Rat Mass

The first Mass of the school year at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Lexington welcomes the first year students from Virginia Military Institute, known as "Rats" until Breakout, usually in February.

Just Looking

Local children enjoy the show as the Lexington Fire Department "rescues" a dummy that had been hung on the local hotel balcony for an April Fools gag.

A pair of mothers capture the moment as their children pass during the opening of graduation ceremonies at Washington and Lee University.

We object!

After the King parade, the Virginia Flaggers gathered in the cemetery around the grave site of "Stonewall" Jackson for speeches, music, and tributes.

The Flaggers object to the campaign against the Confederate Battle flag, targeting Lexington in particular after the city refused to hang Confederate flags from lightposts for the annual Lee-Jackson Day parade.

I Protest!

 

 The backlash against the election of Donald trump was felt even in tiny Lexington, Virginia, where we saw a march in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., carefully scheduled to displace a parade by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in honor of Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson.

 Later, protestors gathered outside the office of the conservative Republican member of the House of Delegates, Ben Cline, mostly to protest his opposition to abortion and Planned Parenthood.

 

The Christmas Candlelight Procession

For the twentieth year, the people of Lexington Virginia, gathered at one end of Main Street, just in front of the landmark Stonewall Jackson Cemetery, lit small candles and walked through town, singing Christmas carols, to Hopkins Green, where the town's Christmas tree was lit.

Santa and Mrs. Clause moved through the crowd, handing out candy canes ...

The fire was passed from candle to candle as the moment to step off arrived.

The Clauses led the procession, riding in a white, horse-drawn carriage.

Among those watching and waving from the sidewalk, local businessman Alvin Carter, standing in front of his clothing store, Alvin-Denis. He would salute those he knew with his cup as the passed.

This Is Not a Leica.

It is said that "The best camera is the one you have with you."  A quick (and relatively lazy) internet search doesn't provide an easy answer as to who actually said it, although I did find one who credited Chase Jarvis.  At any rate, in this post I want to address the thought, because besides my Leica, I do carry a lot of other cameras.

However, here's the thing: I always have my Leica with me, ever since I missed that picture one Christmas of the decorations being set up in Lexington's little version of Central Park, Hopkins Green.  Even today when I ran an errand, interrupting my writing here, I came across an image of people on a local sidewalk casually playing old time fiddle music.  Only in Lexington.  I had the chance to shoot just one frame with my M3, but that was more than if I hadn't brought it.  And I would have been really frustrated about that.

Sadly, nowadays my finances intrude on this photography.  Film lies undeveloped ... for two years.  I just can't afford to get it processed.  So I often double shoot with the camera I have with me: my iPhone. 

These are all pictures I made while my daughters rehearsed for their dance recital this past weekend.  As any dance parent knows, weeks and months of careful practice go into these events, and those weeks and months require patient attendance.  Needless to say, when I saw an image in those empty moments, I wanted to capture it.  The phone was the easiest way.

I used the standard photo function that comes with the Apple iPhone, then ran it through the free version of PS Express, changing it to Black and White, perhaps tweaking the brightness and contrast, and adding the border.  That's it.

By the time we moved into the theatre, I started shooting color.  I'm not sure why.  However, this only changed my process in that, rather than using the Black and White conversion function in PS, I shifted in the other direction, juicing up the saturation.

The exercise is interesting, in its way, much like my exercise of using only one Leica with whatever lens I've chosen to put on it for the day (or, for that matter, usually for an entire roll of film).  I'm pleased that, when I've posted these on Facebook, they've gotten positive responses, including "Likes" from my photographer friends and even on (for the picture immediately above) from the Tamarkin Camera Facebook page.

In my fantasies, they are impressed enough by my work here to lend me one of the new digital M (240)s.  The stuff I could do with that video function!

 

Perhaps I should keep my dreams realistic: like getting enough money to get that film processed ...

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.

7-10-11 The Rest of the Roll

Martinsville Bulletin photographer Mike Wray waits on the bumper of a Horsepasture VFD fire engine at a drowning scene. Although he has an Olympus digital camera slung over his shoulder here, he pulled out a Leica M2 when he sighted the M3 I was carrying.

The drowning actually happened a way up a dirt drive, past an abandoned farmhouse on a large pond. The building was ruined in a particularly photogenic way, and he and I spent the time waiting for the authorities to let us up to the scene making artful pictures of it.

The fireman left to control traffic said it had burned down some time ago.

Preparations for flying by balloonists at the annual 4th of July Balloon Fest at VMI. I made a "nat pack" of it for the station, and managed to get these shots in the process.

Finally, some tambourines in a church pew in Buena Vista. I was working on a story about a local gospel music jamboree, and one group of singers met us there so we could interview them and record them singing in anticipation of that evening's concert.

7-10-11 First Batch

This is the studio at WDBJ7 in Roanoke, my day job. Just before the evening news, it shows co-anchors Hollani Davis and Chris Hurst, looking towards the cameras from within the newsroom. Obviously, this is before the show began.


While we're discussing my day job -- as a photographer for channel 7 -- here is reporter Joe Dashiell working on a story in nearby Buchanan, Virginia. We were there for the town's fair, a fundraiser for the volunteer fire department, and after a morning of filming had stopped in the local lunch place (still inside the local drugstore) for sandwiches. Joe then took advantage of the air conditioning while writing his story for that evening's newscast. We reported live from the town.


A view of the stands at the Roanoke Valley Horse Show in the Salem Civic Center. I was there to shoot the final championship in hunter-jumper, and had ensconced myself next to the official video camera on a platform at the end of the rink. The two men on seated, one above the other, on the right are riders awaiting their turns.


Below the platform where I was, on the rail, were the EMTs and other hangers on. I was never quite sure whether the fellow in plaid, for example, was competitor in another event, a stable hand, a trainer, or what. He did have the air of a man who knows and works a lot with horses, though...


As I left and looked back, I was struck by the scene of riders coming and going into the arena from the stable area that had been erected in the civic center parking lot. It was around 9 pm, and so in total darkness. I tried an exposure anyway -- maybe at 1/8th of a second? It's a little motion blurred, I fear...


A scene from Rockbridge County: Jacob's Ladder Road, just outside Lexington. In the distance is House Mountain, a local -- or rather The local landmark, visible in one way or another (from the side it's revealed to be not so much a mountain as two parallel ridges) from most all of the county.

You may be struck by the pastoral beauty of the scene. It's one of the many reasons why I choose to live in Lexington.


And finally, a scene of accidental domestic art: my kids' toys and shoes in the sunlight on our back porch.

While I set up this blog exclusively to post photos, I must admit some hesitancy. Any honest photographer will tell you that not every picture can be a great work of art. Frequently, we're lucky to get two or three nice images out of every 40 or 50. (I used to say "out of every roll of 36," but as film has become rarer and rarer, I worry that not all readers would understand.)

There are many other photo blogs that I follow. Some have a Leica theme, some a street photography theme. Some just ruminate about photography in general. I confess to not infrequently looking at the pictures and wondering: Really? This is the best he could find? And so, I envision others looking at my pictures and doing the same. Well, I guess that's fair enough.

This is what I did in July -- or at least part of what I shot in part of July. I've been shooting lately with a Leica M3 using a 50mm f/2 lens. I load the camera with Kodak BW400CN film -- great stuff, I think, that I date when I pull it out of the camera. So this was the roll I took out and processed on July 10. Thus the title of this post.

However, I haven't managed to go through all the pics yet -- there is some inevitable Photoshopping to get the contrasts right, take all the color out, and so on, to make it look just the way I want. Hence: First Batch.