Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Boy in Red

Defocus: The act or result of causing a lens to deviate from accurate focus.

The VFXY Photos theme for this week is “Defocus”, a subject I have explored many times and therefore both natural and challenging. Natural because I have so many images at hand to select from and challenging since I can only offer one.

I settled on this modernist and spartan composition of a boy in a red shirt walking past; seen in Santa Fe Plaza back in 2008. A craft fair was being set up in the square and the sunlit white tents of the booths simplify the background of the boy walking in the shade of the governor’s palace.

Our day trips to Santa Fe have always been photographically fruitful, with a higher proportion of peopled street scenes than is usually found in my shy person’s portfolio. Tourist locations are good opportunities for the easily embarrassed Gary Winogrand wanna-be; no one is much surprised or concerned with the camera pointed in their general direction. Stratford-On-Avon and Santa Fe have more in common than the weather and accent would lead you to believe. We return to New Mexico again this summer, staying near Taos but certain to spend at least a couple of days in Santa Fe.

You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.

Log Bridge, Colorado River

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime
than to produce voluminous works – Ezra Pound

I came across this Ezra Pound quote while reading The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes, better known as the author of Under The Tuscan Sun but a teacher of poetry before adopting a run down Italian villa. Pound was speaking of verbal images but I naturally thought of photographs and how it would be would be clever and cultured of me to reference it in my blog. However, reading it again this evening my slow intellect has caught up with my pretentiousness and the potential irony is now obvious – better one perfect photograph than a web site full of mediocrity. I have a lot more than one photograph on this site so it seems that I am much more likely to be erring on the side of volume; never mind the quality, feel the width (to quote a cheap taylor).

Meanwhile, the web site image count increases as my love affair with Adobe Lightroom continues and I unearth more overlooked images from years past. Dating from 2003, this log across the upper reaches of the Colorado River in Rocky Mountain National Park, is one of those discoveries. You be the judge of whether it is a worthy addition or just more unnecessary padding; I was never much good at editing myself whether pictorially or verbally.

We see no evil - Venice, 2004

Do we choose to ignore evil or just pretend that we don’t see so that we cannot be blamed? Are these the sacks we put over our eyes to avoid knowing or the hoods of those waiting for a bullet or worse?

The picture is of burlap wrapped rose bushes in the Volksgarten, Vienna; protected from the assault of the Austrian winter. But the sacked bush heads remind us of other, darker, images and bleaker realities that we would prefer not to know.

Red Mouth

The bloody red maw of an ogre approaches through the unconscious; a monster in the dark of a dream. In reality, the puddle reflected neon of a YMCA sign in the gloaming at the end of a kid’s birthday party water balloon battle.

An old image rediscovered with Adobe Lightroom; an accident of impatience and marketing trickery. Desperate to work with images on my new iMac, and with my Photoshop for Mac package crawling across Georgia towards Texas in a FedEx truck, I resorted to downloading the “free for now” beta of Lightroom 3. For the first time I see my 10,000 digital images in one sweep. I found this unfinished and long forgotten work from 2004; I am hooked, Adobe will suck still more money from my wallet.

My “cross-grade” copy of Photoshop CS4 finally arrived on Tuesday evening; too late to stop the tendrils of Lightroom from winding into my brain but my Mac transition is now complete and I am lost to Microsoft.

—

From the same discovery:

Shakespeare tourists must have unusual taste, or perhaps some midsummer night’s dream overwhelms their normal sensibilities. Why else would there be a store selling Christmas decorations in July opposite the bard’s birthplace? And so the man sits and waits for Christmas, or maybe for his wife to return from the cottage tour that he preferred to skip.

And I sit and wait for Christmas in Austin. It came last week in the form of my new iMac but, like getting a radio controlled car without batteries under the tree, I have been forced to twiddle the knobs without seeing it really run. The Adobe process for converting a Photoshop for Windows license to Photoshop for Mac appears to have been conceived in the 1970’s and left unchanged since then. Three days were lost to the fact that you must speak to a salesperson and they, understandably, do not work nights and weekends. You pay your upgrade fee to the sales person (if you are not already on the current version) and listen carefully to the verbal instructions that follow: your support case number, your order number and how to Google for the fabled “Letter of Destruction.”  You wonder where the part that could not have been done online will reveal itself as you cast around for a pen to write down the numbers. You do the Googling, download the “Letter of Destruction,” sign it, scan it and upload it to Adobe’s support site … and wait a little.

Exciting news, the signed promise to delete all prior copies is seen and approved within a few hours so now they can ship your copy of Photoshop CS4 for the Mac. Except it doesn’t ship, it stays in “pending” purgatory. Thursday evening brings a FedEx tracking number … but FedEx does not have the package. Not until Saturday does the blue box finally start its journey to Texas; estimated delivery Tuesday. Christmas will arrive on Tuesday, 10 days after Christmas Eve.

And so I call my reluctant PC out of retirement to process one more image after all. An image of a guy in a polo shirt, waiting for Christmas.

Making his escape

The photograph above was taken in Stratford-On-Avon last summer, just down the street from where Shakespeare was born. I hope my escape will be more successful than this poor fox’s, he’s already stuffed. While he failed to dodge the hunter’s dogs and guns, I am making a good run at escaping from Microsoft Windows after 24 years. Yes, I really did use Windows 1.0, I am that old!

The image above is probably the last that I shall process on Windows for I am typing this blog on my new 27 inch screen iMac. If Adobe’s sales staff worked weekends then my old PC would have remained cold and lifeless all day, as it is I must wait until Monday to arrange for my Photoshop “cross grade” license transfer from PC to Mac. Sadly, that is not something you can do online or through Adobe’s support line: Photoshop for the Mac is a different product from Photoshop for Windows. The license keys for one are not recognized by the other and I have to speak to a human sales rep, cap in hand and promising to delete my old copy, to obtain a replacement license. Like any kid with a new toy I am frustrated by the extra wait but at least the transfer is possible, besides, I needed to get the 2009 tax return paperwork done today anyway.

I believe that I will also have to purchase an upgrade from CS3 to CS4 since “cross grades” are only supported for the current version. That’s OK except that Adobe releases new versions about every two years and on that schedule CS5 is due this summer; you can bet that CS5 will come out a couple of weeks too late for me to qualify for a free upgrade. That’s what happened when I had to purchase CS3 because CS2 did not support my then new Nikon D300 RAW file format; CS4 came out 6 weeks later. So it goes.

So why am I moving to a Mac after all this time? Well, there is no one overarching reason but my dissatisfaction with Microsoft has been brewing for many years and the break would have come much sooner if Macs were just a little cheaper. My old 21″ Samsung 213T is failing with numerous vertical purple lines spoiling the picture and making calibration impossible, my PC is not quite as old but definitely showing its age. The need to replace both at the same time lowered the bar and a generous subsidy from my father gave me the extra lift to get over it (I am glad that parents never stop being parents even when you are old enough to have used Windows 1.0 and worry about paying for college for your own kids).

The 27″ screen was definitely a significant seduction factor; seduction is the operative word for there really is nothing that you can do on a Mac that you can’t do on a PC. I worried long and hard about whether the glossy surface of the huge monitor would be a problem for photo editing? To my great relief it’s not, at least not in my north facing home office but your mileage may vary considerably if you work in a brighter room. I can avoid or limit the impact of most reflections; if I were sitting with my back to the window it would be a different story.

It’s late, I have to stop caressing my new love’s keys and turn in before my wife gets too jealous and regrets allowing me to have it.