It’s hard not to take pictures of lovely sunsets, no matter how cliché we know they are. And after seeing Penelope Umbrico’s post photographic 5,377,183 Suns (from Sunsets) from Flickr (Partial) 4/28/09, it’s that much harder. But I also like to photograph people in the act of photographing the sunset, like the one below where the subject is trying to catch the sinking sun in his hand.
We’re spending most of January in southern California (south of fire-ravaged LA). Technical note: I used Adobe Camera Raw’s beta reflection remover on this and it did a pretty fair job, except for the white blob on the far right and some vestiges along the top. Expect to see lots more California shots over the coming days and weeks, many of them kind of touristy.
More images I considered, but didn’t pick for Urban Exoticism.
Click on an image below to see them all bigger.
I had a cousin who was an optician. He offered me an after-school job at his shop. He told me he’d teach me how to work the lens-grinding machine but to be careful lest I fall in and make a spectacle of myself.
Some more urban night shots from the archive.
Click on the images below to see them larger.
Some more of the 70+ images that didn’t make the grade for submitting to Urban Exoticism.
Click any image below to see them all larger.
I continue with samples of images I rejected from my Urban Exoticism contest submission.
Click on any of the images below to see them full-sized.
I recently entered a competition on “Urban Exoticism.” From my archive I found 76 images I considered candidates, but only 5 could be submitted. Over the next few days I’ll share some of those that didn’t make the cut.
click any image below to see them full size.
A candidate for adding to Urban Tree Portrait?
The slogan of the Brains Brewery, “people who know beer, have Brains,” is the kind of clever advertising I enjoyed seeing around Cardiff. I did not, however, get the opportunity to taste any Brains while there.
The domed roof over the entrance rotunda of the National Museum + a couple of other architectural images. The “Keep Left” one might go with my “keep right” one from the Metropolitan in NY, or it might be a recommendation to the recently elected Labour party here in the UK who have tried so relentlessly not to frighten anyone with their leftism.
Every time we think the frightfully loud building work outside our windows may be done, something new comes along.
A couple of Saturdays ago we joined the Farnham Ramblers on a coach trip to Salisbury in Wiltshire and went on a 6 — 7-mile ramble. This is a lovely shaded walk at the Northwest end of the Cathedral. I’ll be posting pictures from that trip over the coming days.
In the last post on La Tour I had been trying to see Joel Coen introduce his curation of Lee Friedlander’s photographs but the crowds were too big and I was turned away. I returned the next day to see the show without Joel and capture some more of the stark geometry of the place.
Sitting in the shade at the Place de la République I saw this priest walking across the square and reached for my camera. By the time I had it out of the bag, he had turned and started chatting with this cyclist and the shot was gone. In the meantime, other photographers were attempting images with their Leicas (lots of older men wandering around with Leicas in Arles, shooting, I don’t know what…). Anyway, I clearly missed the shot and didn’t even nail the exposure.
