Tag Archives: Photography

Book Review
Under the Catalpa Tree
Jim Grey

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Like pictures? It’s got ’em. Like variety? Got that too. There are enough pictures to fill a deck of cards or a weekly calendar, which is not accidental. The premise for the book was writing an article to accompany a photograph every week for a year. That could very well be a student assignment in an overly long writing course and in a sense it is. Jim Grey assigned himself the exercise to, as he says, “strengthen this muscle”. He is referring to the writing muscle which can surely benefit from practice just as much as a musician’s skill or an athlete’s strength.

Even though photographs are at the heart of Under the Catalpa Tree, the book’s subtitle mentions only “stories and essays”. I’m guessing that is at least partially because only the stories and essays needed to be newly created for the book. The photos already existed from Grey’s many years of photographing the world around him. He doesn’t explain how the photos were selected. I am sure it was not completely random but there is tremendous variety. They range in quality from slightly fuzzy black-and-white snapshots taken years ago with a yardsale camera to crisp color images taken with high-end gear and well-developed skills. Some photos are digital but film is the source of many of the images since Grey collects — and heavily uses — film cameras. Among the subjects are family, friends, cars, houses, nature, and an abbey in Ireland.

Of course, the subjects of those stories and essays are as varied as the subjects of the photos. Some essays are tightly tied to the photo they accompany and describe exactly how the photo came to be and the thoughts it invoked. For others, the photo is essentially a jumping-off point for some more or less unrelated observations. In both cases, the thoughts and observations tend to be rather insightful.

A detail I appreciate is laying out the book so that all images are alone on a left-hand page. That happens naturally when the text occupies a single page, which is common, or three pages, which is not. There are quite a few two-page essays where a blank is used to get things back in synch. Totally worth it, in my opinion. Those pages, by the way, utilize Amazon’s premium paper which has the photos looking their best.

With all the variety I have mentioned a couple of times, it is not easy to nail down a concise description of Under the Catalpa Tree. The best I can do is this: An illustrated set of glimpses of one Indiana resident’s memories and thoughts from the end of the last millennium and the beginning of this one.

Under the Catalpa Tree: And Other Stories and Essays, Jim Grey, Midnight Star Press (January 1, 2024), 8.25 x 8.25 inches, 156 pages, ISBN 979-8869992697
Available in paperback through Amazon or as a PDF direct from the author here. 

Book Review
Square Photographs
Jim Grey

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In my unprofessional and biased opinion, this book represents what Jim Grey does best. I believe it is his fifth book. It is the fourth that I’ve reviewed. Although I enjoyed reading the collection of essays entitled “A Place to Start” when I sat down to write a review I just couldn’t figure out what to say. I did review Grey’s most recent offering, “Vinyl Village“, and deemed it a success in accomplishing its mission. That mission was to tell the story of a subdivision in pictures. I noted in that review what I thought was one of the biggest differences between “Vinyl Village” and the two earlier books, “Exceptional Ordinary” and “Textures of Ireland“. Each photograph in the first two books could be appreciated all by itself; few if any in “Vinyl Village” could stand alone. That’s not a bad thing and it’s not an accident. The goal was to tell a story in pictures and it makes sense that all the pictures are required to tell all of the story. It does, however, serve to explain why I like this and the first two books best. I said up front that my opinion is biased.

“Square Photographs” contains forty photographs that are capable of standing alone. All were taken with one of two 1960s Yashica twin-lens-reflex cameras in Grey’s collection. These are medium format cameras using 120 film to produce 60 mm by 60 mm negatives. I’m guessing that I don’t really have to explain where the book gets its name. Cameras that produce square images were once fairly common but are quite rare today. Smartphone cameras, the most common of all, typically record images with a 4:3 ratio.

The book is organized so that all photos are on the right-hand page and of a uniform size that essentially fills the square page. Text that varies from a couple of lines to several paragraphs is on the left. It might describe the picture, share some facts about the subject, or share something personal related to the image. The bottom line of text always identifies the camera and film that produced the image. Putting a squarish subject in the center of a photograph yields a pleasing image with a background balanced both vertically and horizontally. “Square Photographs” contains several such images.

Of course, not every subject is square or even symmetric. Composition techniques different than those used for rectangular photos can come into play. As Grey explains in the brief introduction, the 1:1 ratio is familiar to him from some of the cameras of his youth but for the rest of us, it might seem a little unusual.

The pictures are almost evenly split between color and B&W. The copy I have is printed using the highest quality paper and ink available from Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon) and I think it looks great. However, an even higher quality version is available from MagCloud.

“Vinyl Village” was the first photo-centric book that Jim published through Amazon. I thought the quality more than sufficient for the task. Others, apparently, did not. I certainly appreciate the increased image quality of this printing and don’t doubt that the deluxe edition is worth the additional cost but sure don’t see any reason for what I sense are some feelings of guilt associated with “Vinyl Village”. In this book, where the photos are the product, the additional cost is justified. Not so, in my opinion, for B&W pictures illustrating a story.

I first heard of this project when it was still in the planning stages. In the time between then and its recent completion, I’ve realized that, despite the lack of cameras that produce them, square images aren’t as alien to us as I first thought. One example is Facebook’s profile pictures. Another is Instagram which initially supported only square photos. I understand that other form factors are now allowed but I still square my submissions — when I remember. The reason I started doing that was because some software would blindly chop out a square in the very center if I didn’t and that was rarely the best square to be had. I’m sure there are other examples.

I’m used to squaring rectangular pictures. For this blog, thumbnails are simply automatically created scaled-down replicas of the full-size rectangles but for the journal portion of the website, thumbnails are square. It’s something I’ve never mentioned and something I doubt anyone has noticed. If so, they’ve not mentioned it. For the first journal, I extracted odd portions of photos for thumbnails but that was tedious and not well received. I very quickly moved to 72×72 pixel squares which became 100×100 pixel squares by the fifth documented trip and there it remains. Occasionally I’ve thought of adopting automatically shrunken rectangles but the squares allow me to get more of them in a given screen area and producing them is good mental exercise.

The standard edition of “Square Photographs”, like the one I have, can be obtained through the Amazon link at the bottom of this article. Links to both the standard and deluxe editions as well as some additional information can be found here.

Square Photographs, Jim Grey, Midnight Star Press (June 12, 2022), 8.5 x 8.5 inches, 86 pages, ISBN 979-8835769872
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Vinyl Village
Jim Grey

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Jim Grey blogs, collects film cameras, uses those cameras, develops the film himself, walks, bikes, and observes. Put them together and what have you got? This book.

It’s a photo essay which is is something Grey has produced twice before; first in 2017’s Exceptional Ordinary then in 2018’s Textures of Ireland. There are technical differences between this and the earlier offerings that I’ll get to in a bit but I’ll first mention what seems to be the biggest departure. In the other two books, the photos were themselves the stars and their subjects of secondary importance. That’s not to say that it didn’t matter what appeared in the photographs but that the subject of the essay was not the subject of any of the pictures. An easy to describe aspect of that is the fact that each photo in the earlier books could stand alone. With Vinyl Village, they stand as a group. The subject of the pictures IS the subject of the essay.

That’s almost certainly what Grey means when he says, “I’ve never tried to tell a story with photographs before, not on this scale.” A photo essay is defined as “a group of photographs arranged to explore a theme or tell a story”. All three of Grey’s published photo essays explore a theme; only this one tells a story.

It is a story about the neighborhood in which he lives, and where he interspersed COVID-triggered working-at-home with some calorie-burning walking-near-home. We are introduced to the neighborhood as a collection of modestly priced homes in an area of pricier residences. A big attraction is access to very good schools at somewhat bargain prices. Although the location makes them bargains, they are hardly shabby and actually look quite attractive — from the front.

Construction is wood frame with vinyl siding and brick accents. Those accents, however, are almost entirely on the front of the houses. The other three sides are the focus of the story. Part of Grey’s story is about these sides being exposed by the curving streets, numerous retention ponds, and open spaces created by electric and gas lines.

The rest of the story is about those exposed surfaces and areas being a long way from handsome. The story’s name comes from the large expanses of vinyl siding exposed by those curves and ponds. Windows are few and from the outside often appear to be placed rather randomly and often awkwardly. Many side walls are unbroken by any windows at all.

There are few words but lots of pictures. The pictures are black and white and large. The most common arrangement is two 4×6 inch photos to a page. Where words do appear, they typically share a page with one of those 4×6 photos. Occasionally a photo gets a page all to itself which lets it grow to approximately 5 1/2 by 8 1/4 inches. Grey has changed publishing platforms (from Blurb to Amazon) for this project which results in some physical differences from the previous essays. The pages are slightly smaller (8×10 vs 8.5×11) and the paper used is uncoated rather than semi-gloss. Photo quality does suffer but again it is the subject of the picture that is important. The pictures are here to document the subject and illustrate Grey’s story, not to be admired in and of themselves. It’s an assignment they handle quite well.

Jim handles his own assignment, that of telling a story with pictures, quite well also. Beauty may be only skin deep and curb appeal only as thick as a brick but that can be enough if a great personality or a highly rated school is involved.

Vinyl Village, Jim Grey, Midnight Star Press (October 16, 2021), 8 x 10 inches, 64 pages, ISBN 979-8498035475
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
A Matter of Time
Ellen Klinkel & Nick Gerlich

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There’s not much point in counting the number of books published about Route 66; The likelihood that the count would increase before you were done is just too great. An Amazon search simply says “over 2,000”. So why review this one? What sets it apart from the others? The most obvious reason for reviewing it is a simple one: I know one of the people whose name is on the cover. The things that set it apart are not as obvious (or benignly biased). In fact, I’ve only found one thing about the book that I think is actually unique, and I’m not really sure about that. The book has no author; It has a narrator.

Nick Gerlich’s role choice is significant. This is a photobook. Its reason for being lies in Ellen Klinkel’s photographs. They could exist without any accompanying words at all and still tell a story. That certainly doesn’t mean that Gerlich’s words aren’t welcome and useful. It’s simply an observation that the words are narrating a story — really just one of many — present in the pictures. Gerlich, whose day job is as a college marketing professor, is extremely knowledgable on Route 66. In the past, he has filled the role of narrator, in the more traditional sense, for KC Keefer’s series of Unoccupied Route 66 videos. Regardless of whether he is narrating on screen or in print, he writes and researches his own scripts.

The photos are black and white, which is unusual but not unique. What may be unique is how they came to be at all. Klinkel tells that story in the book’s preface. It begins in 2013. She lives in Germany and was in the western U.S. with her husband for a four-week vacation which she describes as “the first time I ever had a serious camera in my hands”. Planned visits to several national parks fell victim to the sixteen-day government shutdown in October of that year and driving a portion of Route 66 was substituted. Klinkel credits this very first time on the historic highway coupled with the “serious camera” as having “instantly sparked my passion for photography”.

No pictures from that 2013 trip made it into A Matter of Time. All photos in the book were taken between 2015 and 2017. Klinkel refers to the images as “fine art photography”. It is a phrase I tend to associate with wall mounted prints or coffee-table-sized books with extra thick pages, but that’s wrong. A piece of the definition of fine art photography is something “in line with the vision of the photographer as artist”, and that fits the images in A Matter of Time very well. They are not artsy in an abstract pattern of shadows way, but in a way that works to capture a “vision of the photographer” and encourages the viewer to mentally reproduce that vision.

Most, but far from all, of the photos are of places I recognize from my own travels on Sixty-Six, and some of those nearly reproduce visions I’ve had myself. There are plenty of pictures of places I do not recognize. Sometimes that’s because they are from a location where I’ve never stopped or maybe even passed, but sometimes it’s because Klinkel sees and shares a vision that never occurred to me even though I’ve stood at or near the very spot she did. I don’t mean to imply that I expected anything else. It’s great to be shown something you’ve never seen, but it can be even better to be shown something known in a new way. Although it is a place I instantly recognized, a favorite example of being shown something in a new way is the early morning shot of the Bagdad Cafe with the coming sun just a tiny but significant twinkle. Another is the low-level shot of a protective wall of tires at a long-abandoned gas station at Texas Exit 0 of I-40.

I confess to initially not understanding the meaning of the word “time” in the title. I guess my first thought was of the elapsed time covered by the popular technique of using old and new images in “then and now” pairings. There is none of that here where no photo is more than five years old. Despite having read Klinkel’s preface, I early on settled on the time element being Gerlich’s words that placed the images in their proper time in history. Those words are certainly important. The often detailed and always accurate telling of how the subject of a picture came to be and where it is located provides both education and mooring.

However, something clicked on a rereading of that preface that hadn’t quite registered on the first pass. Klinkel explains the title quite clearly:

It is a matter of time in a historic and photographic sense; a mattter of being in time before a location fades away; a matter of being in time to capture the sunrise or sunset; a matter of having enough time and patience to wait for the right light and moment.

The historic sense is fairly common. Capturing things fading but not yet completely faded is something that many photographs do. The photographic sense is less so. Being in time and having enough time is not unique but it’s not all that common and it sure is refreshing. And it explains the impressive percentage and variety of truly interesting skies in A Matter of Time.

A Matter of Time: Route 66 through the Lens of Change, Ellen Klinkel and Nick Gerlich, University of Oklahoma Press, October 10, 2019, 10 x 8 inches, 272 pages, ISBN 978-0806164007
Available through Amazon.

BLINK II

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This is the second coming of BLINK. The first was in 2017 when I underestimated the crowd, arrived too late, and missed the parade entirely. That story is here. This year I arrived in plenty of time, again underestimated the crowd, and missed the parade mostly. Reinforcing the claim that I arrived in plenty of time are pictures, like the one at right, of parade entries in the staging area. I could have taken up a spot in the front row of spectators but chose to roam around rather than stand still for an extra hour or so.

When I did decide to settle down, I thought I’d found a spot near the start behind a single row of spectators that I could see over. That turned out to be something of an illusion, however. There was a row of cell phone wielders seated on the curb and a steady wall of passers-by who tended to pause for extended periods until “encouraged” to move by the folks whose view they were blocking. Even so, I managed a few only slightly blurry pictures, including one of a glowing snail I had caught unlit in the staging area, before my phone rang.

For something more than a day, I had been expecting (or at least hoping for) an important phone call. My fears that it would arrive at the worst possible moment were justified. The parade started moving around 7:20; The call came at 7:32. I simultaneously accepted the call (it really was important) and the fact that I would see no more of the parade. I paralleled the parade route one block away but the route itself was lined by a more or less impenetrable wall of spectators about six deep. The picture is of 3rd Street. Despite being crossed by the parade, plans called for the westbound 3rd and eastbound 2nd to be kept open. That was clearly easier said than done. The cars at the left of the picture are in curbside parking spaces; The rest are not. The car in the foreground is running with its lights on; The rest are not. They are effectively parked in the street with many drivers and passengers beside or on top of their vehicles.

I believe the giant ‘O’ is the one I could see above the parade route people wall. The big wheel is a permanent fixture on Cincinnati’s riverfront. I snapped the picture of the big dog as it headed off to a garage at the end of the parade. It’s another entry that I’d caught in an unlit state. I never did see the dragon in the opening photo in motion.

Even though I couldn’t actually see that parade, I went ahead with my plans to reach its endpoint because I wanted to see the nearby Roebling Bridge. It had been the subject of a lot of BLINK promotion but I wasn’t nearly as impressed as I thought I’d be.

I’d read the advice about picking your targets at BLINK, but I ignored it. I’d done no planning in 2017 and stumbled into something impressive every block or two. I expected to do the same as I headed back north from the riverfront. It didn’t happen. I wondered if my sense of awe was dulled by having seen the technology before. Or maybe my disappointment at missing out on the parade was spilling over into other areas. Both of those are probably at play but I decided there was more to it when I reached the lot in the third photo. In 2017, one of my favorite projections had been here. The brick wall had been the target of a King Records themed projection. This year the lot held the light source for shadow puppets.

I crossed the street and ducked into the Bay Horse Cafe for a Hudy and contemplation. I developed no insight but enjoyed the beer and stepped out with my attitude slightly adjusted and ready to enjoy whatever I encountered. A rather nice projection (Purpose and Play) at 8th and Walnut was followed by the lighted seesaws on Court Street. The seesaws were down by the river in 2017. I think they looked better in that location, but folks were definitely having a good time with them here. My favorite projection of the few I actually saw was Razzle Dazzle at the Ensemble Theater.

In Washington Park, I captured the giant bouncy house that is Dodecalis. It’s one of the few BLINK installations with an entry fee and the only one (AFAIK) that requires shoes to be removed. My car was nearby and I headed there undecided if my sense of being underwhelmed was justified but too exhausted from walking to really care.

On Friday, I was back. B & H Photo Video, where I’ve spent a little money over the years, sponsored several BLINK related walks led by professional photographers. I took advantage of one in the Findlay Market area led by Derek Hackett of ChopEmDown Films. That’s Derek at our first stop, a mural literally just completed by Logan Hicks.

I found the face-on-the-wall extra interesting because it is carved into the surface. It is the work of a Portuguese artist using the name Vhils. The many eyes and bright colors of the second mural make quite a contrast to the photo-like monochrome carving. A bit further on, we encountered Galo, the artist who did it, working on a standalone piece.

Even though BLINK officially opened Thursday, Galo wasn’t the only artist at work on Friday. Two of them were finishing projects almost side by side, and both Tatiana Suarez and Elle waved to members of our group as we watched them at work. It was immediately obvious that, in addition to having fantastic artistic talent and the ability to work on a very large scale, these people must be able to operate that lift with controls mounted on the platform.

We visited several more murals and I took bunches of pictures but I’m only going to include one more from Friday’s walk. It’s another work in process. It is the work of a group calling themselves the London Police and I found it extra interesting because of the subject. The face in the center of the mural belongs to Tatiana Suarez who we just saw painting the mural of the lady and the swan.

I returned to BLINK yet a third time on Saturday. There are installations on both sides of the river this year and my original plan had been to attend two nights so I could check out the displays in Kentucky. After Thursday’s mild disappointment, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to go back, but Friday’s experience and seeing photos posted by others convinced me that I’d been the victim of bad luck, my own attitude, and a lack of planning. Saturday’s experience was more in line with my expectations. I parked in Covington, walked across the Roebling Bridge into Cincinnati, and checked out a few specific installations. They included an untitled work from Saya Woolfalk and the projections at the courthouse and the Contemporary Art Center.

Then I headed to the riverside and the giant rainbow that first appeared at Burning Man. The constantly changing LEDs make the thirty-foot arch much more than a rainbow. In the second photo, it frames one tower of the Roebling Bridge which I appreciated much more this time than I had on Thursday. The bridge is sometimes called the “singing bridge” because of the sounds made by tires on its grated deck. Recordings of some of the bridge’s sounds have been used to produce some slightly eerie but overall very pleasant music that is played through speakers in the park. My improved appreciation was no doubt aided by that music and the view of the bridge from water level.

There had been very few people on the bridge when I came north. It was now packed. It is closed to vehicles during the festival but both pedestrian walkways are open and filled. It had taken me several minutes to reach the point on the bridge where steps lead to the park. It took right at half an hour to reach the Kentucky shore from those steps. I probably spent a total of forty-five minutes shuffling over the bridge and overheard claims of an hour didn’t now seem as preposterous as they had when I first heard them on the Ohio side.

In Covington, a London Police mural is the base for an animated projection. I can’t help wondering who the model for the female figure was. Could it be mural artist Elle? I’m fairly confident that the model for the projection in the second picture is the world’s largest disco ball which people are dancing beneath just half a block away.

There is one day of BLINK remaining but I don’t anticipate another visit. It could happen though. Tonight that moon will be completely full.  

Book Review
Six of Each
Denny Gibson

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And now for something completely different. Anyone who thought releasing two books within three months might be overdoing it will have no doubts about that being the case when they see another appear a week later. But this is a different kettle of fish. Really. Six of Each is a collection of photographs drawn from the previously published travelogues. Each of those travelogues is available in two forms. There is a black-and-white printed version and a color digital version. Photo-quality color printing is still relatively expensive in the low-volume print-on-demand world. Printing the books in black and white keeps them reasonably priced. On the other hand, color in digital files is free. Offering B&W paperbacks and color ebooks isn’t ideal but it keeps the books affordable and color at least available.

I had pretty much given up on being able to offer any of the travelogue photographs in printed form at anything close to a reasonable price when I saw the chance to steal another idea from Jim Grey. Jim is an excellent photographer and successful blogger whom I’ve stolen from in the past. He is responsible for what became “Trip Peeks” to fill posting commitments with minimal work. Jim has published two photo “magazines” on the Blurb platform. One is in color and the other black and white. Both look quite good and they are not outrageously priced. Magazines are available in a single 8.5×11 inch page size and have a few other restrictions. The quality is not quite up to offset printing standards and the cost is not a match for black and white but both are much more acceptable than other print-on-demand products I’ve seen.

So what I’ve done is pick a half dozen pictures from each of the existing travelogues and combine them in a Blurb magazine. The magazine is only available through Blurb (that’s one of those magazine restrictions) and there is no digital version available (that’s my restriction). It’s also more expensive than it seems a 32-page “magazine” ought to be. But it does let me see what some of my photographs would look like using something besides black ink on stationary paper. And it’s there for anyone else who would like to look.

Six of Each, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, April 2019, paperback, 8.5 x 11 inches, 32 pages, ISBN: 978-0368444654

Preview or purchase at Blurb.

Take a look at Jim’s books here. My reviews are here and here.

I made a comment about seeing my photos “using something besides black ink on stationary paper”. The truth is I’ve seen some of my photos reproduced via some pretty high-grade offset printing in two books by Brian Butko: The Lincoln Highway: Photos Through Time and Greetings from the Lincoln Highway (Centennial Edition and newer).

Book Review
Textures of Ireland
Jim Grey

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A funny thing happened on the way to this review. Not funny ha ha; Funny peculiar. This is Jim Grey’s second book. I reviewed the first, Exceptional Ordinary, in April, 2017. I figured that this review would reference that one, make some comparisons, make some jokes. It would be fun; Maybe even funny ha ha. But that review has gone missing. I don’t know how or even when. I’ve plugged the hole left by the disappearance, but my memory’s way too far gone to try recreating the original review. The best I can do is try to compensate by being twice as impressed with Textures of Ireland as I would be otherwise.

That’s a joke, of course. It’s also impossible. I’m not saying that the book has pegged my impression meter, and that I couldn’t possibly be a little more impressed with it. I’m just saying that it has put the meter close enough to the max that there’s no room for doubling. I’m even impressed with the title. I think I would have picked up on the role that the various surfaces, from rough rock walls and bluffs to smooth water and glass, play in these photos, and I may have even happened upon the word “texture” at some point, but I can’t be certain. It’s the perfect word and I think having it in the title got me focused properly from the beginning. I don’t doubt that some would prefer not to be steered in anyway at all but for me I feel it was a good thing.

Grey’s considerable writing skills see very little action in Textures of Ireland. The first page is filled with text describing the trip he and his wife made to Ireland in 2016. Neither had been there before, and for her the trip included visiting homelands she had never seen and talking with relatives she had never met. The page also provides some common background for the book’s photos. All were taken with a Nikon N2000 and 35mm lens using Kodak T-Max 400 film. There is some discussion of the reasons for choosing that combination which include the camera’s ability to take quality photographs while being rugged enough to survive the casual handling and mishandling that seem to just naturally be part of vacations. The camera’s ready availability at reasonable prices was very much a factor since it meant that a camera disaster wouldn’t automatically be a financial disaster.

Without counting, I’m sure that first page contains more words than the rest of the book combined. The camera, lens, and film are the same for all thirty-five photos and the only additional information Grey shares on each one is their location. Clearly he expects the pictures to stand on their own. They do.

Although I’m sure I’d feel cheated if they weren’t there, even the few words that identify a photo’s location aren’t really necessary. Knowing where any of these pictures were taken does not make me appreciate them any more or any less. I’ll admit that a couple of the pictures made me curious enough to check out the location before I studied the image, but more often than not I’d spend some time soaking in an image then move on without knowing or caring where it was taken. The two exceptions were a picture of people walking over an unusual jumble of rocks and the picture of a hairpin turn on a steep road. The jumbled rocks were part of The Giant’s Causeway, and I think I liked knowing that because it was a name I’d heard before. The hairpin turn was in Glengesh Pass which meant nothing to me but became a place I might seek out if given the chance.

I’m not enough of a student of photography to understand why black and  white images convey texture better than colored ones. Maybe it’s because the absence of color forces the viewer to notice the shadows which are visual indicators of texture, or maybe it’s something else that I understand even less. About three months ago I was able to look over some original prints of some of the most well known photographs in the world. It was at an exhibit called “Ansel Adams: A Photographer’s Evolution” at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. No, I’m not about to compare Jim Grey to Ansel Adams, and I won’t even try comparing any of their photographs, but I will say that some of the same things that make Adams’ images worth looking at can also be found in some of Grey’s images.

I have other favorites besides the previously mentioned Giant’s Causeway and Glengesh Pass pictures. Two of them face each other. On the left a path bordered by tall (marram?) grass curves out of sight with water and a distant shore in the background. The photo on the right hand page starts with a layer of sand at the bottom, moves to a bit of shallow smooth water, then some deeper water covered in small waves. Above that is a dark shoreline and the whole thing is topped by a sky filled with fairly angry looking clouds. A few man-made objects dot the shoreline with the straight lines of what looks like a building pretty much dead center. Both pictures were taken at Rosses Point Beach, and both pack a variety of textures into the frame. I also quite like a photo of Kylemore Abbey reflecting on itself and one of small boats tied up at Portrush.

I said there were thirty-five photos but that’s not quite true. There are thirty-five interior pages with one photo each. One of these also appears on the front cover. It looks out through the doors of Kylemore Abbey. There is also a photo on the back cover. It does not appear inside and it has no identification at all. In it are columns that go from a coal black silhouette in the center to some reasonably well lighted ones on each side. The columns are at least similar to some inside the book in photos taken at Sligo Abbey. Maybe they’re the same; Maybe not. It’s a cool picture in any case and a little mystery is not a bad thing.

In that missing review of Jim’s first book, I commented on the quality of the printing and binding. It was the first time I had seen a Blurb product and I happily reported that it was not crappy. It was quite good, in fact, and so is this one. The pages are fairly heavy semi-gloss and the printing is quite sharp which helps bring out the, you know, texture of the decidedly non-crappy photos.

Textures of Ireland and Exceptional Ordinary are available digitally or in paperback here.

My Apps — Chapter 11
Affinity Photo

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Affinity Photo is a Serif product. Serif’s PhotoPlus had been my photo editor of choice since 2001 when I started using Version 4.0. More than a dozen releases later, at Version 6X, I was still using it although I sensed the end of our relationship was near. In the My Apps PhotoPlus post I wrote of feeling like a Beta Max user in a VHS world. (Younger readers may have to Google that.) Most people I knew used PhotoShop. Not one of them used PhotoPlus. But what really got me to thinking about moving on was that PhotoPlus seemed to have reached an odd sort of dead-end. I had no wish list of features, so it didn’t bother me that new releases added very few. What did bother me was the tweaking for tweaking’s sake of existing features. Someone must have thought the tweaks were good but I found some actually detrimental to the way I worked. I wasn’t about to spend big bucks on Adobe’s full featured PhotoShop Creative Suite but their Elements product was only a few dollars more than PhotoPlus and seemed to have everything I needed and most of what I merely wanted. I started thinking it was about time to jump ship.

An opportunity to do just that came along in 2016 with the purchase of a new computer. Switching computers means transferring existing software or acquiring new, and I did a little of both. For my photo editing needs, I planned to acquire PhotoShop Elements rather than transferring PhotoPlus 6X but Serif came up with some news and an offer that resulted in me doing neither. The news also offered a little insight into the “odd sort of dead-end” behavior I’d noted with PhotoPlus. Affinity was an entirely new-from-the-ground-up product. It was initially developed for Apple’s macOS and had been shipping for that platform for a year or more. The news was that it was now available for MS Windows. Apparently PhotoPlus for Windows really had been a dead ended product for some time.

The offer was much like those I’d seen with each new PhotoPlus release. Current owners could get the new software at a heavily discounted price. I’d long before decided that I wouldn’t spend any more money on Serif’s PhotoPlus and I didn’t. Instead, I spent money on Serif’s Affinity.

I have no regrets. The Apple version of Affinity had some very positive reviews and had even received an award or two. It was at least as powerful as PhotoPlus and both were more powerful than I needed. From the start Affinity Photo for Windows was fully featured with few problems. I’ve a hunch that the Apple version being around for a while had something to do with that. In addition, a nice collection of video tutorials was available. Those came in really handy in getting up to speed on the new product.

For me, up to speed isn’t all that fast. I’m basically a resize, rotate, and crop sort of guy. I was nearly at speed once those were mastered. I do, on occasion, dabble with tone a bit and do a little touch-up work. About as fancy as I ever get is the rare collage or the slightly less rare HDR. Accomplishing these with Affinity is quite different than with PhotoPlus but I eventually figured it out. I’m a long way from being a master of the software but I manage to do what I need.

Is Affinity better than PhotoPlus? Yes, if for no other reason than it gets a nice clean start without the baggage and limits of a product that has been tweaked and twisted for many years. Is it better than PhotoShop Elements? Probably, but I’m no expert on either so can’t say for sure or even explain how it might be. Is it better than the full PhotoShop? I’m guessing not although some people who demand a lot more from their photo editor than I do consider it a worthy competitor. Even if that’s a stretch, and I’m not saying it is, I’m thinking that Affinity is worth a look from anyone not tied to PhotoShop by corporate decree or something similar. Maybe the truly discerning can see differences in output quality or maybe there’s something missing that real photographers depend on. I don’t know. I do know that it does what I need for about half the price of PhotoShop Elements or a little bit less than two monthly payments on a PhotoShop Creative Cloud annual subscription.

My Apps – Chapter 10 — Garmin BaseCamp

There Goes the Sun

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We just had a total eclipse of the sun and by we, I mean me. The United States, has had total eclipses before but we (i.e., people within shouting distance of me) haven’t. I actually thought we had but that’s clearly not the case. I have a memory of standing on the school playground watching the image of an eclipse created by a pinhole in a piece of paper. Total eclipses have been visible in the U.S. in 1954, ’63, ’70, and ’79. Two of those are within my school years but both took place in the summer (June ’54, July ’63) when classes would not have been in session. But what really stomps on the idea that I’d previously seen a full sized solar eclipse in person is the fact that the 1954 event was visible only in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and neighboring states. The only states caught by the 1963 eclipse were Alaska and Maine. The best explanation I can come up with for my school playground memory is that some group met at the school specifically for the 1954 eclipse and saw about 79% obscuration. Maybe that’s it or maybe not. My recall sometimes reaches 79% obscuration, too.

Last Monday’s eclipse delivered 100% obscuration to fourteen of the United States and partial obscuration to all of them except Alaska and Hawaii. I could have stayed home and had 90.43% obscuration but I wanted to not see the whole thing. Not all complete obscuration is equal, however. NASA identified two “greatest” points. The self-explanatory point of Greatest Duration was in Illinois near the town of Makanda. The point of Greatest Eclipse, which NASA defines as “the instant when the axis of the Moon’s shadow cone passes closest to Earth’s center” was in Kentucky near the town of Hopkinsville where most of the 30,000 plus residents embraced the name “Eclipseville”. Hopkinsville is about 240 miles from my home.

Area motel rooms and campsites sold out months in advance. I visited Hopkinsville about 24 hours before the big event but lodged more than 60 miles away in Owensboro. Food and souvenir vendors lined downtown streets and entertainers performed in areas set aside for the purpose. It wasn’t as jam-packed and hectic as I had feared and my understanding is that even on the next day, when it was jam-packed, it was not terribly hectic. People came to see something not say something.

My plan for eclipse day was to get somewhat close to Hopkinsville then seek out a parking spot on some back road. The Western Kentucky Parkway was busy but tolerable until it neared the Pennyrile Parkway where traffic tightened up in a way that promised congestion from that point on. I turned north (away from the congestion) on Pennyrile, took the next exit, then followed secondary and tertiary roads south to the path of the eclipse about twenty-five miles away.

It really was kind of ridiculous for me to even try photographing the eclipse. Without even considering the pros at NASA and other organizations, thousands of real photographers with much better equipment and infinitely better skills would be recording images that would capture the event for all of us to enjoy. I was here because I wanted to experience a total eclipse not because I needed a photograph. But… I got some anyway. I found a spot at the edge of a cornfield about fourteen miles from Hopkinsville. It was far enough from population centers to keep my phone from picking up a signal. That’s why the screen capture is for the town of Trenton some two miles distant. I set up my tripod and mounted my camera on top. I snapped on the hood with a welder’s lens duct taped to it. I put on my goggles. I took some pictures and I watched something marvelous unfold.

The first picture at right is the very first picture I took. Things had started happening as I parked the car and aimed the camera. A little bit of the sun was already gone by the time of the first shutter click. The photo of totality at the top of this post is sized to minimize fuzziness and to show some of the black sky. Although it does not show up in the photo, a star (or more likely a planet) was quite visible to the right of the sun and moon. A vision of totality with unfettered fuzziness is here. The second picture is my version of the diamond ring effect that appeared as totality ended. The third picture shows the sun starting to reassert itself. The Greatest Eclipse point was about 12 miles west of Hopkinsville or about 26 miles from where I stood. The duration of totality at that point was 160.1 seconds. The point of Greatest Duration, 90 miles beyond, beat that by 0.1 second. At my spot next to the corn it was 159.7 seconds. To paraphrase a slogan from an event that occurs in Kentucky on a more regular basis, it was “The most exciting two minutes in amateur sky gazing.”

Witnessing the sun’s disappearance, the mid-day darkness, and the drop in temperature was definitely exciting. It was also thought provoking. To some it was spiritual. More than anything, though, it was uniting. For a short period the eclipse was at the center of the actions of a huge number of people and the conversations of even more. And almost all of those conversations were quite friendly. Sure, in Kentucky I heard some grumbling about traffic and comments about “crazy Texans who drove all that way for two minutes” but there was no real anger in the grumbling and chuckles accompanied the Texan comments.

It was way short of a “The Day the Earth Stood Still” moment but there was just a tiny glimmer of that “tiny ball in a big universe” understanding. In the diner where I overheard the comment about “crazy Texans”, I also observed one fellow explaining the positions of earth, moon, and sun during the eclipse to what seemed to be a regular breakfast meeting of a local “Liars Club”. He wasn’t breaking new ground or fighting against doubt. All the old timers at that table understood the basics but were just a little foggy on the details.

A few weeks ago I visited some mounds in eastern Ohio that are believed to have been constructed at least partially to study the movements of the moon. On the day of the eclipse I held a device in my hand that, bad reception in the cornfield aside, was capable of telling me the precise effect that two heavenly bodies were about to have on the exact spot I was standing on. I thought of Arthur C. Clarke’s well known statement about advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. It somehow applied but far from perfectly so. I’ve since learned of other lines from other writers that proceeded Clarke’s and may have influenced it. One that seems quite appropriate to me comes from Leigh Brackett’s 1942 The Sorcerer of Rhiannon: “Witchcraft to the ignorant, … simple science to the learned.” Even though, as the latest and loudest news stories often show, plenty of ignorance remains, we really aren’t quite as ignorant as we used to be. I’m guessing that those mounds helped.

There will be another total solar eclipse within range of Cincinnati in 2024 and again in 2045. Those guys in the diner knew about both. There’s a decent chance I’ll be around in 2024 and a very slim but non-zero chance I’ll still be here in 2045. If I am, I hope that someone drags my ancient bones outside and makes sure my chair is facing the right direction.

Book Review
Exceptional Ordinary
Jim Grey

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The review of this book published in April 2017 has gone missing. Maybe I accidentally deleted it or maybe a slightly down level backup was restored and I didn’t notice. Whatever happened, I’m confident it was my fault. I’m not going to try to reproduce the whole review. I’m just trying to head off the “not found” errors — and encourage everyone to buy a copy.

Some of you may be here through a link in Jim Grey’s blog telling folks I thought the book was not crappy. I did indeed say that but there’s a little more to it. It was my first experience with Blurb and I was uncertain as to the quality of their printing. I was especially interested in how well they handled color photographs. I feared it would be crappy and was happy to see it wasn’t. Jim’s contributions, the photos and text, weren’t crappy either but I knew that before I even opened the book. That guy does good work.

The book is available here.