Merrimac Santa

We seldom receive any snow in Florida, but that doesn't stop Santa from dropping into our neighborhood on Merrimac Drive. This Santa belongs to Jerry, the biggest little kid in the neighborhood. Around Christmas time our neighborhood is full of big kids. Many of them love to play by erecting Santas and Pooh Bears and colored lights.

When darkness falls in December I can find my way home by following the lights Jerry has installed on his corner lot. Come back here again in the next few weeks and I'll show you more of my neighborhood.

Hurricane Dennis

Florida's Gulf Coast tends toward quiet most of the year; there are few surf boards on our beaches. The most exciting time to visit the beach is during the movement of a hurricane through the warm shallow Gulf waters.

I caught this scene of frothy seaweed and stormy sky as Hurricane Dennis approached the coast a few years ago. The intensity of low barometric pressure and wind awakes the senses and subdues the ego.

Charmed in Savannah

Out of all the walls I have photographed this year,

 I like this view of botanical walls from Savannah the best. 

These snakey walls are visually and historically interesting to me. The charming iron fence holds the formal gardens apart from the rest of the world. Within this front yard paradise, paths and plantings tell old stories of social rectitude and the civilization of nature in the Old South. It's an old-fashioned view these days, but an attractive one, if not only for the sense of peace involved in reveries and nostalgia.

Above the Abyss

From POOL WORK, a photographic theme begun a few years ago after my wife started chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer.

The reflection of light through the prism of moving water is most exciting and yet strangely calming to me. It fans the role of light in revealing form. Light is alive, absorbed interactions, and it seems to make everyone aware how life is tenuous and delicate.

Working in the pool presented a perfect metaphor for the condition that Pam faced. It was precisely what we needed. Here was a liquid environment where gravity was altered and daily pressures relieved after chemotherapy sessions. Here we were, hanging onto a thin noodle, barely suspended above an abyss of eternal darkness. Yet, as I saw her, the grace of her limbs and the strong curve of her beautiful, bald head made me believe she would live forever.

JBT Heart Quilt

Photograph of a heart quilt that my wife, Pam, made for me earlier this year.

I was recalling some of the high and low points of the year when I suddenly saw myself in the quilted frame of the heart. Me, I'm the small, blue stream. She is the bountiful earth pictured on either bank of the stream. The creative wife, the best friend. Lucky Ger! 

Savannah Selves

Here's a self-portrait of Grandpa Goose.

Savannah is such a fun place to visit.

Self-portrait of Pa Penguin.

These ceramic children are blind. Too bad.

And back at Savannah's Jepson again, I  surround myself with art and artifact.

What better grouping to hang out with ?

Self Portrait ~ Swarm

I wish I could draw as easily as Craig Reynold's mathematical program "Swarm" paints me.  All I  had to do was position myself, blindly aim my trusty Kodak, and fire off a burst of light that places a halo in the middle of my noggin. 

In this Savannah Jepson Art Museum installation the live sensors move across the screen like a swarm of birds flying one way then another. Raking through the picture screen, the scanners finally paint the scene below them.