Central Havana, first random note

I spent six days in Central Havana this month. There are countless thoughts rambling around in my head about it – and almost none are yet sorted into anything coherent.

I think I’ll just post randomly about it as I work my way through the ideas. And images. I took 3,500 photographs there. It was a photo trip, a group of people passionate about photography.

Central Havana is astounding. Crowded, fragrant, hot, humid, colorful. Surprises lie behind the doors, beyond the shabby facades. Cubans are complicated, smart, literate, accomplished, and infinitely resourceful. Material goods may be in short supply, but life is rich. Much of it is lived outdoors, out loud.

They buy their food, fresh, down the street at a corner each morning. It’s a Monsanto-free zone, is Cuba, organic everything except I suppose imported things.

I intend, I very much want, to return.

 

Jury Duty

Courthouse in Springtime

I received a summons to jury duty in the mail on April Fool’s Day. Four weeks later I reported to the courthouse as directed. I’ve been summoned a few times over the years, but until this year I had only served on one jury. That was a civil case, long ago. Now, I was at the courthouse where they handle the criminal cases. It’s new – opened in 2010 – and not lavish, but pleasant and modern.

I served on a jury this time – a case in county court, where the misdemeanors go. The trial didn’t take long. We heard the evidence the first day, and returned the next day for the court’s instructions, counsel’s closing arguments, and jury deliberations.

As I rode the light rail train home after the first day, I realized that I really had not yet decided how I would vote during deliberations. Not making up your mind until it’s over: that’s a standard instruction from the judge to the jury. I heard it many times when I tried cases as a lawyer, and always wondered if any jurors did keep an open mind.

Our jury deliberations were animated but civil. Everyone participated fully, and we all wanted to render a verdict in accordance with the evidence, the law and the judge’s instructions. After it was over, I was comfortable that we did that.

The weather on Day One was rainy, but the next day we were back to late April glorious happy Denver spring. Good photo opps on the walk to the courthouse.

Android Abstracts

Recipe for fun: Send a dozen or so photographers to the supermarket on a Sunday morning – with no tripods or cameras. Turn them loose to roam the store for a couple of hours, taking long-exposure photos with their mobile phones, to create art photos.

Jeff Johnson of Soul Images Gallery was the Chief Instigator. I always have fun and learn things when he’s instigating. Just saying. Teri Virbickis called it iPhonography. I have a Nexus 5, and haven’t coined a clever term for the Android version.

Whatever you call it, I agree with Teri: this is a new obsession. I intend to keep on swooping my phone around and then peering at the screen to see what I got. The whole batch of my keepers from Sunday is on Zenfolio.

Guard Dog

S/he was alert and vocal as we walked by.

So we decided not to open the gate and break into the house after all. [/joke]

But, if we’d had any such evil intentions? We’d have abandoned them in the face of that ferocious cuteness.

Shades of black

Bright – almost harsh – morning Denver sunlight. Streets and alleys in the Santa Fe Arts District. It was a world popping with color and texture.

Somehow I ended up taking a lot of photos of black – and black and white – things. I haven’t counted the shades of black/gray. Fifty? Hmm.

Blossoming

Blossoming tree; 7th Avenue at Santa Fe, Denver; 04/04/2015; Sony a6000; 55-200mm lens at 139mm; f5.6, ISO 200, 1/4000.

It’s a gray Tuesday, unusually for Denver. Last Saturday was typical: brilliant sun, blue skies, mild temps.

Denver has received my usual April benediction and forgiveness for the winter just past.

Alley mural

From Saturday’s arts district walkabout. The alleys are rich in wall (and fence) art.

Santa Fe Art District – Denver

Fragment in an alley

Studio, paused

A couple of shots from yesterday morning’s walkabout in the area of Denver’s Arts District on Santa Fe.

Denver has some great photo meetup groups, including Front Range Photography. My life, and my photo skills, are all the better for having joined up.

Blood Moon

Woke up at 5:40 this morning, stumbled around, got the coffee started, opened the shades on the lanai facing west. The moon looked interesting. Then turned on teevee and the weather lady said it’s a lunar eclipse, the “blood moon” and it’s peaked with a few minutes left. Grabbed a jacket and my camera, went out on the fire escape and got a few grainy handheld shots. My camera was in M, I was in jammies, not yet caffeinated, cold, and barely awake – and it was dark. Under the circs I’m happy we can tell it’s the moon. Graininess and all. Nikon D7100, Tamron 16-300 lens, 1/4 sec, f 6.3, ISO 5000, manual focus.

Daisy and beady

Daisy. Five-photo stack, f/8 at 250 ISO, 0.8 second exposure.

Glass beads, f/22 at 200 ISO, 4 second exposure.

Yesterday was fun – a macro photography class taught by Jeff Johnson. I don’t have a “real” macro lens, but my trusty old manual focus 50mm f/1.8 Nikon lens, plus an extension tube, kept me in the game.

Denver icons

The Brown Palace Hotel in the foreground. In the background: the Wells Fargo Center aka the Cash Register Building. Recently I’ve been shooting this scene with different cameras at different times, from about the same location.

This one is old style. Film. Shot with a Nikon EM + crummy old Tokina lens, on C-41, converted to grainy B&W in Photoshop.

Needs a haircut

And a bath, and a good brushout.

And, mostly, a hug. He gets lots of hugs.

Film day, snow day, work day

I’ve been on eBay again, looking at old Nikon lenses to use with my D7100.  I always browse the old film camera category, because people will sell an old SLR with its lens(es) in a single deal. I’ve acquired a few good old prime lenses for a bargain price that way, and in the past I donated the unwanted sad old cameras to Goodwill. But this time around I’m paying attention to the cameras too. I bought some film and I’m shooting with a few old SLRs – all Nikons so far – in the bundles I bought. A few days ago I took light rail downtown to my job on a day that started clear – see the first photo, above –  and as predicted went all snowy. I took along a Nikon EM with a crummy old 35-70mm Hanimex Tokina [oops, a mistake in the original edit] lens (don’t ask, long story, bad choice of lens), shooting Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400. When I went to lunch, the snow had started: By quitting time, I was happy to be riding light rail and not having to drive home. Or to bike home.

Not critical work

I love the innernets. Today I researched an old Promaster brand zoom lens – once bundled with Nikon “amateur” level SLR film cameras and now often found for sale, cheap. As often happens, I found a discussion on point, on a photography forum, with only a few conflicting details (it’s definitely manufactured by Tamron vs. it’s for sure a Tokina lens).

And then I found this, from a guy who started a discussion by asking about that lens. He thanked the others for the information and said, about the lens:

it will not be used for critical work, just for snapshots and holiday memories

Just snapshots and holiday memories.

Oh, dude. Really?

The photo above is a crop of a picture I took back in the 80’s or 90’s, of my aunt, clowning around at Christmastime with a row of stuffed animals on the hearth. She adored her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and loved making a big fuss over them at Christmas especially.

I won’t put her face on the Internet today. She’s now the prisoner of a vicious disease (Parkinson’s) and not in good physical or mental condition. So bad that she’s incapable of consenting to my posting an identifiable image. It’s beyond sad. The energetic, smiling woman in that picture is only a memory now.

I don’t remember what camera I used to take that photo. It was probably some decent point and shoot with 35mm film. I’m glad it came out pretty well.

But, if I’d had a top of the line, revered, camera and lens, to take that photo? It would have been worth it.

Critically.

Kodak Holiday

Yesterday I took this camera out to a photo meetup. The rules were, to bring an item and photograph it, then post the photo without a caption so that the photo itself tells a story.

This Brownie Holiday was my first camera ever, a gift for my 6th birthday. I’ve bought, sold, lost, and given away a ton of cameras in my lifetime, but always kept this one.

Yesterday morning when I took it out of its box, I slid the catches down and opened it. That’s when I learned it still has film in it!  I have no idea how old that film is, no memory of the last time I used the camera as a kid. Obviously I ruined some of the film by opening the camera. After I closed it again, I rolled the film past exposure 5 and left it on exposure 6. Research on the 127 film indicates that there are 8 exposures on the roll.

At the meetup, I asked about it, and was advised to take the film to Englewood Camera, and that because it’s black and white it may well still be good.

I’ll take three more exposures first. I’m still deciding what they will be. I’m trying to keep my expectations low, to be prepared for the film being ruined.

Woodworker

My father was a carpenter and cabinet maker. Among other things. He started life on a farm and never really got over wanting to be a farmer, but his life didn’t go that way.

When I was a kid he started his own business, doing custom finish trim and cabinetry in nice homes. It was (saw)dusty work, often in sweltering weather, Daddy and his small crew. He’d come home from work, step into the utility room from the garage, and change from his dirty overalls into a t-shirt and cotton trousers, then head straight through the house to take a shower. He was fastidious, my dad.

He died suddenly, too young, of a heart attack, when I was just out of college. Many years later, after my stepmother died, I came into possession of his wallet.

Today I went out on a photo meetup shoot. The rules were to bring an object and take a picture of it, then post it without any caption or comment so that the photo would tell the story.

I decided to take along my first camera. When I reached in my memory box for the camera, my hand touched the wallet. I was a little late to the meetup because I stood there going through the cards, slips of paper, and photos he carried. In the wallet that he pulled out of his pocket on that long ago Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, not knowing he would never touch it again.

My dad’s wallet smells a bit of sawdust. The photo insert sleeves are scratched and rubbed. He probably carried the wallet for years. The leather is smooth, with the feel that new leather can’t match.

As we walked around old downtown Littleton this morning, I wasn’t sure if I’d pull out the wallet for a photo. I’d brought other things along to shoot. Coming out of an alley, I turned a corner and my eye was caught by the turquoise garage door and trim of a small building on a side street. Then I saw the sign on the glass door: Custom Woodworking and Cabinetry.

I propped the wallet on the door of the woodworking shop and snapped a few photos. It felt peaceful and exactly right.

Gazing into another time

A little piece in today’s newspaper led me to this blog. The short version: photographer finds excellent photographs from the 1930’s and 40’s among the other offerings at an estate sale and buys as many as she can. Then she follows up and finds that they were taken by Ellet N. Shepherd (1901 – 1965), Denver lawyer and judge. She gets the rest of the unsold photographs and has shared several of them with the rest of us on a blog.

On reading the article I clipped it out, grabbed my coffee and moved into the study to visit the blog. And I’ve been somewhere else for the last half hour as I look at the pictures and read some of the newspaper articles about Ellet Shepherd’s time as a prosecutor and a judge.

I’m visiting a Denver I have often wished I knew, a much smaller town that I might not have liked but suspect I would. It is I’m sure a longing driven by the desire for simplicity and certainty.

I have visited that place before, often by way of some of Sandra Dallas‘ novels – especially New Mercies. And I pored over the details of the town and people in Mainliner Denver (heck, I even met one of the lawyers in that case, who was still around many years later when I moved here fresh out of law school and passed the bar).

Honestly? One of these days I may just go down to the public library and read old local newspapers on microfilm or however they are stored now, just for the heck of it and not in search of anything special.

In the meantime, I am engaged with Judge Shepherd’s pictures, and the places I go when I look at them.

Breaking up is hard to do

We met nearly ten years ago, and got acquainted mostly sitting there in the dining room of my old bungalow.  He was talented, easy to get along with, and not one of those high-maintenance types.

Of course, we both changed as the years went by, although our working relationship remained strong.  I came to depend on him.  He was there for me to help me edit my pictures from my first digital camera and my first scanner, and we both developed our skills along the way.

But over the last several months, he’s changed.  He’s gotten tempermental and unreliable.  He often just quits in the middle of something, and because I’m so used to him and his ways, I’ve put up with it for longer than I should have.  I’ve even spent more money than I should have, trying to make things work between us.

But I decided the other day that it’s over.  And now I’m looking for something to replace what I’ve lost, and I’m bummed about it.

Yes, finally, after all these years, I am parting ways with my old favorite photo editing software, Paint Shop Pro.