Catching Up!
Well, here it is – a day after Christmas. There are only a few days left in the year 2011, and I can’t bear to admit how long it has been since my last contribution to this site. No, I haven’t forsaken photography. It is true that I did not get as much time exploring out of my “home zone” compared to previous years. So the sheer number of images is down, but not my intent to create better images. Photography is all about “what have you done lately“. So to cap off the year, I am introducing three new galleries that cover my period “in absentia” from these pages.
Full Moon and Other Stuff reflects my continuing love and fascination with night photography, especially during a full moon. We were lucky to have a number of full moons this past summer with clear or wispy night skies, and I forced myself to suffer a little sleep deprivation in hopes of getting some unique images. One of them, (Three AM), won an Honorable Mention at this years “Right Place Right Time” exhibit at the Finger Lakes Gallery and Frame in Canandaigua. Being tired for a few days was rewarded to some degree.
The “other stuff” is mostly old equipment hidden in the hills of the Southern Tier, and a shot from Susie’s always beautiful garden.
I was fortunate to get a call from friend, Peter Ryan, early in the fall selling me on the idea of hunting down a long list of old mines and ghost towns in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. Hmmm… it wasn’t a tough sell. I was ready to get out of Dodge, (or was it go to Dodge?). Anyway, Four State Affair picks the best of the ten day shoot, travel, shoot , travel process that is heaven for a shooter and hell for anyone unfortunate or not crazy enough to want to shoot everything in sight for days on end. There is absolutely amazing stuff slowly disappearing with the passage of time and what is often erroneously identified as progress. Photography helps preserve it.
Finally, after years of hints from ever patient wife, Susie, I arranged for a few days in New York City. We went as tourists and we saw an obligatory Radio City Music Hall show with the Rockettes, (they are amazing!), along with some of the normal tourist destinations. Of course, I brought one camera and lens…. just in case. I was drawn to the World Trade Center Memorial. It is impossible not to be moved by the place and the enormity of what happened there. New York, New York is a small collection of some of the places we visited.
I would be remiss not to mention what fun it was to take the train from Albany into Penn Station, Manhattan. I saw three eagles along the Hudson, and we hit speeds of 108 MPH! (Confirmed by my GPS, yet hard to believe). And since we walked right by B&H Photo on the way to our hotel, I had to visit this legendary photography store. What an amazing place!
I am not big on New Year’s resolutions, but I do have some goals for imagesbypyarnall.com in 2012. I will be moving the site to a new host soon, and at some point I will change how the site looks and functions. It is too hard to get to the older galleries now, and while I have been pleased with the look of the galleries, they are Flash based, and that makes them non functional on portable Mac based platforms. There is no small irony in this since I LOVE my iPhone and iPad, but alas, none of my galleries will display on those platforms. The three introduced here WILL work as they are HTML based, but sadly they are not quite so sexy. For now though, it will have to do.
Stay tuned!
