Category: photography

Milling Around

The other day we walked down by the sugar mill and started to hear sirens. As we approached it got louder, and soon we saw workers come pouring out.

They didn’t look particularly panicked so we decided it was a drill and kept on walking around the pond. Eventually we heard a fire truck siren added to the cacophony, and then everything stopped abruptly. We figured that was the final action to check off.

I took a couple of pictures just in case the mill blew up and these were the last ever photos of it. The camera certainly did a good job… I’ve seldom gotten such a vibrant shot without editing. Made me wonder if the recent iOS update did something to the camera.

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Over the edge

We needed a larger cutting board and hadn’t run across one so went searching online. This bamboo board is wonderful! The way it lips over the edge makes it extra stable (the countertop is perfectly square so that helps). And I thought showing it off with the knife I brought back from my trip to Germany 20 years ago is a nice way to tie old and new.

I took the above picture with ‘portrait mode’ so the background focus is fuzzy. I took a couple of other exposures where the effect is even more extreme, it really works…

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Look at me!

Here’s some random tourists standing in front of the Japanese Bridge, one of Hoi An’s proudest sights. Built in 1593.

How is it that a picture of yourself / your tribe standing in front of a thing is so much better than just a picture of a thing, or of somebody else in front of the same thing, or even just a picture of yourself?

I guess if we didn’t prefer our own faces, we could just hire one very very beautiful group to go have their pictures taken all over and call it a day. Then, after vacation we could just dial up the location and make up an album… the caption would be “I was there and it made me feel as good as those people look!”

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Ponsonby

a) Ponsonby is a cool neighborhood 

b) new iPhone 7+ camera is really really awesome… this is unedited. Yes, Carol, I know your phone has been able to take pictures like this for years. 

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Picture This

Uncle Frank’s memorial inevitably included a rummage through old boxes of pictures. Here are a couple that I thought were especially evocative. Kind of post-war American optimism above and then post-Kennedy American optimism below. Yes, Lee is in both pics. 

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Serendipity 


On my recent trip I spent a lot of time taking my camera in and out of a pocket or backpack, turning it on and off, trying to grab a shot before it was too late. As a result, there were a fair number of unintentional exposures: hooray for digital cameras with no marginal per-picture cost.

For whatever reason, this one struck me as inordinately attractive when I looked at it that evening. Pure formlessness, unreconizable. So much of the trip was a fairly intense attempt to recognize something: a bike rider behind his sunglasses, a half-remembered word on the menu, the correct exit off a roundabout, a pedaling threshold that will balance beating the guy in front with the possibility of cramps. A whole lot of left brain, and in that sense not unlike my normal life.

Somehow, this blurry picture which appeared in my camera roll one tired evening led me to a sort of mini epiphany and served for the rest of the trip as a reminder to stop, switch cerebral hemispheres, and just enjoy, which I did.

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The more things change 


Don’t you think Georges Braque would be amused, and raise a glass with Andy Warhol in whatever demented paradise they inhabit, to see how an open patio door subordinates his poster to this Coke sticker?

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