I am once again out of town, and unable to prepare images for upload, but I will be back at it again in a day or two.

The photon sieve separates a scene into abstract sections of color and tone, creating an image of pure bokeh.  Bokeh, it seems to me, is one of the things that sets photography apart from other visual arts.

I pass the time on the road photographing out the window.  I always end up with a lot of junk frames, but I catch something I like now and then.

So I’m back.  Made a quick trip back to Jefferson City, my home town, stopping in Columbia along the way.  I didn’t have a great deal of time to photograph while I was there, but I wanted to do at least a bit, as I really enjoy the city of Columbia.  There was a time when I was here a few times a week, and I became rather fond of the personality of the place.  During the day, you can just walk through downtown, and it’s quite worth it to do so, whether you are a photographer or not.  Late at night, you can sit on a corner and watch inebriated collage students frolic in the street.  That’s quality entertainment, let me tell you.

Today’s image is brought to you in part by directional symbols and convex surfaces.  I’ve noticed for a while that I’m often compelled to photograph arrows, especially in urban environments.  There is something about these strange symbols that I cannot quite put my finger on that interests me greatly.  I feel a long term series of images coming on.

“Time flies like an arrow.  Fruit flies like a banana.” -Groucho Marx

I’m out of town this weekend, and can’t really work with my photos very well, but I’ll be posting images again within a day or two.  I believe I’ve captured some interesting images this weekend which I’m looking forward to getting processed, so stay tuned.

Even before I began this journey into the world of photography, I always enjoyed urban environmental images.  Something about this is all man made, and yet seems to have slowly evolved into something subtly different from what it was originally is what draws my interest.

Next month, I’ll have quite an opportunity to photograph the natural side of the world.  I’ve been invited to go on a photo excursion to the Flint Hills in Kansas with the faculty of my department and other students about a month from now, and I have to say that I am positively giddy.  Ever since I started taking classes here, I’ve been hearing of this spectacular prairie.  It will be a great opportunity to get out of town, shoot in a new area, learn from the others, and get better aquainted with the other photographers that will be there.  All in one convenient package.  Stay tuned for resulting images.

A pair of fans creates a found diptych.  I was recently given a 50mm Yashica manual focus lens, which works with my Canon 40D by way of an adapter ring.  Although I have always focused manually in the past, I also used the focus confirmation to help.  These lenses of course do not support that function, and in using them, I am finding it more difficult to focus correctly.  Apparently, in making the viewfinder brighter, the manufacturer has also made it harder to detect focus visually.  I have ordered a replacement focusing screen which is supposed to allow the actual focus to be more accurately seen through the viewfinder, so we’ll see if that can help solve the problem.  Until then, I’m doing as well as I can and trying to improve my focusing technique as it is right now.  Interestingly, shooting with a fixed lens causes me to see things a bit differently.  When walking around with only a single focal length, I look specifically for compositions that will work well with that length.  While some people might find this limiting, it gives a bit of direction to a photo walk.  A zoom is convenient at times, but I think that I will be moving more in the direction of prime lenses–when I use a lens at all, that is.

In looking at this image, I am reminded that there are countless ways for light to be altered before it reaches the eye.  Humans grow accustomed to the way that their brains translate the scenes in front of them, and generally are scarcely aware that their perception is in fact born of focusing mechanisms in the eye.  This typical perception is convenient for general purposes, but is really no more “correct” than an unfocused image.  When an image is captured photographically, it is immediately altered, whether or not it passes through a series of lens elements designed to approximate human vision.  Therefore, photographic “truth” can be said to exist only if it is understood that a single photograph is only one out of the infinite list of possibile renditions, all of which are equally correct.

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.“  -Dorothea Lange

So I may have managed to fix the big problem with my computer.  Apparently, Windows Vista didn’t appreciate the fact that I keep my images on an external hard drive connected with Firewire.  With some help from the friendly people at www.geekstogo.com I discovered that the repeated crashing was connected to the Firewire driver.  So, I switched the drive over to a USB 2.0 connection and disabled Firewire completely and so far, I haven’t seen the blue screen of death, and my programs aren’t crashing.  We’ll see if the machine continues to perform decently, but at the moment, the prognosis seems good.