08-05-12 Window Peeking

In my quest for something other than landscape and macro photos for this blog, I have gone "dumpster diving," which is my term for going back to old photos that people more organized than I would have gotten rid of a long time ago.This picture, taken in Delft, Netherlands, is certainly not art. But it is a narrative. Because of that, I converted it to black and white, in part because it was the two dogs that caught my eye in this scene and they were both black and white to begin with.And why is it a "narrative." Well, I think it tells a story, though, like so many other photos, it has many different stories to tell if you give it a chance. Is it about how life in Delft in different than life in your home town? Is is about the couple? What is the young man saying that is causing the woman to look the way she looks? What about the man in the background with his hand to his head?And, of course, what about the dog looking my way?What I like about candid photography is that though I am really "in" the photo because of how I frame the scene, I am also a kind of a voyeur. And so are you. As a photographer, I am saying "Look into this window and feast your eyes."

The Orange Sailor

It is a rare event that I have the pleasure of sailing with one of my sons. I would also imagine that it is a rare thing that anyone sails on Lake Oahe with the official FIFA World Cup colors of the Netherlands football team. But both were true yesterday as my son Brian and I headed back to the Spring Creek marina after a night in Mission Creek."Sailing" isn't exactly what we are doing here, since the wind was unreliable. But it was a beautiful morning with the sky just beginning to clear. And I suspect that Brian's bright orange shirt made us visible to both fish and fishermen.Canon 5DII 1/250s f/11.0 ISO200 17mm

07-17-09 Centraal Station - Amsterdam

Scott P and I were waiting to catch the morning train to Paris. As busy as this train station is, I was struck by the peacefulness at the moment I took this photo. As I look at the picture, I am also drawn to the fact that the golden morning sunlight streaming in the windows echoes the golden color of the trains. I didn't see this when I took the picture. What I saw were all of the lines and curves and if you go back and look at my architectural photos, it's clear that I have a penchant for lines and curves.

06-02-09 City Hall - Delft, Netherlands

I'm embarrassed to admit this but one of the pleasures of visiting Delft last summer was standing in the very spot Scarlet Johansson stood in "Girl With a Pearl Earring." I like Scarlet but I don't think she likes me. This building, incidentally, isn't far from the spot she stood and is pictured in the movie.

Canon 5D 1/80s f/6.3 ISO400 45mm