Travel
This was taken along the shore at San Juan Island National Historic Park, which is near the southeastern tip of San Juan Island. Of course driftwood was once adrift, and that means anyone navigating the waters along these shores, especially in small boats, must always be aware of the hazards of hitting floating logs before they become shore bound.Here's a Panoramio view of this location.
Being in the right place at the right time makes a photographer's job easier. Sometimes I manage this by intent and sometimes by luck.In the case of this photo of Seattle, I got lucky. Apparently, it had been cloudy, cool and rainy for most of the week prior to our three-day stay in the area. But during our entire stay, it ranged from partly cloudy to crystal clear. I took this photo later in the afternoon, which resulted in nearly perfect light for the scene. And I couldn't have asked for more interested clouds.And, yes, this photo is manipulated in software. In my intent to work on the contrast in the photo, I found a setting in Nik Color Efex 4 that gave a look to this scene that I liked.
My son Jon and his friend Lynn gaze off towards Victoria, Canada, from the west shore of San Juan island in Washington state.
I apologize for the bad pun in the title of this post - I couldn't resist. The mussels were one of the many delicacies we enjoyed on our visit to Friday Harbor, Washington.
California is cooler than South Dakota today but I'm afraid it still has a few things going for it that my state doesn't. For example, here in California I can drive 2 minutes from my aunt's house and find a strawberry patch with luscious, ripe strawberries. I can't do that in Watertown this time of year. These tasted great on vanilla ice cream, incidentally.In our planning for my aunt Betty's memorial at the end of next month, I told Deb that we needed to serve strawberries and Dairy Queen ice cream. Betty stood five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds but she could eat strawberries and ice cream like there was no tomorrow.
I don't think that Moses ever made it to southern California but if he had, I'm sure he would have enjoyed the palms and the pure morning sun as I did the morning I took this photo.My son, Brian, has astutely observed that this version of Moses doesn't have the horns that Michelangelo gave the original version of this statue. It would be interesting to know why this editorial decision was made by the copyist.To see the "real" sculpture, check out this post from a few years ago.
Many of the photos I have posted recently have been resurrected from a fairly large collection of old digital files that have been languishing in a virtual closet. They are a little like old, worn t-shirts that have great sentimental value but should really be turned into rags. My wife even tells me that if I get a new t-shirt, I need to throw an old one away. Imagine that! What if I had to throw one old picture away for every new one I took?Well, that's not in my genes - I blame my parents for being a packrat. And the good thing is that my photos are pretty well organized and that programs like Aperture, iPhoto and Adobe Bridge make it easy to view collections of old pictures.So today's photo was just waiting to see the light of day. It was taken in Venice, Italy, in 2006 and though it looks fairly simple and straight forward, I put about 30 minutes of processing into this to get it the way I wanted it.I'm sure if I had been listening to our tour guide that day, I could tell you more about this man. But I'm afraid I was caught up in my photography. . . .
I have several photos I took in and around Durbrovnik, Croatia, and when I post them here, I wonder how many tens of thousands of other tourists have photos from the same location.But anyone who has wondered the same thing knows that there is something special about having your own pictures. It is perhaps some odd way of tourists marking territory.
This is a view of the outskirts of the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia.
I took this photo several years ago when I led a Watertown High School student trip to Rome. We had a free afternoon and one of my students and I made the trip to the church of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome. This church is remarkable in many ways but I was captured by this statue of St. Bartholomew, carved in 1712 by Pierre Legros.In brief, Bartholomew was martyred by being skinned alive. But during the Second Coming, he is resurrected with a new skin. The artistic version of this story that I am most familiar with is in the Sistine Chapel in Michelangelo's brilliant Last Judgement of Christ. In that version, too, he is holding both his old skin and the knife that was used to flay him. In Michelangelo's version, some art historians say that the face on the old skin is the face of the artist.I don't know whose face is on the sculpted version I am showing here[smugbuy gallery="http://scottshephardphoto.smugmug.com/Fine-Art-Photography/Fine-Art/21122937_fHW9Lh"]
Just beyond the pottery featured in yesterday's post I encountered this scene. Maybe it's not at special as I think it is, but I liked how the human on the left complemented the figure on the right. It results in symmetry that would be absent with the standing woman. This was taken at the New Orleans Museum of Art.