Day: August 27, 2017

Red moves the sheep out of the Pole Barn this afternoon and out to the back pasture. Red is the picture of competence and poise. This photo was taken with the new Daguerreotype Achromat Lens.

I don’t generally sell my pictures, I gave that up some years ago because it is just too expensive, I give all of my pictures away for free, I don’t copyright or watermark them. I want people to see them or use them, they are my angels and cherubs heading out into the world.

I have decided to sell one photo again, this one above called the “Blue Heron.” It will be a signed and limited edition, and it will be as inexpensive as I can make it, it will not cost hundreds of dollars or even come close, somewhere between $75 and $100.

The photo has special significance to me, it was a breakthrough photo with a new and complex lens, one I was afraid to use or try. It is a reminder to me to keep opening up and trying new things and put them out there, that is what creativity is all about.

I also really love the image, it was taken by our pond this afternoon, and as my new Daguerrotype Achromat lens is rumored to do, it capture the magical feeling of the moment, it does look like a watercolor to me, it is otherworldy and spiritual.

There’s another reason also. Maria and I are going to take our first real vacation together in October, we’re going to New Mexico, we are staying at a beautiful bed and breakfast not too far from Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch (and yes, we made our reservation to visit the ranch a long time ago).

The Army of Good and others have been very generous this year, I’d love to send something back for those who like it.

I realized while posting this photo that I have gone a lot of fund raising this year, and glad of it, but it wouldn’t be bad to raise a little money for us, vacations are expensive, we’re going for eight days. We need this vacation, we are very excited. Maria lived in New Mexico for awhile, she knows it well, I’ve never been there.

Vacations, even done carefully, are  expensive. That is a good use for a favorite picture.

So I’m giving a full rez photo of “The Blue Heron In Our Pond” to George Forss, he is a master printer, and I’ll sign each of them, this will be a limited edition printing. I first mentioned it on the blog earlier today as something to be sold at our October House, but promptly was awakened by some pointed e-mails saying it should be available to everyone, and so be it. It will be.

If you are interested in pre-ordering or buying a copy (I don’t have the final price plus shipping yet) Maria has agreed to handle these sales as a part of her Open House art show, you can e-mail her at [email protected]. Some photos just touch me in a particular way, and this is one of them.

The Blue Heron has joined the farm and is living in the pond, she is a graceful and beautiful thing. She is a symbol of the beauty of Mother Earth.

My temperamental new lens seem to want this photo. I’m happy to be selling one of my photos again, but it won’t happen often. And it will be as inexpensive as possible, but also classy. George does use beautiful archival paper and does a wonderful job of preparing the image. Maria will be posting it on her blog also.

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update: The image will be sold for $110 plus shipping, 11 by 14 on archival paper. Unframed. If you’re interested, you can e-mail Maria at [email protected].

My new Daguerrotype Achromat Lens is actually a re-issued version of the first optical lens used in photography in 1837. It can be used on my Canon 5D, but i am realizing it cannot be controlled or directed like a regular lens, with auto focus and image stabilizers.

Maria and I went out this afternoon (Sunday) to do the afternoon farm chores and check on the animals, we knew there was a beautiful Blue Heron nesting on our pond in the rear pasture, and we hoped it would take off and fly around the pasture, as it has been doing, when we brought the sheep back there.

We were both surprised when we saw the Heron standing there so gracefully, we are glad to have it in residence on the farm. I only had my new lens, the temperamental and complex Daguerrotype Achromat, and I wished for a faster lens with auto focus so I could catch this shot. I knew there was not much time.

This is a good example of why some softer photographer can be more captivating than the clear and distinct digital picture. No regular lens I know of could get the feeling of this shot, and certainly no smartphone can yet do it either. In an age when everyone is taking pictures, this one is distinctive.

Necessity is the mother of invention, so I just started trying to focus and get the right aperture setting, I put the camera on AV and started trying different things.

The ISO was set at 100, as it almost always is for these art lenses, f/was 0, aperture 1/100. The lens liked the photo, it looked like a landscape painting to me, which was just the right feeling to capture the magic of the moment, seeing this magnificent bird in her new home, with fish and frogs all around.

The scene had a timeless, almost spiritual quality and the lens captured that perfectly, it wanted to take the picture.

We wonder if there isn’t a nest nearby, she lingered a long time with us before she took off.

My lens has a mind of its own, just like a donkey or a barn cat, it will take the photo it wants to take and not take the photos it doesn’t want to take. For every success, there are a thousand failures, you just have to put your head down and keep going until you mess up enough to learn what you need to know.

With lenses, it is just as important to know what not to take a picture of as what to photograph, and I never thought this was the right photograph for this lens. But it caught the other worldy, somewhat magical feeling of the scene better than I would have imagined or anticipated.

I have two weeks to decide whether or not to keep this lens, it costs about one fifth of what the Canon L series lenses cost, mostly because it is so simple in construction.

I am much buoyed by today’s breakthroughs. I give my photographs away for free, I don’t copyright or watermark them.

The  Blue Heron is a very special photograph, I think I will have George Forss  print this one out and I will sell it if Maria wants to use it in the Open  House. I will also sign it and limit the number of copies, probably to 25, so it will be a limited edition printing.

I think it’s special, I think it needs to be sold cheaply, I don’t believe in expensive photos, and I’ll use any profits to help pay our expenses for our upcoming trip to New Mexico in October. We’re not going anywhere first class, but vacations are expensive. We have a room in a lovely bed and breakfast not too far from Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch.

if anyone wants it, you can contact Maria at [email protected]. The photo reminds me that creativity requires courage and determination, nothing worth doing is ever easy.

I have been working hard all weekend to figure out my remarkable new lens, the Daguerreotype Achromat 2.9/64, struggling with the manual focus, the very unusual lighting challenges, and the very soft backgrounds and manual aperture plates. There is no such thing as pointing the camera and shooting, I have to think of three or four different things, most of them new to me.

Of course, social media being what it is, the photos from the new lens triggered some discussions about the photos I was taking, a number of people do not like soft focus photographs, they like the clear and literal nature of digital photography, that’s what they were used to. A good number of people said the photos reminded them of their vision problems, what is beautiful to me wasn’t beautiful to them.

This one is a challenge, and today I took the lens, some groceries and some sympathy over to my friend George Forss. His friend and companion, the artist Donna Wynbrandt, is in the hospital, George is both upset and bereft. He doesn’t eat most foods, we stopped at  the farmers’ market get him some onions, tomatoes, strawberries and potatoes. I also knew it would cheer him up to see my lens.

And who better to show my new lens. George was on the cover of Time Magazine and on the Today Show and praised by the great photographers of the world for his breathtaking shots of New York City and its’ landscape. He began selling his street photographs on Manhattan streets, and his work was discovered by David Duncan Douglas, the great World War II photographer.

He lives in my town of Cambridge, builds his own camera and optics and develops his photos in his Frankenstein laboratory.

George, one of the world’s most famous and brilliant urban landscape photographers in the world, never complains or whines, but I know how upset and stressed he gets when Donna is ill. I also realized that was no greater inspiration or good luck charm than George, just looking at him inspires my photography and encourages me.

He was going to visit Donna today and he expected her home tomorrow, but I know he forgets to eat when he’s excited so we wanted to make sure he had food for tonight. And I knew he needed some company. George and I have a powerful connection.

He knew what I needed and we moved all around his art gallery and dark room, trying different settings and lighting backgrounds.  I showed George each photo and listened to his feedback. He is a photographic genius.

There is no one better in the world to work with on a new and difficult lens. And this one is a whopper. More than 150 years ago, two optical geniuses, Charles Chevalier and Louise- Jacques-Mande Daguerre made history by combining their separate inventions in 1839, putting a Chevalier lens together with a Daguerrotype camera and creating the first optic lens in the world.

That is my lens, a newly manufactured revival of it from Lemography Inc., the lens, fitted with a Canon mount,  diffuses light in a very particular way, it is described as otherwordly and magical, often more like a landscape than a digital photograph. The lens is said to work it’s own special magic, it is like a donkey, I think, it likes some images and just doesn’t like others, and like a donkey, you can’t get it to do what it doesn’t want to do.

George and I click. We just get each other excited, and I am in awe of his genius.

I finally got George in the right place, by the front door, the sunlight from outside lighting up one half of his face, the portrait capturing George’s amazing duality, his brilliance as a photographer, his successful struggle with schizophrenia. I love George dearly and admire him, and he grabbed the lens and looked at it and held it, whistling. and fiddling with it

I think this is the best portrait I have yet taken of him, and the softness of the lens was a big reason.

“This is a great lens,” he said, “you can do great things with it.” I think so too, I said, but it was challenging. Good, he said, you get the best pictures that way.

And I did do something with it, right then.

I found one of the sweet spots for this new lens strong background light, soft interior light, the lens knew just what to do with it, and the image was clear and yet soft at the same time. It capture the character in  George’s face beautifully for me. I took a dozen different photos with different focus and aperture settings before I got the right one.

A breakthrough. I took 100 pictures with this lens in George’s studio before I got this one, and I deleted all but two of them when I saw them on the computer. But these two were worth it.

That is how creativity works for me. You put your head down and break the rules and try to do it so many times that you learn from it, lessons no one can teach  you but that you never forget. You never give up, and never listen to the people along the way who line up to tell you why you can’t do it or it doesn’t work.

You listen to the people who tell you to keep trying, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Thanks George, you are a genie and a fairy and an angel, and I love you for your big heart and wonderful creative brain. Your inspiration got me to see what I needed to see. A good beginning, lots of hard work and experimentation ahead.

Anais Nin wrote that we do not see things as they are, but as we are.

This seems very true to me, and it is something I have been thinking about for a long time, especially as the political and cultural divisions all around me continue to sharpen, deepen and grow.

I keep waiting for us to find common ground with one another, to  revert to some common ground, but instead, we seem to be being pushed apart a bit farther every day, we do not have leaders seeking to unite us.

This time has been a gift to me, as much as it causes suffering to others, it has challenged me to go deeper and inward into myself, to find ways to do good and feel good, to be part of an Army of Good, which is a thrilling turn in my life, and a welcome one.

But I am also working hard to practice true empathy, the highest calling of humanity, the ability to put myself in the shoes of another, and it is both difficult and compelling. My political views and sensibilities have not changed in the past year, they have only been sharpened, and that is true for almost everyone else as well. I believe I have managed to avoid the anger and outrage that fill the air around me.

Yet I do want to know and feel and see what it is that drives others to great passion and anger and feeling, and to see the world so differently than I do. I won’t do what so many people have done to me, and labeled me quickly so that they can ignore me.

It isn’t enough to simply declare myself virtuous and compassionate and superior. Why do other people see immigrants and refugees in such different ways? Why do they seem to heartless when it comes to the poor and the suffering to me? Why do the seem so cold and angry, so selfish and closed? Why do the persecute gay and  transgender people so relentlessly, and how do people who claim to love Jesus ignore his every teaching and hate the poor?  Why are hypocrites the lowest form of life for me?

I look at a video  of a frightening demonstration and see one thing, millions of people look at it and see another. I am shocked by a pardon of a renegade law enforcement official who defied a federal judge, yet so many other people see him as hero and cheer his escape from justice.

Am I all good and they all bad? I don’t think so.

It is true what Nin wrote, we do not see things as they are, but as we are, and that is the problem, of course.We confuse our own perceptions with absolute reality. Jesus and the Dalai Lama can get away with that, they are holy figures, Jon Katz cannot.

We have forgotten how to speak with one another and meet in the middle, we all seem to be moving to the edges, farther and farther apart from one another. I keep thinking we have fought this war before, and more than once, but then I  realize this is a war that is never over, and will always have to be fought, that is the nature of human beings. The rich always screw the poor, the dispossessed always find someone to blame.

Until we finally find a way to destroy the planet once and for all, we will find new ways to argue and hate and fight with one another. This ought to be dispiriting to me, but it is not. It is yet another door to open, not a gate to shut. The world is a mess. The world has always been a mess. The world is a glorious place.

Every morning, I look at the news, and I take the position of the other side. What do they see that I don’t see? What do they feel that I don’t feel? I put aside my anger and bias insofar as I can. How can I see things that are, not that I am?  This has not changed my basic beliefs, but it has softened them.

I do not have a gloomy view of the world, quite the opposite. There is so much love and light and beauty on the earth, and so much suffering and darkness. One goes hand in hand with the other.

A good friend of mine was attacked and beaten in Charlottesville she was knocked to the ground and injured, and several members of a militia, carrying big machine guns,  rushed to help her, give her first aid, and save her from further harm. These were people she was prepared to hate, but they turned out to be angels who hovered over her. They saved her life.

She is looking at the world in a softer way now.

Moving out of a rich, educated and smug community in New Jersey, it was helpful for me to come here, to a small, unpretentious, struggling and truly diverse community of very real people.  Here, farmers and artists live and work side by side, we talk to each other all the time, we know one another even if we don’t always like or love one another.

This is not a place for snobs or elitists, there is no comfort for them, it is not a place to be smug.

Living in a rural community, I have long felt the isolation and anger and abandonment of the people who live here, engulfed in suicides, unemployment, fleeing jobs, remote and arrogant politicians,  drug use, hopelessness and despair.  There is great suffering here, and it was, I know, a lit fuse waiting to ignite something furious and explosive all across the country. And that has happened, we we all bear responsibility for it.

There is so much desperation here, I did not see it or feel it or know it until I moved here more than a decade ago. I see this anger and disconnection all the time at rallies, in interviews, from my neighbors. They have joined their own revolution.

Empathy is the way back for me, if I can see what others see, then they might be able to see what I see. I don’t wish to be a soldier on the left or the right, I like being an organizer in the Army Of Good, that is how I began the year, that is how I will finish it.

I expect that I will always be me, I’m not looking to be someone else. But I can’t only comprehend the world through my own prism. That isn’t working for anyone.

A friend came up to me on the street yesterday and began raging about the people who don’t wish to take all of the statues down, the latest political hysteria in the country. He said they were bigots and separatists and fascists. I don’t want to be doing that or enabling that. If the statues upset and offend people – and some of them upset and offend me – then they should of course come down, and go somewhere else. They ought not to sit in the middle of town commons and courts.

I would not wish to explain to an African-American child, or to my granddaughter why a huge statue of a general who fought for slavery and the destruction of our country should tower over her every day, literally on a pedestal.

Yet it is not so simple, as nothing really is.

Many people I know who are not racists or Nazi’s do feel their history and identity is being torn from them without much thought or consideration, along with almost everything else they have known or loved.  They feel discarded and libeled. I spent some hard time this week trying to stand in their shoes, and I see it all differently, my mind has not changed about the statue, but I see it in a softer way. This is a conversation we ought to be having.

It is wrong to me to label everyone who sees the world differently than me as a moron, bigot or thug. I will never get to see the world as it is that way, and it seems to me that is the great moral and ethical challenge facing me. How to find my moral ground without taking it away from everyone who sees the world differently that me. That feels arrogant to me.

Condemnation and argument accomplish nothing more than more condemnation and argument, and then, violence and bloodshed.

I’m looking for a better way. It starts by recognizing that I see the world through my own prism, and I am not ever certain that I see things as they really are.

I wish to remember that before I take my daily outrage pill every morning. There are more colors than black and white in the world..