Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Girl crossing, car turning - Santa Fe

A day trip to Santa Fe for our daughters and their friend who is staying with us … but I have had enough of Santa Fe for this year, at least photographically speaking; so what to point the camera at? Two years ago, in the same location, I experimented with extreme over exposure and out of focus; I liked the results then so I try that again today. I need to use more shots; the technique is unpredictable especially when you are not looking through the viewfinder! If people see a camera to your eye they either avoid getting in your way (the opposite of what you want) or just avoid being photographed (understandable). Holding the camera down from your face solves the problem but makes framing a little hit or miss.

I think I am going to love this image; it grows on me with each look. There is a hint of a Bronte character, standing on the moors looking into the distance, thinking of unrequited love. In fact the girl is crossing the road with a car turning in the opposite direction, it’s turn signal luckily caught in the moment. The camera was to my eye for this one; she is walking away and unaware of my presence.

Kite in motion, Pacific City, Oregon

The VFXY Photos theme for this week is “Flight”. So far there are lots of submissions of planes and birds, oh, and one balloon. I will be the first to offer a kite; a kite flown by one of my daughters back when they were young enough to be excited by single string versions with bright colors and no steering, especially if the colors were pink and blue.

You can see all the offerings at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.

The kite was high and small in the frame; the resulting crop is grainy from the magnification and blurred by the motion but you can still just make out the string

Trumpet, Preservation Hall, New Orleans

As promised, the final image of the low light blur jazz player triptych from Preservation Hall, 1990.

More than 18 years has past since this photograph was taken and I wonder if he is still playing? Is he still alive? Is he still a member of the Preservation Hall band? Knowing that this was taken around Easter of 1990, an expert on the band’s long history could probably tell me who he is and answer these questions. Me, I’m feeling the noeme of Roland Barthes: all I know is that “That has been“.

12/8/2008, Addition: Ron left a comment to say that this is a photograph of Wendell Brunious and that he is currently living in Sweden but may return to New Orleans. You can learn more about the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at their web site: http://www.preservationhall.com/home.php; if you are visiting New Orleans, Preservation Hall is a must see.

Trombone, Preservation Hall, New Orleans

Second of three low light blur jazz player images from Preservation Hall, 1990. One more to come in the next post and then I’ll add some new images made this morning.

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.