My friend and stalwart blog commenter, Joe Kennedy sent an email this morning announcing that today was “National Joe Day”… “Really” he wrote.
Of course, I did not believe him so I did what any modern fellow would do… I googled it!
Well, guess what? Today really is “National Joe Day“!!!!
In Joe’s honor, I made this photograph while I was in Brattleboro this afternoon. Being a true modern guy, I used my cell phone!
Happy (or is that Merry?) Joe Day, Joe!!!!
Our neighbors down the road about a half mile are in to stockcar racing. Both the father and one of the (teenage) sons race. A couple of months ago, I was chatting with the dad and discovered that they race regularly at the Claremont (NH) Speedway, a bit more than an hour’s drive from Antrim.
Yesterday, on a cool and threatening rain, afternoon, I decided to head to Claremont to ‘check out’ the scene. I was hoping to get there early and spend some time in the paddock photographing ‘behind the scenes’. Alas, that did not work out and I arrived only a bit before the first race. They got in about an hour’s racing before the rain began. The good news is that, because of the rain, my ticket is good for next Friday night as well!
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Have you ever noticed that folks who put bumper stickers on their vehicles are not usually satisfied with one?
Found in Peterborough yesterday…
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Last weekend was Antrim’s Home and Harvest Festival… a combination of street fair, parade, barbecue with fireworks, etc. A little bit of something for everyone.
That little bit of something for me was the competition at the skateboard park.
Although I am too old for skateboards now and their introduction on the east coast was a bit late for me to catch in my youth, I greatly enjoy combination of athleticism and revolt (outsiderism?) that skateboarding represents.
Thus, I took up a position behind the quarter pipe and snapped away while dodging the occasional errant skate board.
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* I usually photograph flying animals (odes and birds) so maybe this is not as far off topic as it seems!
The language we use to describe photography is sometimes quite curious… most folks talk about “taking” photographs. “Taking”, in my view, is not the correct word. One implication of “taking” is that something (maybe the subject of the photo?) is diminished in the act… if I take candy from the baby, the baby lacks candy, if I take a photo of the same baby, she or he looses nothing!
The proper phrase for the act of tripping the shutter is “making a photograph” as this is inherently an act of creation. I am not sure that I have been successful in convincing any of my circle of photography acquaintances in changing their use of the language, but I’ll keep using “make”, not “take” in this regard. I’ll keep tilting at windmills too!*
Oh well… back to the main act.
I note that, again, have not written a blog entry in over a week. This is because I have been spending time making photographic apparati rather than making photos.
First, I decided that it might be worthwhile to stabilize the relationship between camera and lens in the apparatus I described a week, or so ago in “Experiments in Optics“. The result is show in the first photo below and the four photos following are test shots from around the yard. Now all I have to do is find some time and energy (it is heavy!) to take it further afield. (Kevin… I’ll definitely try some flowing water.)
In addition to this decidedly nonstandard photographic contraption, I also spent a couple of days constructing a classic sliding box camera for 4″x5″ film. I used another old lens I had lying around; an 6.5” f/4 doublet with an aperture but no shutter. I have no clue as to its former life. Instead of ground glass for the back, I used a piece of an el cheapo (2 for 99 cents at Ocean State Job Lot) plastic chopping mat. These are textured on one side and smooth and shiny on the other and one can form an image on it just like ground glass.
In action, the ground glass and its frame get replaced with a film holder that I forgot to take make a photograph of of this blog article.
The last two photos below show “Big Red”.
Now comes the big step… setting up a darkroom. Fortunately I won’t need anything too fancy if I stick to lith film. I figure that I’ll use the negatives to make cyanotypes and maybe, eventually, silver contact prints. We’ll see if I follow through. Setting up a dark room from scratch in the 21st century… I must be nuts! Stay tuned!
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*When I was teaching, I used to tilt at another, similar windmill.
Both students and faculty invariably use the word “give” when it comes to grades. I gave Sally a B on the last test. Professor Jones gave me a B in biochemistry. Wrong!
On the first day of each semester, I would announce to my students that I had never, ever, ever, never given a grade in my teaching career. Invariably, this led to many puzzled looks. Only some of the puzzled looks disappeared when I continued by saying that the grades in my courses are earned by the students.
For years, I would bring up this issue of proper language around grades with my windmills faculty colleagues. I never got very far there either!
Yesterday was the peak of Antrim’s 8th Annual Home and Harvest Day event… a parade, skateboarding, crafts and food along Main Street, a corn on the cob eating contest and much more. The day ends with a chicken barbecue, concert and fireworks at the Tenney Farm; the headliner for this years concert was Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, a Chicago bluesman who lives in the Antrim area.
Joan and I spent the entire day “downtown”. We delivered the apple crisp that Joan made at the behest of her cousin Liz to the Antrim Historical Society booth just before 9 AM. We ended the day with chicken (cooked by Joan’s cousin John) and the concert/fireworks. We arrived home — very tired — just about 9 PM.
While Joan made herself “useful” at the apple crisp stand, I, as you might imagine, spent the day roaming with my camera.
Here are the photos:
The parade… [nggallery id=95]
Skateboarders… [nggallery id=96]
Everything else… [nggallery id=97]
We were getting ready for breakfast on the porch this morning when I was struck by the items on the table:
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Sometime last winter, after a spate of delivery problems, I got fed up and cancelled our subscription to the Boston Globe. You know that there is something wrong with the way things work when a newspaper changes its subscribers more for the paper than they charge at the newsstand… I thought that the having a subscription (and being a loyal customer) would merit a discount not a surcharge.
I probably would not have minded the delivery surcharge if the Globe could have met its own deadline. They say that the paper will be delivered by 6 AM… many mornings the paper was not in the box when I left for work at 7:30. So, in a fit of frustration, I cancelled the subscription and began reading the paper on-line every day. (I had been reading on-line on some of the days when the paper was late.)
It took me quite a while to get used to reading the paper (and doing the crossword puzzle) on-line each morning. But by now firing up the laptop is simply part of the morning routine just as making the coffee is. On weekends, at least, Joan does the same. The scene shown above is the result!
As far as the Globe goes, the story gets worse.
For other reasons, I have been using FireFox with Ad Blocker Plus, to surf much of the web. Now the Globe website, along with many others, load four or five time faster than they used to and there are no advertisements cluttering things up…not that I every paid any attention to the ads before.
I may be a codger and a curmudgeon, but I am a modern up-to-date with technology one!
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