bright-field

before afterEntirely too many How-To books around here. With enough time and dedication I'm going to become an expert at HTML, Javascript, Snow Leopard, video Color Correction/Grading, photographic lighting, motion picture lighting equipment, Cinematography, Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut Pro, CSS, Microstation, Autocad, etc. etc. Pretty much all of them are hard copy print editions, overflowing the shelves, only a few of them current.

Tellingly there are no Pop Psychology titles in the lot. DIY should not be confused with Self Help. I can't find a breakdown in the categories, but the Educational Book Publishing market in North America is worth something like $4-5 billion a year, most of that in secondary and university textbooks.

DIY is probably only a small fraction of that, but it seems I'm doing my part to keep publishers busy with new titles all the time. This work with "bright-field" strobe photography is from the inappropriately titled Light: Science & Magic - An Introduction to Photographic Lighting.

old news?

Compare & Despair - as Stuart Smalley used to say. It's certainly easy to despair, these days.

The world seems to be ripping itself apart. Revolutions, earthquakes, nuclear meltdown, tornados that tear apart a third of the towns they touch. Is this the supposed evidence that Judgement Day is upon us? Only now we have to wait another five months until the final, total destruction of the planet.

Tornado victims cheer themselves with the thought that "The Good Lord will provide."

Meanwhile, it is said that prophet "Camping reads neither Hebrew nor Greek, the two main languages of the Bible, but insists his arithmetic is ironclad."

Matt Tutor, Camping's longtime producer "...thinks $100 million is a conservative figure for the money Camping has spent publicizing May 21."

from LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/la-me-rapture-20110521,0,1687317.story

signs of the times

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Our local plaza, within walking distance of the house, used to be a lively assortment of small businesses. When we moved to Earlysville 11 years ago there was a moderately sized food market, a pizza restaurant, a lawyer's office, all generating a fair amount of traffic. Through the go-go Shrubbery years the market changed hands and was given some updates, a furniture business sprouted across the street run by an energetic young couple, and traffic was substantial enough for the landlord to banish yard sales from the adjacent parking lot to accommodate parking for the corner businesses. Fast forward to 2010: there isn't a single business presence in any of the space.

Of course no one is blameless. There was a fair amount of intrigue surrounding the coming and goings of the furniture store proprietors, as in divorce, rumors of embezzlement, etc. Nor should one ignore the outside influences brought to bear: a large supermarket chain opened a massive new store only about five minutes away. Were people willing to forgo the better choice and pricing in order to support the smaller more local market? It didn't seem so, myself included.

Curiously enough, the much smaller country stores scattered around the area appear to still be doing fine, specializing as they do in pickled eggs, chaw, beer, and the white necessities (toilet paper, white bread, eggs, milk) always required prior to a snow storm. As seems to be the case in so much of commercial enterprise these days, there is little or no middle ground. We have Mega Marts in every town, or one location bodegas.

some places I've been

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The only association between these two is that they're both b&w. No connection is implied or to be inferred. Make your own conclusions.

one more - why not?

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before the blue door

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This one's from directly across the street from the previous entry. Obviously too far away to see anything at all, other than that it's a "pitcher book." I'm still trying to figure out the range, how close I need to be to really see what's going on in the book's picture and still have a "meaningful" surrounding that I can select and capture.

As a gauge, Shore has three photos in Uncommon Places that are overtly of pictures, either painted or photographed. What is most interesting about them to me is the relative distances between the surfaces of the pictures he is photographing and the surfaces on which these pictures "hang." One is a billboard in a spectacular natural landscape. Another is a painting of a northern Italian landscape hanging on a plain white concrete block wall. The third is a painted mountain landscape hanging on a wallpaper covered surface printed with images of Native American artifacts. The latter is more interesting for the wallpaper the picture hangs on, so the image more or less pushes the viewer outside the frame. The Italian landscape is a deep well that you fall immediately into, even while still holding onto the block wall around it. And the billboard with it's blanked out text is also a surface that pushes the eye outside it's frame, to have you pay more attention to the natural surroundings in which the billboard has been placed.