Don't Get Around Much Anymore

Green River, Utah, 2012

Shadow self portrait. At a Motel 6 which didn't refund the $2.99 extra I paid for WiFi that didn't work. I've been reviewing material from my 2012 American Drive-in Theater Road Trip for off-topic pictures I didn't post at the time, but might be interesting to look at now.

Early (for me) Digital Capture

Burlington, West Virginia

We all need to find things to do during this period of restricted activity and travel. This past week I decided to revisit the first personal work I did using color digital capture. It was 2004-2006 and I was really excited about what I was seeing on screen and from my first photo quality digital printer. I decided to make a set of intimate (almost exactly the size of classic whole plate) prints that are what you get from native Olympus E1 files at 300 ppi. I liked the results and decided to put up a web gallery on my site, with this introductory note on the Web Galleries page:

In 2004 I acquired my first digital SLR camera, for a large assignment that the publisher required be shot digitally. I quickly found that I loved many aspects of working this way. I’d always worked in color as well as black and white for both personal projects and assignments, but was never really happy with darkroom color prints. Over the next couple of years I made a lot of pictures with this Olympus E1 outfit on shooting trips that centered on my Drive-in Theater and White Churches large format b&w projects. Recently I decided to revisit the archive of this work and select thirty or so pictures for printing. Hardware (the printer) materials (baryta style photo paper) and software (the current version of Adobe Camera Raw) have vastly improved since 2005, so I found I could make  better prints than 15 years ago. Since the E1 files are so small, they still look best as modest size prints, around 6.5x8.5 inches. Next I assembled this web gallery to make the work available here on my site.

The "early" needs a couple qualifiers. The projects on my site go back to 1969, so pictures made mostly in 2005 aren't exactly early in that context. Also, digital capture in 2005 isn't necessarily "early" for anyone but me. I'm really pleased with this new edit, in two ways. First, I'm very fond of a lot of these pictures because they exploded in a burst of enthusiasm for a new aspect of my medium, offering all sorts of new possibilities.

Second, to go techy-doo for a moment, I have to hand it to Adobe. Back fifteen years ago, I ended up shooting RAW+JPEG because while the advantages of raw capture are obvious, many of the personal project pictures had higher resolution and better color in the Olympus jpg files than in the ACR interpretation. I was fascinated to find that this is no longer true. I had to update ACR's understanding of the raw files to it's current state. Each time, the file improved enormously. I found the jpg files and made comparisons. Current ACR digs out more resolution than the original jpg files that had more than ACR could find back then, and the color in the ACR interpretation has all the "magic" that Olympus fanboys rave about (with good reason).

If you'd like to look, the direct link is: http://www.carlweese.com/earlyE1color/index.html

6, 63.99, 5.0

Salem, Oregon

Smoke Break

Salem, Oregon

Motel, Evening and Dawn

Centralia, Washington

Motels, fast food, gas—all grouped together near the interstate highway. The center of town is pretty interesting. Centralia has quite an interesting history, too.

A Tough Job but Somebody Had To Do It

Ruskin, Florida

When I made my way to Ruskin to spend a week as Artist-in-Residence with The Firehouse Cultural Center, I figured that this enthusiastic non-profit arts organization would probably put me up at a nice little place like this, the Comfort Motel on Highway 41, at the south end of town. But it was not to be:

It seems that The Resort at Little Harbor is a backer of The Firehouse and a major sponsor of my Residency, in the form of providing a suite at which The Artist could, well, Reside.

The living room:

The kitchen end of the living room:

The bedroom:

The balcony overlooking the marina:

The pre-dawn view from the balcony across Tampa Bay:

I managed to survive.

15 Minutes Before Sunrise

Savannah, Georgia

At the Savannah North Super 8, very cheap and not bad. With birds from the balcony in the morning.

Savannah, Georgia

Seen Better Days

Cookshire-Eaton, Quebec

El Dorado Morning, I, (5/29/12)

El Dorado, Kansas

Sunrise from my room at the Super 8. I wanted to make photographs of the back of the screen tower from the entry at the nearby drive-in theater in early morning light, showing the tank farm that encircles nearly half the theater's parking field. This is an important subject because it's probably what allows the theater to survive. The tank farm crashes the property value, so it's possible to own the land for the purpose of running a drive-in theater. I saw this, and grabbed a snap, as I went in and out of the room, dragging the equipment back into the car.

El Dorado, Kansas

Reading a book on Main Street.

El Dorado is a small city, just 13,000 population—which wouldn't be enough to be called a "city" in more populous parts of the country. But there was public art on display, something I wouldn't expect to find in a Connecticut town of similar size. This was just one of several sculptures on Main Street. Now, the art in question seems both preachy and treacly, but I suppose they mean well. As I continued west I kept encountering more of this. The heavy-handed didactic message seen here got overwhelmed by a slide into the (false) historic record of the Old West, but the saccharin aesthetic remained remarkably consistent from city to city. More later.

El Dorado, Kansas

LEADERSHIPBUTLER.

El Dorado is the county seat of Butler County, KS. So one might think that when the window decal arrives missing the space between...well you can see...they might try again and get it right. But no.

Down the Hall

El Dorado, Kansas

The Super 8 in El Dorado (pronounced El Dor-AY-do) was only two minutes from the drive-in theater, but that was about its only virtue. That and the view down the hall from the door to my room as I made the five round trips necessary—because they didn't even have a hotel-style luggage cart—to get the equipment cases out of my car in the 100°+ heat and into the air conditioned room. The "story" turned out to be this:

El Dorado, Kansas

NOT U, NOT US

Cabool, Missouri

Evening in Carthage

Carthage, Missouri

A church building next to the motel.

Carthage, Missouri

A sliver of moon. Both about 45 minutes ago.

Motel

Liberty, New York

Motels, Again

 Madison (vicinity), Wisconsin

Amazing, the variation in hotels of the same chain. Sunday night I stayed at a palatial  Motel 6 in Weston (Wausau vic.), MI. Monday, I wound up in a totally ratty Motel 6 near Madison, which cost me about eight dollars more than the palace had. In the morning I realized that not everyone there was a traveler. Actually I sort of got the idea the night before watching bunches of kids playing in the stairwell. In the morning as I was loading my equipment into the car, school buses began pulling into the drive and picking up kids. So I guess some of the place serves as a residency.

Madison (vicinity), Wisconsin

When I got in the car to leave, a curious cat was observing me from the window facing my parking space.

Motel Stories

Traverse City, Michigan

So after photographing the famous Cherry Bowl drive-in theater, my GPS unit sent me to Traverse City to find a Motel 6 (most reliably decent and affordable of the chains if you don't have time to find something interesting). But it's Friday night, that's the airport and a lakefront resort area, and the place was full. But the very old Economy Inn (forties-looking construction) across the parking lot had vacancies. The same young woman I'd talked to at the 6 walked across the lot when I followed instructions and dialed 0 at the office of the Economy. "Same owners," she said. There was drive-up to the door parking, (I'd almost gone there first having pulled into the parking lot) much more convenient than the fortress-style place across the drive, and the price wasn't bad for being stuck in a resort area on Friday night. While I was signing in at this accessory venue, the cat (I'm not kidding) jumped up on the counter and came over to head-butt my hand while I was filling out the forms. Like all yellow male cats, aggressively friendly, even when obviously elderly. I asked about WiFi, and was told no, we don't have it over here, but you can go over and sit in the lobby of the 6. Then a helper who had come along advised that if I sat in the window, I could probably get a signal from my room. This turns out to be true. Sitting on the side of the bed at the window, I got my email. Moving the MacBook to the bedside table lost the signal. So I put an equipment case on top of my cooler and made a desk right at the window.

Another Offbeat Motel

St. Albans, Vermont

When you're named The Cadillac, but are a bit on the aged side and showing a bit of wear, some compensations may be in order. The room was tiny, but with an excellent bed. No 'continental breakfast' but pretty good coffee setup in the room along with refrigerator and microwave. The pool was very well-kept, and there was the weird, anomalous touch of outfitting the desk, bedside tables, and bathroom with marble granite counter tops.

Motel

Room Entry at Sunrise, The Hollow, Barre, Vermont

When I get to travel for my various photography projects, I do everything I can to avoid staying at chain motels. Plastic cookie-cutter sameness, and overpriced to boot. It's almost always possible to find something much more interesting, unless you have to stay in a big city.

Outdoor Breakfast Nook, The Hollow, Barre, Vermont

Last Thursday I thought it would be easy to find an interesting place around Montpelier, VT, but was frustrated in the search. Moving south toward Barre didn't get any better, until we came all the way out the south end of town and stumbled on The Hollow Motel.  The place was built in 1940, when "motor hotels" were still a relatively new phenomenon. This one was built to be the most lavish place in town. The sign out front still touts "giant rooms" and it's the truth. Easily half again as big as those cookie-cutter big-chain rooms.

The Pool at The Hollow, Barre, Vermont

The huge lobby is a real period piece. One of the things I don't like about the chains is that they've all gone "security conscious," so the rooms no longer have exterior doors. You've got to go through the lobby and down hallways to reach your room, which is a real drag with multiple cases of large format camera gear requiring four or five trips. Old style motels let you drive right up to the door of your room so to unload and reload in the morning takes, like, two minutes flat. At The Hollow, you drive right up to the door of ground floor rooms. For rooms on the second floor, you drive through a tunnel in the south end of the building, up a hill, and then park right at your door from the back.

It wasn't advertised, but WiFi popped up the moment I opened my MacBook Pro. The free breakfast was better than most places and included something I've never encountered before, a do-it-yourself waffle-making station. OK, the carpet in our room was pretty worn and would have been replaced years ago at a chain place, not all of the light bulbs worked, and the grill and sink at poolside were no longer in service, so I suppose someone might be put off by those things. But we thoroughly enjoyed the place.