January 2021

POTD: Helping Hand

Helping Hand
Bozeman, Montana
2020

Another shot from the wide windowsills in our dining room. They’ve become a jumbled repository for the many interesting rocks, bones, snake skins, bird nests and other natural detritus we’ve found out and about as well as a few man-made trinkets we’ve collected over the years.

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POTD: Patchwork

Patchwork
Lyndon, Kansas
circa 1973

I believe this photo is of the side of one of the two barns on my grandparents’ farm. One of those barns (my favorite) burned down after a lightning strike and the other was dismantled by a barn wood collector when the farm was liquidated when my grandmother moved into town after the death of my grandfather in 1983. (This image is from a color slide scan that I converted to black and white.)

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POTD: Frozen Motion

Frozen Motion
Bozeman, Montana
2020

The relative lack of snow here this winter has made it easy to get up to our mountain house once in a while. Last week the wind had blown what little snow there was off of a section of our pond revealing these bubbles trapped in their ascent from the pod bottom by the steadily forming ice on the surface.

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POTD: Spent Beauty #47

Spent Beauty #47
Wichita, Kansas
1974

I just finished going through all my old slides from back before I switched to digital photography. (That’s all of them unless I find another stash somewhere.) I tossed a whole lot of them and scanned the rest. After the cull, there were about 1200 that I scanned. At about 3 minutes a slide, that’s about 60 hours of scanner time. I spent about that same amount of time I imagine sorting them, labeling them etc.

The bulk of the photos are just records of the past–people I’ve know, places I’ve been. But a number of them are also results of my early attempts at using photography for artistic expression. I was not new to this effort when I was shooting slides as I had been working with black and white film for probably six years or so before I switched to color slides. Anyway it’s a fun exercise to look at those early attempts at art photography and compare them to what I do now. There have certainly been some obvious changes in my photographic style and skill over the years (as evidenced by the number of “artsy” photos from back then that I simply threw out), but there is a small set of them I’m still quite happy with. This is one of them, taken on a winter day in a park in Wichita.

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