American in Spain

For her second birthday, Nora received, from my Godfather and Godstepmother, an assortment of plastic animals. To me, these are way more interesting than dolls. The detail is absolutely exquisite. I applaud whoever designed the molds in China and the factory workers that painted them. I thought they would make an interesting subject for some practice at inanimate studio photography. I used my “tinkerbell lighting” technique of a long exposure and a moving LED point source of light.
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On April 15, 2011, I was struck by the photograph on this news article. The caption attributed it to a photographer for Getty Images named Chris Hondros. I’d never heard of him, but, when I tweeted about it, I specifically mentioned his name. If my good friend, Kevin McCloy, hadn’t been on a Facebook hiatus, he might have seen my message about Hondros and proudly told me that Chris Hondros was one of his best friends from college.

Five days later, on April 20, 2011, Chris Hondros was killed in an RPG attack by Libyan government forces in Misrata. I heard immediately via Facebook from my friend, McCloy, and the next day it was the top news story across the United States.
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Two nights ago, we were sitting in the living room, and Marga exclaimed, “Whoa! Check out the moon!” It was just peeking up over the tree-lined hillside to the east of our house. I ran to get my camera and snapped several pictures during the minute I had when the natural satellite was still behind the trees. Only one of them came out very good.

The following night, I decided that, if the weather was willing, I’d be ready to photographically ambush the moon as it rose over the trees.
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Three months ago, when I went on a ferry ride under the Golden Gate Bridge, my shutter finger got a little too excited and I ended up snapping several dozen photographs of the bridge. Part of the reason was that we were lucky enough to take the ferry on a clear afternoon, right at golden hour. Golden hour is a term in photography and cinematography referring to the first and last hour of sunlight every day, in which the sunlight, after passing through a larger portion of the Earth’s atmosphere than normal, takes on a golden hue, which makes the world seem warmer and generally more photogenic. I meant to post these photos immediately after blogging about the trip, but the intense series of four posts about our trip wore me out almost as much as the walk from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge did. Here are just a few of the photos I took on that ferry ride. (more…)

While they are still only fun to her as colored objects and not the mathematical concepts they represent, Nora very much enjoys playing with these foam numbers we bought for a few pennies at the local chinos. The other day I was goofing around with them as she was popping them out of their placemat-sized sheet and handing them to me, and I noticed that they could be interlocked in sequence. It was then that I thought they might make an interesting subject for photography, so I waited until Nora’s interest moved to another toy and went to get my camera.
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Because I carry an apparently dominant motion sickness gene, it’s really important to me that my brain be in visual range of the horizon out an airplane window. My wife, while she does not suffer from the same equilibrium problem, does suffer from being a terribly kind person, so I almost always get the window seat when traveling.

Often, the view out the window can be quite boring. I normally think, “There’s an awful lot of farm land to feed all of us,” and “There are way more trees than the environmentalists make us think there are.” On my recent flight across the continent of North America, I very much enjoyed the views, which mostly turned out to be of California and Wyoming.
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As soon as I learned that my friend and grocery store manager, Andrés, cultivates mushrooms, I knew immediately that we had to do a timelapse photography project with his next batch. The particular species he cultivates is Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom. He buys preprepared bails of hay wrapped in plastic, to which nutrients, mushroom spores, and water have been added. Holes have been cut in the plastic on the top and sides of the bail. Before you can see any mushroom growth, the whole bail gets warm to the touch, as the nutrient consumption begins inside. When the little fungal sprigs started appearing in the holes, Andrés came to me, with a big grin on his face, and said, “Today’s the day!” So I returned that afternoon and set up the tripod, flash, and intervalometer pointing at the bails of hay in his grocery store’s warehouse right down the street from where I live. And then we waited…
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Recently I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun playing with some bubble solution that Nora was given by a local shopkeeper. Besides the obvious, the bubbles are my favorite of Nora’s toys. It took her a while to break out of her awe at looking at them enough to intentionally pop them, and she still hasn’t understood the process of blowing through the hoop to create them. But that’s fine; I’m content blowing them for her.

I have more ideas about photography of bubbles than I have time to implement them, but last night I finally got around to my first attempt. For some reason my off-camera flash wireless connection wasn’t working, so I decided to turn off the room lights, set a long exposure, and manually fire the flash. Of about twenty shots, these are the best three.
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It’s been just over a year since my last experiments with taking off-camera flash shots of my daughter. All yesterday she was reminding me, both in looks and behavior, of the title character of that 1993 Dennis the Menace movie, so I decided to take some photos of her during her playtime before bed. Recently, when my flash is on my camera, I can’t get her to look at anything besides the flash, so in all of my photos of her, she’s looking just above the camera. This problem is what gave me the idea to try my off-camera flash transmitter to see if I could capture her looking more at the camera or at least not looking almost into the camera.
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On a recent walk I snapped a photograph of the local postman’s scooter. The mail in Colindres is delivered mostly by foot, with mailmen and mail-women walking around town pulling a little pull-cart, like the ones housewives pull to and from the grocery store. There’s one mailman who zips around on a scooter, parking it in the middle of a neighborhood and delivering letters from it to the nearby houses. I really liked my photo of his scooter and decided to play with it in photoshop, adding a pseudo-tilt-shift focusing effect to the scooter, with some desaturation of the background. I liked it so much that when a mailbox caught my eye, sitting alone with a tree, the following day, I snapped a photograph. After some similar photoshopping, the mailbox and tree really look to be keeping each other company. With these two made, I decided to go, yesterday, and snap the other mailbox (there are only two in town that I know of). Lo and behold it, too, was accompanied by some inanimate friends. And thus, I present to you, Correos Still Life.
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