August 2011

August 26, 2011September 18, 2011

St. Vincent Silhouette

There was a time when I experimented with high contrast photos and silhouettes. It was a fascination that didn’t last long. This church looked familiar, but I wasn’t exactly sure where or what it was.

Definitely St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church

There’s no doubt that it’s St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church on Main Street across from the Red House as confirmed by this photo I ran in November. There’s no mistaking those squared, open crosses below the steeple.

How do you make a silhouette?

Pick the right subject. It has to be something that has a distinctive shape.
It has to have a strong light behind it.
Underexpose the foreground, intentionally letting it go dark.
When printing it on paper, pick a high contrast photographic paper. That will cause the blacks to go black and the whites to go white, while eliminating most gray tones. (Does anybody still do darkroom work anymore?)
When producing it for the screen, do the same thing. Make the whites whiter and the blacks blacker until pure black and pure white are all that are left.

August 25, 2011January 2, 2016

Photographing Mount Rainier

Before the pictures get too old and the mountains erode down to nubs, I thought I’d honor the promise I made July 31 to publish a gallery of photos from our trip to Mount Rainier National Park near Seattle.

I always feel self-conscious about shooting photos in famous national parks because they have been photographed so many times. I hardly took a frame when I took a trip to Yosemite in the late 90. I kept saying to myself, “Do you REALLY think Ansel Adams hasn’t done that better?”

So, to avoid competition, I find myself focusing (pun intended) on the human landscape when it’s available. At least I can be pretty sure nobody else has shot it before, not will they be able to shoot it later.

I look for non-touristy details

Everybody shoots the mountains, and I have to admit to getting in a few frames of them if only to prove I was there, but I like to concentrate on the details that I hope other tourists will overlook.

Black and white photography depends on subtle tones of black, white and gray to convey a message. As a black & white shooter at heart, it’s taking me a while to learn how to add subtle color shadings to the mix. That’s why you’ll see that many of my images are primarily monochromatic photos with a splash of color here or there.

Mount Rainer Photo Gallery

Not all of these photos are spectacular, but if you’ve been considering a trip to Mount Rainier, they’ll give you an idea of what you might see. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

Advance Birthday Autographs

Mother was Facebooking six decades before we gave her an iPad. There’s a new Facebook fan page called Advance Hornet Alumni where all the buzz is about the upcoming high school reunion. Mother graduated with the Class of 1938, the group that named the Hornets, she says. Anyway, she pulled out a scrapbook I had never seen before.

It contained her Graduation Memories Book. You’ll be seeing bits and pieces of it from time to time.

Birthdays January to April

There was a section for Birthdays. I noticed that most of the handwriting was different. “Well, I was just downtown, and whenever I’d see anybody, I’d take down their birthday. Most of them wrote them themselves.” These pages read like a Who’s Who of Advance in the late 1930s. I recognize about a third of the names on these pages. It’s a real thrill to look up to see the signature of your grandfather, Roy E. Welch, [Feb] 6 – 1891, written in his own hand. I’ve seen that writing before and would recognize it anywhere. You can click on any page to make it larger. I scanned them a little bigger than usual if you want to look at the names.

Birthdays March to June

There are contemporaries of my mother, friends of her parents and the high and low of Advance society. Roy and Elsie Welch ran a variety of businesses in town: a hotel, a tavern and a liquor store, among them. Mother could put a head on a mug of beer when she was in her early teens and she managed to hoodwink the sheriff into not confiscating a slot machine full of money when they left her in charge when she was about 13. The businesses, plus living downtown, put her in contact with everyone.

Birthdays July through October

Elsie Welch shows up as Sept. 24, 1892. I recognize her handwriting from the scores of cards and notes she sent me over the years.

Birthdays September through December

I’ve never been much interested in collecting the autographs of famous people, but I have to admit to feeling a little thrill when I see the handwriting of ordinary people my mother stopped on the street in a tiny town in the Midwest when she was a high school senior. That’s why I said she was creating a Friends list and doing Facebook six decades before she ever got her iPad.

August 22, 2011December 28, 2015

Waiting for Hurricane Irene

I pulled into West Palm Beach shortly after 6 p.m. Monday night. It was an incredibly smooth trip: the new transmission transmitted, traffic was fast and light. Either traffic going through Nashville, Chattanooga and Atlanta was a lot less congested than usual or my driving experiences in Seattle have made anything short of a one-hour parking lot seem fast.

I hit the Florida line’s Welcome Center right about sunset Sunday night. The first thing I noticed was that our cost-conscious Governor Rick Scott had two signs (that I saw) telling everyone that he’s the Gov. I called Wife Lila and Mother to let them know my progress, then I went in for a – as they say in the Tour de France – a natural break.

That’s where I was greeted by a sign that had me a little worried. There are some things I’d rather do myself. I didn’t know if robot arms were involved or if this was some kind of new stimulus project. I waited until the room had cleared out before I grabbed my cell phone to capture this photo. I was afraid to hang around too long lest someone mistake me for a Congressman and pull out handcuffs. The fly I saw at Lambert Airport was less unsettling.

Where’s Hurricane Irene going?

Last night’s track was a bit troubling. You don’t want to see your home right in the middle of a Cat 2 Cone of Uncertainty. The news tonight is both better and worse. Now it looks like it’s going to be a Category 4 storm when it’s offshore West Palm Beach. Offshore is a good thing, but it doesn’t take much of a wobble to really spoil your day.

The tracking map, by the way, was done by SkeetobiteWeather. They do some of the best and most useful maps I’ve seen anywhere.

Tuesday’s track will determine what I do next. I stopped in Ocala in central Florida to pick up bottled water, batteries, a new Coleman LED lantern, some Coleman chemcial Glow Lights and a selection of fruit.

I like Glow Lights

I’m a big fan of chemical glow sticks. They have a long shelf life, they’re safe for kids to use and they throw out a surprising amount of light without generating heat. The Coleman lantern is very bright for using only four D-cell batteries. LEDs don’t burn out like bulbs and they burn cooler. The one I bought looks like the same one in the link, but mine says it’ll run 86 hours on high and 122 hours on low. It’s a lot safer than the old-fashioned propane or white gas lantern with their delicate mantels. A more expensive model is available with rechargeable batteries, but I think that’s a bad buy for an emergency light: if you don’t use it all the time, the battery will be dead when you need it, and if the power’s out, how are you going to charge it? A stack of alkaline batteries makes more sense.

I noticed I wasn’t the only one with a cart full of water, but the clerk said they hadn’t had a run on supplies yet. If it still looks close, I’ll pull the generator out, change the oil, hook it into the gas line and fire it up for a test run. I adapted it to run on gasoline, propane or natural gas. Since we already had a line for our kitchen stove, hot water heater and clothes dryer, I tapped off it as fuel of first choice.

Month: August 2011