Black & White Scans.2

Resurrecting neglected film can be fun. These black & whites emerged in negative form from a dusty shelf in the old office.

Parisian Parking Ticket

Icelandic Stairwell

Early morning fog, Vebron, France

B&W Sweetheart

Started scanning b&w film today. Here is my sweetheart amidst a cluster of rock outcroppings in Parc Nationale de Cevennes, France, circa 1995. 

Cell Phone Hallelujah

I found my cell phone in the front pocket of my blue jeans; right where it belonged. Unfortunately, the jeans had just gone through the washer-dryer cycle and the phone was still burning hot.

"For crying out loud!"  I was scheduled to leave town the next day. So when the phone cooled down a bit I tested it and placed a long distance call to my brother, Gregory. He answered. We talked for awhile on the warm cell phone. "How lucky", I thought, "it works."

Then I tried a few other numbers but the phone freaked out, dialing numbers and ** ##! crazy symbols that I never touched.

I disassembled the phone and left it on the bureau when I left town. Meanwhile, my everloving mate, Pam, heard about an old techie trick on National Public Radio. She filled a quart jar with uncooked rice and my cell phone. And there it sat for four days.

When I removed the phone from the rice jar I noticed that the edges of the screen had cleared up. I tried the phone. It works today!!! Hallelujah!

Morning Has Broken

Morning has broken. Sun light skims the top of the roof to make shadows on our Hundred Year Oak outside the bedroom window. A great view to begin the day.

Atlanta Fresco

On Saturday evening I flew to Ohio to visit my daughter, Cindy. The scene below revealed itself as the plane left Atlanta. I cooked the image in Photoshop with a Fresco filter. Tastes good to me.

Friend Kristy made us a lunch; whole grain bread, mayonaise, big ugly tomatoes, chives and cheddar cheese. Broiled, of course.

Delicious textures, delicious taste.

Cindy bought red and orange peppers at ten for a dollar. I trimmed them for a stuffed pepper birthday dinner and found this little bird inside a red pepper.

Next week I will revisit Sarasota's public sculptures.

Pepper Vision

This picture just resurfaced, lighting a flame of recognition in my funny bone.

When you fill your vision with the pepper seeds, you can't focus on the squirrel. Yet you can feel the squirrel's presence; It feels like the squirrel is alive

Let's face it: Catching oneself in a misperception can be fun. Especially for people who think there is a need to know everything. Of course the soft brass patina, the softening camera focus, selective and peripheral vision aid this illusion. But that's just a causal explanation and not much fun.

It's been months since I invited the brass squirrel to lunch on these pepper seeds. I am grateful for his demonstrating yet another reason why it may be important to save seeds.

Time to change one paradigm since today's amusement came from seeds unplanted.

Now I'm unplanting them again.

The Last Glacier

I was almost done eating dessert when a thought occured to me:

Might this look like the last glacier?

Margins of the Gulf

Margins of the Gulf is an ongoing photographic theme that continues to intrigue me.

I'm interested in watching that strand of land that geographers call the littoral zone; essentially the land between high and low tides. This long strip of land follows the sea coast all around the world. It's magnetic in its appeal to people seeking the peaceful rhythms of the sea.

I look to catch a bar or two of visual melody here, the melody being played by strollers along the littoral staff. To my eye, people become dancers and notes on the littoral staff. Click title link for more ...

Man Blames Cat for Porno

It was a short article. A space filler really. But it jumped out at me from the Sunday newspaper. From Stuart, Florida, the headline read: Man blames cat for more images.

Keith Griffin told sheriff's investigators that 90 child pornography images downloaded onto his computer when his cat jumped on his keyboard while he was downloading music. I asked my cat, Popi, if that claim was possibly true.

Popi laughed. "Of course, it could have happened that way," she said. "Tabbies are notorious troublemakers. I once knew a Tabby who wrote D.O.S. with her hind quarters. She hacked her way into the Pentagon simply because she smelled a rat."

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Someone's always telling someone to go somewhere or do something. That makes me mad in the same way television ads make me want to go deaf. I will eventually seek refuge in Norway.

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I like this graphic in spite my disinclination to follow directions. It's a strong, simple composition. It probably looks more dynamic to people who read their newspapers from right to left. But it's a kinetic image with the potential to move a viewer's eyes in ways the body can feel.

There is an invisible force or connection between the arrow image and your everyday memories. When you look at the arrows sweeping downward, you can feel the movement in your gut. Eye to subject to gut. That's photographic triangulation; a big part of my personal mapping system (PMS).

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Did I post this image of the bus stop in Laerdal, Norway before? I think so. However, I did take a second look at it and decided to bump up some contrast and color. The original shot was grayer, less interesting.

This Image is all about color quality. In a recollective world, I see this print as a signature of bus travel in Norway. Yet, you don't need to know the where to appreciate repetitious forms struggling in an ice cold (?) winter field. And the dark spot I see as oil drippage seems such a human thing ... could it also refer to a hole in the Universe?

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Reviewing last year's trip I came across this sweet little fellow. Found him on the sidewalk of a very classy Norwegian hotel.

The understandings you carry into any visual experience affect and may transform the meanings that come out. Even dogs, we discovered, have a visual intelligence. They learn by observing, too. The mouse was so soft and furry... He had come out of the garden to die.

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Who doesn't love mushrooms? Get serious! These visually tasty fellows were hanging around the new old Stave Church in Bergen, Norway. Go little fellows, go! Don't let the trolls eat you! ;^ ) Such fecundity makes me remember.

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Gully, gully. One good tern deserves another. This remarkable piece of sculpture makes this photographic image a carrier of great consternations. That's why this sculpture is showing its face again here.

There seems to be something elemental to be learned here. As a sculpture it brings Myth so much closer to home. Must one be a seafaring Norwegian to completely understand?

Cave Art

Two caves have long occupied spaces in my head: Plato's Cave from The Republic and the cave paintings of Lascaux, France. I have a fascination for walls.

I gathered the walls below by electronically painting colors and forms, then subjecting them to filtration by mathematical algorithms. The bouncing and bending of light across a sensitive electronic cave wall was captured. I call it my cave. It is now present on your monitor.

The circus show girl is for Sarasota, the circus city where I live. Here she becomes transformed into Anima Muse, a character in my personal mythology. I reversed her colors to negate any smattering of personality imposed by a tonal photo portrait. The colors work well in the cave. Anima Muse vibrates with enthusiasm ... like a cheerleader.

The Leaf and Me

The Hubble space telescope focuses on distant galaxies and astronomers see our Sun in another 4 billion years. I look out the window and spy a mystery in my swimming pool: A flat leaf floating on the surface of the water casting a grape-clustered shadow on the bottom of the pool.

I am neither an astronomer nor a botonist, but I knew the tiny lens on my Kodak camera could record the mystery.

How can a spade like leaf cast such a shadow? What properties reside in the water? the leaf? and the sun? Where is the closest physicist with an answer?

Despite my ignorance, I like the geometries of this composition. The triangulation between the leaf, the shadow, and the camera lens takes me along a deep space route to a shadowy nebula. Even the cracks in the pool light up like runway lights pointing the way.

And then there's that guy over there, out in nebula space, with the shadowy camera. Looking over a high wall at parallel worlds? A reflection of the viewer who is seeing and being seen?

I love a good mystery.

The Swamp II

The CSU band cheers the brave Buccaneers of Charleston Southern U as they take a half time break. Behind in the game 40 to 3, the second half would get better for the Bucs as they held Florida's second string offense to 22 points.

CSU's band leader takes a half time break as Florida cheerleaders line the field. I had good reason for leaving my DSLR camera at home: fear that history might repeat itself. I lost my first camera long lens years ago at a football stadium when the person next to me knocked the lens onto the concrete at my feet.

I find that shooting pictures in a crowd is difficult to impossible. One of the problems with a small Kodak digital is that crowds are unruly and they love to demolish compositions before trigger fingers can do their job. And another problem is the lack of focal length that could clear the scene.

I asked my neighboring bandsman if he had any idea how much money the Charleston Southern athletic program was bringing to the school by playing big time champ Florida.

He told me that Charleston Southern would receive $450,000. Not bad for a night's work! Even if you have to work on the Sabbath in The Swamp.

The Swamp

We drove to Gainesville last weekend to attend our first University of Florida football game at The Swamp. We skipped the tailgate party scene and took a bus to the game.

It was Saturday, the Sabbath, but there were a few things I didn't expect to find at the game.

This fellow, I'm told, brings his banner to all the games.

And, oh man! I love that tune I was hearing. Had it been that long since I'd been on a college campus? Here in the middle of upstate Florida we came across our first Hare Krishna singers in a long, long time.

As I remember, they used to be younger.

I thought we were going to a football game, not a religious convention. But then I should have figured it out. It was the first game of the year, a warmup game, and national champion Florida was playing Charleston Southern, a small Christian school from South Carolina.

Ah, here's one thing I expected to see: a lot of young people wearing blue and orange.

We got great end zone seats, right next to the Charleston Southern band and cheer squad. They seemed a bit uncomfortable in The Swamp. CSU is a school of about 3,500 students my neighboring bandsman informed me. The University of Florida has about 50,000 students. The Swamp was filling up with Florida fanatics.

90,000 people assembled in The Swamp to watch the University of Florida Gators play a brave Charleston Southern team who actually beat the 63 point spread that Las Vegas gave them.

The Gator Chomp illustrated on the big screen at our end of the field.

Continued in next posting ...

Red Pepper Dance

Adrian's Birthday Pepper

Adrian's birthday pepper.

Early morning light through the kitchen window. Red pepper awaiting breakfast. Trusty red Kodak at the hip. Happy Birthday, Sonny!

Lisa's Ant

One day recently, my Chicago friend, Lisa Faron, stepped out the back door of her house to find a black ant, seen below, busily moving a feather across the sidewalk. She sent me the pic via email.

Wow, I thought, "Another inspirational metaphor coming out of Chicago!"

This is a Poster Image in my book; a small black creature, undaunted by the gravity of his task, grabs ahold of a huge problem. You can almost hear him saying "Yes We Can." And he does.

I keep the image of this brave creature on my desktop. I consult him at the beginning of each long day of work. He sobers me up a bit. Thereafter, the load remains great, but the spirit is lighter ... and determined.

Rescuing Frozen Beans

Ever since we went to see the movie Julie and Julia, I've been able to perform kitchen magic. And I suspect I am not the only one to have come out of the theater with some extra mojo. But I am quite happy in the kitchen these days and this rescued bean dish is one of my silly, but tasty, accomplishments at the stove.

The overly frozen snowball of green beans I rescued from the freezer had to be saved. But how? And to what avail?

Herein lies a true beauty of photography; it records. You don't have to write down the recipe. Just make a snapshot and refer to it later after you've had a chance to clear your palette.

Clicking on this snapshot, you can see all the wonderful ingredients I used whilst ridding the refrigerator of neglected foods. This is better than a trophy fish photo. Isn't photography wonderful!?

It's easy now to recall how this cooking challenge started. Butter, olive oil, garlic and onion coated the pasta and flavored the pan. Thinly cut chicken breast with teriyaki marinade were heated until a dark sugary bottom emerged in the pan.

How much like the old fashioned liquid darkroom; cooking evokes magic!

Empty the pan, throw in the frosty beans, add more oil, garlic and onion. How about a few mushrooms; delicious! Build the juices, let it simmer. Oh, Julia!!!

Not so smart, not so fast

Some days we are not as smart or as quick as we imagine ourselves. Do you know what I mean?

Well, for a very short time yesterday I was neither too smart nor too quick. Here's what happened that caused many of you to receive a blog posting from eyes that hear containing not much more than a blank rectangle.

Yesterday I thought to test a new banner for a web site by dropping it into this Blogger posting application. I didn't know if the banner I made in Photoshop did, in fact, contain the necessary html code to send a clicker to my web site. So I, not so smartly, laid the png file into my blog's posting page.

I accidently published the banner only to find that I am slower than Google. I deleted the posting, but not fast enough. Google won, Gerry lost. And you got the empty rectangle in yesterday's posting. Sorry about that. I'll try to be smarter today.

To answer your question: No, the banner does not contain the necessary html code to bring you to my web site. You'll have to click on the title above while I go back to banner school.

Three Abstractions

Streetcar is one of dozens of experiments conducted in Amsterdam last year. Streetcar is also one of my favorite digital experiments conducted there. The easiest way to get to Amsterdam's many fine art museums is to take the streetcar. Here my trusty Kodak camera was set at a low ISO and the shutter was snapped while boarding and swinging the camera toward the subject.

Once imported into Photoshop the picture seemed only to need a bit of a color tweak. +35 green was added to bring out the form of the red headed passenger in the streetcar. Now it feels like Amsterdam.

Streetcar

Bosnia is an abstraction of another ilk. You may recall Bosnia and the mass graves; I hope so. One day when working in Photoshop with body images and listening to the news, I realized that the negative image of the body stretching across my monitor screen looked like a grave. It seemed a fitting memorial at the time, so I filled the apparent grave/graben with bodies.

Bosnia

A third kind of Photoshop abstraction, Panty Raider, came out of a self-devised exercise in digital manipulation. Starting out with a pirated image from one of the sex industry sites, I manipulated the pixels by duplicating, folding, erasing, painting, and essentially massaging out the pixels that I didn't want to see.

What I love about this kind of a manipulation exercise is the surprise of resulting colors and forms that emerge.

Panty Raider

Red Skies at night, Sailor's delight

The red life guard shack at Siesta Key Beach seemed to spill color into the skies Friday night.

As usual people crowded to the beach to see the sunset. Someone must have been kicking up some dust in Texas.

Sunset, a great time for gathering at the shore. A sweet little stroll to end the day.

Digital Manipulations

I've been told that the work I show on my web site is about as far from photography as the commenting photographer could imagine. That's OK. This explains how so many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

In my book the point of Photographic study is to open the imagination. You see, the study of light and form is not only about what is seen with the eye, it is also about what can be seen with the mind's eye.

Here is a sampling of Photoshop manipulations I've done in the name of Photography throughout the years.

Siesta Nest Eggs was one of the first digital manipulations I performed with Photoshop 2.5 many years ago. It is essentially a clean up and color enhancement exercise done from a digitized transparency. Just a few items were painted into the picture.

Erotica-1gz emerged from the digital darkroom during a session with some web porn that came across my email box. The chief crime of pornographers is that they attempt to kill imagination with banality. Starting with the original color pixels, I merely rearranged them until a sense of mystery returned to the sacred act portrayed.

Computers and digitalization offer us countless variations of visual scenes. Variation is the key word here. Kitty Kat was originally launched as a study into the variations offered by duplication. The computational ease of cutting, folding, duplicating and transparency offer formal design possibilities that can stimulate imaginations these days.

Working with a 2mb digital camera never slowed me down in the early days. The little Kodak always brought home something to work with. The possibility for post production work in Photoshop remains nearly limitless. This Bahamian Church offered an interesting compositional problem and solution. Rub-a-Dub in Photoshop: Voila! The church stands out from its background.

Ed's Closet is pretty straight, early digital photography with an addendum of blue background and words. All easily available in Photoshop. I post this image to remind myself of the magical ingredient in all documentary photography: subject appeal. After viewing any photograph I like to ask myself what it showed me and where it took my thoughts and emotions.

100 Postings

This is my 100th blog posting. Google counts the postings and I believe them.

I want to thank all you readers, fictitious or not, for taking this journey with me. I may be moving my blog to a new site soon: the crassly commercial gerryzeckphotos.com web site.

I am now selling my off beat photo art prints, photo art wall clocks and photo art note cards. Many of my photo art themes may be classified in the world of censorship as adult material. OK, I can live with that.

Warning: if you don’t like to look at photo renditions featuring the human body, don’t visit my web site at www.gerryzeckphotos.com. You will be offended. Go off somewhere else and have a good day.

If you do visit my new web site, you can register in the Guest Book to win a free photo art wall clock (see below) and receive an occasional photography newsletter in which I will update you on my latest photo thoughts and images. The newsletter is likely to become a photo history tour of sorts. But not all old work.

EyeEyeEye, a photo art wall clock

Web site visitors: Be sure to register in the Guest Book for the drawing. EyeEyeEye, an original Gerry Zeck photo art wall clock, will be presented to a random choice winner of the drawing to be held on September 14, 2009. The winner will be announced in the blog on site.

Moon Rise

Some scenes are worth returning to capture.

For Michael and Rachel, Pepper Fans

The Pepper Roasting Recipe

See July 26 posting

Thanks Michael and Rachel. You win the coveted Pepper Roasting recipe

learned from the Gourmand (in the French tradition) Joe Kady.

1. Coat the bottom of a large roasting pan (or two) with extra virgin olive oil.

2. Set the oven to bake at 350 to 400 degrees. [Hotter means checking more often.]

3. Slice three or four red peppers, yellow and/or orange peppers into 1/4 inch slices. I use only sweet red peppers if no others are available.

4. Cut the 1/4 inch pepper slices into 1-3 inch lengths. Throw peppers into the oiled pan and move them around the pan to spread the olive oil.

5. Slice a sweet yellow onion into 1/4 inch or smaller slices. Scatter amongst the peppers.

6. Sprinkle peppers and onion with olive oil again and salt lightly with sea salt.

7. Dice 3 or 4 good sized garlic cloves and sprinkle amongst peppers in pan.

8. Slice and dice a nice fat shallot and spread amongst peppers in pan.

9. One variation of the weekly pepper roast includes adding two or three sliced tomatoes.

10. Sprinkle the entire pan with coarse black pepper.

At this point you want to use a pancake turner and turn the onions, peppers and garlic until they are thoroughly coated with olive oil. I usually use two pans and spread the veggies evenly.

Set the timer for 45 minutes if roasting at 350 degrees and at 30 minutes if roasting at 400 degrees. When timer rings, take pans out of oven and turn peppers over a few times.

When you place the pans back into the oven, place the original top pan on the bottom shelf and the bottom pan on the top shelf. Set timer for another 30 minutes. You may want to do a visual check again in 15 minutes.

When the smell becomes irresistible, check your pans. As the onion carmalizes, you know you are nearing roasting climax. Slightly blackened peppers mean take them out.

Thereafter, I place the peppers into storage containers, put them in the refrigerator, and dig into them when I want to sweeten up chicken dishes while cooking it, almost any tomato pasta dish [chicken or burger], and as a topping on home made pizza.

Warning: You must guard against nibblers drawn to the kitchen by the smells.

Photographic Failures and Peppers

Not all attempts at making photographic art are successful. Let me illustrate with some recent pix that may show the difference between intent and result.

Here's an attempt that fell between the cracks.

This is a picture of a hoot owl whooo got away.

These scenes are from my Saturday afternoon pepper roasting orgy.

It's just a cheap little Kodak camera, but it's ever ready to get to work.

I ask myself: Is it possible you have a pepper fetish?

I don't know, but I love roasting peppers.

And I'd love to see your peppers, too!