52 week Challenge: Week 34

WEEK 34: Portrait: Child – Candid or posed, capture an image of a child. Try getting down on their level for a unique perspective.

OK I’m cheating on this one a bit, but there is a reason why. At my age I don’t have any friends with young children and I am surely not going to start poking around a school or someplace trying to get a picture of a child. I value my liberty too much for that. My daughters will always be my children and as two of them are still under 18 that means they are children, at least in the legal sense. So, here goes:

160907_52wk34_portraitchild

~Richard

September 8, 2016 1

52 Week Challenge: Week 35

WEEK 35: Landscape: Nature up Close – Get up close and personal with nature in this natural beauty shot. Flowers, bees, bugs and spiders might all make great shots

One of the easier challenges, in my opinion. I have recent shots of a dragonfly or fungi that I could use but in the end I was persuaded by a friend to use the autumnal one below as it seems pertinent with the leaves starting to fall from the trees around us.

How short summer seems to have been…

(Oh, and yes, for those of you who have noticed, I have skipped week 34 temporarily. I’ll come back to it as soon as I can.)

~Richard

September 7, 2016 2

52 Week Challenge: Week 33

WEEK 33: Artistic: Collaboration – Doesn’t matter what you shoot, just do with another artist. Share vision and ideas. Collaborate.

For this composition I decided to look back to a brief visit I had to the UK in the early summer. My mother is an amateur watercolorist and oil painter with a keen eye on composition. As we were standing outside her kitchen door enjoying the sunshine in a bright, cloudless sky she pointed over to her fence and the rambling rose that was overhanging it and suggested that I take a photograph because of the beautiful bright red petals. I thought the arch of the flower made an excellent frame for the chimney pot on the neighbor’s house.

A collaborative artistic effort.

~Richard

September 6, 2016 0

52 Week Challenge: Week 32

WEEK 32: Landscape: Colorful – Shoot a landscape that packs as much color as you can find into the scene.

This was an interesting challenge. I haven’t had the chance to get out this weekend so I went through some of my recent images to see which would provide the most colorful compositions. In the end I have settled for this mixture of landscape and sort-of street scene that I took at the beach in Mahabalipuram, in Tamil Nadu Province, India a few months back. The beach activities don’t really start up until much later in the day but even so the place is full of bright color.

160905_52WK32_ColorfulLandscape

~Richard

September 5, 2016 2

52 Week Challenge: Week 31

WEEK 31: Portrait: Street Candid – Candids on the street, show us life in your town through the lens.

OK, it’s not my town, but it is my side of the country at least, and quite nearby. I took this on a recent trip to NYC. A particularly muscular looking chap was using the reflective properties of a storefront to help his extremely strenuous workout with a resistance band. How ironic that he was stood next to a parasol advertising 100% beef…

~Richard

September 4, 2016 0

52 Week Challenge: WEEK 30

WEEK 30: Artistic: Patterns – Get inspired by the rhythm that patterns bring to your images.

I cannot believe I am back to playing catch up yet again for this challenge! I really haven’t been all that focused (pun intended!) with all the hectic activities of summer. This image does not so much show a repeating pattern but the “pattern” of chaos as the universe descends to entropy…

~Richard

September 3, 2016 0

Art Talk: The Modern Juggler

A few months back I had the opportunity to wander around Philadelphia with my camera after I dropped off my daughter for an art class. It was an overcast day but I wanted to stroll around center city and see if I could get any interesting shots of the architecture. It was only a couple of days ago that I went back over the images and recalled this excellent sculpture by Robert Taplin, The Young Punch Juggling, that sat atop a plinth above the entrance to the Philadelphia Academy of Arts. I was particularly taken by the piece because of its apparent simplicity of design, and the unusual items that Young Punch is keeping aloft. They are reminiscent of the pieces in the board game Monopoly, at least to my mind.

To me the piece represents how we have to juggle many things in order to make their way through the modern world, at least in the industrial west. I don’t know how Mr. Taplin chose his objects but they seem to work. I’d be interested to see what others think, so please give me your opinion.

~Richard

September 2, 2016 5

I’m Alright Jack!

The last few weeks as a corporate cog have been a bit of a challenge, one way or another. Two phrases come to my mind, one from my British heritage in the form of the classic 1959 Boulting Brother’s comedic film, I’m Alright Jack, and the other from the more well known Kubrick adaptation of the Stephen King novel, The Shining.

It was a close run thing and although the latter inspired me to create the following artwork, I now feel more in tune with the sentiment of the earlier film’s title…

~Richard

August 30, 2016 3

A Century of National Park Service

Today is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, created to protect the wonderful tracts of wilderness, defined by Congress as National Parks, for all time. There are 59 of these sites spread across 27 states, and covering nearly 52 million acres (210,000 km2) and they truly represent something special.

My first introduction to them was many years ago as a teenager in the UK when I stumbled across the amazing work of Ansel Adams, particularly his stunning photography of the mountains in Yosemite, that were sold regularly in shops such as Athena, on the UK High Street. I had a huge poster of Half Dome on my wall for many years.

I would never have believed at that time that 25 years later I would actually be emigrating to the US, visiting Redwood and Yosemite National Parks from my new home in California and be able to take my own photographs.

The National Park Service does a great job of fulfilling their mandate to protect the National Parks and they also have a really nice website to educate us all on the parks and the other areas that are affiliated to the NPS or managed by them, such as National Historic Sites, Scenic Trails, Recreation Areas, Memorials, Battlefields, Heritage Corridors, and Waterways.

So, next time you or your family want some real quality time why not turn off the TV, check out their site and then leave your technology at home and enjoy some of the beautiful countryside that the United States has to offer?

Happy 100th NPS!

~Richard

August 25, 2016 2

World Photography Day 2016: the camera never lies; except when it does.

I stumbled on the fact that today is World Photography Day, courtesy of Facebook informing me of this odd fact. Given that it is estimated that around 250,000 photos are uploaded to Instagram every minute and around 2 billion (2,000,000,000) are added to the internet each day, I would think that every day is really a photography day, rather then just today! And these numbers are increasing as more and more of the world gets smart phones.

It’s amazing to think how far we have come since the early days of photography in the third decade of the 1800s, when we first managed to capture light directly onto a more permanent medium without going through an artistic representation involving brush strokes.

The truth, in all its glory or horror, could be shared more widely.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is credited with the first (surviving) photograph using the technique of heliography, in 1826. The image through an upstairs window is still visible (after enhancement) on the hardened bitumen layer on the glass in which it was captured. There is a great article on PetaPixel from 2013 regarding this that is well worth the read.

We have traveled far with technology since then. And so has our delivery of the truth through this objective medium.

It is an enlightening insight on the human psyche that from early on some photographers sought to mislead the public by clever editing and manipulation in the darkroom. Sometimes this was for humorous effect, such as the famous giant animal series, an example of which I offer here:

160819_Grasshopper
…but also for propaganda reasons too, such as manipulation of scenes in the famous photos of Abraham Lincoln and his new body,

160819_LincolnCalhoun

Ulysses S. Grant’s battlefront composite shot (nicely done)…

160819_UlyssesGrant1

160819_UlyssesGrant2

…through to the removal of people in official state photographs by Stalin …

160819_Stalin

… Mao Tse Tung…

160819_MaoTseTung

…Adolf Hitler, and many others.

160819_Hitler

These days, with digital images and easy to use software, we are bombarded on social media with photographs that purport to show some bizarre scene. Often they are so well edited that it is difficult to determine if they are fake, without resorting to forensic image analysis.

So, although the old adage “the camera never lies” still hold true, for when the image was actually taken, the same has never been true when processing the image for final viewing – even in the days of the Daguerreotype!

With that in mind, I leave you with a rare shot of the elusive Striped Rhino fish:

~Richard

August 19, 2016 2

Category: photography

52 week Challenge: Week 34

52 Week Challenge: Week 35

52 Week Challenge: Week 33

52 Week Challenge: Week 32

52 Week Challenge: Week 31

52 Week Challenge: WEEK 30

Art Talk: The Modern Juggler

I’m Alright Jack!

A Century of National Park Service

World Photography Day 2016: the camera never lies; except when it does.

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