mills

From my photography blog, yesterday:

This is the window behind my computer, fuzzy with dust and its paint chapping like desiccated leather. Today has been very gray; it’s cold, wet, and the plants seem lush.

Gray Saturday, gray Sunday, beautiful Monday. The simple difference between happiness and unhappiness is in whether I am (1) glad that the weather is now beautiful or (2) irritated that it wasn’t when I was free to enjoy it.

Homes in flooded, post-Katrina New Orleans.

A case in point of Will’s exceptional memory: more than a year ago, on March 6th, 2008, I posted a photograph and wondered at the photographer; at the time, I wasn’t able to determine the source, which frustrated me as I considered it one of the finest examples of beauty in disaster to emerge from Katrina.

Last night, Will emailed me -from across the room- to let me know that he’d stumbled across the photographer’s site. It is by Benjamin Krain, whose work is just wonderful.

Photographic hero Propellers for Umbrellas has a second site, where she posts the photos that, for various reasons, didn’t make it to her main site; she calls it “a shelf of knicknacks or a drawer full of old letters and waiting-room doodles.” They’re really wonderful. It’s called and then after.

el cráneo de lobo (10.27.09, brooklyn, ny. mamiya rz67, 65mm@f5.6, 120 fuji provia 400 speed, slide).

By the inimitable S. Stratodrive.

One of the most famous of E.J. Bellocq’s photographs of prostitutes in New Orleans’ Storyville district, where sex work was legal from 1897-1917. See below for more.

A beautiful color photograph from 1942 by Jack Delano: “Steam locomotives of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards.” Delano was one of the photographers employed by the FSA, on whose work Errol Morris has posted a typically long and interesting series of articles this week.

Dust gives substance to the streaming sunlight at dusk; after a childhood of playing in the spaces it creates, I’ve come to consider it beautiful, its silent speeding within beams of light a kind of model of matter: frantic vibrations forming the shapes and colors we see.

One of the photos we took with the telescope. The large feature towards the bottom right is Mare Crisum, the Sea of Storms.

A few years ago, I lost a crucial argument because of this fact:

“The Moon is in synchronous rotation, which means it rotates about its axis in about the same time it takes to orbit the Earth. This results in it keeping nearly the same face turned towards the Earth at all times.”

This amazes me. Also, I resent this furtive concealment, even if it’s just lunar modesty, and am trying to determine which side is better so that I can properly attenuate my irritation:

The two hemispheres have distinctly different appearances, with the near side covered in multiple, large maria (Latin for ‘seas’…). The far side has a battered, densely cratered appearance with few maria.

Like everyone, I find whatever is kept away more intriguing and am now cross with the moon for its secrecy.

(Note: this is not related to Cameron’s post about The Great Moon Hoax, or, for that matter, this classic UNLV track).

Last night, B. and I mounted my camera on his massive, GPS-equipped, sky-tracking telescope to experiment with some astrophotography. It was our first time and we had no tele-extenders, but it was enormously fun.

I’ve posted some photos here and here: the moon (my favorite), the largest zoom I’ve ever used (2500mm), Jupiter and four moons, and a shot of the Ring Nebula. Hopefully, we’ll have more to add soon!

(Via Photophobia).

I cannot recommend Riaz Moola’s blog, Twitter, or Flickr enough. I’ve tried to before, but I still feel the periodic need to mention him.

I love his photography so much that choosing something to post is hard; this is great, too. And this. And this!

“…no man not in love takes pictures of girls reading books in soft focus…” -Meaghano.

The camera belonging to the amazing Joshua Heinman, of Cursive Buildings, “died a spectacular death” and as it did so it captured a beautiful cityscape: “This was the final thought as the circuit brains scrambled & blinked out of existence. Sort of a beautiful parting shot.”

He later used the resurrected camera for this lovely zombie video.

Abby, Will, John, Rebecca, Andy, and I went to the ranch for a few days of filth, scrum, shooting, swimming, high-bluff-jumping, smoking, night-photography, drinking, and more. We didn’t take enough photos, possibly because we were too busy having a good time.

We followed some deer and some hogs and even caught some rain, despite the drought. Worse than usual, I am having a hard time being back.

The photos are here; I’ll probably post some more when I get the chance.

My sometimes mediocre, sometimes worse than mediocre, photos of the wedding I attended in London are now online. It was often easy to photograph such attractive, kind, smart, fine people, but that couldn’t save me from elemental errors in composition, flash-usage, and so on.

I liked being at the British Museum with them: they were always affectionate with one another without ever being cloying, and both were so erudite that it briefly reminded me of what sort of emotional health, intellectual depth, and romantic connection we aspire to. Also: they know how to handle weapons.

The complete set is here.

Fireworks tonight in Baton Rouge with Will, Paul & Heather, and Spencer & Lauren. (More and better on Photophobia).