Blue (prints)

 The Soho Photo Gallery announcements of current shows appear weekly in my email and always make me wish I lived closer to the Big Apple.  This week's message was about two artists who make cyanotype prints on fabric, Kevin Rose Schultz and Jessie Swimeley.  I particularly enjoyed working my way through the website of Jessie Swimeley from Caldwell, Idaho.  Swimeley's work can also be seen on her Instagram account.

Swimeley does marvelous work with the cyanotype process, but she is also an accomplished photographer with a range of analog and digital work to her credit.  She has me thinking I should make use of that envelope of cyanotype paper I picked up some time ago from the gift shop at the NM Natural History Museum.

The cyanotype show opening will be shared as a free zoom presentation on June 10th. 

two eggs, up

The Cafe Lush at 7th St. and Tijeras is a classy place for lunch or breakfast with reasonable prices.  There's one friendly, competent waitress and a good cook.  I had two eggs up, hash browns, toast and coffee for $6.  We ate inside because it was early and a little cool, but by lunch the sidewalk tables are still feasible in early December.

In New York's Lower East Side in the '60s I could get the same meal for a buck, though the decor was not so spiffy. A couple blocks over, a lunch of pig hocks and mashed potatoes could be had for a buck or two.

All this got me thinking about deli food, so I picked up some pastrami, sauerkraut and rye and we made sandwiches for lunch today.

Combating Entropy

I have added a new feature to my web site home page to facilitate showing some of my old camera work. Down in the lower right corner will be found a link called "Sunday Slideshow". I have stored my photos over the years on several photo sharing sites, and all offer an easy way to generate slide shows from directories of images. For this inaugural Sunday, I have turned the big selector knob of my webmaster control panel to the mid-1960s to display one of my personal favorite photo-essays, Chinatown Hip Shots.
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Nikon S -- Wikipedia

The NYC Chinatown essay was shot on a Nikon S that I bought in the '60s.  I sold it soon after shooting those pictures, much to my regret ever since.

wallpaper

The carousel picture was made with one of my classics, the Vito II. The photo was taken five years ago during a brief stop-over in New York City on our way to Greece. The rest of the NYC pictures - all with the Vito II - are in a photo.net folder.

Traveler

I acquired two more nice examples of the Voigtländer Vito II.  I have some film in one of the Vitos now and hope to have some new photos to show from it soon. Meanwhile, it has been interesting for me to look back on my previous experience with the camera. I was impressed from the beginning with the extraordinary qualities which the Color Skopar lens could impart to the images from the camera. The Vito II also seemed to me to embody the best qualities of German craftsmanship refined from the past.

Most of the pictures I made with the Vito II date from May 2005 when Margaret and I traveled to Greece. That was a marvelous experience, and I liked the pictures I made there, but that is largely a reflection of my feelings for the adventure, rather than any objective evaluation of the resulting photography. I mounted a small show of the photos on our return at the Las Cruces Library. It was fun to lurk in the background and listen to comments; I was pleased to find that viewers were able to perceive some of the sense of discovery that Margaret and I enjoyed on the trip. Looking at the photos from a greater distance now, I have rather more mixed feelings about them, as I often do when going through past work.

I see now that I had a lot yet to learn about the craft of photography then, particularly in regard to translating the images from their analog to digital forms. The cameras, films, computers, scanners and software I used also evolved quite quickly during the time since our trip to Greece. It is a little tempting to try to retrieve the negatives from rather haphazard storage and do them over. I'm sure I could make some technically better images in the process, but I doubt that I could recapture the original impressions and feelings that went into creating the photos. Better, perhaps, to move on, taking what I can from the past without trying to recreate it.