One of the things I love about photography is the freedom to explore different areas where I wouldn't have gone 5 years ago. In 2011, I joined the 365 Project which challenges photographers to shoot at least one shot every day for 365 consecutive days.
Now, for those of you who know me well, when I dive into something, I dive into it full cannonball mode. Not only did I do an entire year, I did a second year, not missing a single day of picking up my DSLR camera and taking at least one shot.
Looking back on some of those early shots, I think I would be embarrassed to even show those shots the light of day today. I can distinctly remember a shot of three different kinds of hotdogs. Who posts photos of hotdogs anyway? Yeah, well I did.
One aspect of photography that has intrigued me over the years has been street photography. When I first started doing the project, I rarely took candid shots just walking down the street. Over the course of the first year I became bolder and now I find myself enjoying taking street photography. This particular shot is one of my better street shots I've taken. Because I feel street photography works better in monotones, that's how I usually process them. Every now and then, I'll post a street photograph in color, but most of the time, I find the black and white aspect of the shot gives it more detail and dramatic effect.
Please check out others interpretations of the theme Photograph here.
I'm trying something a little bit different here. Since I did well with writing prompts, I've discovered some daily writing prompts and I'm going to try and see if that will help me get through this block I sometimes have. We'll see where it takes me, but the one I checked on today gave me some good material to work with for the first day, so I'm going to try it.
Sometimes, you just need music to help you get through the day. 5 song titles that pretty much typify my past week would be the following:
Pressure - by Billy Joel
Under Pressure - by Queen and David Bowie
Help! - by the Beatles
Deadlines - by Arkells
Don't Stop Believin' - by Journey
Sometimes, it's just so much fun being the multi-media instructor at school. I was on my high school yearbook when I was a senior in high school. Deadlines look a lot different from the instructor's point of view. The respect I've always had for my yearbook teacher, Mrs. Denise Tate, has just been ratcheted up several more notches.
It's Friday and with this post I'm halfway through the Chill challenge. To be perfectly honest, I never expected to see me get this far. I have had some nice encouragement from different quarters, some bloggers and some friends of mine who have been nice enough to post something, either here or on Facebook, that has helped keep me going. So I thank you for that.
Besides writing to the prompt, I've also kept in the back of my head that I wanted to tie the prompt in with different photos that I've taken. Some, I think, I've been pretty successful in tying in, while others (yesterday's post comes to mind) I don't think I've been quite as successful.
Today's prompt, the morning after, can have a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. Yeah, that's pretty wishy washy, but it's the best I can come up with. I have to admit that every time I've seen the prompt, Maureen McGovern's song from the original Poseidon Adventure keeps running through my head. Look up the video and you'll see a pretty amazing cast in this movie.
The lyrics for the first two verses, written by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn speak about love getting through the night and about the journey the people in the Poseidon had to make to get out alive.
There's got to be a morning after
If we can hold on through the night
We have a chance to find the sunshine
Let's keep on looking for the light.
Oh, can't you see the morning after
It's waiting right outside the storm.
Why don't we cross the bridge together
And find a place that's safe and warm.
Originally, the song's title was called, Why must there be a morning after? Either way, reading the words, or thinking about either title, I think the song takes on an entirely different meaning when juxtaposed along with the photo I've chosen to tie in to this prompt.
Comments as always are welcome.
As the title says, P. J.'s blog challenge for the month of June was Bridges. One of the bloggers who participates in this monthly challenge suggested that any of us who live in California hunt down one of the Bridges actors, Beau, or Jeff, or find Lloyd's grave and take a photo of that. Well, Lloyd was cremated and the resting place of his ashes are unknown according to Find a Grave.com, so I decided to go a different route.
1. The traditional bridge
About a week into my summer vacation I had planned to go geocaching with a couple of my friends. We ended up taking two cars mainly because one of the guys thought he might have to leave early, so we ended up meeting at a geocache entitled Bridging the Gap, where the Union Pacific Railroad tracks run under Highway 18 out in the Mojave desert.
This day was to be mostly car caching, driving from cache to cache with very little hiking involved, which ended up being a good things as the heat was getting to the point that we decided that even in the car, getting out all the time was strength sapping and we called it a day at around 1:00 in the afternoon. My friend's car, fortunately, stayed relatively cool in the shade of this bridge.
The clouds really make the scene although I'm a little perplexed to what caused the streaks in the sky, but overall, I'm very pleased with how this image turned out. And in reality, I had visions of grandeur that I would end up near San Francisco sometime this month so I could go on a bridge shooting spree, but it was not to be. This would be my only traffic bridge that I would shoot during the month.
2. The musical bridge
I've shot this particular bridge many times over the years including one other time from a different perspective for P. J.'s weekly challenge on Flicker. Our family is very musical with all of us playing or singing at one time or another during our educational years. My daughter received her college degree in violin performance. My son played the piano and my other son played the viola and sang all four years of high school in his school's top choir. My wife plays the piano, flute, guitar and clarinet, although the latter two she hasn't picked up in several decades. I sing in our church choir on Sundays.
This is my son's old viola that he obviously doesn't play anymore since he discovered he enjoyed singing so much so it sits in its case, only coming out when I want to take another photo of it. The purpose of a bridge on stringed instruments is to keep the strings off of the finger board and to transmit the vibrations of the strings to the sound board.
3. Lucy
Named after Lucille Ball, Lucy has been our pet for about 10 years now. Lucy is a California Desert Tortoise, an endangered species. I have a permit which allows me to keep her in our back yard, the only legal way to do so with endangered species.
California Desert Tortoises have been losing their habitat mostly to development. As more and more people move to California, the encroachment on their territory becomes more severe and their range continues to shrink because of it. While out geocaching, I've run across empty tortoise shells but have never seen a live one in the "wild" so I count myself fortunate, that I get to see one almost every day in the summertime as she cruises around the yard in the early morning or late afternoon when it's not too hot out.
With more and more areas in the desert being turned over to wind farming or solar gathering, not to mention housing, development by humans continues to put more pressure on the native species of tortoises. Unfortunately, domesticated species, which is what Lucy falls into, cannot be reintroduced into the wild, because the domesticated ones tend to have respiratory problems they could pass on to the wild species.
As a caretaker of Lucy, I view myself as a bridge keeping the species alive. Should desert tortoises become extinct in the wild, I may be asked to give up Lucy so that she could become involved in a breeding program to help perpetuate the species. I would gladly do that.
4. The Claremont Colleges
I live in a college town. Actually, there are five colleges, a graduate school and a school of Theology within the city limits of Claremont, California. There are two buildings on the Pomona College campus named Bridges - Big Bridges and Little Bridges. Originally, I wanted a shot of Little Bridges, a converted chapel on campus because it's where my daughter performed in her orchestra when she was in junior high and high school, but the area was cordoned off due to construction, so I wandered over to Big Bridges.
Bridges Auditorium is a memorial donated by the parents of Mabel Shaw Bridges, a student at Pomona College who died at the age of 22 in 1907. Construction of the building cost $600,000 and was completed in 1932 with a performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Arthur Rodzinski. I found this billboard window outside the entrance to the auditorium and the reflection of the grounds beyond the front entrance I thought was very inspiring.
Every time I walk by this area, I am reminded of my own college and how similar these two areas look, most likely because there are many coast redwood trees around the outside of this plaza. The coast redwood tree was the dominant tree on my college campus, Humboldt State University, located in northern California.
5. The bridge to adulthood
On June 13th, my youngest son graduated from high school. It was a gloriously warm afternoon and there was a slight breeze blowing as evidenced by his tassel flowing in the wind. This is actually one of the few shots I have of him with his tassel as he ended up losing it sometime after receiving his diploma and reuniting with us after the ceremony. He didn't seem to be too concerned about it, so I'm not concerned.
This fall he'll be moving out of our house and into the dorms at UC Riverside where he'll begin his college days as a physics major. Both of his older siblings chose schools in northern California and his stated preference was far away from mom and dad too, but in the end he chose a school that was close enough that he'll be able to come home on weekends if he so chooses, although I would expect him not to do so very often. With his older siblings both graduated from college, we'll soon be crossing over that bridge to the empty nest come September.
If you click on the link to P. J.'s page at the top you'll see how other bloggers interpreted the theme of bridges for this month. I'm looking forward to next month's challenge. Hopefully it will be something where I'll be able to use some of the shots I take while we're on our camping trip.
Every now and then, I'll take a shot and think to myself, "I don't know why I need to continue because I already know I have the shot." That's the way I felt about this shot. I know I audibly gasped when I saw what was happening in my viewfinder.
The theme for that week in January 2012 was sound. I'd asked my wife to get her flute out and play some songs for me so I could take some shots of her. I kept playing around with different settings, but eventually, I just wanted to zoom in as close as possible and get some shots of her lips playing. Just as I took this shot, I saw her breath condense on the mouthpiece of the instrument and I knew I had the shot. I probably took a dozen more shots, but never caught her breath on the mouthpiece. I love this shot, but perhaps it's because I love the person in the shot so much.
On Sunday, I walked around Claremont Village area looking for a new photo opportunity. I passed a couple of guys who appeared to have just started singing for their supper. Just as I passed them I bumped into a fellow teacher from my school. He was in the Village with his mom and brother shopping and I ended up talking with them for about 15 minutes or so.
My friend asked me whether I was out shooting photos for my 365 project and I told him yes, but I wasn't sure what I was going to take yet as nothing had really struck me as photo worthy, although I kept hearing these two guys behind me and I thought I might at least get some street photography shots out of it.
I took my leave of them and continued my walk, getting some still life shots of a couple of interesting things I saw. When you walk in alleys, you sometimes get all sorts of things you wouldn't normally see just walking on the sidewalks. By the time I worked my way back around to where these two guys were, I had decided that I was going to introduce myself to them and ask them to be part of my 100 Strangers project.
Both were cool with being part of the project, but neither was very talkative since they were really into their music. The guy playing the guitar was Ken and the guy in the wheelchair was David. Ken was a little more hesitant about having his photo shot, saying as I was taking a couple of shots that I wouldn't get anything good because "I'm not photogenic." In a way, he was right as the photo above was the only shot I got where he had his eyes open, but I feel like I caught his personality with the shot. I really like that he was not looking at me, but at David as if getting ready to lead David into a harmony, or perhaps to get him to play harmonica.
David was singing harmonies with Ken, but also played the harmonica. He was non-stop talk, but not really talking about much of anything outside of the music. I listened to them for a little bit, dropped a couple of bucks into the guitar case and moved on. I think the only thing that I'm really disappointed about with this shot is you can't really see the cigarette smoke. It's more pronounced in the original photo, but the smoke seems to have been wiped away when I processed it to black & white. I need to work on this.
So my worries of not getting another stranger photo were for naught. I wasn't worried, but this definitely was the longest dry spell for me with the 100 Strangers project. In a couple of weeks, I'll be heading up to the bay area and San Francisco. Who knows what or who I'll encounter when I'm up there.
Back in August of last year, I wrote about the 100 Strangers Project I was embarking upon. This is a story about a stranger who got away. Not that he really got away, but he was one of the people I approached who said no to me.
On my walks through the Claremont Village area, I'd see Ray sit on various benches on the sidewalk and converse with people who knew him. Sometimes he'd even converse with people if he didn't know them, he was that kind of guy. He had long white hair and a long white beard which was one of the things that I noticed about him and why I really wanted him to be part of my 100 Strangers project.
I met Ray in October, I believe, although the exact date eludes me. I had been walking through the Village looking for some interesting shots and I saw a bird up in the tree next to the bench where Ray was sitting. After some unsuccessful attempts at getting a good angle on the bird I struck up a conversation with Ray. We talked about the bird in the tree and some of my photographic endeavors I had been doing at the time. This brought me around to the 100 Strangers project and I asked him to be part of my project.
He politely declined and I said if he ever changed his mind, I'd love to photograph him. His response was, "But we wouldn't be strangers anymore." Every time I'd see him on a bench somewhere in the Village, I'd say hi to him and he say hi back to me. We had a connection that wouldn't have happened were it not for the 100 Strangers project.
Today, as I was walking around the Village, I noticed a memorial on a bench, the bench that Ray would frequent the most when he was enjoying life in the Village. I saw this and realized what had happened. Ray had suffered a heart attack five days before Christmas and had died Christmas Eve.
What I hadn't known before this was Ray's full name. He was known as Ray Collins, the lead singer of the Mothers of Invention, and the person responsible for bringing Frank Zappa into the group. Ray was the lead singer for the early Mothers of Invention albums, but parted ways over the direction the band was going in and never really got into music again after leaving the Mothers of Invention in 1968. Apparently, in his later years he was living out of his van in Claremont, CA.
The bench has been dedicated by some citizens as "Ray's Bench." There was a poem attached to the left of the memorial. It read:
"Come a Day, any day.
Sit on this bench, Ray's Bench.
Speak awhile with him, then leave.
You have not wasted your day,
Just lived it better."
I shall miss seeing Ray on his bench as I walk around the Village. I'm glad I got to know him, even if it was just for a passing conversation.
