Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Evidence of a Failed Gasket

No photograph is truly abstract. All photographs are ultimately representational and, as such, are separated by a wide gulf from abstract paintings. Photographs are always “of” something before they “are” something.

The appearence of a photograph may resemble the work Clyfford Still, Cy Twombly or Jackson Pollack but where an abstract painting simply “is” itself, a photograph always points to the “of” from which it was drawn. This is true even of Man Ray’s “rayographs” and the road tar lines of Aaron Siskind.

The image above is abstract, but before and after its abstraction, it is a photograph of the tire prints left by the old Mercedes that parks in the garage slot next to mine at my work. The car leaks oil to a degree that only an aging European luxury car can and yet still be loved by its owner. The tires track this machine ink across the dividing lines of the vehicle’s alloted space as the driver pulls out to go home each night.

Sidewalk Rorschach 1, 5th & Lamar, Austin

Fine art landscape photographers, the kind that might make a living from their prints, will scout a location and calculate what time of day to come back for the most dramatic lighting. Some will go as far as figuring the date when the moon will rise at sunset on the left side of the crest then plan a return visit to the area on that date. That’s not me. I am an opportunist with a schedule that is defined by family and work. I am also lazy and impatient; I will never be able pay for more than a very rare meal for two with my pictures.

So it came as a surprise that that I would see a subject and make a plan to go back the next day with a camera. And when the result was not quite what I had in mind (bad framing in the poor Panasonic GF1 EVF), to go back again with a different camera. Again not satisfied – the afternoon sun glared off some of the elements – choose to go back yet again, before 11am and on an overcast day. That’s not my usual haphazard M.O.

And what majestic scene was it that drew me back three times? Was it a Moon and Half Dome (Ansel Adams)? Was it Shiprock Storm (Mitch Dobrowner)? No. It was tar splatter on a downtown Austin sidewalk.

I’m strange that way.

The Temporary Mark Of Civilization,, Second Visit - Bull Creek, Austin

I took stock of my Nikon glass a couple of weeks back and recognized a serious lack of imagination in which lenses I choose to use. My full bag has contained the same optics for the last seven or eight years but one of them has been the overlooked step child virtually since the day it was purchased. On paper I can cover the full range from 18mm to 300mm (FX equivalent), everything a typical landscape photographer might wish for. In practice, the 12-24mm F4 DX lens rarely got to experience the fresh air outside of its pouch.

The 70-200mm VR is saddled up for abstracted distant horizon landscapes, cloudscapes and the rare rock festival; maybe accounting for 20 or 25 percent of the shots I have taken since it was obtained. But it is the thoroughly plastic and slightly wobbly 18-70mm that has hogged the driving seat of my D300, only giving up its place when forced to. Now, the 18-70mm is not a bad lens; it is great for a day walking around Santa Fee (for example) without triggering back ache in the evening, but it has become a bad habit. A lazy habit.

So two weeks ago I made a point of starting my visit to the drought dry bed of Bull Creek, Austin, with the wide angle on the camera. I kept it there for all but a handful of shots where a six inch deep, twenty foot wide, “puddle” kept me too far from my subject. Today I went back to the same location, under the gray clouds of another failed promise of rain, to shoot the same scene in low contrast light instead of the high contrast bleach out of the first occasion. The puddle has gone the way of all the other water in Texas and the 12-24mm was the only glass I used.

I love this lens. Why on earth I have I left it in the bag all these years? I knew it was a quality design when I paid for it; why haven’t I use it more? Well, that won’t be a problem from now on. At this rate, I may have to rediscover the mid range in a couple of years.

Sidewalk Satellites

“Don’t look down!” is a cliché of Holywood and TV thriller dialog from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, to Shrek, to Dr Who. It’s not bad advice when you are crossing a busy street at rush hour either. But if you do look down when you walk the streets of a city you find new landscapes for the imagination every 20 feet.

By the strange math of fractals, a crack in the concrete is indistinguishable from a satellite photo of a rift valley. The spray paint markings of utility repair surveyors are the crop circle communication of aliens preparing to invade. A piece of string or wire echoes the lines of a Miro painting.

Modernist and minimalist painters have given our minds permission to see the ground under our feet as athestic forms. Post modern philosphers and semioticians have retrained us so see signs with double and triple meaning, to read it all as quotes and opportunities for deconstruction.

Viewed with an open mind, the sidewalk we cross to reach our morning Starbucks fix becomes a source of beauty and pleasure.

Seating, Laguna Gloria, Austin

Good riddance to this summer of 2011.

32 daily temperature records set for Austin; almost one day in three topped a previous high for that date. One, of 112°F (44°C), matched the highest temperature ever recorded for the town. 85 triple digit days in all; that’s 85 days over 37.8°C for folks that follow a sensible temperature scale. We would normally expect 10 to 15 days that high.

1,600 homes lost to wildfire in and around nearby Bastrop; we would normally expect none. It beggars belief.

It was hot in Texas, this summer. Actually not just hot: The heat Texas experienced in June through August are the hottest on record in the U.S., the National Weather Service reports.   npr

Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry, doubts the scientific evidence for human contributions to global warming (contradicting 97% of professional scientists). He wouldn’t spend a cent to combat it. In an year of ‘exceptional’ drought, he signed a state budget that cut funding to the agency responsible for fighting wild fires. It beggars belief.

This heat (coupled with despair at the self-centered stupidity of all politicians) has mostly limited me to movement between air conditioned house, air conditioned car and air conditioned office but I did take a slow walk around the Laguna Gloria grounds last weekend; moving like a drunken crab from shade spot to shade spot while taking photographs.

Arboretum parking lot 6, Austin

The Panasonic GF1 is the light and discrete camera I carry for street photography and grab shots; it is my ‘affordable by mortals’ Leica M9-P substitute (see Panasonic GF1 – Two Week Report from May, 2010 for a full review).

I continue to be delighted with the camera but Panasonic the company has me a little worried. Between them, Panasonic and Olympus blazed the trail for mirrorless, interchangeable lens, cameras and with the GF1, I bought into the Micro 4/3 architecture. Now the GF1 is discontinued and there is no replacement. Come January, 2012, I will have the funding for an upgrade to address the GF1’s several deficiencies but neither company has yet shown me that it will have a worthy successor in its stable when I have the money in the bank.

Yes, there has been a GF2 and now a GF3 but they represent a sleight of hand change in direction not an upgrade path. To quote DP Review from its February, 2011, GF2 review:

These changes all signal a clear repositioning of the GF series in the market. Whereas the GF1 was unashamedly a camera for enthusiast photographers, the GF2 is now aimed much more at compact camera owners looking for an upgrade.

The GF2 took away controls and the GF3 took away even the ability to mount a viewfinder attachment – that is not progress. Good for profits perhaps, but a serious dissapointment for the likes of me. Meanwhile Olympus is doing no better; the EP3 is barely treading water by way of being an improvement and the new Olympus VF3 viewfinder is a lower resolution, lower magnification, retrograde move.

What I want is:

• An integrated EVF viewfinder that won’t be damaged knocking around in my book bag
• A high resiolution EVF that is close in quality to looking through the glass
• A form factor that does not attract unwanted attention (it should not look like an SLR shrunk by an encounter with an over-hot washing machine)
• A flip up rear display for waste level shooting
• A Micro 4/3 lens mount

In fact, what I want looks disurbingly like a Sony NEX-7 with its built in 2.4M pixel EVF (more than 10x the resolution of the GF1’s EVF). If the Sony was combined with the kind of user interface consideration that the Samsung’s NX200 Smart Panel exhbits then my loyalty might really be stretched come the new year. Perhaps it is a good thing that Sony continues to prove itself clueless with its menu designs?

Sony NEX-7 - rear view

Here’s hoping Panasonic or Olympus has something better on the shelves by, say, February of 2012. I won’t be holding my breath though.