Camellia Lit by Flashlight

The Camellia in the front yard once again bloomed with a snowfall following the next day.  I had wondered what would explain the early arrival of the blooms, which would probably doom it in more northern areas.  Wikipedia to the rescue: the source of the plant is the Himalayas.
 
The photo was taken at night by leaving the camera shutter open and selectively adding light (often called painting with light) with flashlight.

Ed Deasy

Redbuds on Brown's Mountain in Charlottesville

I walked up Brown's Mountain (not far from Monticello) and found that the red buds were blooming. These are small trees that are struggling between larger, more successful tree types. It was quite a visual effect. There was a heightened sense of depth, as those reddish clusters could be seen stretching to the top of the mountain.

Light Painting and the Story of a Guitar

The images above are” light painted” time exposures of a corner of my room.  The light painting is done by doing a time exposure in a dark room, and using a L.E.D. flashlight to illuminate areas selectively. In this case I took four different variations of the light painting and combined them in a Flash movie so that they fade between each exposure.  Since the camera was left on a tripod, the images fade between each other smoothly. The rather “blueish” tone is due to the color of the L.E.D.  The red streaks were from a red bike light.

    That’s a Fender Mustang electric guitar that I bought several eons ago. The Mustang was a model that didn’t really sell well when it first came out, but developed a following years after.  It was a “short scale” neck, which makes “note bending” (pulling the pitch up of a note by pulling or pushing with the left hand) easier.

    I was playing this guitar on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in a bar with the band “Fat Shadow,” (not the same band as the current Fat Shadow) when I dislocated my shoulder. I had a chronic problem with the shoulder, and generally I had to go to the hospital to get it back to where it was supposed to be. The guitar skittered, face down, across the stage, making an indescribable noise. The audience got out of its seats and was shouting encouragement, presumably thinking this was part of the act. I went out to the car to get driven to the hospital.  The shoulder popped back into joint when I sat down in the car, and I finished the night with the band.

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(Click above for a larger image) When I hike or walk over open land, I tend to scan the path for interesting finds. The fallen fall leaf above has some small round structures on it. Why? What are they? Were they on the leaf before it fell, or did they form before the leaf dried on the ground? They look a bit like tiny mushrooms, or leaf blight, or both, if that’s how it works.  I have no answers for this question, and would love to know if any readers might have an idea.

(Click above for larger image) The second is a very fine traveling vine-like plant that forms a perfect model of a network. I’d like to identify it, of course. We are collectors by nature and sometimes, of nature.  This vine/plant/thing has nodes, and each node is surrounded by the same number of connections.  Essentially, it is a model of a of an early version of networking  also.

When I lived in New Hampshire, and when I spent a brief time in West Virginia, I knew a Freeman Smith (a father of a friend of mine), who had spent his life as an agricultural expert. He traveled widely as part of the programs the United States ran to educate farmers in many countries. He was able to walk through a wooded area or field and identify many of the plants he came across. Those informal walks with Freeman were enjoyed quite a bit by the twenty-somethings of the time.

This was when the “returning to the land” theme had begun to be discussed in popular culture. Euell Gibbons had come out with a book called “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” and the notion of identifying, and sometimes eating, wild plants, had become a hot topic.  A person like Freeman could be a very interesting person to walk in the woods with.

After that I lived in various places, but when I moved from Washington D. C.  to Charlottesville, I took up hiking again. I started photographing plants purely for identification later. When I went through the first spring in “C-vlle” I was surprised by the wildflowers that sprung up near the trails, wherever they could get some light from the break in the trees. It wasn’t long before I hit the public library, and the library at UVA, looking for more information. It’s not just the notion of identifying plants, it is also the plant history that is interesting.  From that point on, I had to use some care hiking downhill.  I’d get to lost in the view on the side of the trail, and manage to do a nose-first dive into nature.

A Mannequin Dreaming in Black and White

I was wandering in Baltimore, waiting between buses (to Boston via New York) with an old 120 film camera (Rolliecord). I took a photo of a store window with the street reflection mixing with the mannequin. It was 120 Tri-X film.

The way her head is in the beginning of the out-of-focus area with the blurred lights makes me think of her as “dreaming.”

So, this is a traditional twin lens (one for viewing, and one that exposes the film) camera like the Rollie, such as the Rollieflex, which was a slightly higher quality model. They were easy to carry and relatively simple. There wasn’t much to break, although the film transport (it had to manage the spacing of the images on the film) sometimes could get troublesome.

    What I never understood: how to compose something in the square format finder. You generally took a photo planning a rectangular crop that was either vertical or horizontal. Thinking about cropping it from the square took some planning if you wanted to make a rectangular crop later.

An interesting place for discussions about the format, and film cameras, is Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/squareformat/discuss/13448/

Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, and lots of others used square format.

Ivy in the Wall, Charlottesville

This is a parking lot wall not far from the Charlottesville Downtown area. It’s on a path I follow from a parking spot to my favorite coffee brewer. I had noticed the hole in the wall earlier; apparently it had been mistaken as a trash container. All sorts of odd items had been stuffed in it.

Nature, and especially ivy, has a way of making the best of a situation. This is about 5 feet above the ground, and I couldn’t find any evident soil nearby. It’s all concrete or asphalt for as far as you can see.

The downtown area of Charlottesville has history built into the walls of most buildings. The Mudhouse coffee shop, where I generally buy my coffee, has been renovating the interior of their place on the downtown mall. There was layer after layer of wallpaper, newspaper scraps, stenciled messages, as they stripped the wall. I stopped by more often just to see what new layers came up.The renovation is finished now, and they left the cleaned, but unfinished, wall between buildings open to the room. The whole shop interior is now a rearranged space, and the it looks great.

The Howard Johnson at the End of the Universe

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As route 250 crosses over the mountain headed west towards Waynesboro, there is something like a commercial ghost town. At the crest of the mountain, where the southern end of the Shenandoah National Park (A.K.A. Skyline Drive) passes over route 250, there is an area in which every single business (even the gas station) has closed. In the midst of this is a closed Howard Johnson, shuttered, but otherwise untouched. It looks almost like a houseboat run aground on an overgrown river bank. It is in great shape compared to the other empty buildings there. Most of the buildings are heavily painted with “tagging.” The H.J. is untouched. The roof of the building is in perfect shape. Evidently they used a ceramic tile on the roofs. All the tiles are the trademark orange (not even faded) and none are broken.

My apologies to Douglas Adams for borrowing a concept (the restaurant at the end of the universe)

Snake Encounter in the Shenandoah National Park: Skyline Drive

I got a bit lost on Bear Den Mountain, at the Skyline Drive National Park. I took the wrong fire road down the mountain, and ended up about two miles from my car. I had to walk back on the grassy side of the drive. I almost stepped on the snake in the picture. Fortunately, as it turns out, I noticed it.
      It was beautiful, but not happy about the privacy issue. I took two photographs, looked it up when I got home. Timber Rattler. 
      I was very lucky to be looking down before coming up on this fellow. That being said, after the two photographs, he moved into a coiled position. About two months ago I had heard a PBS show about strike distances for snakes (both poisonous and non-poisonous). They are capable of reaching much further than most people think, since the tail becomes the anchor for the push. So, I walked a large circle around him (I had to go in the road) and hiked back to the car.   

Found Photograph - Niagra Falls - 1950

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This is a found negative, and I don’t know who took it. It was in a box of 4X5 photographs, but the others were close ups of wood.  They were obviously being used to document some work.
I love this photograph. I doubt you could fault the composition, and your eye gets drawn to the woman dressed in black. The rather surprising sculpted railings lead your eye in a wandering path back to the woman.  The tonal range is great, holding a nearly white value in the hanging mist over the falls.
   To see a larger, full screen version of the photo, click on the photo above. 

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Light Painted Flowers

This is one of the more radical approaches I’ve taken to a still life photo. The fact is that I’ve done quite a few of these, but this color one was the most successful. I’m having a show of black and white photography in Charlottesville in a few months, and I have a shot of Foxglove flowers illuminated by flashlight.
This is a simple technique. If you happen to be shooting on digital rather than film, you’ve got it made. You can experiment on a succession of shots and fine tune your lighting as you go.
This was done with a single flashlight I chose color rather than black and white due to the color of the flowers. The flowers came from the Charlottesville City Market, and it was from the Twin Oaks Commune people, one of the longest running communes in America. The shutter was opened at F11 (arrived at through many unsuccessful experiments). This time I went behind the flowers to bring out some unusual highlights.
All you need that is a bit tricky, is a shutter release that allows you to lock open the shutter. Not difficult with a film camera, but a digital camera will usually require the purchase of an electronic shutter release to lock open the shutter.

Event at the Bridge Progressive Art Initiative

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This is a photograph of a very small garage on North 1st street in Charlottesville. I had just come back from taking a few photos near the McGuffey Art Center, and noticed that this space was hosting an event. I’ve happened across at least one other event here. During one of the few snow storms of last winter I was biking back from Preston Ave. and noticed the garage was open. There were a few people who had finished up hanging a “mobile” of jars with various items in them. They were hung over a map of Charlottesville, indicating the location of the contents of each jar. I guess it was a Mobile Geolocation device : >.

I sat down on the side of the wall on Lee Park with a small group of others. Having missed the first act, the next was a mix of poetry and singing using a tape looping device, although the device was digital. Tape loops thankfully are no longer with us.

It was a well done short piece. I had the camera (the Rapid Omega 6X7 with 58 mm lens) so I dropped it in place on the tripod and took one exposure.

I’ve attended a number of events at the Bridge, and even had my own photo night there last year. The Bridge and its projects (which are many) has been a real boon for Charlottesville, providing show space and lots of entertainment. One particularly interesting event was about producing audio for radio. It was presented along with a few other nights of presentations involving just sound. The best feature of Bridge presentations is the audience interaction, which is really encouraged.

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

Why I shoot black and white (and color)

I got an e-mail recently that asked;

I was just wondering, why do you enjoy taking photographs in black and white? Do you like the effect is makes? Or do you think it perhaps communicates a certain message to the viewer?

I do like the effect, and by that I mean the effect of conventional black and white film printed on black and white paper. In a way, this doesn’t make much sense to someone who is getting into photography currently, unless they’ve seen some black and white prints. I started in photography when film was the only available medium for capturing still images. There is a certain look that one gets printing black and white materials. For that matter, color film also has its own unique look. However, in the case of color, that was generally a limitation, so generally, nobody emulates it in digital.
That vintage black and white look was a higher contrast, and there is a texture in the image due to the film grain. The grain could be thought of in the same way that pencil shading works in a paper drawing. There are certain qualities of the shading (grain) as it goes from a mid-tone to black.
In the digital age black and white is still around, but mostly for design or artistic reasons. Some people like to shoot character portraits in black and white because they think of the color as distracting. The subject is thought to stand out more when there is less to distract from it. I don’t necessarily agree with this. It also has to do with the type of subject, and lighting.
There are all sorts of experiments going on with color, or various color sets, especially limited ones. There’s sepia, a way of toning an image that is monochrome so that the entire tone scale is slightly brown.
So, it is a bit complicated. I’ve got one photo that consists of black, very dark brown, and a lighter brown. http://www.deasy.com/dreams/paupers_graveyard_2b.htm . It’s called a tri-tone, something invented by the printing industry. It works pretty well for the particular image.

Where I work, which is a research lab, I’m now using digital imaging exclusively. I had no choice in this particular change. The speed of digital and the reduced costs won over film. All the public relation style photos are in color, because they eventually go out for glossy brochures, or the web. Same for all the research documentation, they generally need to be in color. Sometimes they are images of materials research, and color accuracy is crucial.
I do a lot of night photographs for my own photos. There are usually street lights, which are arc lights that put out a narrow and incomplete spectrum, mostly in the green range. I use black and white for these, because the color makes a sickly green image, which is not how it looks to the eye.
So, in spite of the name on this blog, and the name on my main site, which is also Black and White Dreams (http://deasy.com ) I do shoot color from time to time.