Catching Up ... from January

The thing with shooting film is that it takes a while to get it processed, edited, run through Photoshop and then uploaded. As I finish this, which has awaited my uploading it as I took a new day job, five more rolls of film await the Photoshop treatment.

Why Photoshop? The simple answer is that it's quicker and requires less space than chemically printing and then scanning the prints. The more complicated answer is that almost no picture is ready for viewing straight out of the camera. Ansel Adams, it is said, thought of the negative as sheet music, and printing as the performance. I run all my pictures through a process, ensuring the color is correct, the contrast is what I want. There's the electronic equivalent of burning and dodging, and removing dust spots.

I won't do anything -- at least I don't like to do anything -- that I couldn't have done in a darkroom, and wouldn't have done as a matter of course as a photojournalist. Ironically, some of those techniques -- techniques I consider photojournalistic -- have come under controversy lately, like in this piece about contest winners: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2012/03/should-photo-contests-require-original-image-files/. Personally, my apporoach is like Potter Stewart's to pornography: I'll know I've passed the limit when I see it.

At any rate, the picture above needed very little processing. We were in Lexington Antiques, selling some things to the store's owner, when I noticed the sunlight spilling in through the front window. What photographer could resist that light and texture?

God, with his infinitely ironic sense of humor, gave us the birthdays of Robert E. Lee, "Stonewall" Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all within days of each other in mid-January. In Lexington, where both Jackson and Lee are buried, the Confederate generals' birthdays have been celebrated in past years with greater and larger amounts of pomp and ceremony, depending on the amount of government involvment and history enthusiasts ... uh, enthusiasm.

This past year, however, there was more attention as the local Sons of Confederate Veterans engaged in their second year of lobbying to hang Confederate flags from lightposts throughout the weekend ... including the Monday holiday for King. The city responded with an ordinance limiting flags on city property to the US and Virginia state flags. The SCV promptly sued.

When no progress had been made by the day in question, SCV members responded by calling on supporters to stand by the lightposts, holding their flags.

Each lightpost was conveniently labeled with a tag, so the various SCV chapters could find their place.

Bob and I did a live shot at the Roanoke Civic Center for the annual Guns & Hoses Hockey Game, a fundraiser for the Muscual Ystrophy Association. Here, a policeman texts the Roanoke Police Chief to find out when he'll arrive to be interviewed.

The sign amused me.

Downtown Lynchburg in the predawn darkness. We were at Amazement Center, which is just out of frame to the right.

I convinced Bob, towards the end of January and about a week before we both left channel 7, that we had to do something on Djangoary and Gypsy swing music. A local band was performing that weekend; I had grand visions of an artful piece. It all ended with a simple taped interview, some B-Roll of the band practicing ... and us locked out of the venue in the foggy predawn darkness.

It's ironic, I think, that I shot these pictures in that predawn, reminiscent, if I dare make the comparison, of the work of early street photographers in Paris in the time when Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli were creating that very form of jazz.