02Dec / 2014

Roses, 29 November 2014 (2)

This is the second plate I took of the same red-and-white roses that day – in a glass vase on a table in front of a wooden fence. Outdoors, drizzling and wintry and starting to get dark, so the exposure on this one was 90 seconds. Same wooden German travel camera from sometime in the early 20th century, Carl Zeiss lens. (I guess I can stop writing that since this is the only camera/lens I currently have.)

f3.5, 90 seconds. Lea’s Portrait collodion #2, ordered from Mamut in Prague, and the first time using homemade developer (I spilled the last dose of store-bought developer I had). Black aluminum plate 13x18cm (5×7″).

This picture is a lot softer than the previous one, which is largely due to the different collodion recipes used, I think. It has a lot of streaks on it, which I am assuming are from the new developer I am using – maybe a different formula? Could also have something to do with the temperature, it was getting cold and although I poured everything indoors, the plates were outside for a minute or so each.

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02Dec / 2014

Roses, 29 November 2014 (1)

Weather is grey and drizzly and no one in the family wants to sit still for the minute or so it currently takes for an exposure in those conditions. These are some dried red/white roses in a vase on a table in front of a wooden fence. Taken with a wooden German travel camera from sometime in the early 20th century, Carl Zeiss lens. f3.5, 75 seconds. Old Workhorse collodion (IIRC), and the second-to-last dose of developer I ordered from Mamut in Prague. Black aluminum plate 13x18cm (5×7″).

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05Nov / 2014

Weather is weird

Weather is weird.
This is no season. This is no proper season. Seventy degrees in November.
This is no season.
How are you, he tells the kid.
There should be fog covering that field, but there is only warm dry air.
How are you, how is a person supposed to answer that, he says.
Someone asked me that, he says, once, and it totally threw me because I paused to think about it instead of just say, fine.
The kid chuckles. Yeah.
I was all like, objectively or subjectively?
By whose standards?
What time frame are we looking at?

You walk to the store. A kid has a party, another kid says, your cat is so cute, the first kid says, that’s not my cat, and suddenly you’re walking to the store for extra catfood on your lunch break, plus something from the bakery in case a crow passes your way.

Of course it does.

Every day is the same. Get up, make coffee, read, clean something, feed cats, take shower, get dressed, go to work. Get lunch, or don’t get lunch. Read. Go home. Clean something, go to bed.

At a certain level of magnification, anyway. At a microscopic, sub-atomic level, I suppose things vary wildly. This electron will only ever be exactly here once.

This quark, now you see it, now you don’t.

Just say you’re fine.

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15Oct / 2014

The Gauntlet

The day has a weird liminal feeling to it. Grey and quiet, except for a lawnmower, crows, traffic and pedestrians, like the soundtrack to a National Geographic documentary on urban corvids.

Odin tries his wife’s number but she doesn’t answer.

He walks down the street, past a line of crows. They just stand there watching him: the old black one with white feathers, three grey ones. More keep showing up.

Odin wonders has he overdone the crow thing.

He follows a little old woman with a tiny little dog on a leash. What is it with old people and little pets, he wonders. They can never, like, stay out all night drinking or anything. Sorry, I have to get back to the little dog! And they are the ones with all the time for adventures like that, and then they go tie themselves down.

He turns a corner and a sleek black crow swoops down from the other direction and follows him to the store, hopping from car to car.

Odin’s phone rings. It’s his wife.

The day has a weird feeling to it, says his wife.

Weird and grey and in-between, agrees Odin.

He tells her about the crow gauntlet because she always laughs at his crow stories.

He holds her up to his ear and talks to her all the way through the store.

I picked out a ham-and-cheese sub for the crows, he says.

Which ones?

All of them.

I’m getting cottage cheese now, he says.

He hangs up before paying the cashier.

He feeds all the crows he can find on his way back to the office. They eat the whole sandwich, except he eats the parts with pickles, as they don’t like pickles.

It’s like a day hidden between other days, he had said to his wife.

She agreed.

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12Oct / 2014

Wreath

Dried flower wreath, full sun, f5.6, 8 seconds. Old workhorse collodion.

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03Oct / 2014

Fly fishing in Austria

Man and woman standing in creek, both wearing waders, holding fishing poles.

Woman: Oh, he’s a big fella.

Man: Where? Oh, he’s big.

The big fella swims deep, nosing the gravel of the creek bed with singular concentration.

Most of the time, that’s his whole world: gravel.

Man: What’s he looking for?

Woman: Periwinkles? May-flies?

Gravel, gravel, gravel. Rarely, something shiny or something bright catches the big fella’s eye and he leaves the creek bed and swims to the surface and there’s a small splash and a dragonfly disappears, or sometimes a lure of chrome or polished brass.

Incomplete list of shiny things that have caught the big fella’s attention:

The phrase “better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt” (as a child);
The idea of going through life without leaving any footprints (as an older child);
Young woman in blue shirt eating a banana in a cafeteria (back in college);
Falling stars;
Heat lightning;
Fireflies;
Certain people;
The phrase, “as you live your days so do you live your life” (somewhat recently);
The phrase, “your problem is you think you have time” (more recently)

Man: Where’d he go?

Woman: Into that shady pool, I think.

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02Oct / 2014

The secret of happiness: WWASPD?

Part of being happy is doing things that make you happy.

Part of being happy is avoiding doing things that make you unhappy. This second class of things include stupid things.

By definition.

Both of these skills can be helped with the WWASPD method.

Like yesterday. There is this guy. He is driving home and there is a bottleneck where the road from Vienna goes into the Vienna Woods. The road is lined with old homes and goes from two-lane to one-lane for a block. Each end of the bottleneck has an electric sign that lights up red when there is oncoming traffic.

The sign is black so the guy goes. He meets two oncoming cars. Either the sign is not working or they ran the red light.

But since there are several oncoming cars now, he backs up and lets them pass.

The sign is black so he goes.

He meets a big, fat Audi driven by a guy about 60 with a chihuahua. They stop and look at each other. There are no cars behind the Audi, but a line of cars quickly forms behind our guy. Two things are possible: the Audi ran a red or the light is broken.

They wait like this for a couple minutes. Then the Audi begins to honk.

Cars behind our guy honk back.

What Would A Smart Person Do? thinks the guy.

The situation is out of his hands, he realizes. He can relax. The problem will solve itself, somehow.

So he relaxes while the honking goes on. It’s a nice evening and in the distance the Vienna Woods are just beginning to change color.

Eventually the Audi driver gets out of his car. Our guy rolls down his window. The Audi driver yells at him. Our guy doesn’t even try to explain his theory about the light; he just says, I’m kinda boxed in here as you can see. You’ll have to talk to the guys behind me.

The Audi driver goes and yells at the other guys. They all seem to be, as our guy noticed earlier, burly young construction workers, and they yell back. The Audi driver eventually backs up and lets everyone pass.

And they all go on their way, happily, except for maybe the Audi driver.

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Metamorphosism

Category Archives: ferner liefen

Roses, 29 November 2014 (2)

Roses, 29 November 2014 (1)

Weather is weird

The Gauntlet

Wreath

Fly fishing in Austria

The secret of happiness: WWASPD?