One of those hazy foggy Maine early-morning hikes a couple of years ago.  Can’t remember which mountain this was, not that it matters.  Coastal fog wrapped the summit, which steeped it in atmosphere and mystery.  Sometimes I prefer that to seeing views, which have never really served me as the reward for a hike.

This was actually taken with my Nikon D70 and edited in Photoshop, which was the way I was working back in the ‘oughts.  I’ve been looking through old prints and finding interesting stuff, which I will post occasionally; it’s all quite different from what I’m doing now.

The new blog header (old cameras in a store window) is another of those old prints I uncovered, from my street photography obsession.  More of those to follow, I’m sure.

Jack and Tricia.

I love the intimacy you feel, even though you can’t see what they’re doing.  Jack (the navy pilot) has very precise, perfect knots in his shoes.

This is another Jordan Lake shot, they are probably ogling the eagle nest or some such, and did not notice what I was doing.

Hipsta-matic.

There is a quirky little interest that some photographers have — what used to be really bad is now highly desirable.  Old crummy and funky Instamatic cameras, old box cameras with plastic lenses that have weird distortions and inappropriate flashes in the exposure — these are highly desirable cameras now.  People haunt yard sales and thrift stores looking for these because of their unique “flaws”.  You probably don’t realize it, but each Instamatic has its own unique “fingerprint” of distortions.

Of course nobody has a darkroom any more, and you can barely even buy film any more, fergoshsakes.  So it was only a question of time before people started creating digital versions of these old chestnuts, the very same cheap cameras that were so irritating at the time.  But the VERY best part of this fun craft is that you don’t need a special camera, the effects can be put on after the image is taken.  Many photo editing programs now have this feature, in addition to grunge, textures, etc.

My favorite, though, is an app called Hipstamatic on the iPhone.  It is unique because you get an image of the back of one of these old cameras, with a little viewfinder and a button on the screen to tap, so the experience is very much like using an old Instamatic. And the image is saved with the Instamatic effects: yellow and green tints, mottled light, distortions, weirdly cropped.

Personally, I love this. I gravitate towards grainy, blurry images anyway, because they seem spontaneous and more about the moment being captured than the craft of getting everything pixel-perfect.

The buddha pic above is an unretouched Hipstamatic print, just a little cropping.  These prints come out better without the cropping though, because it puts a white border around the (square) image, the way prints used to look decades ago.  Either way, it is nostalgic and evocative.

Frost.

I just installed a WordPress app on my iPhone, so that I can blog from the same device that I’m taking pictures with and editing them with.

This is a shot out my back door, with boosted contrast but no other effects overlaid.  Good tonal range and impressive detail on the frosty grass.

Gold staircase. Another of those shots that no one but me likes.

Taken with my iPhone in the IBM lobby in RTP.  Granite interleaved sculpture at the base of a curving staircase.  Edited in Picassa to apply a Holga affect.  One of the very last images I did before learning about iPhone editing,  NEVER AGAIN will I do my work in Picassa.

Anyway, I thought this image was pretty good and used it as my entry in the “best of the month” photo contest at Briar Chapel, where it went over with a big soft thud.  But that taught me something life-changing:  from now on, my photography is only for me.  I will never again create something with the intention of “pleasing” or “impressing” someone else.  If art isn’t personal and expressive, it’s not worth anything and there is no reason to do it.

So from now on, I’m letting my photography express what I see and feel and what I want to say about the world. I’ve talked before about being competitive, driving myself too hard, and it’s that kind of thing exactly that takes all the fun out of photography.  In the past, many people have looked at my pictures and said “you should be a professional, these are so good!”  and I feel all the fun just drain out of me.  If it must come up to professional standards, it is no longer (for me, for now) a creative journey, it’s about pleasing someone else.

Photography is an exploration of the world, a new way of seeing the world around me, and of showing it to myself in new ways.  You can go through life never seeing anything, your eyes just gliding over and off of things that are either totally familiar, or so unfamiliar that your eye never latches on.  When you learn to look, and see, you begin to think. And when you THINK, you’re no longer just creating, you are revealing something to the world.

Long story short, no more contests.  Express, don’t impress.

Sometimes you just have to go with what you’re seeing in your mind’s eye.  I hate that phrase, as if your mind is separate from your vision, but I digress.  Yesterday I had a myofacial massage treatment and began having synethesic visions, as my tissues were slowing pulled and loosened and stretched.  This morning I tried to create images of the waves of colors, patterns and strange figures that I saw.

Burning but not consumed.  I made this image with a Decim8-ed background, overlaid with flames from my gas fireplace, and a torso of a statue from the NC Botanical Garden.  Gave it a diffused glow with Iris.  Et voila.

Golden Angel.  Guess I’m in a weird mood today.

The background is water spraying out of a fire hydrant.  The foreground is a picture I took of a stone angel in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA.  It’s about the size of a shoebox, and after I took this picture I could never find the statue again because it’s so small.  This was during a phase of obsession with stone angels; I have hundreds of images.  Now that I have an iPhone, I can finally create all the pictures I’ve had in my mind for years.

Layered a Decim8-ed background with a wooden cross and a page from a Sanskrit version of the Bhagavat Gita I have lying around.  Religious art has always fascinated me, even though I am not a religious person.  I can stare at those Rennaissance paintings of dead saints all day, or old wooden Russian icons.  Maybe I like it because these are easy targets.  Everyone “gets” the symbolism.

I like how this image came out, with the bottom of the image rooted in strong color, and the top fading away.

Jordan Lake, continued.

The boat had an upper deck with this tiny little spiral staircase to get up and down.  It was so steep that almost everyone was afraid to go up.  Once they were up there, they were afraid to go down the stairs again, so I stood at the bottom to catch the nervous Diane as she descended.  When she got to the bottom she said, “these stairs would make a great picture”.  And they did.

Jordan Lake, 4/28/2012

Yesterday I went on a boat tour of Jordan Lake.  Entire flocks of blue herons, bald eagles, ospreys, fish jumping out of the water … everyone else on the boat was training their cameras on all these amazing sights.  Nobody noticed me taking pictures of everyone’s feet.