Category - travel

Fall Tour 2021
Retrospective #1: Gettysburg

I have always been interested in American history.  Even when I was failing every other subject during my junior year high school, I did well in an American history class.  I am an attentive student of the ‘Early National’ period, owing in large part to my devoted following of Clay Jenkinson’s ‘Thomas Jefferson Hour” podcast (and I’ve been to Monticello like four times – I should dredge up some of those photos, too).

In 2011, that general interest in the subject drew me into a partnership with songwriter/producer/guitarist Thomm Jutz, songwriter Peter Cronin and a host of Nashville’s finest as Executive Producer for ‘The 1861 Project’ – a series of three CDs released to coincide with the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War.  In the course of that project, learned a great deal about the ‘War Between The States’ (aka ‘The War of Northern Aggression if you’re from the South) and in particular the gory details of the Battle of Gettysburg.

When I started thinking about a destination for my annual ‘Fall Tour’ last year, I decided it was finally time to see Gettysburg for myself.  I spent the better part of three days there, finally seeing for myself all the spots I’d read about: The Angle, Seminary Ridge, The Seminary Cupola, Little Round Top, the Highwater Mark of The Confederacy.

I’ve never done anything with all the photos I took during that trip, which also took me to Cooperstown NY (Baseball Hall of Fame), Quebec, Canada (the most European city you can drive to), New England (Alice’s Restaurant), my old stomping ground in New Jersey and Philadelphia.

Here’s some photos I shot during the first leg of the trip. Over the next coupla/few weeks I’ll post some from the other stops. I’d gotten off the socials a few months before that trip, and hadn’t fired up this site and My Dunbar Project until a few months after – so this is the first time I’ve shown this stuff anywhere.

  • Top down and ready to roll...

While I’m at it, here’s some of the best stuff from The 1861 Project:

Snow Day: Jan 6, 2022

It’s been a minute…

Happy New Year?

We’re having quite the “winter precipitation” event here in Middle Tennessee today. It started snowing just as I was getting out of bed around 7AM… oops, no walk through the neighborhood this morning. If I don’t get out later, today could be the first time in a couple of years that I don’t “close the rings” in my Apple Watch fitness apps.

What is it about a ‘snow day’ that invites the mind to wander? Is it just the notion that ‘nobody is going anywhere for a couple of days…’ that tempts us to back away from the usual sense of duty and obligation and consider other possibilities? That’s how I’m feeling at the moment. There is nothing I really have to do so… what would I like to do.

And it seems that the first place I turned is the open “Post” window for this website that I’ve been casually maintaining for what seems like a decade now.

Also: perhaps not coincidentally, today is the first anniversary of the “High Water Mark of the Conlunacy.” – apparently the last essay of any consequence I posted here.

Furthermore: I turned 71 while y’all weren’t looking, so all the miracles contemplated when I turned 70 remain germane.

I went on a road trip in late October/early November. From Nashville to Quebec Canada with stops in Gettysburg PA (for the battlefield) and Cooperstown NY (for the Baseball Hall of Fame) on the way up, and stops in West Hartford CT and Philadelphia PA (for family) on the way back. I nailed the timing, the foliage pretty much looked like this the entire time:

Shenandoah Valley, VA

Of course I took lots of photos along the way, but, also of course, I haven’t quite figured out what to do with them. Maybe I’ll just post some at random over the weeks or months ahead. Or maybe not.

Then it dawns on me, I can put the images on the web in a “shared album” via the Apple Photos app. Wanna see where I went? I’ll have to come back over the weeks ahead and tell the stories that go with the pictures.

An any event, Buster was certainly glad to see me when I got home. She is sitting wedged between my thigh and the arm of the chair I’m sitting in as I type, but here she is when I got home from the trip back in November. She likes to ride around the house perched on my shoulder.

I know, I haven’t been doing the Daily Busters, I haven’t been doing the occasional “Wisdom From A Typewriter,” hell, I haven’t been doing much online at all – mostly because back in June I got my sorry ass off of Facebook and Instagram, which is where I posted all that stuff.

Now I guess I have to find some… strategy?… for posting stuff here with some regularity. Such are the sorts of thoughts that never make it past the “vague intention” phase of their formulation – and beg for some attention in the midst of a ‘snow day.’

In the meantime, I have assembled all The Daily Busters in a shared Photos album you can view on the Web via iCloud.

Click the link above or the image to see all The Daily Busters

*

Having fully retreated from the toxic swamp of “social” media for the past six-plus months has altered my sense of ‘connection’ with the rest of the world – in ways that I am still hard pressed to make sense of.

On the one hand I rather miss the occasional – if ‘virtual – contact with people I care about.

On the other hand, I totally do not miss the obsessive ‘poke and scroll’ impulse or the subconscious desire for validation and gratification by inherent in “Like”s and comments. And I sure don’t miss being a peasant on Zuckerberg’s estate, tiling his digital fields for free while all the wealth goes to the Lord in his castle.

That’s about as much sense of the detachment as I can make for the moment.

In the months – years – prior to my “Zuckerberg Extraction”, I would often comment that I felt about Facebook (in particular) the way I felt about Scotch and vodka in the months/years before I finally stopped drinking. That was 34 years ago this past Thanksgiving. I wonder now, what was I like in that first year of sobriety? I think there may be parallels to what I’m feeling / experiencing now re: social media withdrawal. I don’t miss the reality of it so much as maybe I miss the idea of it, and even that passes with time.

But, still… what about the people I care about?

Who are they?

How do I stay in touch with them?

Do they want to stay in touch with me??

These are tougher questions to answer absent the casual association through the artificial mediation of something like Facebook.

But maybe I know where this is going, if I can muster the energy, focus, determination and consistency to get it there.

This vaguely forming concept of “analog social media” started during my road trip. I actually wrote and mailed a few postcards to people that I otherwise would have taken for granted would see my posts on Facebook. It was a much smaller potential audience, but as my friend Susan said when she got hers, “Postcards. What a great invention do you think they will catch on?”

Why the hell not?

So, I dunno, over the months ahead, I may pare down my bloated contacts database, find the 150 or so people I really want to keep in my life, and start sending them postcards – even if I’m not going anywhere.

Who knows, maybe some of them will send one back.

 

Speaking of Hogwarts…

(…which we were talking about three posts ago…)

While watching “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” I took particular note or the location where the words “the chamber of secrets is open” appeared in blood on a stone wall. What caught my eye was the extraordinary “fan vaulting” in the ceilings of what I tracked down to the Cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral in the English Midlands.

When I returned to the UK in the spring of 2017 to “Chase The Light in the Celtic Latitudes™,” I made a point to put Gloucester on the itinerary. I also made a point to get to the cathedral before it opened, so that I could be there before the crowds started showing up – Gloucester Cathedral is now a very popular destination for tourists, and takes some pride in its “Harry Potter” connections.

The Cloisters (an isolated quadrangle of corridors with access to a garden where monks and priests could retreat for solitude and meditation), did not disappoint. Although medieval gothic architecture originated in France and Italy, “fan vaulting” like this is unique to England, and Gloucester Cathedral is arguably the most elaborate expression of the form. (Henry VII’s Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey is pretty cool, too, but they don’t permit photography there at any time of day… )

Since I was there early the corridors were empty, and after a few minutes of wandering, I found this perfect angle capture the vaulting and some stained glass with a fisheye lens and five HDR exposures.

photo ©2017 [email protected]

Mama Barn and Her
Two Little Baby Barns

I made a “painting” today.

This original photo is from a road trip that Ann and I made around Lake Michigan in the spring of 2009. We went up the Michigan side, stopped at Mackinac Island for a couple of nights, then crossed over the Upper Peninsula and went down the Wisconsin side.

This scene was somewhere on the Leelanau Peninsula.

All digital, of course.

But hey, at least I’ve got something too show for my day off…

Click to embiggen:

The old Day Farm in Sleeping Bear Dunes Park

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…

What Did He Just Say???

So here’s what all the fuss is about...

This is 17 month old Juniper Rae, Ann’s first and quite possibly her only-ever grandchild. She is the primary reason why Ann decided to pull up stakes and move to Portland back in July.

Sunday night, we all – Ann and I, eldest son James, younger son Robert, Rob’s wife Melissa and Juniper – all tuned into the professional verbal wrestling match aka “The Presidential Debate” btw Hillary and Drumpf.

Her parents don’t let Juniper have a lot of screen time, and she doesn’t see much TeeVee, so this was an exception. But as you can tell from her expression, even a 1-year-old can look at Trump and wonder whatthefuck just came out of his incoherent noise hole.

Oh, and I have to put a dollar in the “swear jar” for saying “fuck.” Actually, I put in two dollars. Figured I may as well pay in advance for the next one…

Photo Challenge #2:
“Pendennis from St. Mawes”

For Day 2 of Ken Gray‘s Facebook 7-Day Photo Challenge, we’re reaching once more into the photo-wayback-machine. This is one of the very first manifestations of my fascination (preoccupation? obsession?) with medieval castles and abbeys

I made my first trip to the United Kingdom with my then-future-ex-wife Georja Skinner for five memorable weeks in the spring of 1976. The tour covered almost the entire UK.

We started with a couple of days on the Isle of Sark in the – a tiny refuged in the in the English Channel most notable for the nearly complete absence of motorized vehicles. Once in England proper we went as far west as Cornwall, north through the Cotswolds, Wales and the Lake District, and made it as far north as Edinburgh in Scotland. Unfortunately our car was broken into outside of Edinburgh, and – in a demonstration of what international travel newbies we were – our passports were stolen. We had to beat a hasty retreat back to the U.S. Embassy in London to secure temporary passports so that we could eventually fly home.

But I digress: the photo here was taken across the bay from the town of Falmouth on the south coast of Cornwall.

One either side of the mouth of Falmouth Bay are two fortresses built during the reign of Henry VIII to defend the English coast from invasion by the Spanish Armada. On the west side of the bay is Pendennis Castle; we spent a bit of time on the east side of the channel, at a nearly identical installation called St. Mawes Castle. While we were at St. Mawes, a spring storm rolled over the coast, and I captured the layers of clouds as they rolled past Pendennis with my Nikon F2, a 300mm lens and (I think) Ektachrome 400 film.

I have a print of this shot on the wall in my “library” (it’s just a small room with bookshelves, but I like the pretense of calling it “the Library”). The print was made and framed back in 1976 – it’s the oldest photo of mine presently on display in the house. I had it and several other photos from the era (like yesterday’s “Ground Strike“) scanned a few years back. They’re all digital, now….

The image that appears at the top of this post has been “landscape” aspected to fit the way “featured images” are displayed in these posts. Here’s the full “portrait” aspected image, which shows many more layers in the clouds and sky:

st-mawes