 113

This week also has a lot of water. Hard to pass up all those beautiful reflections not to mention the things on the water like the geese. Expect more geese because soon there will be goslings. But I made an effort to get out and about with my camera. But just because you take a picture does not make it note worthy. Water photographs were just turning out better this last couple of weeks.

Day 114

The sculpture above stands at the United Church of Angel Fire up church road. It is suppose to be the three crosses. I am, however ever unclear about the tubular bell shape. Do they ring? But the rusty iron before the purple mountains gets me every time.

Day 115

Herons slipped into the migratory pattern this last week. They never seem to stick around long enough for them to get totally used to my camera. So my shots are always from a distance. I like this one among the willows with the almost mirror like reflection.

But the black and white photograph below of sun rays slipping through the trees is one of my favorite reflection photographs. The sun makes the trees look ethereal. I said in last week's blog that rules were made to be broken and three of the watery reflection photographs in this week's blog does that. The waterline in these two is really close to center. And in Day 116 and Day 117 the sky is included. In the black and white I do not have to worry about the difference in the color of sky and water.

Day 116

And in Day 117 the clouds break up the lighter blue of the sky. You can tell spring time in the Rockies because of the nature of the clouds. No longer the low hanging blanket of cloud.

Day 117

The clouds are above the tops of the mountains and have tops and space unless it is actually during a snow storm. This may be the winter of snow-capped mountain photographs. I seem to have gotten Old Mike and Wheeler Peak often and from many different angles. I like it best with clouds and with the snow fields broken up by wind and melt. It gives the mountains more definition and depth.

Day 118

And back to water and reflections. And this one with absolutely no land. With post processing I think it looks like the water in a Cezanne or Monet painting.

Day 119

Travels With Charley - Part IV

Heading West

There comes a point in every journey where the conscious person realizes it is not about the destination. As we left Las Vegas bound to drop Barb-from-Santa-Barbara off in Barstow I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass. Penny had shotgun and I tried to sleep. I had not slept since before my last final, four hours before our departure. The trip could no longer be counted in hours but in images and flashing across my memory like slides shown in the backyard.

Slides were after film and before digital. Dad was an avid recorder of our family adventures. He gave me a Kodak camera when I was eight and his Rolex when I went off to college. For some reason I left it back at the dorm as if this forbidden escape should not be recorded except in my mind. It it was. Each image recorded like a power point presentation with a caption.

"Why Barstow?", I asked Barb as we got her bags out of the trunk at the railroad station there. "Because we moved here."

So Barb was more like me than I wanted to admit. We were the homeless of college. Our parents lived in towns where we knew no one, but our parents expected us to visit. The college listed the strange town on our records.

"You going to see any of your friends in Santa Barbara?" I asked.

"Probably not," she said with a sadness I felt deeply. "It is over three hours from here."

My school friends were in the same town as the university but once I had moved into the dorm I no longer seemed to fit with them, the townies. I definitely did not fit in Denver. I resisted my father's efforts to switch to University of Colorado in Boulder. At that moment it seemed home was in the car with Charley. Penny at shotgun navigated us to Union Station in Los Angeles. Bunny, Penny and I waved as our chariot and driver took off to San Francisco with Penny's instructions.

"Damn," Penny said as we walked into the grand and cavernous space. "The train isn't due for two hours."

Penny's lie to her mother was that we had taken the train from Kingman. She was picking us up. Bunny was catching a commuter train to a town I forget. The timing was right for her. There was only time for a wave.

"Let's clean up," Penny said, as if she had done this a thousand times. But then a summer in Europe probably was like that. She was the first person I knew who was not in the military and carried a duffel bag. I had a Samsonite. But at least it was not pink. Mother always picked pink for me. "If we go to Europe this summer and do Vespas you will have to ditch that suitcase."

When I had returned to college after the summer I had started talking about never going home again. Penny, my roommate, had hatched the plan of touring Europe on Vespas. It sounded wonderful but since I was under 21 would require my parents sign off on it. A four day escape from their control was one thing. An entire summer quite another. I wanted to do it but did not know if I had the guts. Till that moment in the municipal public restroom at Grand Central Station.

Dressed in clothes I had not been in for what seemed weeks I felt more presentable even if they quite suddenly did not seem like mine. New suitcase and obviously new clothes. Madras was in at college. Wrinkled Madras. Buttoned shirts and wrap around skirts. I had sewed up a couple of those and made mother buy me Lady Arrow shirts over the summer. She put her foot down at Madras. My hair needed washed but I could not see myself doing that in a public restroom. But I did take a scissors out of my makeup case and whack away at my perfect pageboy. Penny stared at me as she washed her air.

Done with our petite toilette we wondered off to the gift shop across the empty marble lobby to kill time.

I was immediately drawn to the carousel of paperback books. Right in front of me was Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. I started to laugh, and elbowed Penney. The clerk looked at us rudely and suspiciously as if we were going to steal it. I picked it up and put it on the check out counter, adding a blank journal and Double Mint chewing gum to the pile. I pulled out a fifty to pay for it. It was hard to surprise Penny. I enjoyed it when I did.

"Let's say I won at slots. No worries about our trip back to college."

"You going back," she asked.

"For now. You?"

"For now."

As good a place as any to quit.

Note: Things and me were never quite the same. And immediately after finishing Travels With Charley I got a list of all of Steinbeck's books and started with his first. And that journal, called a blank diary then, was the first of a whole series of diaries which continued steadily till on line journals became popular. We call them blogs.

Penny and her Republican boyfriend hitched to Kingman at spring break to pick up the repaired Buick, and never returned to college. I called her mother, and my hostess for that trip to Laguna Beach but she had not heard from her either. They had her listed as a missing person.

I did get a post card from Charley. He went to work at the Van Yves plant in California.

I did go home the next summer but home by then was Dallas, Texas. And the last summer with family. You do not have to burn bridges to leave.