Picture Post, Sunday February 25, 2007

Some random stuff from the slide archives today, folks.

Sometimes you take a photo that pierces your heart every time you look at it. It captures someone or something at a perfect instant. This is a picture of Number Two Daughter when she was just a couple of months old. This is the look of a child who recognizes her mother who is talking to her. Kids don't look at ANYONE else like this. This kind of undivided attention is reserved only for Mamas.

From the same roll is this one of Don C. (my Dad) and Number One Daughter on the back patio of our apartment in Irving, Texas. I wish I had more candid photos of my Dad with the girls. With everyone actually. (I thought I might have posted this photo on here before, but I couldn't find it anywhere.) I had to work with this one a bit in Photoshop Elements because I had taken the photo through the glass of our sliding glass door so I wouldn't disturb them. This version is actually better than the slide because the glass had lessened the contrast a whole lot and I punched up the contrast to counteract that, and presto.

This is a British Airways Concorde at the gate at DFW airport in the late 80s. Last summer I posted a bunch of other photos I made of the Concorde, if you care to see them. I still think this is one of man's most awesome machines, even if they sucked money into a black hole. I certainly see why they were flown despite being money losers, the prestige and cool factor is still there even after all this time. (Remember, these were 60s technology.)


This is the Atlantic Ocean beach just south of Sebastian Inlet, in Indian River County, Florida. Looking south. We love to go to the beach here. This is a shot I took a few years ago after a storm and the beach was cut into by the waves in the storm.

This final shot is a slide I took at Turkey Creek Sanctuary a couple of miles from our home here in Palm Bay, Florida. I am woefully ignorant of the names of plants, flowers, trees, birds, etc. So all I can tell you is that this is some flowering thingy next to the paths in the sanctuary. Any horticultural geniuses out there, feel free to chime in on what this thing is. And if you know this one, maybe you can tell me what these flowers are at the bottom of this old post. Thanks, I 'preciate it.

I have to say, working with scanning 35mm slides again, that I LOVE slide film. There is a quality that slides have (and scanned negatives too) that digital cameras just haven't caught up to, though I have no doubt they someday will. It's like the difference between a facade and an actual building. The slides and the scans of them result in images that seem to be dense with color, as if it truly has thickness. As much as I love my Nikon D70s, and the whole digital thang, I think my slides are better. Digital images, which I love too, seem "thin" by comparison. Just my opinion after working with both decent slide and negative images that have been digitized as well as the output from my digital slr. I'm not going back to film, well I still have all of my film cameras and lenses and will still use them, but I think that digital technology has nowhere else to go but up, or better. Kinda makes me want to load up ye olde Canon AE-1 and A-1 and go on an old school film shoot. [An example of what I'm talking about here is in the two photos embedded in this paragraph. The lower-left photo is a slide scan, while the upper-right photo was taken with a digital slr. They are of the same area of Melbourne Beach, Florida, and while I love them each for different reasons, I'm trying to get you to see how the lower photo looks "thicker" than the upper photo. Maybe it's because the first one is a scan of an individual 35mm slide that physically has thickness and layers of chemicals giving it the colors to make up the image. Do you see what I'm talking about?]