Torrington, Connecticut
This afternoon I set this picture to go up tomorrow, after I'd put up the Steep Rock damage post this afternoon. Then I realized that I'd been meaning to check the Dashboard because in the back of my mind I recalled that the count of Working Pictures posts was nearing 2500 when I was putting up posts at the library from my MacBook and returning to a frigid house. Pretty good timing. It turns out that the Steep Rock post was number 2499. So this is 2500. This quiet picture has been in my Current folder since July. I never quite picked it to post until yesterday, but liked it—for reasons I don't understand in any precise way—enough that I never dropped it out of the folder. Quite a few pictures get processed out to the current folder, then go so long without being chosen for posting that I decide I must not like them after all. I never considered dropping this one, just never posted it. The quietness of it is very appealing. Perhaps it was just waiting to cooperate with my subconscious to make a landmark post for this little blog. Quietude, and subtlety, are far more often the subject here than fireworks and bombast, except when I post about political action. But the coincidence of choosing this picture for this morning before knowing it was a mile-marker post seems to have worked out just right.
9 comments:
Congratulations, Carl - 2500 is a really proud number, telling about the perseverance of the photographer and writer.
Your silent "Parking Lot" should have no reason to be so shy, but alas, in our loud world the fine-crafted objects are all too easily overlooked. Me, I do like the geometry, emphasized by that half orb of the tree.
Thanks, Markus. The tree is what caught my eye. The lot is on an odd-shaped bit of land between a MacDonalds and a small shopping center with a down-market big-box store as anchor. It's all old and run-down, but someone has carefully tended this tree, and some others nearby.
Hi Carl: Congratulation on reaching the 2500 mark. Perhaps the "quietude" of this image is fitting for today's date being the eleventh of the eleventh?
I like the picture too and think that it is a study in geometry where order is imposed through the central/vertical tree and the horizontal kerb in the distance.
You probably noticed some time ago from my comments that I do not yet understand your photography but that I really do want to (and please understand that my comment is not meant in any critical way at all; far from it). I believe that by exposing myself to what I personally see as "more difficult to visually access" work will help me understand my own path better. In other words it will help me to step away from cliches and to discover my own REAL motivations. The words in this post are very helpful in this regard as I can relate to similar thought processes about liking my own images and that helps my confidence to proceed with them. Incidentally, this IS a scene I might well have photographed, though I know I'd have seen and composed it in a slightly different way; the order and tidiness in it would have appealed to my engineers mind! Thanks.
@Carl: I'm not sure why but I got an impression of endurance and perseverance from the photograph, a kind of elegance which some old people have. Strange given the subject of the photograph. But anyway, congratulations!
Speaking generally of your compositions, I've been looking at your photos for some time now and have concluded, based upon their somewhat higher than usual perspective (and this one in particular strikes me as a good example), that you must be fairly tall.
Or at least you are noticeably taller than I am (6'1"), as I have to use a stepstool to achieve the sort of perspective you have with this and many of other of your photos.
Just an observation in passing ... keep up the great work!
@Juha: the picture also persevered in my "current" folder for a number of months, so you may be on to something.
@Jeffrey: I'm 6'4" and while I don't always shoot at my basic eye level, it's likely to be the starting point from which I spot a potential picture.
Something else that might enter in is my propensity to use short lenses, and to mask that fact to some extent. If I'm using a moderately wide lens without letting that fact dominate the reading of the picture, then the result might have a perspective that a normal lens would only deliver from a step stool. I like the immediacy, the actual physical proximity to the subject, that short lenses foster, but I don't want the picture to scream, "ooh, look what a wide lens!" That a side effect of this may sometimes be a taller or more bird's-eye viewpoint hadn't occurred to me before.
I really never thought about how differences in photographers' heights might influence their photography --- that's an interesting thought.
And - congratulations! :-)
@Martina: what I've been aware of for a long time is that if I use a tripod it has to be at least tall enough to put the lens at my eye level. Not that I always use it there, but if I *can't* get it there...no good. Many years ago now, when I got the lighter of my two Ries tripods I ordered it with lower leg sections 6" longer than standard because the standard couldn't place a small view camera high enough.
@Carl: I know well the effect that you've described because I also use wide (and ultrawide) lenses a lot of the time.
Whereas most people use them to include a larger portion of the scene that's in front of them, I use them to increase the perceived distance between the foreground and background, such that a lot of the time, viewers don't realize that I actually used a very wide lens indeed.
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