Posts in Category: Photography
Backdrop
I may be the only person to go to Hawaii and return with dark brooding pictures of the Garden Island. I guess it is just my nature.
Some Candidates for a Show
Good grief! I’m participating in a group photography show opening next Friday, June 18th and the finals selections aren’t even made yet. But here are some possible candidates. More details coming very soon!
The Industrial Age
One of the last images my little Nikon D40x took before the shutter refused to budge anymore.
This last weekend was jam-packed with activities and photo ops. It started on Saturday with a whole day and evening sailing in San Francisco Bay. Well, not quite sailing. We were a crew with only one current sailor, and a bay with strong winds and lots of white caps. So, the sails remained furled and the engine hummed. Nonetheless, it was beautiful day with none of the forecast rain, and all the anticipated excitement of seeing a beautiful urban landscape from a unique perspective. And that night, we watched the KFOG kaboom fireworks show from out on the water.
The next day we checked out Maker Faire for the second time. It sneaked up on us again, so we didn’t have the time or freedom from a certain Lego maniac to see as much as we wanted. Worse yet, there were no pictures taken. The reason goes back to the previous day.
While otherwise glorious, there was sadness, too, during our sailing excursion. Above is one of the last pictures my little D40x took before the shutter mechanism quit working. There was suspicion that the environment led to the failure. But I was careful to keep it pretty dry and I don’t think it was out there long enough for salty air to penetrate the body and gum up the gears. I’ve searched for information online and it looks like quite a few people have experienced the same error. One person posted a fix. I just need to get some tiny screwdrivers to take the camera a little bit apart and apply WD-40 to a gear or two. I’m hoping for the best, though clearly, the camera was not built to last as long as this bridge.
Pin holder
Last year we moved mom to a board and care facility on account of her increasing dementia, and it was while we were emptying out her apartment that I photographed everything in it for my Family Heirloom Project. Among the items was this one: a little ceramic bowl.
I attended kindergarten at Del Mar Elementary School and had Mrs. Kasner. She was an older lady with fiery red hair. I liked her just fine, although she occasionally sent me to the “thinking chair” or, if we were out on the playground, the “thinking step” to think about something I had done. All that thinking; maybe that’s where I picked up the habit that eventually resulted in grad school in philosophy. My cousin Tommy claimed that she once told him he’d never learn to read and that he never got over it.
In any case, we did a lot of art projects in her class. For example, there was lots of finger painting. I still remember the first day when we were told to bring an old shirt of our father’s to wear while painting. We wore them backwards. I still managed to get paint all over myself. One day, we did a ceramics project. I made a small, simple bowl. I remember shaping it with my fingers, over and over again, trying to get it right. I never really succeeded, but eventually got something to hand over to Mrs. Kasner.
So, I made this little bowl, and painted it blue and black. On the bottom was inscribed “Nickie AM”, because I was in the a.m. class. I brought it home and gave it to my mom as a gift. She did a lot of sewing and needed pins to be handy. She was always pinning things up for alterations, or pinning patterns to fabric, and so on. So she kept pins in it. For 40 years or more that thing sat on her sewing machine with pins in it. After we moved my mom, it came to our house and sat on a bookshelf in the office. Without the pins, of course.
Just a few months later I was cleaning up around the side of the house where the trash and recycling bins sit. I saw a little patch of blue on the ground and a wad of neurons jangled in my head. It was so familiar. I picked up a little chard, then another and another. My heart sank.
What one kindergartener made, another demolished. (I know, it’s a metaphor for a natural process all children and their parents go through.) I don’t know exactly what happened, and never will, I’m sure. Somehow Theo got ahold of the bowl and it became a play thing, until it broke. I have to admit that at first I was pretty mad. But when i looked into that sad, confused little boy’s face, I knew I had to just let it go. I might have gone a long time, maybe forever, never thinking about that little bowl. I don’t know what I would have done with it anyway, other than allow it to be another piece of baggage to carry around the rest of my life and eventually leave to someone with no personal connection or emotional attachment, and hence free to take it to the Goodwill with all the other old crap. So, that came sooner in this case. I didn’t have to carry it around another 40 years. Still, I can’t help feeling a little loss, not of material wealth, but of a piece of the story—a little hole, just like the growing gaps in mom’s memory.
One day in the waiting room
Efrosini Serafimidis
A couple of weeks ago I got a call from the board and care facility where my mom lives. It was late morning. They said she simply woke up complaining of intense pain and couldn’t move her left leg. She had been in bed all morning. I went over as soon as I could. She was clearly not able to move her leg much and certainly could not stand. But as she lay there in bed, she said she would be okay, that she just needed to rest her leg because she had been overdoing it. Then a little later, she said she had fallen down a couple days before and now it was sore. I had seen her a couple days ago. And the day before. This didn’t really quite add up. That’s not really a big surprise considering she has worsening dementia. Nonetheless, I worried that she had indeed fallen and that I wasn’t getting the whole story from the nursing home. They claimed she just woke up with pain in her leg.
She was actually in pretty good spirits and insisted she would be fine with some bed rest. I already had a lot on my mind that day, so I didn’t push it. I decided I would go back home to finish a couple errands and call the Kaiser advice nurse from there. I described the situation as best I could. The advice was to get to the ER as soon as possible. Which we did.
I started to assume the worst, which was that she had fallen and destroyed the hip replacement she had just had done in May, and from which that she had only just fully recovered. In fact, just two days before when I had seen her she was really getting around great with her walker, and taking a few steps here and there without it. This was part of the reason for my increased worry. She has always been incredibly stubborn. I plead with her to be safe and always use her walker. Which she doesn’t.
We spent all day and evening in the ER. They x-rayed her hip. It looked fine. That was a huge relief. She is so small that the x-ray image got about down to her knee, and the ER doctor saw something down there. So eventually they got another set of shots of the left knee. There they saw a bone chip. The location and lack of bruising suggested that she had not fallen. The doctor opined that something like a sudden muscle contraction could have pulled off a bit of her fragile bone. Perhaps she was catching herself from falling. It also appeared that there was not much to be done about it. After finally hearing back from the orthopedic doctors about her x-rays, the ER doc declared that they would put a brace on her leg and that we could leave. But it was now midnight. Everyone would be asleep at her facility. I would have to get her into my car here, and out at the other end—or pay a few hundred bucks for an ambulance. And she was pretty loopy from the morphine, not to mention tired and in pain when she moved. Moving her at the moment didn’t see like a good idea. So, I talked the doc into keeping her there in the ER overnight so that I could come and get her in the morning. Which I did.
We had an appointment with the orthopedists the following week. We sat in the waiting room. I took some pictures. Eventually we saw the doctor. The doctor agreed that surgical intervention was not worth it. But she cautioned that it would be painful for a while. Which it has been.
Photography Show: Auto Archeology at Chop Salon
Auto Archeology East Bay
Photography Art Show at Chop Salon: Auto Archeology East Bay
I’m happy to announce my next photography show, coming up very soon! I will have a series of photographs of found autos from around the East Bay on display at Chop Salon hair salon. I have the editing almost done; it’s down to two sets of images, and I’ve got to pick which one to print tomorrow. It’s definitely down to the wire but I expect the show to be all hung and ready for the reception, Friday Evening, November 6. I will be up through the end of December. I will update with start time and more details in the next day or two.
The first set consists of complete broadsides of cars found parked on the street. Set B includes cropped cars. I’m not sure which it will be at the moment, but I’m leaning towards A. I’ll be including the nine square format shots of cropped cars from the last show (yes, sadly none sold from that), and I’m thinking the complete cars will provide the right amount of contrast. Here is the first set.
Here is the second set.
The Old Plymouth
Old Plymouth off Broadway #3
I have a soft spot in my heart for Pontiac. Ever since word of its demise, I have been meaning to take a picture of the sign at the dealership on Auto Row in Oakland. I finally got around to it the other day. And while I was driving around looking for a place to park, I saw some other photo ops on the side streets. This old Plymouth was in beautiful shape. And as I just commented over on flickr, I have to admit I find it very sexy in a zaftig sort of way.
Chimneys of Albany
Albany Chimney #8
The leaning, the straight. The clean and symmetrical, the organic mess. Squared, rounded, rock, brick, plastered. These are the fireplace chimneys of Albany.
I would hate to apply a misleading name to something. Looking on the web and within Flickr, “fireplace” seemed like it would be more misleading than “chimney” which is also a little snappier. If there is a better word for referring to the exterior structure of the fireplace and chimney on a residential home, please let me know.
In any case, it seems that these houses, like most of the houses in Albany, were built by a builder named Charles M. MacGregor. Around here, a necessary and sufficient condition for dubbing a house “a MacGregor” is that it has the following floor plan: split level with garage at grade, main living area up about 8 steps, and two bedrooms and a bath above the garage. The master bedroom is right over the garage looking out towards the street, followed by a bathroom , followed by another bedroom overlooking the back. I suspect this can’t be a correct definition, but it works well with the rest of the local MacGregor mythology. Me, I look for whimsical chimneys.
I’ll try to dig more on the man and the myth soon.
Stream of consciousness: Scenic photos
Climbing up on Albany Hill
San Francico Bay from Albany Hill, Sept. 19, 2009 #2
I’m not sure what to call the kind of photography I have been primarily engaged in since getting back into it over the last two years. I just know it hasn’t been landscapes and scenic photography. Indeed, I have not been trying to make images that are overtly beautiful or aesthetically pleasing at all.
Yet, there is something irresistible about nature. Often, it is awe-inspiring. And as we all know, sensations of pleasure, well-being, and the loss of self in the one-ness of the creation often lead to addiction. Gotta get that fix again and again. That leads to wanting it for oneself, even in a puny way like making a picture of it.
That’s not to denigrate scenic photography. I find a lot of it pretty wonderful. I just also see the production of it as beyond my ken–not to mention my lacking the wherewithal to afford the gear and the travel to seriously pursue and produce beautiful scenic photography.
All that said, I’ve had fun working with some shots of San Francisco Bay taken mostly as an afterthought–or just because I always have my camera with me, so why not? And the other night I was at a friend’s home that is on Albany Hill and overlooks almost the whole bay. After taking a couple shots from the deck, someone showed me the Richard Misrach book of the Golden Gate. It was inspiring. I came to see the intrinsic interest of a series of photographs of one thing taken over all the different conditions to which it may be subject. I think I may try my own little series from a given vantage point and see what happens. If only I could get a neon martini glass, or rusted car, or dead cow or something in there…
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