Clarinet, Preservation Hall, New Orleans
Sometimes I move the camera to create motion blur, sometimes the subject does it for me. The lighting in jazz venues is rarely bright but, in 1990 at least, there was little more than a couple of table lamps in Preservation Hall, New Orleans; with Kodachrome 64 in the camera the blur of the musician’s movement was as inevitable as it was welcome.
Motion blur - Rocks, Austin, Texas
The tag line says this is an “occasional blog” but I did not intend that it would be 11 days worth of occasional; so it goes. This image continues the blur series but stepping back five years to 2003. Vibration reduction lenses have a useful side effect when panning long exposures; they can’t stop the panning itself but they straighten the lines of motion making for a stronger, less accidental, design.
Time passes in a blur and it is easy to miss the colors and patterns it contains; we focus on our worries of the moment and grow older without noticing. Thanksgiving is one of the greatest of American inventions: a holiday weekend that starts on a Wednesday evening and runs four days. Time to stop the clock and take stock (if you are not stuck in an airport or traffic jam).
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… also time to rewrite your main web site in PHP and Drupal. Ruby on Rails turns out to be an unstable choice in a shared server environment. Demonstrating how a showroom iPhone could browse the Web to Tina last weekend I found that the main site was down – my service provider had updated the Rails Gems and broken my code. That’s the second time in a month; PHP is more stable, Rails has to go.
Blank face bunny
This is what happens to people who spend too much time and money in shopping malls.
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As I wrote yesterday, I have to make a series of prints for a shared project; my contribution will be a dozen or so of the Store Life images. This is the one I chose to start with; color matching the large expanse of off white is a royal pain.
Branched tree cascade, Rio Hondo valley
Returning to the series of motion blur images, this is another from the Rio Hondo valley off the road up to the Taos ski area.
My posting rate has regrettably dropped and is likely to be down until after thanksgiving.
The after-work energy that I have left after providing homework assistance is currently being applied to yet another reimplementation of the main Web site. The current site uses Ruby on Rails but that has proved less stable than I would have hoped in its shared server environment where I don’t control updates to the Gem packages. And, after using WordPress for this blog, I have realized both that PHP is just as “cool” as Ruby and that I would love to have the off-the-shelf functionality of a platform like Drupal. My biggest problem will be maintaining the existing URL population for SEO value.
Oh, and there’s the print set that I need to gather for a cooperative project. I have been procrastinating over that and should not put it off any longer.
Arrival of vaporetto No. 1 - Venice, 2004
I missed the email announcement for this week’s VFXY Photos theme of “Destruction” so I am a day late with this submission. You can see all the entries for the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.
Venice is not the place you expect to find allegories for the destruction of the psyche by the pressures and confusion of modern life. Taken in mid-winter, the people in this picture are commuters arriving to start their work day, not tourists. The condition of the Vaporetto stop with its shattered glass can be found on many run down, big city, subway systems and bus routes; the only difference in Venice is that it is on a canal.
Branched tree swimming, Rio Hondo valley
Election night now history, I will again return to the blur theme; still using pictures from this summer’s New Mexico trip and the trees along the Rio Hondo valley coming down from the Taos ski area.
At heart, I am interested in color more than form. Perhaps not color completely without form but that is a rare encounter in the fractals of the natural world that a camera sees. It is color made visible by form, rather than form made visible by color, that reaches into the deepest part of me.
