Tag Archives: wondering

A time for contemplation

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This last month and a half has been quite busy and I brought down the level of activity with a retreat in southwestern Indiana last week.

This was at Willow Pond Retreat, a small retreat center owned by Charles and Sarah Gipson.  Charles had been pastor at Church of the Saviour in Indianapolis in the period just before my wife and I joined that community.  I was at the retreat center for several days and while I spent a lot of time photographing the beautiful landscape, I found myself concentrating on the one acre pond that is part of the retreat center and within the pond, just along the shore.


Leaves in water are fascinating.


I suppose one could see melancholy in photographing in the autumn but it is enormously inspiring to me.


Inspiring because there is beauty in both the life and death of these leaves and beyond that, regeneration will follow.


Is this a metaphor for our own lives?  We can see beauty in life all around us and my mother in some respects became even more beautiful as she was dying.  Mom remains as a gift that will be with me for the rest of my life.


But what about regeneration, life after death?  My religion teaches that there is life beyond but I can’t speak from personal experience.


All I can say for sure is that there is life here and now and our sacred job is to live it.  Thank you, Charles and Sarah.

Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis

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Members of the camera club participated in a world wide photo walk a few weeks ago.  It was brisk when we got started at 9:30 but it warmed up after a bit.

We worked in the Massachusetts Avenue area of Indianapolis, a historic area with many artists.  A lot of the images I have here were created by combining images shot at different exposures (High Dynamic Range or HDR).  High saturation, which is often a part of HDR images,  just seemed the right thing to include with many of them.

It was a go-go kind of morning.

I liked seeing these three kinds of architecture together.

Indianapolis Fire Department Station 7.

At the Indianapolis Fire Museum up the street from the fire station.

Many years ago, when I first started working at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel NJ, I worked on automating Directory Assistance.  I learned that the DA offices often served areas far removed from their physical location.  A few years after we moved to Indianapolis, my wife and I started going to the Agio Restaurant.  It moved around some in those early years and when we stopped by at the last known location, it was dark on a Friday night.  Moved again, but where?  I called Directory Assistance and asked for the number for Agio and the operator replied “I was by there the other night and it was dark.  I guess they moved.”  Not the answer I expected.  I’m glad to know where it is now, it’s a good restaurant.


Mass Ave.  An excellent place to go with a camera.

Columbus, Indiana

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Photo Venture Camera Club went to Columbus, IN last Saturday to shoot architecture but it was raining.  Are cell phones waterproof?


We had met at The Commons, home of Chaos, a piece designed by Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguel.  I didn’t get any shots of Chaos as a whole, there were too many interesting details.  You can see it at the link to The Commons above.  Given that it was raining, we stayed there for a couple hours which encouraged shooting details.


Including a boot that is part of it.


The water fountains are not part of it.


This hook isn’t either.


Still raining.


It did eventually clear up and we wandered around outside.


Nice interaction of water drops, granite and a leaf.


I wasn’t going to have time to get around to see the buildings designed by the likes of Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei and others.  With a population of just 39000, Columbus is ranked sixth in terms of architectural interest behind Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Washington.  Not bad, not bad at all.


So I just stayed in the neighborhood.


Shooting through a window can add interest.


Philip Roth wrote ‘Goodbye Columbus’.  Many photographers and other visitors say ‘Hello Columbus’.  Some of us will go back in a few weeks.

Kaleidoscope images? Sure, why not?

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The other evening a friend mentioned that someone was doing kaleidoscope images with photographs.  This sounded interesting and in this day and age, the first thing to do would be to check for software that does that.  There is such software and it does an interesting job.  Here are some examples:









Some are clearly better than others but I’m learning more and I hope the next batch will be better.  I don’t know how creative this is, but it’s fun.

Once upon a time

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Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess in the flower of her youth.

As she matured, it became clear that she was going to be a tomato.

A red hot tomato.

The princess, aware of her beauty, decided to go to the big city where the pickings ought to be good.  There, she had four suitors, all named Basil.

The Basils, really quite crude if attractive and smelling good, couldn’t agree on who should have her so they cut her up.  All would marry their piece and so they called the parson.
The parson had never married vegetables before and since he was hungry, he ate them all.  The moral of the story is that it is not wise to leave home if you have the sense of a vegetable, you might become an ingredient in someone’s salad.  Which will happen at home too but at least you won’t have to travel so far.
Special thanks to Edward Gorey.

Letting go

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I was out in the front yard yesterday morning shooting some small yellow iris that have been blooming lately.


I was fairly pleased with what I was getting.


The light was diffuse and that saturated the colors.


Then the light changed and that was the end of it at least until later.

I didn’t get back out until this morning and I really wanted to do better with those iris.  I knew I had missed something but didn’t know what it was.


The light was different and even though I didn’t know what it was, I was farther from what I wanted than I was yesterday.


I headed back to the house and near the back door was this cleome (I think that is what it is).


The iris yesterday were nice.  The iris this morning were OK but the real gem was this flower.

I think I have part of the lesson now – going out with a tight agenda (I need better iris shots than I got yesterday) isn’t going to work if the conditions aren’t there.  Sometimes it’s better to let go and just look without any agenda at all.  The lesson yet to be learned is when is it time to give up one and go to the other?

A morning at the zoo

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Becky and I went to the zoo this morning.  It wasn’t unpleasantly hot and I didn’t need the headband I’ve been carrying around.  It was overcast which helped saturate the outdoor images.

How many parent have ever resisted this expression when feeding their kids?


I guess blowing bubbles is one of the chief occupations of a sea lion in the zoo.


What is it about penguins?


At the shark petting tank (these are young dogfish) one of them kept sticking its head out of the water.  I guess this is how it sees what’s on the other side of the surface of the water.  This one appears curious about the rest of the world.


In contrast to the curious dogfish, this gibbon seems more intent on an inward meditative journey.


Stealing a kiss while feeding the giraffe.  Lucky giraffe.


There were two giraffes especially interested in the vegetables.  The one on the left is only a year and a half old.


A lot of the kids enjoyed feeding the giraffes.  Even if Dad was a little firm in helping make the decision.


We have a new addition among the elephants.  Mom is very patient.  She has her own stick and so does the baby.


That’s pretty fancy footwork, getting a front and back leg up a bit at the same time.

I look at the animals in the zoo and wince that they are all captive.  Is that Right?  But I still had a good time and will be going back again.

Glow night at the Indiana State Fair!

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My friend Becky and I went to the state fair last night for lots of reasons, among them to see the images some of our friends had entered in the photography contests but mainly to see the balloons.  There was a balloon race this morning and last night the balloons were all lined up to glow.  It was dusk and the fun was about to begin.


At 8:45 they were firing them up.


As you can see, one young fellow riding on his father’s shoulders had a balloon of his own.

The darker it got the more impressive it was.


The notion of putting fire inside a bag made of what seems to be a delicate fabric eludes me as a real possibility.   But then again, there was an engineer who proved that a bumblebee can’t fly.


Are we at the state fair?  Yes, we’re at the state fair, complete with Ferris wheels.  And lots of people.


I was very glad that we could get up close to these flying machines.


This magic couldn’t last forever and the balloons were eventually brought down.


And then it was off to the midway.

The pattern of lights on this Ferris wheel kept changing.  It was beautiful.


The idea of paying money to hang upside down in space is a little uncomfortable.  Although I suppose I would if asked.   Then again, maybe not.


The memory of those balloons will be with me for a long time.  At least until next year at this time.

Good day to be out

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My friend Eileen and I went to the EcoLab at Marian University yesterday morning.  It was in the low 70’s and I didn’t need to use the sweatband I had brought along.  The sweatband was an essential part of spending much time outside the last month or so.


The waterlilies are getting ready to bloom.


And there were plenty of other flowers.



There were plenty of birds but we could only hear them, they were in the woods.  But there was a muskrat.


And plenty of dragonflies.


I wanted this one to face the camera but he would have none of it.  Reminds me of when I was a kid.  Some of the waterlilies were looking the other way too.


Good day to be out.  We’ll hope for more.