WHERE MY CAMERA TAKES ME

I’m pretty much a landscape/seascape photographer with only an occasional departure from my comfort zone.  There have been some of these moments recently and I thought I’d share them.  The first was in Philadelphia in December.  In looking around, this crazy-mirror image of city hall caught my eye.  Were I a pigeon I think I’d also prefer a flat ledge.

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On that same day I experimented with street photography.  The idea is to capture people in their reality, hopefully showing some emotion-inducing aspect of their lives.  I’m not a street-photographer.  It’s intimidating; I feel as though I’m intruding into the subjects’ lives, and that it could prove embarrassing.  It’s anomalous that I’m reluctant because most of my early exposure (beginning in high school years) was to the work of great street photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, Eugene W. Smith, Edward Weston, Dorothy Lange, etc.  on the pages of Popular Photography magazine.  I saw myself in the future as a Weegee (Arthur Fellig) or a “Casey, Crime Photographer” chasing the grit of New York with my Speed Graphic.

My effort that day in Philadelphia was because I had to have entries for the Street Photography competition category at the camera club.  Later I found that the category was only for prints rather than for projected digital images which is my preferred category.  Anyway, here’s one of the results that day:

I offer no comment on the image other than that I felt sorry for him, and there is sadness and need in this world.

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After the stress of Christmas I always like to get away for a few days.  This has typically been to Williamsburg and a return home through Chincoteague but this year I wanted something different.  I went instead to Harpers Ferry just across the border between Maryland and West Virginia.  I can well imagine your excitement at this news.  🙂

Well, once again, the family had visited there, probably in the late 60’s and I remembered a certain charm.  It lies between the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers which converge at the tip of the town from which the surviving Potomac continues on its way to Washington and thence to Chesapeake Bay.  Because of its strategic location, the train lines and bridges, it was occupied by both Confederates and the Union, the ownership shifting several times during the Civil War.

Potomac left and ahead

The train tracks seen above coming thru a tunnel in Maryland Heights are for Amtrak on the left, and CSX on the right.  I didn’t have to wait long to enjoy this thundering freight train headed west.

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Sometime in the recent past, on a visit to the Forsythe Refuge  I photographed a flight of snow geese.  The result was as confusing as a flight of birds can be but as I studied it I saw the picture within the picture seen here.  I loved the composition but….it was fuzzy because of their motion and having been cropped out of the original.  So, I applied Topaz’s Glow with a pleasing result.  So, here’s an image cropped out of a larger one and then further obscured with some software artistry.  I like what’s left.

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It’s Monday which is always a downer for me, and it’s raining.  Fortunately, there’s some color in the house.

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Last week I received an email from a friend here on the campus, telling me that there was a white flower blooming outside her apartment.  What!?!  How could anything be blooming in this nasty cold weather?  I walked over and found it, a Hellebore or Christmas Rose, an evergreen perennial flowering plant in the ranunculus family.  I was on my tummy to capture it, and pleased that I could get up without calling campus security.  I didn’t stay long because in witchcraft it is believed to have ties with summoning demons.

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Finally for this post, last Saturday found us at a familiar site overlooking the East Point (of the Maurice River) Lighthouse.  I keep returning here and I’ve never been disappointed.  This visit’s view was made dramatic by the ice and the shadows created by the low hanging sun.  Beautiful, but oh, with a sharp wind from the northwest, it was colddddd.

Many of us photographers present a year-end post of our best shots from the previous year, and I’ll be doing that for 2014.

Looking back in 2015, however, I think the above lighthouse scene is my best shot of the year.  😉

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