Eagle Ford

 Ottawa, Illinois, 6/29/12

Fall

 

Torrington, Connecticut

Suddenly autumn is coming in fast.

Big Tire Tracks

 

Walkerton, Indiana. 2012

With a threatening midwestern storm sky approaching.

Wall, Fence, Reflection

Madison, Georgia, 2012

More rummaging around in the archive of "Off Topic" pictures made on my Giant Drive-in Theater Road Trip in 2012. Look closely enough and you can see the old style hand painted advertising from long ago on the brick wall. Window reflections always fascinate me. I couldn't figure out what the little white plastic chain fence was for.

South Main and Harper

Star, North Carolina, 2012

I was heading north to home with a big hurricane forecast to arrive in a few days. Morning skies were already dark and stormy.

From Southeast to Grand Central

MetroNorth, on a rainy Friday afternoon.

Breakfast Room, Super 8

Summersville, West Virginia

9/11/16

New Preston, Connecticut

Last Sunday, 9/11/16, was an anniversary marked around the world. For Tina and me it was also a much smaller, private anniversary, our 45th. We decided to go for a drive in the countryside. The weather was appropriately ominous, which is fine because we both prefer that to plain sunlight. My car has Sirius XM, and the Symphony Hall channel was playing Dvorak's requiem. Utterly beautiful music, but when it ended, they went on to another requiem, so we switched to Real Jazz.

Millerton, New York

Things brightened up a bit as we moved west into New York state, but the clouds stayed heavy and interesting.

Millerton, New York

Claverack, New York

Meandering around narrow back roads through fields of corn we spotted this simple bare white cross.

Claverack, New York

Hudson, New York

As it got toward noon we realized we were close to Hudson, where there are plenty of nice restaurants including Mexican Radio, where we've eaten before, so we decided to head there. Between the municipal parking lot and the restaurants on Warren Street I always seem to find some interesting stuff to shoot.

Hudson, New York

Hudson, New York

Some very faded graffiti adjacent to the parking lot. The sky was clearing, the light getting harsh and flat, so we took a leisurely drive back home.

Germantown, New York

Sail boat and cement plant, sun and cloud.

Steuben Bowling Academy

Bath, New York

We're back from a short excursion to the beautiful agricultural country (and fascinating small towns) of New York's Finger Lakes district, with a convenient operations base at TOP World Headquarters at Keuka Lake.

Patti I Heart You—Picture and Setting, #3

off Rt. 68 East of Bowling Green, Kentucky

After working at Little River Canyon in Alabama in February of 2005 and shooting at several drive-in theaters in the area, I headed north through Tennessee (more theaters) and into Kentucky. After spending a night at Bowling Green I moved east on back roads in an early morning rain and spotted this storage silo with messages. The flat farmland couldn't be more different from the forested canyon.

The digicam snapshot proves useful again. I thought this had been back in Tennessee, remembering it eleven years later, but without digging out my shooting logs or transcriptions, the sequence of snapshots quickly established time and place. Today, even though I have good digital equipment, I tend to do these record shots with my iPhone. Partly because it's right there in my pocket, but also because the snaps get not only a time/date stamp, but a (usually accurate) location notation for town, though not state. Close enough to help with tracking.

A Populated Place

Looney (West of New Castle), Virginia

Driving southwest from New Castle I stopped to photograph this little complex of buildings at the edge of extensive farm fields. Before leaving I checked the GPS and it said I was in Looney, VA. Later, I couldn't turn that up as a valid town name, but when I zoomed in enough with the Apple Map app and definitely found the cluster of buildings, there was a town ID of New Castle, but also the word "Looney" in a different typeface. Doing a search turned up a new identifier I haven't encountered before—Looney is officially a "populated place." Not very populated, though.

Hinton, West Virginia

For some reason there's a visual echo or resonance between this in-town outbuilding and the rural building in the first shot. That made me wonder how far apart they are (I'd gotten from one to the other by a very roundabout route over two days of driving and shooting) and the answer was almost, you can't get there from here:

The shortest road routes are about 80 miles through the hills and ridges, but it looks as though the distance as the crow flies is about half that.

NOW OPEN

Lexington, Virginia

NO PARKING ANY TIME

Copake, New York

Storm Light

Lancaser, New Hampshire

Had a little weather Thursday evening, up in the northern hills.

Lancaser, New Hampshire

Lancaser, New Hampshire

Kitties

Guilford, Vermont

Randolf, Vermont

WELCOME TO MANSFIELD

Mansfield, Ohio

I've spent all day working on layout-size psd files of the drive-in theaters to begin assembling trial drafts of a full book treatment. Along the way, I found this scan of an off-topic 7x17" negative of Mansfield, Ohio's fairly famous welcome sign on grain elevators on my Midwestern drive-in search in September of 2011. Sometime I'd like to make a nice big print from it to dig out all those wonderful details in the towers and railroad cars.

POST10 (Another Rainy Morning)

Seymour, Connecticut

Watertown, Connecticut (Route 8)

The Port Townsend Wheel-In Motor Movie

Port Townsend, Washington

A very small theater way up the peninsula in Puget Sound. The combination of overcast, ready-to-rain weather and the dense forest makes another distinctly Pacific Northwest setting. One of the two smallest theaters I've been to, in terms of cars that can be accommodated (the other was Kanopolis, KS), the owner told me, just about this time last year, that he expected to manage the transition to digital projection for his one screen. The area looks sparsely populated, but it's also a tourist destination, which can be a lifesaver for a drive-in theater. The concession stand, which he told me is almost all originally as his father built it 60 years ago, is large and well-appointed for such a small venue. If those tourists patronize the concession, they'll get to see digital projection and the theater will survive beyond 2013: drive-ins make essentially all their profit from food and other items at the concession, not from ticket sales. Checking the web site just now, it looks as though they are still actively raising funds for the transition, so I hope they have a great summer season.

Group Portrait

Ruskin, Florida

Last October during my week-long artist-in-residence stay at The Firehouse Cultural Center, one of the interesting activities was a meeting with the art students at the nearby regional high school. We began the session by setting up the 8x10 Deardorff and 7x17-inch Korona cameras in front of the school. Most of the kids had never seen anything like a view camera before, much less looked at the upside-down-and-backwards image on the ground glass. They really got into it and began to pose for each other in front of and behind the camera. Then someone suggested a group portrait, which seemed like a good idea. This was one of the negatives in this morning's processing run.

Then we went inside and I put out some rather large digital prints (13x32") made from 7x17 negatives. They seemed quite fascinated, being much more familiar with photographic work on screen than as finished prints. They also asked some perceptive questions in the following Q&A—a rewarding group of young people to spend a few hours with.

On the Ferry to L'Isle-aux-Coudres

St. Lawrence River, Quebec Province