What's
going on here: This website is an on-going, nearly daily,
personal project to display a random selection of some of my
8000+ pictures taken since I started taking pictures, which
was sometime around 1964. Rather than have these images rot
under my desk, I thought it would be interesting to make them
available. (More
about my slide collection.)
I am not a professional photographer,
but some of my images have turned up in interesting places: record
jackets, books, funeral memorials, even documentary films made
for TV, and off-Broadway stage productions.
Some of the rules I set for myself
for doing this project require that I spend no more than 10 minutes
working the orignal scanned slide in Photoshop. The only adjustments
I permit myself are some simple color balancing (many of the
slides come out of the scanner too blue), brightness and contrast
adjustments, and some sharpening. Some of the images are cropped,
but most are full image.
I do not distort the images.
In fact, I really dislike seeing images that are intentionally
distorted for some artistic effect. I'd prefer to leave that
to painting. What I want to see in a photo is a realistic image,
but one that draws attention to things that otherwise might escape
our view.
Of course, you will notice that
many of these images were taken in Europe, or other interesting
places. It seems that the times I am most actively taking pictures
are when I'm on a trip or on vacation. I took my first trip to
Europe (Ireland/Scotland/England, actually) in 1966. I was 22
years old, and I had a new Nikkormat camera. Being outside New
York CIty and out of the US for the first time really managed
to open my eyes. In the 1970's I managed to spend two years living
in working in London, and took trips to the continent and north
to Scotland. And I took many pictures during that period.
I started shooting digital around
2003, and I like the immediacy of the medium, but I don't think
I've given up on film yet. Digital photography is very seductive
.. it's so easy to shoot, and cheaper than film. I still
have my film Nikons, and plan to use them. But starting in 2007,
more and more recent digital images start appearing on this blog.
Now it's a mix of past, current, and future.
If you were to ask me what interests
me the most when taking pictures, I'd have to say that it seems
that what I'm trying to photograph is stillness and a sense of
place and position. Geometry fascinates me, and reducing a three
dimensional world into a seemingly flat image is all about geometry.
Some of these pictures are, what
I call, "corner of the eye" images... images you might
catch out of the corner of your eye. Unexpected and momentary.
Other than that, there is no
program or agenda here. I took these pictures mainly so that
I could remember where I was then, and what it looked like. Years
later I find myself pleasantly amused to find that some of these
images are really worth looking at again and again.
It's just that simple. Hope you
enjoy them. Do leave comments.
You can find another statement
about my photography here.
