Category - photography

My Homage to ‘Mr. Turner’

Here, then, is my “digital homage” to JMW Turner…

Joseph Mallord Willam Turner (1775-1851), for those of you who have never heard of him, was one of Britain’s premier landscape artists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

I first learned of Turner several years ago after I started photographing medieval ruins in the United Kingdom. Turner traveled Europe extensively during his career, and painted dozens of canvases depicting the ruins that Britain’s aristocracy were just beginning to preserve during that period, often turning them into parks on their estates. When I started researching the sites that I had visited in the spring of 2013, Turner started showing up in my web searches.

I was of course intrigued by the 2014 feature film “Mr. Turner” that portrayed the artist during the peak years of his career.

When I returned to the UK in the spring of 2017, I sought out some of the locations that Turner had painted 200+ years earlier. My itinerary started in Chepstow, Wales (park car, see castle…), near the ruin of Tintern Abbey that Turner painted in 1794. I carried a file of his painting with me on my iPhone so that I could find and attempt to replicate his vantage point.

I did manage to find what I suspect was the spot where Turner stood when he painted the Abbey, though things look very different when viewed through an ultra-wide angle lens compared to a painter’s ability to render things with whatever perspective he can conjure with his brush. 200+ years can also do a lot to how a place looks; Turner’s paintings show ruins like Tintern in a native state, largely overgrown with vegetation. A lot of that growth has been pruned back and manicured in the centuries since preservation has become more of a priority.

Once I got home with the files, I put them through several layers of processing. First I blended 5 frames into a single HDR file. I loaded that into a “digital painting” program from Topaz Labs called “Impression” which can take photographs and overlay then with digital brush strokes. The program features several “Turner” presets, so I started with those and worked them with details that hopefully do Mr. Turner some kind of contemporary, digital justice.

But I didn’t stop there.

When I was in London at the end of the trip, I made a pilgrimage to the Tate Modern museum which houses much of Turner’s work. I spent several hours touring the Tate’s Turner exhibit. And, thankfully, they have no restrictions on (no flash) photography of Turner’s canvases. I took detailed photos of every one, thinking that I might have a use for some of the master’s skies…

Once I was back in Photoshop, I masked the (boring, bright, solid blue) sky out of my Tintern Impression, and made a background layer out of one of Turner’s paintings. So this is a composite of my digitally processed photo and an actual JMW Turner painting.

On the left is Turner’s painting from 1794; on the right, my digital homage from 2017, created with Photoshop, Aurora HDR and Topaz Impression – with a ‘digital assist’ from JMW Turner himself.

Chasing The Light – UK 2017
Opening August 5 at The Arcade

Hello, friends…

It’s been a while, I know. But (among other things) I’ve been traveling…

Last month I returned from spending three weeks in England and Wales “chasing the light in the Celtic latitudes” – during that time of year just before the summer solstice, when the light that cinematographers call “Golden Time” lasts for nearly three hours.

I have hundreds of new photos to share with you: photos of ruins as well photos of living, medieval cathedrals and churches. And stories. So many stories about the places I visited and the things I saw.

So my main reason for writing today is to invite you to the first showing of this new work during the Downtown Art Crawl on Saturday, August 5 at the Erabellum Gallery 2nd floor of the Arcade. The Crawl runs from 6:00 – 9:00 PM.

To tempt you to come out and see what’s new, I’m attaching two digital files to this missive you can use as “wall paper” on your smartphone or computer:

P6051927_Aurora2017_HDR

The smaller, “vertical” file is from a medieval church in Yorkshire called Beverly Minster. It makes a great lock-screen wallpaper for your smart phone. The larger, “horizontal” file is the fan vaulting in the cloister of Gloucester Cathedral, where several scenes from the Harry Potter movies were filmed. That one makes a great wallpaper for your desk-or-laptop.

Those are not the actual files, those are just thumbnails I’m putting in this message. To download the actual files, click here. That will take you to a .zip in my Dropbox. Download the file and double-click on it, that will open the actual files. Then move them to wherever you keep your wallpapers.

There will be much more to show-and-tell at the Crawl. Please come by and say hello…

—PS

Farewell, “Alive Now”

….and thanks for all the fish?

For the past several years, it has been my unique and singular privilege to have photos from my visits to the UK (and other destinations) featured in “Alive Now,” a bi-monthly journal of prayers and meditations published by the Upper Room Ministries here in Nashville.

Sadly, “Alive Now” has just published the last issue of it’s ‘print edition’ – another victim of the relentless transition to digital media in the 21st Century.

On the other hand, I’m pleased to report that this final issues features not one, but two of my photos from England and Scotland – and this time, one of them (finally!) made the cover.

The cover photo is from Jervaulx Abbey – a Cistercian monastery that lies in ruin on a private estate in Yorkshire England. The interior photo is from St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Scotland, a destination known more for its golf than it’s ecclesiastics. St. Andrew’s Cathedral was once the largest church in all of Scotland, now all that remains is the East Facade, seen here through the arch of the West Gate.

I am forever indebted to Nancy Terzian, Beth Richardson and Gina Manskar for their support and patronage over these past several years. The inclusion of photos like these in their publications has provided some much needed validation of my fascination with these ruins.

It is appropriate, I guess, that the theme of this final edition of “Alive Now” is “Thresholds,” as we all pass through the thresholds of our daily existence to whatever awaits on the other side.

Thank you, Nancy, Beth, and Gina.

Onward…

Where’d Paul Go??

I can’t really know if anybody besides me has been asking that question, but if you’re one of the regulars around here (the numbers may not be legion, but the affection is sincere…) you may have been wondering why the frequency of posts to this site dropped off dramatically in the second half of last year (2016).

At least, I hope somebody noticed, and even if nobody did notice, I’m going to attempt to explain the absence.

So, where did Paul go?

He sorta went into hiding for awhile. His innate tendency to be reclusive and withdrawn when things “go all pear-shaped” got the better of him for several months.

Or, rather, maybe, he just had the wind kicked out of him, and he’s been trying to catch his breath.

Or maybe he’s been thrown into the middle of a lake and is treading water, trying to figure which shore to swim to.

Yeah, that’s it. Treading water.

Chalk it all up to disruption on a personally cosmic scale.

– – – – – – –

I remember exactly when the fabric of my universe started to tear: April 29, 2016.

Ann and I were in Portland, Oregon. She got back in the car and said,

“They want me to start August 1st.”

At that moment, the Big Bang Theory went into full reverse and my Universe started to implode….

Read More

Exit 2016, Enter 2017, Exit…

Well, here’s something good that happened in 2016 that bodes well for 2017…

For the past several years, I have been a regular contributor to the publication Alive Now – a bimonthly publication of the Upper Room Ministries which “speaks to the opportunities and challenges of following Christ in the modern world.”

Anybody who knows me and my lack of (organized) religious conviction will appreciate the irony in that mission statement.

Nevertheless, over the years Alive Now has featured many of my photos from my wanderings amid the medieval ruins of the U.K. I am endlessly grateful for the patronage of the magazine’s art director, Nancy Terzian and its editor, Beth Richardson – who also selected one of my photos from Scotland to serve as the cover of her book, Christ Beside Me, Christ Within Me: Celtic Blessings.

Alive Now has published enough of my photos – and actually paid for them! – that I’ve probably earned enough over the years to reimburse the trips I made to England and Scotland to shoot the photos of medieval ruins that they used (OK, not ALL of the photos were from the UK, but who’s counting?).

alivecover

click to embiggen

Now, the capstone of that fruitful relationship is in place. After however many years, I finally secured the cover of March/April 2017 edition of Alive Now. I know it’s a sin, but I’ve coveted a cover for as long as I have been submitting photos, and I finally have one.

Unfortunately, in what feels like a hangover from the annus horribilis known as 2016 (trust me, you want to follow that ‘2016’ link…), the cover comes with its own sad tidings: this will be the final print edition of Alive Now. The publication will continue, but as has befallen so many print publications in the past decade, all future editions will be online/digital only. Once again, The Medium Is The Message (#TMITM).

The photo on the cover was taken at a monastic ruin in Yorkshire, England called Jervaulx Abbey. I stumbled on Jervaulx while touring the UK in the fall of 2014 looking for more “Portals of Stone.”

Unlike the neatly manicured ruins that are maintained by well-endowed institutions like English Heritage, Jervaulx sits on a private estate. Its owners have gone to considerable effort and expense over the past decade to rehabilitate the ruin, but it still lingers in a state that is more reflective of how these ruins must have stood before their preservation became pet projects for the British aristocracy starting in the 18th century. That made spending an afternoon at Jervaulx an exercise in time travel that stopped in at least two different centuries at the same time.

And here is the ‘Portals of Stone’ version:

pa160471-edit

RIP “Rags”

She was 17 years old and was fading fast… last time I took her to the vet they told me there was a 70% likelihood she was suffering from liver cancer. It was pretty much downhill from there, and I finally put her down about two weeks ago.

And no, I did not put it all over Facebook etc., but this is my personal space on the web so I’m mentioning it here.

Ann found her at the gas station down the street not long after we moved into our house in 1999. Seems oddly apropos that she’d leave us about the same time as my wife (who moved to Portland, Oregon back in July).

I’m a ‘cat person,’ and Rags was ‘my’ cat. I named her for ‘Rags The Tiger,’ a character in the first animated cartoon series on television, “Crusader Rabbit” – which was created by Jay Ward and was something of a prototype for “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” You have to be old (i.e. my age, 65) to remember “Crusader Rabbit.”

Rags was a cranky, whiny cat. She’d cry for some attention, but when I picked her up to pet her, she’d lie in my arms for about 30 seconds and then start whining again. Hissing was a pretty regular part of her repertoire, too.

I took some photos of her about a year ago… I guess I knew then that she wasn’t going to be with us much longer. It wasn’t until I looked at these photos, just before I took her to the vet, that I realized what a beautiful cat she was.

Just more evidence that everything is permanent only so long as it lasts.

They Said “No Photos!”

but when has that ever stopped me?

File this one under the hashtag: #OnlyInNashville:

I went to the Ryman Auditorium last night for the “Guy Clark Celebration” – a tribute concert for one of Nashville’s most revered songwriters, who went on to the great writing room in the sky back in May.

The tone for the evening was set early on by host Vince Gill, who promised “three hours of music an no shitty songs.”

And no shitty singers, either. I’ve been going to stellar shows in Nashville for more than 20 years now, but this was a lineup like you’ll never see again.

How’s this for name dropping: Jerry Jeff Walker, Vince Gill, Terry Allen, Shawn Camp, Verlon Thompson, Sam Bush, Bobby Bare, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Joe Ely, Steve Earle, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Robert Earl Keen, Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White, Chris and Morgane Stapleton, Rodney Crowell, Lyle Lovett, Gary Nicholson, Delbert McClinton, Radney Foster and Bill Lloyd.. (thanks to Jim Moran for posting the cast of characters on Facebook).

You really can’t see ’em, but that’s who all is in the photo at the top of the post.

As I posted myself last night “I don’t need to go to any more concerts this year, I’ve already seen everybody…”

*

The Ryman was insistent throughout the evening that there were to be absolutely no photos of the show. Every time somebody in the audience pulled out a cell phone, an usher showed up to point an admonishing finger at them.

But when that stellar ensemble gathered on the stage for the last two songs, there was no way I was not gonna record that moment.

I got out of my seat (near the back of the upper deck, aka “The Confederate Gallery”) and went to the very back of the venue, got my iPhone out, discretely got it ready, and then brought it up to eye level and grabbed the ONE shot above.

Then the photo-Nazi usher ran up to me and said “No photos!”

And I said, “OK…” and went back to my seat.

*

If you were not fortunate enough to be present for last night’s tribute concert, consider going over to iTunes and investing in the tribute album that Tamara Saviano put together back in 2011, “This One’s For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark” – which includes performances by a lot of the artists who appeared last night. Or if you still believe in plastic delivery, you can get the CD at Amazon (it does not appear that the collection is available thru Spotify).

Then listen to it and give yourself a master class in songwriting.

"This One's For Him" - the Guy Clark Tribute album.

“This One’s For Him” – the Guy Clark Tribute album.

 

 

 

How To Shooting Star

As I mentioned yesterday on Facebook, I’ve been chasing the Perseid Meteor Shower since 1973.

That was the summer I drove across the country, after getting a diploma (I would use the term ‘graduated,’ but only loosely…) from Antioch College (I’d attended made-up classes at a branch campus in Columbia, MD. Remember, 1973 was still the 60s…).

I’d thrown a few things into the back of my 1966 VW Squareback (affectionately named “Duck” and sporting a Daffy Duck decal on the front fenders) and headed off to seek my fortune in Hollywood. I’d done some “guerrilla video” in college and figured it was time to see how real TeeVee was made, so off I went, taking three weeks to get from the east coast to the west.

Along the way I stopped at the Vagabond Ranch outside of Granby, Colorado, at the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park. I’d spent two summers there when I was 14 and 15 years old. Those might have been the best summers of my life. Vagabond wasn’t a “dude” ranch, but it was run as a Western-themed summer camp by a couple from Connecticut, Charlie and Ronnie Pavek.

Not very many people nowadays remember “Spin & Marty” – a short movie series that Walt Disney ran as part of “The Mickey Mouse Club” in the 50s; It was about a city kid (Marty) who got sent to a western ranch where he got to ride horses and friend up with a cowboy kid named “Spin.” That’s about as much as I remember about the series, but it was always my frame of reference; I still tell people that I spent two summers in the mountains of Colorado, “acting out my ‘Spin & Marty’ fantasies.

For the four summers before Vagabond, my parents sent me for two months at a time to a ‘sleep over’ camp in Maine called Kennebec – a sports driven, competitive environment inhabited mostly by affluent Jewish kids from the Northeast. That’s where I spent the summer of 1962 being tormented by an 11-year-old monster named Jeffrey Katzenberg (the name might be familiar?). But that’s a story for another time.

I never exactly excelled at sports; I could hold my own at tennis and I was an OK sailor, but the first time another kid threw a hardball at my head (he wasn’t aiming at me, he was just 11 years old and it’s not like he had any control…) I knew I was never gonna be a baseball player.

Basically, sports suck when you suck at sports.

Vagabond was the exact opposite of Kennebec. There were almost NO sports. Instead, I spent the summers mostly riding horses in the mountains. Unlike Camp Kennebec, I have nothing but fond memories of Vagabond Ranch. I even recall with some distant fondness the night I spent shivering under a tarp in the rain at 11,000 feet; and my favorite horse, a red mare named “Strawberry.” She could be tough to catch in the coral, but once saddled Strawberry was a soft and responsive ride.

So that summer of 1973, I made my way across the country, alone in my little VW – Niagara Falls, the The Great Northern Plains, The Badlands, The Black Hills, The Crazy Horse Monument – I stopped at the Vagabond Ranch and said hello to the Pavek’s.

I must have gotten there the night of August 11 –because that night all the campers were taken out to a meadow to lie on their sleeping bags and watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. I’d never heard of the Perseids before that. But once I saw them – probably 2 or 3 shooting stars every minute – I was hooked. I’ve tried to see the Perseids almost every year since.

The flier my then-future-ex-wife Georja Skinner made for the Perseids cruise we ran in August of 1982.

The flyer my then-future-ex-wife Georja Skinner made for the Perseids cruise we ran in August of 1982.

Probably the best I ever saw the Perseids was from a few miles off shore from Lahaina, Maui, in the summers of between 1981 and 1992.

From Lahaina, you start out 70-some nautical miles from Honolulu, the nearest big city; once you get a few miles offshore there’s little impact from the lights of Maui. The sky is ink black and there are stars by the bazillions. The years we went out on the boat, we probably did see 60-100 shooting stars every hour (but not every minute!)

In the summer of 1999, I went back to Vagabond Ranch with my then-future-and-still-second-wife Ann. The Ranch was no longer owned by the Pavek’s (who were no longer living) but was owned the family of Richard Kelly, the owners of – how’s this for irony?– a large hotel chain in Hawaii. Since the Kellys only visited the Ranch occasionally, the caretakers of the property, Mark and Jane Bujanovich, welcomed us to stay a few nights and we watched the Perseids with them. I’d forgotten how cold even a mid-August night can get at 8,000 feet…

It has been harder to see the Perseids since I’ve been living in Nashville, but almost every year when there’s been a waning or new moon, we’ve tried. Last year we went out to Bell’s Bend. This year I went out to the Natchez Trace and set up my camera with my photo-buddy Ken Gray.

*

So this is how you shoot a shooting star: you drive as far away from the city as possible. The Natchez Trace Parkway outside of Franklin, TN is only one order of magnitude-of-light-polution less than Nashville and its environs, but it’s a decent night sky.

You start at about 11 PM. You set your camera on a tripod with a remote control shutter release. You aim the camera at a dark corner of the sky with the widest-angle lens in your bag (in my case a 14mm equivalent) to cover as much of the sky as possible, and set the shutter to open for 15-30 seconds with the aperture wide open at a fairly high ISO, like 1600. The 15-30 seconds is long enough to get an exposure from the star field, and you hope that the high-ISO is enough to capture the fleeting light of a hot grain of cosmic dust as it streaks across the frame.

After that, it’s entirely random. So you open a folding camp chair, sit down, and just start releasing the shutter, over and over again, until something streaks across the sky while the shutter is open,

And then you apply the one tool that you will not find in any camera bag: abundant patience. A little luck helps, too.

In this case, I shot about 100 frames, between roughly 11PM and 2 AM.

This was yet another year when the coming of the Perseids was touted as going to be the most dazzling display in memory. That’s what they say every year. But every year… enh. Not so much.

I exposed frame after frame after frame, but for more than two hours, nothing happened in the frame. Once exposed, the camera takes as long to save the file as the shutter was open – 15 or 30 seconds. Several times, that’s when something blazed across the frame. But for as long as I was out there, it was less like 2 or 3 every minute and more like 1 every two or three minutes.

As 2:AM approached… I finally got one. After that, it’s like fishing. You get one… you want another. It did seem like the activity was picking up a little, an so I kept releasing the shutter. Slightly after 2AM, I got one more, a little better than the first. That’s the one at the top of the post.

And then I drove home.

So that’s how you shoot a shooting star. You go out in the wee hours of the morning. And you wait. And then you wait some more. And when you’re finally ready to give up… you get one.

Forty-plus years I’ve been chasing the Perseids. That’s the first I ever got a picture of one.

But regardless of the actual number, every Perseid Meteor or see is filled with the memories of a lifetime of shooting stars.

Photo Challenge #6: General Grant

Starting in 2010, I worked on The 1861 Project [Spotify]: “A collection of new, original songs, recorded in a contemporary acoustic style, telling the stories of the real people who fought and lived through America’s Civil War…” The project was the brain child of Thomm Jutz, who co-wrote all of the songs and produced all the tracks on three CDs released between 2011 and 2014. I partnered up with Thomm and co-writer Peter Cronin to get the CDs produced and distributed.

Besides my role as the Executive Producer on the project, I also found myself supplying all the photos for the CDs ands the few live shows we did. This meant that starting in the late winter of 2011, I attended numerous Civil War reenactments, during the course of which I got to know some of the unique… ummm… characters.. that populate these events.

Among the most colorful characters I encountered was Dr. Curt Fields, an educator from the Memphis side of Tennessee who portrays Ulysses S. Grant, the Union commander who did “the terrible arithmetic” (Lincoln’s words) that finally ended the war in 1865. I first met Curt at the Sesquicentennial reenactment of the Surrender of Fort Donelson, which was one of the first engagements that marked Grant’s ascendance in the winter of 1862.

Let’s just say that “General Grant” has a keen sense of “his” place in history, and so is quite cooperative about posing for photos. In fact, I went back to another reenactment of Fort Donelson a year later, and Curt arranged for us to get onto the grounds of the actual fort where the battle was fought for a few location shots – like this one of General Grant and two of his aides posing with one of the big guns overlooking the Cumberland River.

General Grant and his colleagues at Fort Donelson - March, 2013

General Grant and his colleagues at Fort Donelson – March, 2013

I ran into Curt/General Grant at several other events over the course of the years of the Sesquicentennial. I guess he rather liked the photos I took of him, because he always did me the great honor of addressing me as “Mr. Brady” – i.e. “The Matthew Brady of the Reenacted Civil War.” Considering how many people have also worked with the very photogenic “General Grant” – and Curt’s equally photogenic wife Lena who portrays Mrs. Grant – it’s quite a distinction.

The last time I saw Curt was in Appomattox, Virginia, where he portrayed General Grant at the Sesquicentennial of Lee’s surrender in April, 1865. That excursion produced this photo:

Unity - The Final Interview - Grant and Lee at Appomattox - April 10 1865/2035

Unity – The Final Interview – Grant and Lee at Appomattox – April 10 1865/2035

…which I still like to think of as one of the defining images of the Sesquicentennial.

When I first saw that image in the LCD on the back of my camera, I thought I had my “Hindenburg” shot (OK, maybe not quite that dramatic, but you get the idea…). I tried to get prints or products with this image into the Appomattox National Park gift shop, but they turned me down. The manager said the horses are too fat. Go figger…

But I digress…

The image that I’m submitting as the penultimate entry in my “Facebook Photo Challenge” (which I have failed utterly because you’re supposed to put up 7 pictures in 7 days and I think I’m on the second week here…) is the one at the top of this post…

It shows “General Grant” shortly after emerging from the McClean House, where Lee accepted Grant’s terms of surrender on April 9, 1865. After the formal reenactment ceremonies were concluded, General Lee rode off quietly in one direction, and General Grant rode off to greet the crowd that had assembled for the occasion, where he delivered what can only be described as a “comedy routine on horseback.”

I don’t know how he does it, but Curt Fields is so well steeped in everything that has ever been written either by or about Ulysses S. Grant that he can hold forth for hours at a time and tell stories about Grant from Grant’s own perspective. The material is all Grant, but the delivery… well, that’s all Curt. He keeps audiences enthralled, and while he has their attention he delivers a rich education on the true history of America’s Civil War and the men who fought, won, and lost it.

Curt Fields is much more than a cliche “Civil War reenactor.” He is the quintessential embodiment of a “living historian.” I’m proud to consider him my friend and I hope these photos capture a little bit of what he brings to the experience.