nice package

The pic is from Jamaica, Negril specifically. This is the scene off the cliffs, not all the way up to Rick's cafe, but at the undeveloped part which probably does not exists anymore. The part that was undeveloped in 1981.

The nice package is some full frame slide mounts and some cleaning fluid that I ordered from Light Impressions. The full frame mounts are really honest full frame, you see the whole image as opposed to these Kodak mounts which round the edges. So for my new scans I will pop the transparency, clean it good, then place it in the full frame mount. More work but cleaner original and no more rounded edges. I hate cropping out the edges and losing some of the image. I am stingy with those pixels!

It was so fun to learn how to scan the magic lantern slides, not I can scan some of my larger format negatives and transparancies. While the 2 and 1/4 negs are not that great, some of my 6 x 4.5 negs are rather nice. So new stuff abounds.

fun addition

OK, obviously I did not take this one. I would guess it is late 1800s early 1900s. It is from a set of magic lantern slides that I have. The man in the pic is wearing a bowler hat. The detail on these is amazing, as is the dirt! This is a direct scan, no clean up. An amazing part of history. I will share these as I learn how to clean them safely. I have had these since I was 17, it is wonderful to begin to be able to see them!

Travel Pic

From Israel in 1972. Dad let me have one of the cameras and I took this one. Isn't that pipe distracting? Need to photoshop that one out. Old Ektachrome slides just don't hold their color like Kodachromes, and this one is a bit washed out. But it fits the scene. Kind of a "you had to be there" pic, but the girls and the lamb are evocative, and that is what I like in pics.

cousin Scott

Nice black and white of my cousin Scott. He was in his riding gear and rode some for my children, who loved it. This is a black and white film negative that I scanned. The lens was an old nikon 135 f4 that I bought for about $40. The lens has NO depth of field! It is a hoot to use and needs lots of light. At the same time, it is a nice sharp lens, great for isolating the foreground from the background.

Pumpkins

Hmmm, I hit a wrong button and posted this pic in the wrong place. Oh well. I really enjoy pumpkin pics. There is a sensual quality about them, their color and texture, that I enjoy. And we all know the color pumpkin. This pic is nice because it has lots of pumpkiness without a single whole pumpkin. I like that. The edges are nicely activated as well.

good morning

It is a good morning. I had a fun evening with my cigar smoking buddies last night. One of the high points of the evening was getting turned on to toddadams.net (sp? real url to follow.) Todd, one of said cigarsmokingbuddies, has this website where he shares his wonderful travel pictures. He gets lots of hits and sells some too. It was, as I told him, an inspiration! So the clock is ticking on blogger, but no hard feelings. Blogger has been a great way to get my feet wet and get in some practice. Todd's amazing looking site and the low costs associated with it have inspired me to move forward with my own little endeavor. So thanks Todd!

Oh yeah, this pic is actually an evening pic taken in the Wind River range in Wyoming. Or is it Montana? Well, it was when I was on a NOLS course and took the extra ounces of my camera and a couple of rolls of Agfa slide film. Low ASA, nice gold color, good grain structure. It was a great film. 1978 I would guess.

early surprise

These types of pics I refer to as Warholian in that I tend to mess with the sense of scale and context, like a grand painting of a soup can. Instead of popular culture figures or consumer merchandise, I tend to do it with nature elements. The idea is to decontextualize the content so that it becomes more structural and form based than what it is a picture OF. In that way it is like some of Mondrian's work which was about balance and color and tension instead of subject. Now it is difficult to remove the subject matter that much when you are using nature, often water, but this is the idea. Here, it is unusual in that this pic has those elements in 1978 or 77, long before I was exposed to the concepts. The pic is TOO close, and I really like that. It is a nice surprise that the style was percolating before I had the grounds to steep. Kinda.

Also, I am thinking of renaming the blog "More Pictures of Water" since I am obviously preoccupied with the substance.

cool pic for a hot day

Ya know, it is perfectly acceptable to ignore the rambling and just enjoy the pics. I should do a textless version for those allergic to the banal. But anyway, taken on a college trip to Crested Butte, Montana. Great trip, lots of fun memories. Tis was my first experience with cross country skiing which I loved. Here is Jimmy Grogan taking his turn at breaking trail. There is a lonely and determined quality to the pic, different to the actual high hilarity of the moment.

Classic

Well, it WAS taken in 1978 or so, but I meant this one is classic scenic. Something I do not seem to do all that often. Lake Louise, easy to tell because of the water color. A favorite image of mine for almost 30 years!

interesting comparison

As I was getting ready to upload the balloon pic I noticed that the leaf pic was almost the same. They are both about color, tone, and roundish shapes. Both kinda pastels too. I appreciate the leaf pic in that the colors are not too loud, and yet it is a fall pic. I think I will eventually photoshop out the cyctic fibrosis content of the balloons, but for now I like the tension they create between the joy of the balloons and the tragedy of the disease.

boy in motion

Good one. Well I like em all don't I? But, this one has a great sense of motion without there being any motion. The crooked composition helps. And the blue swash behind him. It makes my wife dizzy, but I really like it.

flowers

Nice and sharp! I really like the texture and glossy sheen of this one. And it is a digipic, which is unusual in that many of them do not have the quality. I used an old fashioned glass lens, and it shows.

discards

Discards at a glass foactory. Handblown stuff, somewhere in Mexico. Nice light and colors, and I was glad that I could rescue the discards in some way before they were melted down.

Tedious edit

This one was scanned from a print and had more smutz on it than you would believe. So I took the 30 minutes to clean it up. I am printing it right now to see what I have left. At the res you can see it, no spots should remain.

Why do the tedious work? Well, I love this pic. It is from late 70s. Three friends sitting ona rock in the fog. It is not that the background is too hot, it was a high key fog. The rock is 60 feet over the lake. Aside from the spotting I messed a bit with the contrast and tones.

I like the composition, but it looks like a set piece rather than a found arrangement. The composition is more central than I would usually use, but I was a teenager when I took it, all is forgiven. The girls were nice folks, church friends. Each more lovely than you can see in the photo. I am warming it up quite a bit for the print. Not quite seppia, but certainly warm. Thanks to the Epson 2400, a fine printing machine!

Not your average flower pic

I like this one as it is unusual. Two dried rose buds forgotten on the sill. Great light too.

answer to a problem

It is fun to take pics at zoos, but difficult to get pics that do not look zooey. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that, but I prefer shots that look wild to those that look zooey. I posted about this before with a pic of an alligator. Scroll a bit, you will find it. So for this pic I just got in close to hide the domestic living arrangement of the tortoise.

more from the beach

While it is from the beach it is not a beach shot per se. Nice symmertry, good color, and a little mystery. I like that. I also like that the child is in an interesting context.

pastoral

I have another pic of flowers on the barb wire. This one is so nice and calm.

The question.

As I have mentioned before, I have some aspirations for commercial uses of my images. And as I have mentioned, I am a father. So I have snaps. Wearing both hats, it is an interesting question to separate the commercial from the loved. This one is both for me. The picture is evocative enough that it could be mersh while a lovely picture and remembrance of this particular visit the family took to this place. The commercial part wants to replace the top right corner of grass with pasted garden to make the image a little more coherent. But this works for me as a little girl lost pic. In reality, she was likely peeing and standing still so as to accomplish that. Thanks goodness she cannot read so that she will not resent me for years for posting it!

Friends are the best

Models that is. Nothing like real people for a real pic. "Hey Bill, close your eyes and lean your head back OK?" "Like this?" "Yep, that was it, thanks pal."

Caleb

This is the other pic from the gonzo tubing trip.

old school

Some black and white. The negatives scan quicker, but are harder to deal with because they are always harder to touch up. Great light in the top one huh? The middle pic is wonderfully grainy, and the last one goes from hard white to deep black without looking too contrasty. And just what is that loast one a pic of?!?!? I think it was a disintegrated mattress hanging on a rusted black wheel. Who knows. Hope you like em.

Busy at work

I tend to favor off center composition, but some things just lend themselves to the straight and narrow. Putting this one in the middle, well, lower middle, gives it a kind of Warholian importance. Man, I would love to have this one as a big print, 2x3 feet or so. Apart from the colors, the plug has an anthropomorphic quality that I dig.

history lessons

I have the family slide archive and am looking through it for gems. To save myself from bitter disappointment I am now using a loop. Without it I think all the slides are in focus. Bad assumption. So I will load them up and start to scan them and find that all 4 Ihad loaded were out of focus. Sigh. It really is sad for me to think I have the images and then see that I do not. And what do I do? Throw them away? Well, no.

SO I pre-edit them now. I also may have found one of my first photos. It is a square slide, as tall as 35mm. I have a VAGUE memory of dad quieting my desire to take pics by getting me a little plastic camera to use on a trip to Williamsburg. I have at least one of the photos. Nothing to write home about, but an interesting curiosity at least!

Then I have the photos from my trip to Allaugh, France with Teen Missions. I was physically abused on that trip, starved to be specific. The slides are 110 kodachromes. Tiny little things! But they are Kodachrome. They are too small to scope with the loop. Well, more accurately, my eyes at 46 are too old to scope them! I am half considering putting them on a blog in sequential order. At the same time, that feels kind of borderline. (Psychology leakage alert. Substitute "attention seeking.") But I may post some, only here I will not coment any more about the abuse. There is a time and a place, and this is NOT the place. This is my happy place! But enough talk, let me post a pic.

Nice pic. But I prefer the one with the butterfly.

Two from the vaults

Astute counters may notice three pics, but the two important ones for this discussion are not photographs. TM-INK has multiple meanings: It refers to my slow evolving dream to sell my fairly extensive body of older and sporadic more recent work, it refers to the work of my father who was also TM, and it refers to the artistic output of The Monroes, the final TM. OK, most of the stuff is mine. It is good to be the blogger.

But here are two wonderful items from the family. First, one of my father's small paintings. It is the second that I have shared here. The original is not nearly as dark as the scan, but I am living with that as I like it better dark. Dad had amazing small muscle contorl, he was a gifted and accomplished surgeon. And boy, could he tell the paintbrush where to go! His teachers were always on him to loosen up, but in my heart I wanted him to stay who he was as a painter. The difficulty dad had was in knowing what to paint. He did not have a great sense of design in his painting. He did wonderful and amazing sculptures and wrought iron, but in flat terms he had to grow to know what to paint. And this is all his, from the work to the conceptualization. They would get better, but this one is dandy!

The second work is a self-portrait by my eldest daughter Mary. I do not know where she gets her talent for drawing as it did not come from her parents as far as we can tell. I take photos due to my inability to write cursive, much less draw. But Mary does not have my dysgraphia. This self-portrait was used as the cover of the school bulletin for her lower school art show. She was 10 when she drew it. I am amazed and thrilled with her talent. More will follow.

The pic of her is wonderful, but it is just to show the artist. The supplied photo makes Mary look a little chunky, which she is not. Not that I would mind, I love her as she is. But it is funny that this photo makes her look fuller and heavy when she is a bit on the thin side. I offer it, taken just a little later than the self-portrait, as both a proud father and curator of the TM artwork. Enjoy.

What I've been working on lately

Hmmm, all scenics of a sort. Only one is panoramic in intent, and I like em all. Well, I would, I am showing them right? The daisys work by sheer number and the dazzeling white. There is SOME texture there in the 100 meg original scan, our mileage will vary here in compression land.

The middle pic is of an Alabama dawn on a lake. I have printed out one try on watercolor paper, and it did not work. I think it will need glossy to get the color and shimmer right. If you do NOT get the color right on these color fields type photos, you do not get the pic right. They are about design and color for me. Well, they are also about the innefable quality of God's light, how He could have left us in darkness or in black and white like our animal friends, but He gave us color. He gave us so much. Thanks!

The last one is a friend walking away in the dusk. I took this one with my Nikonos. Somehow, I thought it would be a good idea to tube down a river with a keg in one of the tubes and interesting other travelers in small baggies with my camera. This is one of the two useable pics. Oh youth. Well, I will show the other later. This is the end of the trip and there is a certain psychic exaustion and liberation.

empty glass

With appologies to Pete Townsend, this was an empty drink glass taken at a lakeside bar in New Orleans. Looks like a salt rimmed margherita. I do not think it was the first such libation, probably not the last either. I like the image, that it is empty, the condensation, I enjoy this image a bunch. Makes me thirsty!

a favorite

I knew I would love this photo as I was taking it. I still remember the event, it was the early 80s, when I was taking so many photos a week. I have several versions, this is perhaps the best. As the moth would move the background pattern would change, the wings shift, but this one works. No need to comment on what it means is there?

Thoughts on the blog

I was looking at the pics and felt happy and acomplished. I like the diversity of the work as well as the consistency within that. I like the beauty of my scapes and nature shots. They tend to be a little static, but I appreciate that. And it is how I see and I accept that. The people are good too. I was concerned that with so much of the subject matter being my family the blog would be lightweight. Well, I don't think it is, and nobody else is posting otherwise! Well, OK, the only post I got was spam and one I posted myself, but still. So I feel satisfied and invigorated. There is more work to come. I have so many slides and negatives! And I continue to produce work. So this is a satisfied post. I am happy with the amount of pics I am sharing. I am eager for more people to take a peek and leave a comment. But I believe that will come!

more new scans

Well, not this one. This is an old scan. Old pic too, I would guess early 80s. Nice evocative image though! I moved the scanner from one puter to the other. Now my Everquest machine is free from the scanner, and I can scan while I play or print. Cool. I have scanned four new pics, three family and two scenics. OK, five new pics. You may see two, even three. The scenics are good, intense colors. Not like this one which is fairly monochromatic and blue. But the blue works with the subject matter. For me this pic is about couplehood, the companionship and the isolation of a couple. Nobody but them can make it work. And it is about me looking at them, cause all the pics are about that in at least an implied level. And about you looking at them too.

our little addict

OK, it is just a joke. But look at that, she is clutching her icecream close to her chest, she has that contented, far off look in her eyes, she is a mess, and she would take off your arm if you tried to get hold of it. The family pics that work for me are usually just family as talent. I mean the ones that I blog, not the ones I cherish at home. This one is great because it is a bit twisted and looks a little like it came out of the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Twisted. I wrote that already.

good morning

This is a nice morning shot. Good light and nice colors, muted purples and blues, I like it. Perhaps I overdid it with bringing out the coast line. What do you think? (Talking to myself again.) Well, at least when you discover this blog, there will be LOTS of photos to browse. And I enjoy it, it is a fun hobby even if it is a private one.

great colors

I love this one, great, saturated colors. Nice pose too! My wife really likes it. I love the feet off the ground. It is not critically sharp due to the motion, but it still works. I made a 12x18 of it on the Epson and it rocks.