Random Rasam Thoughts

I woke at 1:15 AM and watched a documentary on William Eggleston.  That prompted me to venture into the kitchen and just photograph 'stuff.'  However, that didn't work.  Then I got the idea of going to Meijers, an all night store, and photographing food, maybe a few stray lost souls out in the middle of the night in need of a can of bacon and bean soup, or some avacadoes.  However, those harbinger feelings of pressure told me I better not wander from from a visit to the throne first.  I love taking dumps, butt the problem is I don't stay long at all.  In and out.  Out.  Butt my love of books makes it virtually impossible to wander into a water closet without a book in hand.  Today I really wanted to read about India while attending to my functions.  Please - no connections between my desire and necessities.  I often read spiritual literature on the porcelain   India fascinates me and I've had a book on my shelf about India for a long time and lately it calls out to me.  "The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cell Phone."  I stopped in at a bargain bookstore over the weekend and found a pristine hardbound copy for under $5.  I thought it would look nice on my pile, below the paperback version I already have.  Then it dawned on me...if I have two copies, that must mean I really want to keep it.

India fascinates me.  Five or six years ago I decided I wanted to only eat Indian food.  I had been a vegetarian for years and American food just doesn't work so well for a vegan.  Try eating at KFC with a group of friends.  Well, actually, if I had to be totally honest, I'd have to confess that I don't have a group of friends.

When I decided I was going to curry myself (the word 'curry' was probably invented by the British to describe the incredible spices of Indian dishes that they consumed during their invasion and occupation of India) so I went through my kitchen and tossed out everything resembling 'American' food, especially the spice shelf, and replaced it with those beautiful spices of India...turmeric is so intensely yellow...powdered chilie powder...such a deep hue of brownish red...the slight greenish tint to unroasted cumin seeds...the delicate shape of basmati rice grains...the veins of fiber running through a block of compressed tamarind...And I stocked up on cookbooks.  At first I really didn't 'get it' about Indian cooking and picked recipes randomly out of various cookbooks.  I spent whole afternoons preparing an array of dishes and slowly started learning more about the secrets of Indian cooking.  Part of my problem was I was still thinking American and compartmentalizing the dishes.  A pile of legumes sitting on a plate.  Then I discovered the secrets of dal.  They are incredible and when cooked, melt into a sauce/paste.  I have all the main dal on hand at all times...toor, moong, masoor, urad and channa dal for tempering.  Each one is so different.

Rasam and sambars are SO delicious.  There is nothing like them.  Which reminds me...I would love to make a steaming bowl of rasam every morning.  My living situation isn't ripe for that dream at the moment.  I found an incredible cookbook of vegetarian South Indian cooking and made the most amazing dishes from it.

I love music, all kinds of music, from speed death metal to ragas.  It was a natural for me to slowly wander into the Indian music culture, both classical and modern.  I picked up a few Indian students (I teach music) and started listening to Hindi rock and began teaching it.

When I first visited Indian markets, I must say I wasn't well received.  That was over twenty years ago.  However now I have built good customer relationships with my two main sources of Indian groceries.  One store even presented me with a canvas "India Town" sack to carry my groceries home.  I bought three pressure cookers, two of Indian origins.  I began making up my own recipes and even had one published on You Tube on the wonderful channel, "Show Me the Curry."  You can view it here.

I find, as a general rule, that Indian people are happy, positive in nature, and very colorful.  Color is so important to Indian culture, and color is so important to me as a photographer nut.

Next life I am going to travel through India and photograph the wonders.  I have too much to photograph in Detroit this time around.

Violence

I don't write much these days mostly because it seems pointless.

I am in that part of a cycle right now in my continual love-hate relationship with shooting in Detroit where the city feels unfriendly to me.  I'm not welcome.  Detroit is struggling with city services, the police are underpaid and overworked and too few...and violence seems to be getting out of control.  I follow the latest shootings and violence on a local news website and the stream is steady, shootings, carjackings, etc.  But what is disturbing to me is that they occur at locations I had just visited.  One was a shooting that happened just and hour after I drove by the location.

I'm thinking it might be difficult to make pictures if I was dead.  Not if, but rather...when.

Circumnstances lately infringe on my free time and I just do not have it (time) to visit and comment on as many of you that are on my 'watch list' (watch it - I'm watching you!) lately.  I basically do a grand sweep of new things in the morning, but I've noticed that Flickr pops new images in after that initial sweep, and I probably have missed a ton of images.

Ranting the Coffee Bean

Okay. I'm addicted to coffee, strong black coffee. I start every morning with a few cups of ground-daily dark roast (usually French roast) and then sometimes later settle into a coffee shop to read, write, think, etc. I also visit my local Arabic coffee store and get freshly ground coffee ground just about as fine as talc powder for Turkish coffee, which really puts stiff lead in my early morning pencil.

Back to the coffee shops...

I seek peace and quiet. I want to read, think, take out my fountain pen and start writing in my Moleskine. Oh, did I mention that I am easily distracted? I am. I'd say to the point of a disorder even. The slightest noise (like my former asshole crack-smoking neighbor who used to blast his fecking tv pulsating through the wall all night so the sounds of the city didn't wake him up) knocks me off kilter. Good thing I don't own any weapons.

Back to the cafes...

So lately, as I'm working through this photo funk I'm in, I've been hitting coffee shops. However instead of peace and quiet, I'm running into noise fests, noise so loud I can't hear myself swearing in my head. The customers are mostly sitting there quietly, along with me, trying to read, surf the web, talk quietly, but it's the employees making all the noise. I was at Caribou in Madison Heights last week, right there on the corner of 14 Mile and Campbell, and the two coffee wenches were talking it up, gaffaw-laughing, and belching out loud sentences over the sound of the espresso machine. They were utterly disgusting, and what they were talking about wasn't even interesting, mostly petty shit about how someone pissed them off and how they're going to get even.

Then I tried Starbucks, the one way up there in Auburn Hills, on Auburn Road and Rochester, Sunday morning. Same thing. So loud I had to leave.

Those areas where they prepare the caffeine laced drinks are mostly hard surfaces and bounce sound like a banchee.

I should probably just make a thermos of the stuff at home and go park in a local cemetery. Nobody seems to bother me there.

Gas n' Go

Living on the edge, much closer to homelessness than most, and with the price of gas going up and up, my visits to Detroit will be curtailed, limited to special occasions. Since I don't have actual destinations when I go, getting there (and poking about) drinks a lot of gas. Gas. "They" have us by the nuts. Next it will be water, then food. I don't know about you, butt my balls are really hurting lately.

The good news is I get to explore different avenues of picture making (which I have been doing all along), but the bad news is I'll be posting them in my Flickr. You guys don't seem to really like my other stuff, the stuff that's coming. I've come to the conclusion that it's not so much my pictures you like butt the subject matter. Oh well. What can I say?

I grow weary.

PS - I'm not sayin' I will be stoppin' Detroit, butt that I be slowin' down. Violent crime is way up in the city because obviously I'm not the only one having trouble with expenses.

Speaking of gas, you know that Keystone XL pipeline that is in the news these days? The oil flowing through those pipes would not be for domestic use. The oil companies, who don't give a hoot about us, ship oil to Asia and Europe, where they can get more bucks. A little known fact is that oil has become the second leading export of the USA, right behind military weaponry.

BTW, GE stands to make a lot of money from this project as they have secured rights to water processing technologies, and as this type of fuel is quite dirty...and you won't hear about this on the corporate news media. Don't forget that G.E. owns MSNBC and I'm sure the corporations have agreements among themselves about certain news stories on which they would rather we remain ignorant.

Slipping into the Void

I think I slipped…into some void perhaps. I think I forgot how to go out and make pictures, too. It was a slippery spot I hit and before I knew it, I was in the air, wondering how I was going to land. Well, that didn’t really happen, but it feels that way.

The crime in Detroit got me thinking again. So I haven’t been to Detroit since that car-jacking with the AK-47, right in an area where I was beginning to explore again after some years. Last weak end (and it was that) I felt a strong aversion to passing over the city limits, that fearful “Eight Mile” that M&M talked about so much. So I headed north and it was boring as hell. Nothing to shoot, damit. I did drink some coffee at Starbucks but left in no time because the employees back in their little corner were so fecking loud I couldn’t read, think, or even concentrate on the taste of the coffee. Then I moseyed over to Barnes and Noble and had an equally crappy time there. I just don’t like B&N and I don’t know why. Never have. Maybe it’s because they make you pay for their discount. Or more likely, because they aren’t self-help friendly at all. Borders had computers where I could look things up and serve myself. Self-serve.

I really didn’t feel the spirit of the cemetery either.

So I told myself that I have plenty of unposted pictures and who cares anyway? Well, I do. I care. It’s my nature to be putting out constantly. Put out or shut up. I can stop putting out when I’m dead.

Maybe I should just buy an AK-47 and shoot back if fired upon in Detroit. If I start playing the mega-million lotto, and win, I could buy a bullet proof Hummer and really do Detroit in style.

Maybe it's a good time to start spring cleaning, or perhaps get my CDs all in alphabetical order.

Photo Fascism

I’m a pretty free-thinking soul. I want freedom not only for me, but for you, too. It is a birth-right. Last Sunday I hit a brick wall at Flickr, right after I posted a picture of a fascinating grave marker, one that has been in my focus since 2004 when I first found it. You can see it here:

What beautiful art work. And such detailed breasts. As I mentioned in the description, I wonder if the husband had this carved as such so he could sneak in the cemetery at night and sort of feel his way around.

Anyway, as you can see, I didn’t include the entire name. It really wasn’t important to me and had nothing to do with the image I had in mind. But then…a Flickr member posted a comment, something about how the name was almost hard to read. I posted a response that I really didn’t care about the name, that wasn’t at all what my image was about. He then told me I MUST include this in my photo. I was stunned as I haven’t dealt directly with a photo fascist in quite a while. Wait, maybe never. I’ve had people inflict their personal opinions on me about how they would have taken my photo (which, I suspect, means it wouldn’t be MY photo anymore!) but never a person trying to play a rousing game of ‘you do what I say’ authoritarianism. We went back and forth on this another round or two. Then I decided to check him out on Flickr and he indeed had some lovely photos, lots of page views and comments, too. I’d go as far as to say he was fairly popular on the site. Looking through his photos, I noticed one he had taken from his classroom. Classroom? Here in America, you just don’t take pictures of other people’s children! ;-) He wasn’t in America, though. I guess things are different in Italy. I suppose here if one posts such a photo, Big Brother notices and invites said pervert to come in for an interview on Chris Hansen’s “To Catch a Predator,” after sending that person some luring emails from police officers posing as twelve year old girls looking for older men.

Anyway, on this blackboard were mathematical symbols.

So, said photo fascist is a math or science teacher! Ah…it all came into sharp focus then. LEFT BRAIN. Laws. Rules. Theorems. Precision. And teachers don’t take sass. What he says…goes. Well, at least in his classroom. I should have studied his photos more closely and noted if all his photos follow those LAWS of photography, like using the grid of thirds, processing any ‘art’ photos in B&W, sharp focus always, etc. Oh, and include a person in every shot (which is kind of hard with macro shots! But clever uses of things like reflections of people in drops of water on flower pedals works.)

I too am a teacher by profession, but instead of math/science…music, a totally right brain endeavor. Sure, there are ‘rules’ in music that were drilled into my head in college by Mr. Johns at Wayne State…”roots in the bass a fifth apart…keep the common tone and move the other voices stepwise.” But RULES in music are merely suggestions and when one updates the type of music, like rock, blues, popular, many if not most of the rules melt away. How could you play a decent rock song without parallel fifths and octaves? I wonder if hardcore music theoreticians, the ones that teach below the college -level, have sympathetic aneurisms whenever they hear loud, rowdy rock blaring?

My ‘zen’ approach to photography wouldn’t work well with Mr. Science’s view of how the world MUST be. Was it a case of a confrontation between right and left brain? That’s what I figure.

Hell, I bet my photo fascist friend worships Ansel Adams. I find Adams’ photos boring as hell. Beautiful, but boring.

Photo Fascist drifted away eventually and removed his comments from my page. Now all evidence of our skirmish have vanished.

Life goes on. I hope he doesn’t feel inspired to dictate other requirements when I’m out taking shots.

A Lethal Mixture

High gas prices and increased violence in Detroit are curbed my enthusiasm to go out shooting. Well, in Detroit, at least. There are shootings every day in Detroit, plenty of violence to go around. That doesn’t faze me so much as one incident I heard about on the far east side, in a residential area (where I tend to roam.) Two fifteen year old boys were hijacking cars and robbing the people inside. How? With an AK-47 they were shooting into the car. That’s getting a little personal.

So perhaps I’ll take a little break now from the trolling through bad neighborhoods I visit to get my photos. I can always focus on flowers. Oh, and how about some photos of my shoes? And pics down the neck of a guitar are always nice, since I don’t have a keyboard.

It is a Toss Up

I seem to have two personalities when I am with camera: Detroit vs. everything else. Those of you who know my work probably found me through Detroit. That IS one side of me, for sure. However, there is another side that I mostly hide because you just don't find it very exciting. The irony is that I do.

For me, Detroit is an adventure. I do have my experiences in the city including two attempted carjackings. I must be alert, vigilant and that distracts from my photography really. I suppose if I went out in a pack, I'd fair better, be safer, but I truly enjoy my solitude and the freedom to let my thoughts and eyes roam. Actually, I often let my thoughts just float away and get into a pure looking mode. That is when I am having the most 'fun' behind the lens. Don't think - Shoot. Look later.

It is a real pleasure to go out with camera and not have to watch my back.

Shifting Gears

As anybody who follows my work knows, I go through cycles with what I like to shoot. I would imagine this is not uncommon. However, due to the emotional investment connected with shooting images in Detroit, in some of the nastiest sections, I find myself totally drained emotionally with camera in hand when I face to prospect of driving into Detroit. Shooting Detroit is definitely an adventure but I wouldn't say it is 'fun.'

I try posting other types of photography in Flickr, I mean, other than my staple cemetery work, and usually it doesn't work so well at all, view-wise. So I post a few and quit for a while. I love to photograph a certain type of Nature, abstract Nature, street shots, and probably my favorite, vernacular style photography, especially when I turn off my thoughts and just focus on color and form. I love color photography and only resort to B&W in rare occasions when I think an image was custom-made for that style. Anyway, I'm really into a vernacular state of mind lately, and totally enjoying it. However, if you are following my work, YOU are definitely not as enamored as I am. Does it matter? I suppose because what I post in my gallery is really for you. I have thousands of images I just wouldn't put up on Flickr, my private stash of images I like. I like a lot of my Detroit stuff, too, but it is like having a secret life away from the public.

I do not like shooting people, with a camera anyway. I avoid people in my daily life so why would I want to waste my precious shooting time on that? To paraphrase Charles Bukowski from "Bar Fly,"...it's not that I don't like people, but I just feel better when they're not around."

Sure, I'll take some shots at people once in a while, but when I do find myself drawn to shooting someone, I bet that person would fit nicely into an Edward Hopper painting.

Enough words for now.

End of the Year

As the year winds down, I want to thank the photo buffs who have supported me this year, looking at my stuff, sometimes leaving a comment, sometimes hitting the favorite button…I cannot express to you how much I appreciate your attention to my work, and how much I look forward to going out as often as I can, hunting down images, and especially how I’ve enjoyed posting fresh images nearly every day. I am guilty of sometimes posting lesser quality images on Flickr because I don’t think of it as showing only my best work, but my way of interacting with the photo community around the world.

Photography IS my passion. I live all aspects of it. When I’m not out prowling in the sometimes VERY dangerous streets of Detroit, or looking for ghosts in the cemetery, I am usually reading about photography or looking through a collection of photos. I have a decent collection of monographs by some of my favorites and love to get lost in the images, sometimes trying to imagine what it must have been like to be behind the camera at the instant the shutter button was pressed, wondering what sorts of decisions that photographer made to capture the image.

You might notice a lack of people in my photos. I am a bit of a misanthropist and really enjoy my solitude. I genuinely like people and my occupation keeps in working with people every day on a one-to-one basis. Maybe that’s it…not that I don’t like people, but just that I like them one at a time.

I only go shooting alone. Sorry – I don’t give tours, or take people out on a photo safari. By myself, I can open my mind, stop my thoughts and just ‘look’ and find the things I want to photograph, largely a subconscious process. It’s always fun to get home and download my images, only to discover a few images I didn’t recall capturing.

I did not have as much time this past year to devote to my photography as other avenues of my life detoured my desires. We do what we gotta do. But I did upgrade my equipment and am really enjoying ‘better’ equipment, even though I had been a devout point-n-shooterist. The P-N-S is ideal for my style of photography, with super zoom, all-in-one style focal range. Sometimes I just don’t have the option of getting in close to where I go, and the zoom can get me right into the thick of things.

So, again, thanks for your eyes and fingers on your keyboards and I'll see you in Flickr.

Burning Down - Burned Out

I must confess, I have not been in the Spirit of Detroit photo mood the past few months. Just imagine how difficult , how emotionally draining it is to drive around the city looking for dysfunctional street scenes, burned homes, ravaged stores, trashed neighborhoods, and homeless people. Photographing the city has never been ‘fun.’ I did it because I thought it was important for people to see the conditions in the city. And when I first started doing so, Detroit was a good example of post-Industrial decay, but it wasn’t evident that she was also a harbinger for things to come. Now, many large cities have, like Detroit, taken gas and on in free fall further down the spiral. Crash and burn. Greed is destroying our cities and the people who live in them.

Greed.

Back to the streets of Detroit, the city has changed. It used to be like a ferocious tiger/lion (depending on which sports team one supports) and the streets had a lot of attitude. And danger. I do not enjoy driving around the suburbs looking for trouble as I do in Detroit. However, I can find quite a few Virgin Mary statues in the suburbs, but not so many in Detroit, so I haven’t given up on the ‘burbs just yet. Lately, Detroit’s streets, at least the times when I invade them, usually early morning, have been tamed, feel beaten, on the skids. The trash has mostly been picked up, many abandoned houses have been boarded up instead of torched, and those that were torched have largely been demolished. Some areas where houses sat uncomfortably c lose to one another are now vast open fields with a house here or there, giving some areas a rural, not urban feel.

People are just trying to get by.

If you don’t see as many photos of Detroit flowing through my gallery, you’ll know why. I need a break. But then of course as soon as I commit this to writing, I’ll be back combing the streets, looking for shots. But just in case you don’t, or you see photos from my archives, since some of you are focused on freshness, you’ll know why.

This IS my season right now and when I drive around taking in all the color, roll down the window and feel the cool temperatures, smell the sweet aromas of decay…it’s refreshing and so very different than smelling the putrid smell of natural gas leaking from abandoned homes, and the occasional fermenting trash at the curbside of abandoned homes that have been gutted and left for pick-up.

Under Pressure

Not that what I eat has anything to do with what I shoot, I mean, with a camera, at least...

Good news for the Tooloose homestead...I just received a new pressure cooker. Little known factoid about me is that I love to cook. About 4-5 years ago I went through all my spices and ingredients and completely stocked my shelves with necessities for cooking Indian food. IMHO, it is the best, the absolute best in the world. The hot spicy dishes keep my sinuses clear, for one thing.

A pressure cooker is a necessity for Indian cooking. The legumes/lentils (dal) cook up in a flash under pressure. I have a huge pressure cooker for massive doses of this wonderful cuisine, and a much smaller one, an Indian utensil, for small quantities, and for pressure cooking rice. The Indian cookers are quite different than my American-friendly unit as the Indian cookers work on the principle of building up steam, then blowing it off in a huge blast that might last a few seconds, and cooking is measured in 'whistles,' whereas my Fagor cooks in minutes. Both are great and together, I make some damn yummy meals.

I've been at this for a while now and have quite a library of Indian cookbooks. And I have been honored...a former client of mine grew up in India to a rather privileged life, from what I understand. She did not cook at home. After many discussions of Indian food, she confessed that I knew more about cooking Indian food than her, and even gave me a cookbook from her motherland that she never used.

Dals are my favorite, and usually that with rice will fill me nicely. But I love the vegetables, too, especially eggplant and okra. Since I shop at Indian markets, I also enjoy the wonderful fresh vegetables used in traditional Indian cooking, the various squashes, (opo (aka long squash), winter squash, cayote, bitter melon, etc.) and love to cook simple meals from South India, rasams and sambhars.

I submitted a recipe of my own design to a really excellent You Tube channel that presents Indian recipes, and it was featured here. If you like Indian food, this is a great show to watch. And it certainly doesn't hurt that the two ladies are extremely cute. ;)

So I will be blowing off some steam in my kitchen, butt worry not...I won't be posting pictures of my cooking, neither before or after consumption.

I do also cook Middle Eastern and Thai dishes as well.

Got any favorite recipes in these cuisines, please post to this blog.

Feeling Foggy

Finally...some fog. It wasn't thick as pee soup butt I'll take it anyway.

I love the fog, the mystery behind it. I can almost sense the invisible earth forces at work in the watery visions of fog. And it seems to active in the cemetery, amongst the dead. And like the watery element, the fog environment changes so rapidly, thickening, thinning, lifting, descending. I was very fortunate this time, anticipating the fog and heading out before sunrise to various cemeteries in the area. One day, last Thursday, was very special. The large cemetery I visited had so many different views and settings of the fog. The most spectacular moment, though, was when the sun was beginning to rise. I really felt a sense of piety for some reason. The autumn is truly MY time of year, the time when I have feel my soul forces bursting with a great joy of the return of the elemental forces to the earth, gathering underneath my feet, preparing for the winter.

+ + +

Equal Time

It's 'that' time of year again...when the forces of light and dark are equally balanced on the equinox. The yearly cycle has been a fascination for years. Many years in fact. It probably isn't evident from my photo gallery, but I am quite taken with Nature, the diversity and just the whole process of life...and death. Now we are into my season, the season of colors, of harvest, of chilly temps and hot apple cider, of spicy squash soup, and even the college football games that mean nothing to me. Then after, Nature strips. Black and white. Everything.

I even enjoy early winter and the most uplifting day of the year has to be the winter solstice, when the forces of darkness have reached its zenith and the forces of light are being to wax. If the temperature is not overly cold, it can be such a wonderful day/night. I sometimes wonder what this day was like at a stone site eons ago, like Knoweth in Ireland (never been there), when on the morning of the solstice, a beam of light travels down the passageway of the entrance, hits a special crystal, and the entire inner chamber is filled with a burst of light, signaling the event.

The least exciting season change for me has to be summer. How odd, the forces of light reach their maximum and the hot temperatures are yet to follow.

The whole planet is a living organism onto itself, breathing in for the winter and breathing out for the summer, as new life bursts forth from the earth. It is an amazing process, something I think about often.

Needing Some Fog

Autumn is in the air, so I'm in the mood. Autumn's colors and cool temps tickle my fancy. The sunsets during this time of year are often spectacular. And there is a feeling of activity in the air, with the forces of Nature preparing herself for the cold winter months. The seasons are like a breathing process, inhaling in the autumn, exhaling in spring. And the cycle continues.

This past year has been challenging in many ways and my photography has taken a slam. It is not that I have lost interest in any way as my main focus still is imagery. When I'm not behind the lens, I'm often buried in the pages of books, monographs, pouring over photos of photographers with whom I share a kindred spirit. There are many....Walker Evans, William Christenberry, Gary Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Clarence John Laughlin...the list is long.

I just discovered Christopher Churchill and hope to gather enough pop bottles to purchase his book on faith due out in November. I heard a fascinating interview of him on the "Thoughts on Photopgraphy" podcast and then viewed his website. He's a bit offbeat, which of course appeals to me, and I like that he delves into the topic of spirituality in an offbeat way. He wandered across the country photographing people discussing various aspects of faith, recording their words, and he includes sound clips on his website, which you can listen to while viewing his wonderful photographs.

I've already scored my first gallons of apple cider. Next step will be to scout for some excellent autumn vegetables. Perhaps a spicy butternut squash soup is in my future, with some wonderful Indian spices, of course. I can't wait for the leaves to turn, for the sweet smell of decay in the air, the crunch of leaves underfoot. What a great time of year! When I was a kid, we'd all burn piles of leaves at the curb, and that aroma actually was pleasant in its own way. I don't mind winter at all, so the pending cold waves do not chill my enthusiasm for the autumn. Early winter is equally as beautiful, when the first snows begin. Suddenly, from a world of magnificent colors, we are thrust into a world of stark black and white. Color disappears for a few months, only to return in late spring.

I have already been revisiting cemeteries in my area and whenver I catch wind of fog or haze in the forecast, I plot which cemetery I want to visit. Cemetery photography is not as interesting to me in the summer.

And on top of that I have been trying to get all my photo files in order, redoing so many now that I am getting more comfortable in Photo Shop. I have in the neighborhood of 144,000 photo files on my hard drive, though not all of those are candidates for printing. Actually, only a small portion of them are. And I've started printing my favorites and am sorting through them. I can't believe the hours I spend before my computer screen sorting through, examining and processing images!

So...I'd love to hear from you about who your favorite photographers are. I'm always on the lookout for something interesting to view when I cannot get out and shoot.

Links:

Christopher Churchill's photo website.

Thoughts on Photography Podcast: Christopher Churchill.

We All Fall Down

Time to Drag Down the Sun.

Ah, I noticed while driving home from work last evening the long shadows. Actually, I spotted them descending a while ago. I keep an eye out for that, for this time of year when the arc of the sun drops. It certainly makes for lovely long dark shadows, something that pulls me in.

The summer is winding down. The really hot days seem to be gone…I hope. Cool mornings, chilly mornings…a harbinger for my favorite season, autumn! To me, summer is massive GREEN. Everything is green, a wall of green. Trees and bushes block my view. It’s scenery. But then autumn comes along and starts the transformation to a time when the green turns brown, then disappears and suddenly the world has a barren depth that was hidden in the summer months. Instead of not ‘seeing the forest for the trees’ and suddenly, striped of green, the forest becomes vast, and empty. Soon thereafter, snow will accentuate the bleak barrenness, with everything looking so black and white.

But autumn is coming. The chill in the air…apple cider, squash soup, the crunch of leaves underfoot, horror movies, Halloween…wait, I forgot. No Halloween this year. Don’t you recall that the Rapture was rescheduled for 15 October. Hmmm. I don’t want to miss Halloween so I just might see if I can get our city to declare Halloween early this year, due to Rapture. I mean, I’m sure nobody wants to miss Rapture, but then, who wants to miss Halloween?

I only hope I have the time and inclination to get out with the camera and celebrate my season.