'The Genius of Photography'A 'don't miss' series on Ovation TV

The Ovation TV network (Channel 157 on Dish satellite and Channel 274 on DIRECTV; check your local listings for the network's availability on cable television) is running several installments this month of the excellent BBC series "The Genius of Photography."

Check Ovation's schedule guide for dates and times, but I can tell you this much: This month's installments will be aired and repeated on only three days -- this coming Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (Jan. 19, 20, 21).

I saw three of the shows for the first time last month and am glad I thought to record them on my DVR, because I plan to revisit them periodically. They deal primarily with photography's origins, influences and master photographers. It's something anyone with a strong interest in the craft of creating images should look in on. Check back in early February to see when any of the others will air.

In addition to checking Ovation's schedule guide, you may want to visit the BBC Web site on the series to read more about it.

Forks: A tine or two for art

In my debut post, I mentioned that I would like to use this blog to have some fun from time to time, whether it be in the discussion itself or with the pictures. So I'm going to use today's post to do just that, introducing one of several still-life images I've concocted that use a fork as the primary subject. I call my ongoing fork endeavor "Tines Art" ... and I call the above image, which dates to April 2007, "Salt 'n' Pepa Reach the Forks in the Row." 

With one exception, for all the photos in my Tines Art Series, I used a makeshift mini-studio. The studio consists of the dining room table, one horizontal gray cardboard and two vertical cardboards (the latter to help funnel or direct light), and sunlight from a north window. I'll introduce the other images in my series in subsequent posts.

Oddly, only two months after I came up with the first two images in this series (I shot the first in March 2007), Greg Mitchell, the teacher of an advanced photography class I took at IUPUI through the Continuing Education Program, assigned our class to take a photograph that incorporated as its subject -- can you guess? Uh-huh. A fork.

I didn't submit "Forks in the Row" for my assignment, but I did submit the one I had taken in March. I thought the "fork in the road" concept might be a bit too obvious, and indeed, another student did submit one. To her credit, she did a nice job with it. She set up the shot outside and positioned a table fork on a road in rural Hancock County. It had to be a bit risky, considering that she could easily have encountered traffic in the time it took to set up and take the shot to her satisfaction. Increasing the danger, she lay prone in the center of the pavement to give the camera a direct line to the fork. She did ask her young son to act as a lookout for traffic, by the way, and fortunately, she had no close calls. The depth of field she used helped make hers a fine effort, I thought. 

After we submitted our images to Greg, he seemed less than impressed and challenged us to go out and do it again for the following week's assignment. I was glad; after submitting the first image, I felt like I had skirted the spirit of the assignment by submitting a photo I'd already taken, and I really did want to  do a new one. Now Greg was giving me that chance, and not only did I submit a new image for the redo assignment, I submitted two. After I'd taken the first shot and emailed it to Greg, I came upon a fortuitous situation for a second tines image, snagged it and sent that to Greg, too. When the class convened and Greg asked me to tell the story behind the second image, I got the sense that some of my classmates were skeptical, but I asserted then, and I assert now, it was 100% true. 

I'll tell that story in a later post. 

From the b/w archives: Gene McCarthy's last hurrah

In early 1972, only a few months before burglars broke into Watergate, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota came to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire to drum up student support in his bid to win the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary. The Wisconsin contest was critical for McCarthy; his campaign was not keeping up well with George McGovern, the South Dakota senator who had announced his candidacy the previous year and already was regarded as the front-runner.

McCarthy had established his legacy in presidential politics four years earlier in the 1968 primary: His anti-war campaign and pledge to wage clean politics picked up such steam and popularity early on that he finished a surprisingly strong second to the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, in the hard-fought New Hampshire primary. It was enough to persuade LBJ that he didn't want to stay in the race anymore, and at the end of March, Johnson stunned the nation by announcing he would not seek a second term. But McCarthy's steamroll was short-lived; he soon was overtaken by the rocketing campaign of New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, and when RFK was assassinated after winning the California primary in early June, Vice President Hubert Humphrey stepped in to snag the nomination at a rancorous, violence-marred convention in Chicago.

McCarthy's 1972 campaign never picked up the steam or notoriety it had attained in '68. Still, when he came to UW-Eau Claire that winter, his was a big enough name to justify a decision I made to take my school-issued Yashica-D camera and attend his news conference to get pictures for a class "news story" assignment. I gave my instructor a contact sheet (below) showing the frames from nine pictures I took (including one in which I held the camera over my head and aimed blindly down into the crowd in front of me, trying to get a better angle; it's the one that you see upside-down). My instructor selected and marked two that he wanted me to print -- one from the news conference (above left), the other of McCarthy talking to one student while another waited at the candidate's side, standing front and square toward my camera.


On April 4, 1972, McGovern won the Wisconsin primary, finishing narrowly ahead of perennial candidate George Wallace of Alabama. Finishing third and fourth were former Vice President Humphrey and Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine. McCarthy was so far behind those four that he called a wrap to his campaign. McCarthy would try again for the presidency-- as an independent candidate -- in 1976, but he spent almost as much time battling laws that made it difficult or impossible for independent candidates to get their names on the ballot as he did trying to draw attention to the issues. Nevertheless, he did manage to get his name on the ballot in 30 states.

Eugene "Clean Gene" McCarthy was 89 when he died of complications from Parkinson's disease on Dec. 10, 2005.

From the b/w archives: Shooting sports with a Yashica-D

Above is one of the first sports shots I ever took. I was in college, taking a photography course required for my journalism major, and decided to see what kind of shots I could get with the class-issued Yashica-D camera at a flag football game on campus. Harry, my sophomore year dorm roommate, was playing in this game; he is the quarterback in the above picture. I was standing along the sidelines when Harry dialed up a down-and-out pass play that ended up coming right at me. I was fortunate enough to capture the ball in flight; as I remember, the receiver did make the catch.

The twin-lens reflex Yashica-D (pictured) entered the market in the early 1950s and was out of production not long after we trained on these in college. It was considered a "break-in" unit affordable for those interested in moving into medium-format (medium-size negative) photography because of the large images it provided (compared to negatives provided by the smaller 35 millimeter cameras already more popular by this time). The Yashica-Ds shot 6cm x 6cm frames (2.25 inches by 2.25 inches) on 120 film (we used Kodak Tri-X) and was equipped with a Yashikor 80mm f/3.5 lens. With such large frames, photographers could squeeze a lot of material into a picture -- if they wanted it. Sometimes, though, they didn't want so much, like for a portrait. So because there was no zoom option, photographers had to move forward for tight frames, or backward to take in more subject matter ... much like photographers do today when using any prime (fixed focal-length) lens.

It wasn't until I developed the film and made the contact sheet that I realized that not only did I capture the neat ball-coming-at-me-in-flight, but also got two unexpected nuggets -- the gleam of sunlight off the car behind Harry and the grossly mismatched pass-rush battle on the far right. Good thing Harry was so far over to the left; I don't think his undersized teammate could have staved off that defender for very long!

Below is another sports shot I took with the Yashica-D in about the same time period. I had brought the camera home to shoot some pictures of family. I took it to the playground of a nearby intermediate school, where my brother, Pete, was playing two-on-two pickup basketball with two neighbors and an interloper we knew from grade school. Pete's the one taking the shot, on the far left; the interloper is defending. The fellow on the far right, who lived across the street from us, went on to play on the local high school team as a center. I don't think he made the team because of his agility, or scoring or rebounding prowess, as much as he did for his size and eventual bulk (as I recall, when this was taken, he had just begun a growth spurt that would max out at somewhere around 6-5 or 6-6).

Pete and I used to play basketball at the playground a lot, and snowy weather was not an obstacle, as you can see in this shot. In Wisconsin, where we grew up, you get a lot of snow in winter, and it made playground basketball more interesting. After particularly heavy snowfalls, we'd bring shovels to remove just enough to move around and create a path to the basket. Besides, a good snow would slow down a stray ball rolling away from the court!

I don't pretend that this is a spectacular image; it's not. Plus, the quality of the print itself (from which this scan was made) has suffered a bit through the years. That gray area in the sky is not a twister moving in; it's undoubtedly evidence of inadequate time in the darkroom stopper or bath (and, yes, I did the lab work on these). Nevertheless, it has preserved all these years ... and it was taken by that classic Yashica-D.

Lizzy's 3rd birthday

Granddaughter Lizzy's third birthday was last week, and the family got together Saturday to mark the occasion. That's Lizzy above, donning the head gear (I know there's a more fashionable term for this stuff, but this is a guy speaking!) from a dress-up outfit she received as a present. Below, Lizzy takes her first huff at the three candles on her cake. She needed two tries!



Lizzy's mother and the mother of Eva (above and below) are longtime friends dating to grade school. Eva, who will be 4 years old in February, was seated at a small card table in the kitchen, where the kids were eating cake, and I happened to find an open corner behind the table, right below a window where sunlight was splashing through a curtain. Eva, who had been facing forward (to the left) when I first sat down on the floor, turned toward me while I took pictures in another direction. Apparently intrigued by my activity, she struck this pose without any prompting. I turned and noticed her -- and the interesting light play on her face -- and I was able to take two pictures before she moved. This frame was the first of the two, which I deemed slightly better because the illumination on her right eye in this one was a bit more generous than the one in the second shot. I liked the light play so much that I created a copy and converted it to grayscale (below) for dramatic effect.

Photographs as art: Winter scenes as paintings II

In a previous post, I mentioned an ongoing project I'm working on -- using software editing filters to explore how some of the landscape and vista images in my portfolio appear as works of fine art on canvas, such as paintings, chalk drawings and watercolors. Above and below are two more photos from the Jan. 8, 2005, "Winterscapes" shoot, and both are streets scenes from my neighborhood that Saturday morning. (The brick house you see on the right in the photo above is where the gentleman in burgundy short-sleeve shirt and sweatpants was shoveling snow in a photo that I included in a previous post on the Winterscapes shoot.) For both of the images in this post, I applied a long-painting-stroke filter to copies of the original images to effect this canvas-on-easel look; it was the same filter used in the two frames you saw in my previous post, also from the Jan. 8, 2oo5, shoot.

Photographs as art: Winter scenes as paintings

Above is a January 2005 photo of a bridge over Bean Creek in Garfield Park, Indianapolis, the result of an experiment with software filters that apply fine art textures to photographs. A long strokes painting filter was used in this image and the one below.


Above is another January 2005 photo, this of a clump of snow serving as a sort of hub on a branch in Garfield Park.