She would have been right.

Seems like often enough when we are searching our local drives for a particular image, we come across something totally unexpected. I came across this gem today…

"I was having so much fun with a digital camera that I had the chutzpa to send some photos to Kodak with word of praise. They featured me and a selection of images on their website at the time which is still online in Taiwan here, check it out!"

Those were the days !!!

Hold the edit!

A few posts earlier, I posted a comment by Garry Winogrand about saving your contact sheets for a year before looking at them. His reason was to separate the act of taking the photographs from the photographs themselves. This really makes a good bit of sense and I personally find that I have a hard time selecting images from a recently shot set, especially street photography.

Going back through an archive can often yield overlooked gems. The older the better? Street photos naturally aquire a patina with age…call it retro if you like. Naturally, because the depict a time gone by.

In 1974 after selling our photo studio, Valbuena and I went separate ways. I went north. That summer I packed much of my belongings into my 1967 red Volvo and headed for New England. I took my time and as many backroads as I could find. There ain’t much to photograph along the interstate! After heading north through western Georgia I found myself in the curious copper mining berg of Ducktown. It seemed to be a strange place perhaps because of the mining activities at the time.

A few weeks ago I came across this shot while looking through some boxes of contact sheets and negs for a specific photo. Somehow I had missed it 35 years ago. It had never been printed nor was the contact sheet marked for printing it. Today, I really like the image. The hat and the cigar make it, but he is also nicely joined to the lightpost by his shadow. I like the minimalist building which may be a post office, but I don’t recall. The final bit of humor that appeals to me is the exiting man with his bowed head. What else does one do in Ducktown but “duck”?

http://copyrightaction.com

This posting consists of 21 “commercial” images from 1973 to present. Most of them were paying jobs, although a few were done as portfolio shots. Up until my first book in 1999 I did a lot of commercial work. In 1970, Joe Valbuena and I opened a commercial photo studio called Eye Studios in West Palm Beach. We ran the business for four years and being young and impetuous, moved on to other things. After a three-year stay in New England I returned to the Palm Beaches and have been practicing photography here ever since. The bulk of my work was product photography so this collection may not be truly representative and I admit to just choosing photos that I like. I feel as if I have photographed everything at least once and done everything from fashion to corporate executives to greyhounds to charter aircraft. Twenty-one images is a relatively small sampling and there are many that have been left out. In the future perhaps I will do a collection of say, products or fashion. For now though, this provides a brief overview of my commercial work.

If there were ever a 20th century Mona Lisa, it was Anita Gilbert (Senno). This particular photo has such compassion in her expression that for me, it has a mesmerizing haunting quality. I knew Anita casually and she modeled for me for a couple of ads for Mildred Hoit. Last year I was saddened to learn that she had passed away in 2007. Such a loss.

Click here for the gallery of commercial 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.

btw – his work is beautiful