Put this website by your bedside and read a little each night. By the end of the year you will be an expert on all aspects of digital photography.
www.dpbestflow.org

This slipper orchid, Phragmipedium Fritz Schomburg ‘Tom Coffey’ AM/AOS was awarded at the Miami Orchid Show this past weekend. Some of you may have caught the brouhaha in the news a few years ago about the Phragmipedium kovachii that was brought into the country illegally by Selby Gardens in Sarasota, then quickly described as a “new species” in the middle of the night. This hybrid shown here has Phrag. kovachii as one of its parents. Outstanding seductive color!!!!

Here is a fantastic “cat and mouse” video of Charlie Rose interviewing Henri Cartier-Bresson ten years ago, with an introduction by Richard Avedon. Cartier-Bresson was difficult prey and known for being evasive. It is as interesting watching Rose persue him as it is hearing what he has to say about photography.

Up until a few years ago I used to be able to make a 15 minute drive west of West Palm Beach and do a little walking around nature in the old “shellpits”. I would usually take a fishing pole and a camera and fish for bass and take photos of native orchids. That property was leveled and now, million-dollar estate homes occupy the land. I tend to get a little stir crazy if I don’t get out into the natural world so on a March day in 2007 I set forth at the crack of dawn to the Wakodahatchee Wetlands, a water reclamation area in Delray Beach a half hour south. It is actually, in an urban area and accessible to many and has become a favored bird watching (and photographing) location in the southeast.

I am neither a wildlife photographer nor bird photographer so the subject provided a worthy challenge. Many of these photos are taken with a very compact, old manual focus Tamron 350mm catadioptric (mirror) lens. Although most nature photographers scorn “cats”, I like the lens for its pictorial effects, the “donuts” bokeh. I try to get out to either Wakodahatchee or Green Cay at least a few times each winter and find it relaxing and a great tonic for stress relief. I do tend to get behind in editing these images so some of this group of 21, although taken last winter, has never been seen. The shot above, also out of my comfort zone technique-wise, is an attempt to rescue a decent shot of a rarely-seen bird from an overly distracting background. How’d I do?

A year or two ago I had a section on my website of tattoos that people had sent photos of. All were done using images from the Orchid Photo Page as reference. One of the best examples of tattoo art is pictured here. Fortunately she lived in South Florida and even more fortunately, was willing to participate in a recreation of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ famous Odalisque. Ingres was one of my early heroes from art school days so it was especially rewarding to create the photo…with a modern twist! The photo was taken two years ago.

Looking at Ingres’ painting today, it has the look of Audobon’s birds: something about the anatomy seems askew.
BTW – we hope to bring back the tattoo gallery here at the 21.

This interesting interview with Kim Weston (grandson of Edward Weston, nephew of Brett, son of Cole) sheds interesting light on what is fine art and when it becomes commercial art. It all sounds soooo familiar because I have echoed his sentiments many times. Read here .

btw – his work is beautiful

While preparing a little presentation on Street Photography for our local Photo Salon, I uncovered a treasured issue of LIFE magazine in my archives. This particular issue (May 3, 1948) was mentioned in a 1980’s issue of American Photo magazine as being at the foundation of the photo essay as we know it today. I decided to digitize it to protect against the ravages of climate on paper. The Private Life of Gwyned Filling was shot by Leonard McCombe over a four-week period and I post it here for students of journalism and documentary photography. The page spreads are large (appx. 800×1200 pixels) so that pages may be scrolled and images examined.


Here is a 1999 interview with Gwyned Straus six years before her death. It provides some of the details that went into the photo essay.

In today’s world of “Jon & Kate plus 8″ and the whole lot of quasi-real “Reality Shows”, a photo essay like this seems quite tame, but 60 years ago such an imtimate look at the life of a stranger was unheard of and was offensive to many. From the interview linked above: “New York Journal-American columnist Paul Gallico was taken aback at the intimacy of the photo spread. Commenting on the picture of her crying, he wrote, “Exposure of what purports to be a genuine emotional break-down experienced by a living person is a type of spiritual nudity that leaves me more than a little uncomfortable.”

Although photographers such as W. Eugene Smith were dabbling with photo essays such as this a few years earlier, Smith’s best work (Country Doctor, Spanish Village, Nurse Midwife, Man of Mercy, Minamata, etc.) lay ahead and may indeed have been influenced by McCombe’s pioneering “…Gwyned Filling”.

I have been very lucky to have visited Colombia three times; a different city each time. The photos in this collection are mostly from a trip to Medellin for the 32nd International Orchid Show in September, 2008. One photo is from a trip to Pereira two years earlier. The one thing you bring home from Colombia is a warm feeling of welcome from the people. Colombians have to be among the friendliest people in the world. The stigma of the years when FARC ruled the country and Americans thought the country unsafe are long gone. Medellin is a clean, modern city where we felt perfectly safe and at ease. The metro is extremely clean and efficient. The downtown parks and squares are free of littering and loitering. The Botanic Garden is recently renovated and worth a visit. The Fiesta del los Flores is an annual week-long celebration with parades and dance competitions on the streets. We caught the Antique Auto parade during the fiesta and it rivaled any that I have ever seenand was a lot of fun. Photo ops abound in this culturally diverse country. Here is just a small sample.

I have six of these large prints in my home and I never tire of looking at them. They are almost therapeutic. The sensuous lines, soft colors and abstract forms give me a sense of well-being and help create a stress-free living environment. They are easy on the eyes and the soul. I hesitate applying the label “fine art” to most photography as many so readily do – but these photographs easily qualify as fine art and even more so when you see a framed 20×30.

I have the orchid subjects lumped together on my orchid website but wanted to group other flowers with them. And so we have here The Tranquility Basis. There were many good suggestions for names in our recent contest, thanks to all who replied. Special thanks to Tom Sullivan for his winning name for this collection of photographs – he won a print! This name says that the photographs are the foundation of something (tranquility), yet the reference to the Apollo 11 mission suggests they are also exploring new frontiers.

Prints are available in very limited editions of 10 for the large prints and 25 for the 12×18’s printed on heavy watercolor paper. A shipping crate is availble for sending framed prints. Prices shown include domestic shipping.. Overseas orders please inquire.

Country Photography Workshop (click for bigger)
L to R: Winogrand, ?, ?, Me, Bill Cottman, Mike Pretzer, Peter Gold

In 1973 I was fortunate enough to take a week-long workshop with Garry Winogrand. It was at the Country Photography Workshop in Woodman, Wisconsin. His point of view of what a photograph actually is, is bizarre, yet infinitely true. Light on surface. Period. We would go out shooting to the small towns in central Wisconsin, Prarie Du Chien, Dodgeville, Lancaster…come back and process our film and make prints, then critique the work after a family style country dinner. It was a great period of growth for me and the train ride there and back was an adventure in itself. When he died in 1984 Winogrand left behind thousands of rolls of undeveloped film, and thousands of unedited contact sheets. This 1982 interview with Bill Moyer offers some insight into the personality of the photographer and his views on what photography is and is not.