Charlottesville Mall - Photographs and Fantasies

For a set of more Mall night shots, click here.

A doorway on Second Street, off the Downtown Mall. It may appear to be the utility entrance to a cineplex, but there is evidence that other forces and laws are in effect. I've taken a series of color night photographs of the C-Ville Mall at Night.

In fact, I never took anything other than black and white in night setting for years. I had fallen into an orthodoxy that many night photographers follow. The condensed version of that; color film can't produce "true" colors under available light in typical night situation. Almost all outdoor lighting is some odd combination of mercury vapor, or fluorescent, or one of the newer technologies. These are some of the things that drive astronomers nuts and also has made the historic McCormick Observatory less useful as a research tool. Light pollution is one of the major problems for astronomers, and also means that very few people have really seen how impressive a clear, un-light-polluted, night sky really is.

Shifting back to photography, arguing the validity of color representation in a typical night lit scene is a lost cause. Our brains make adjustments based on our almost instinctive knowledge of the daylight colors of objects. Film, or sensors in digital cameras, have their own spin, but we soon make that part of our habit of "seeing."

I find that what I get from shooting color (negative) film at night is "interesting." Sometimes a color that is technically "wrong" is a surprising discovery.
Here are a few more examples, all linked to larger versions, click here

Walk up Brown's Mountain, Charlottesville, Va.

We were doing our walk up Brown’s Mountain, although this time we were walking without talking. It became much easier to get immersed in the sound environment, and I began to listen with enough intent to quiet my thinking to some degree.

We came across a pileated woodpecker, at least we heard it, and after some walking, the trail went by the dead tree it was working on. It fell silent and shifted to another tree until it knew we had continued. As we climbed up the mountain trail, the woodpecker could be heard all the way to the top. Sound is remarkably able to indicate direction, and as the trail twisted upward, the woodpeckers sound gave an immediate indication of our winding upward path.

The tree cover is in full Spring mode, so the sun poked through, sending beams down to the forest floor. It reminded me of theatrical spot lights, the beams illuminating areas of detail on the forest floor. Some of the areas brought me to a halt to take a better look. I ended up taking a photo of a leaf that had some water sitting in it. No clue as to ‘why.’

Gone but back now . . . .

Well, I'm an infrequent blogger, which is supposed to be the kiss-o-death for click-throughs, traffic, etc. Eventually nobody reads your blog and soon you dry up and blow away in the next stiff wind.
In any event, if "you" happen to be still reading, I ran off and became re-acquainted with my guitar. It is and old Ovation I bought from Boe's Strings ages ago when I had signed up for one of the Guitar Craft classes.
I was playing it in the "heathen tuning," which may just be appropriate for me. I also was playing with a Zoom digital recorder, and I ended up with an mp3 to share. Its short. My repertoire is mighty small lately as I rarely get around to giving the guitar my time. This is the classic "over popped and plucked" method I've been perfecting, ahem. There's a sigh towards the end. It was someone stuck with reading in the multi-use studio (the living room) and they simply passed out with excitement. Here it is

Unseen Ventilator - Omni Hotel Charlottesville

Click above for a larger image (new window)

In keeping with my observations of selective vision, I have a photograph of the massive air conditioner that feeds the Omni Hotel. It’s on a street that forks right where the Vinegar Hill Theatre is. It now has the Charlottesville Running Store and a few other offices on it. On the other side of the street is the large air-conditioning unit that feeds air to the fishes checked in for the night. Ok, it’s not an aquarium.

I stood out there with my camera for about an hour and I was almost entirely unnoticed by passerby’s. Pretty much no one looks at the blank wall, loading dock, and gigantic life support machine that fill that side of the street. No one also looks/notices the miles of wire hung from poles, and the huge (surely fatal if they fell on anyone) transformers that hang from poles overhead.

If an American travels to Europe, where overhead wires are buried in many places, he’ll feel something is missing, although it might not occur to him what it is for a while. Then he’ll look up to see unobstructed sky in places, and realize the wires and transformers are missing.

Anyway, here’s the largely invisible Ventilator/Thing. Take a look next time. It’s huge, you can climb up the ladder and see all the way to the ice park.

Asylum Street Spankers in C-Ville Again

The Asylum Street Spankers played at Charlottesville's Outback Lodge last week. This is one of my favorite music acts, which specializes in a mix of older songs which lean toward the obscene/naughty, and plenty of their own songs which are both obscene (in a healthy way) and really funny. They played this time without Christina Marrs, who is out on maternity leave.She has a myspace space page http://www.myspace.com/marrsgirl . And a few other links http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/69209-asylum-street-spankers-what-and-give-up-showbiz/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh3o1_whqu4&feature=related Leaf Blower, Holy Holy
Miss Christina and the songs and vibe she brings.

Jack in the Pulpit

Our backyard is full of Jack in the pulpit plants, or Arisaema Triphyllum. Almost all of them produced the trademark flowers simultaneously. I find them somewhat creepy, so I’m not inclined to celebrate the flowering.

I thought it might be fun to do a time exposure and paint one of the plants with light. If you haven’t seen this written up elsewhere on this blog, here’s how it goes. In complete, or near complete, darkness, the shutter is opened and locked open. Then, small flashlight, which has been modified with some black opaque paper to narrow the beam, is used to selectively illuminate the subject. Usually I move the flashlight beam back and forth over the subject, which is a bit like painting. The light brightness I modulate by closing my hands over the front, muting the light selectively.

Many exposures are taken because the results are somewhat unpredictable. Hopefully one of those exposures will produce a desirable image or you end up doing it again. I’ve gotten better over time doing these images, because eventually you learn to modulate and move the flashlight to produce what you want.

I took twelve exposures and chose the one above. Evidently the plant is entirely poisonous, and it looks like it.

Live Oak

This is a dirt driveway through the live oaks, at the end of a paved road on the Sound side of Avon, N.C. I had been wandering on the paved road, which has some very old graveyards on it, when I saw the dirt road snaking away through the trees. I felt almost compelled to follow it, but it was a private driveway. This was one of the largest groups of the oaks I had seen.

Live oaks stay green all winter (they are also called evergreen oaks), and were once used for building parts of boat hulls. Getting a straight plank from a live oak is not easy, so they were generally used for large structural parts.


The next photo is from Cumberland Island, and Island that’s been settled by people as far back as local written history goes, and farther than that, based on archeological evidence. Most of it is now part of the National Park system. This is just over the inside dune on the ocean side, where there is a NPS campground entirely under live oaks like these. The live oaks and the campground go up to the dune facing the ocean, and stop. It’s interesting coming in from the beach. You walk down the open beach, climb a wooden boardwalk over the dune and down into the oak grove.