Update

Middle of last week Tina and I both got hit with severe cold/flu/sinus-infection symptoms, then tested positive for Covid 19. After managing to avoid it for almost four years.

It will be a while before I have new "recent photographs" to post here.

One Down, One to Go

Waterbury, Connecticut, 2/22/21

Yesterday afternoon we drove through a light snow storm to downtown Waterbury for our Covid vaccination appointments. Online instructions directed us to a parking lot on Scovill street, and then onto an adjacent school campus. Signs led us to a basement auditorium area. There was a line for St. Mary's Hospital or, depending on your paperwork, one for the Waterbury Department of health. The lines were busy, quick, and efficient. After our shots we were sent to a theater area for our fifteen minute wait. Staffers with clipboards were circulating. One of them checked our papers, determined we'd had the Moderna vaccine (others were getting the Pfizer) and set us up for our second shots exactly five weeks away. They even gave us a vaccination sticker that got us out of the parking garage for free. We were there for less than half an hour.

In the Rain

 

Waterbury, Connecticut

Early this morning, near the Courthouse. The combination of early morning light and the reflectivity of wet pavement is wonderful to work with.

START A NEW CAREER IN WEEKS - NOT YEARS

 Seymour, Connecticut

Yesterday at dawn the sky was absolutely bald so I didn't get the shots I was planning on. They wouldn't work with no cloud or color in the sunrise sky. Seymour is a Naugatuck Valley town and the business district sits very close to the steep East wall of the valley, so even 50 minutes after official sunrise, only the tallest buildings were getting direct sunlight.

detail

It's worth noting that with the state of our national response to the pandemic, one's allied heath career stands a decidedly non-zero chance of also not lasting for years.

Early Morning, Ansonia

 Ansonia, Connecticut

In 1955 the whole Naugatuck River Valley and Housatonic River floodplain suffered huge losses of life and property in a massive flood. One of the responses by authorities was to create a series of flood control walls which are particularly prominent in the town of Ansonia. I've been working on a series of pictures featuring the flood wall, which proves a little difficult because after all, it's just a poured concrete wall with a few massive steel gates that can close off a couple roads and the railroad tracks on the east side of the river. Recently I thought working with very early morning autumn light might be interesting, and these are some of the results.

Cloudy Morning

Naugatuck, Connecticut 

This morning I went down to the town of Naugatuck to try some dawn and early light views of the river and surroundings. The heavy overcast prevented any hint of rosy dawn light, even at five minutes before official sunrise. Still, the moving lights of the early morning traffic on Rt. 8 made for some interesting patterns. (Click on the picture and you'll get a much better view than the front page presentation.)

A Bit More on that Rally in Southbury

Southbury, Connecticut

It was scheduled for two o'clock so of course I arrived at one forty and sat in the car catching up on email. At about one fifty an enthusiastic young man pulled into the parking lot of the Playhouse Square complex and began to get a table and handout materials from his car and set them up in the adjacent open space at the town's main intersection. (I photographed demonstrations here, in 1991, from competing sides for and against that year's invasion of Iraq.) Suddenly, lots of people showed up right about two. This is a specifically local action. It's the thirteenth week they've held it, and all the locals know how long it takes to drive there. When enough people had come, organizers used a bullhorn to make some announcements and rhetorical points.

A particular point was to stress that this is an independent movement in the town of Southbury, not connected with any widespread organization, though they choose to use the "BLM" slogan as central to their effort.

Someone over in upstate New York is making these bracelets with the names of people (almost all black men) killed by police in questionable circumstances. I didn't get the details but it's a fund raising effort. The woman distributing/collecting ($10 a piece) asked me to take a picture of it, and wanted to put the basket on the ground to get her hands out of the picture. No, I said, it will be much better with your hands holding it out. Oh, of course, silly me, said she.

I'll just let the signs carry it out from here. Do click on any picture to see them much clearer and tighter if you're using a large display.

Picnic Park

 

Jennings, Florida, 2012

I haven't been getting out to shoot this month, partly because of a minor injury, so it's back to the archive for a while. This picture from a strange town park/playground has always appealed to me but I didn't put it on the blog back in 2012.

Greenhouse, with Weeds

 

Woodbury, Connecticut

This greenhouse on Main Street is vacant but not abandoned. It's empty but pretty well maintained, except for the crop of weeds growing up outside. This was shot Tuesday a couple hours before the wind storms came through. We got power back at our place Sunday afternoon, almost exactly five days after the storms took out the grid. Cable internet is still off, so I'm back at the Firehouse to use their WiFi.

Looters and Arsonists

New York, New York

Apparently there was some trouble at 29th and Park Avenue. I noticed this last Sunday taking a walk around the block before my workshop session at the Penumbra Foundation.

detail

More damage a little farther down the block. I didn't see anything else like it in the area.

From the Firehouse

Woodbury, Connecticut

That's our Joe Pye Weed behind the house, Tuesday morning before the storm. This Saturday morning we are at the Orenaug Fire Company where there's a community room with charging stations and two showers.

One o'clock Tuesday afternoon and the wind is beginning to whip the plants around.

About two o'clock, after a raging wind storm with not much rain. When it got calm I went out to look for damage. The only direct damage we had was this maple that missed the barn when it came down, but took down the barn's power line. While I was checking, a new twisting wind came suddenly out of nowhere. The trees began making insanely loud cracking noises. I got back to the house and later found that many more trees were snapped off, uprooted, or torn apart by the second and third bouts of wind. Luckily our buildings weren't hit. I've looked around the area Thursday and Friday as part of a view camera field workshop I've been teaching for a private student, and the damage is amazing and extensive. Three foot diameter oak trees are snapped/twisted off ten feet above the ground. The towns have run out of detour signs because nearly every road is blocked by downed trees and power lines. The utility claims they expect 99% restoration by Tuesday—one full week—but that's obviously nonsense. The state highway that runs past our house has multiple partial blockages that haven't been touched, and is completely closed less than a mile from us, where downed trees and wires as of now are exactly as they've been since Tuesday. While out we saw a group of bucket trucks setting up to work—the company logo said they were from Wisconsin.

Brief Note

Tuesday's storms devastated our area with massive damage to trees and widespread road closures and near universal power outage. I'm using my iPhone as a hot spot to put this post up. I won't waste the data to post any pictures here until we have power and WiFi back. That might well not be until the middle of next week.

Major Muffler

Waterbury, Connecticut

For the past month or so the exhaust on my car has sounded—"wrong." Not really loud, but just not quite right. I've had the car over nine years and driven it 117,000 miles so I know what it's supposed to sound like, and something's been off. Strangely, under hard acceleration it sounded normal (there's a place nearby where you make a full 90° right turn straight into a really steep hill so you have to run it up in second or it will bog down when you shift to third) but it was raspy and louder than usual just puttering around in normal driving and light acceleration. It's also been making a weird "thud" sound the instant the engine catches from a cold start. That's a new phenomenon, but I hadn't connected the two.

When I started the car this morning, that thud was more like a BAM! Now the exhaust was loud, not just weird. I shut it right down. Oh great, it's Thursday morning and I need to drive into Manhattan Saturday morning to teach a private, one on one, workshop, at The Penumbra Foundation.

There's a great mechanic in town who we've used for more than twenty years for our often rather old cars (we run them till they're ready to donate). His new place is triple the size of the earlier one, and it's always really busy. I called, and of course found that they're booked up over a week in advance. When I explained my dilemma, Pete recommended an exhaust system specialty place, Major Muffler, way down at the bottom of South Main Street, Waterbury, almost at the Naugatuck line.

I called and explained the situation. The guy on the phone said, let me check out on the floor, came back and said, bring it in at 2:00 PM. Wow. A two-thousand-something street number on South Main is a scruffy end of town, but the phone was on speaker and while I was doing this, Tina looked online with her iPad and said, "these guys are great, they get 4.5 star ratings from Goggle and Yelp." Well, I said, and from Pete.

My GPS got me there smoothly, avoiding driving noisily through the middle of town. I arrived ten minutes early. The front office door was locked and had a little clockface widget in the window indicating that they'd be back at 2:00 PM. It’s an old three-bay garage building with a used car lot attached. A guy pulled in with a huge RV that needed a tailpipe.

I'd been sitting in my car in the 93° heat with the AC on, deleting junk mail on my phone. When the guy got out of the RV I shut down and put my mask on. He'd been told to turn up at 2:00 as well, in what turned out to be his son's giant machine that had been diagnosed earlier in the week and needed a new section of tailpipe.

The crew came in a couple minutes after two. I followed a weight-lifter looking guy with tattoos and a big black beard, who would turn out to be my mechanic, into the office and handed over the key. There was no AC in the beat-up looking office so I waited outside. He came out a few minutes later to drive the car in, then ran it up the lift. A few minutes after that he came out and said it’s no big deal, had me come in to look. He slapped the muffler and said it’s in great shape, but the section of pipe that bends up and over the rear axel, then down again, was rotten. Pointing, he said we just need to cut out the bad section, here, and here, bend a new piece of pipe to fit, and weld it in place. Will only take a few minutes, $85. I said great! Then I hung out in front of the building, even took a couple snaps of the view up and down South Main in the 93 degree heat. The car came backing out of the garage, so I went in and paid the bill. Got in the car and it was 2:35 PM. Pretty efficient. Also a huge relief that it happened this morning instead of on the East Side Drive Saturday morning. Tina’s car has been making exhaust noise for a while now. I think I’ll take it in to these guys soon and hope for as good luck again. 

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.

RESERVED FOR CLERGY

Torrington, Connecticut

I've been experimenting with 'Zines again, adding three more magazine publication projects to the set available as either hardcopy/epub or epub-only from MagCloud—click the link over in the sidebar to see the set. For each project you can see a preview—front and back covers plus opening spread, which has the explanatory text for the project.

One of them revisits the first serious personal work I did using color digital capture. They're from 2004-2006, many of them pictures I made in West Virginia and Virginia on trips for my large format b&w project on drive-in theaters, and trips in connection with a gallery show in Richmond, VA.

Another shows the set of pictures I made during a week as Artist in Residence at The Firehouse Cultural Center in Ruskin, FL, in 2012.

The third new release is a big set of pictures that I made over the course of several years, "Off Topic" while spending weekends in Manhattan to teach Pt/Pd workshops at The Penumbra Foundation. Street shooting in digital color in the off hours around the weekend workshop.

Many of the pictures have appeared here on the blog (which I began in 2006). In our semi-lockdown times, I'm enjoying the exercise of sequencing these pictures for the publication, turning them into a kind of narrative, instead of single stand-alone photographs.

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

Signs of the Times—One

Woodbury, Connecticut

Northwestern Connecticut isn't like the wide open spaces of Montana, but compared to the population density of Manhattan, well, it's at least 75% toward the Montana side of the equation. So I've been out looking for pictures to document this unique time. It's easy to stay distant from other people or put on my homemade mask if walking down a sidewalk, and I don't have to touch anything except my car and my camera. "Signs" was one of the first tags I entered for this blog a decade and a half ago, and signs continue to fascinate me. It's not entirely clear who made and put up this one, but the corner is adjacent to an old big house that has been repurposed into several medical practices.

Torrington, Connecticut

Then there's this. I've been vegetarian for decades, but for even more decades I've been very careful with money, so I've never bought anything from a juice bar because of the prices, and more to the point, have never set foot in one. So I was surprised, even shocked, by this. I hadn't put two and two together. I just sort of vaguely assumed that a place like that must be a health conscious entity run by and catering to well-heeled customers. Or, it turns out, antivaxer idiots.

Some people—Just. Do. Not. Get. It.

At the Grocery Market

Woodbury, Connecticut

It was time to resupply, so we were off to the local grocery market at 7:30 this morning. There were few patrons and for the most part the shelves and cases were well stocked. There were social distance signs everywhere.

I should have made a wider shot to show the fully stocked produce section, but you can see that our cart has all the vegetables and fruits we were looking for.

Flour and pasta were conspicuously scarce, along with most paper products, but otherwise the center aisle packaged goods were all OK.

Being a vegetarian I usually don't notice the large butcher shop section at the back of the store, but this morning I saw that while the cases with pre-packaged meats were fully stocked, the cases for custom cut meats and seafood were completely empty. Of course the hot food buffet at the front of the store was shut down and empty. Bread, which was all gone ten days ago, was in good supply though less varied and plentiful than usual.

More signs, and sparse pasta shelves. Click on any picture for a larger, more legible view.

'ZINES!

Something new and different—magazines printed with MagCloud.

Last fall I set myself a project of creating a series of photo collections tailored to fit the MagCloud print-on-demand magazine medium. I had several projects in mind, beginning with what I've called my "Off Topic" pictures made on my 2012 Giant Drive-in Theater Road Trip. There was nothing casual about the Off Topic pictures. I thought it was essential for me to take every opportunity to make the sort of pictures I post here in all the new-to-me places I might wind up while chasing the DI theaters. Just doing the primary project without looking up to breathe never seemed like a good idea.

Turns out, I like the Off Topic pictures as much as the primary project.

This past summer I was designing a personal project (a large PDF album for a fifty year reunion of a scholarship group) and decided to check out MagCloud for the first time in several years. I learned that, unlike a few years ago, I could work directly with InDesign and produce my own design, not limited to pre-designed templates. So I did one and ordered a copy as a proof. Of course it doesn't look like digital prints from one of my photo quality printers, but it conveys a solid representation of what my intent was for the pictures and offers a lot of good reproductions for very little money. The magazine format also lets me sequence the pictures and lay them out in ways that I hope let them enhance and reinforce each other. I made and ordered proof copies of a couple more issues and have studied and evaluated them off and on over several months. Now I've decided to activate the MagCloud sales mechanism and make the 'Zines available.

You can view the projects at the links below, and decide if you're interested. You can buy a print magazine with a free digital version for all your devises or just buy the digital. Of course, if you fall in love with one of the pictures, you could contact me to buy a full tilt print.

Here are the links to the product pages at MagCloud:

Off Topic: Cross Country, 2012

https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1644969?__r=6137

Off Topic: Pennsylvania, 2007-2008

https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1647262?__r=6137

Off Topic: VA/WV, 2015-16

https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1642479?__r=6137

All three in the "collection" should show at each link. I've found that MagCloud's packaging of the magazines is well designed and protective, and with my test orders I found that when ordering more than one they bundled them into a single package for less total shipping cost than getting one at a time. However, last I checked international shipping was prohibitively expensive.

Partial Shutdown, 3/19/20

Torrington, Connecticut

Rural and small town northwestern Connecticut is not under lockdown, so I decided to go up to Torrington and have a look around, since I could certainly avoid any "social contact," much less mingling with groups of people. The streets and sidewalks were not exactly deserted, but vehicle and foot traffic were drastically less than normal on a Thursday afternoon. Restaurants are on orders to function only for take out or delivery. Most of the ones in the center of town had home made signs declaring that they're open for take-out/deliveries, but several others were just plain closed. A downtown drug store was doing only curbside pickup or deliveries. A used clothing thrift store was open. The several art galleries that are part of a downtown renewal effort that has been going well, were all closed. A large indoor children's playspace in former Main Street storefronts, part of that urban renewal, was of course closed and dark.

Click on any of the pictures to get a better view that will make the signs more legible.

This is not what Main Street, looking north from the Five Corners, usually looks like at two in the afternoon, even on a rainy day.