Route 96 in the Rain

We drove home from Rochester today.  We both love rural upstate New York, and so we don't take the Thruway for these trips - instead we take Route 17 to Owego, and then take Route 96 up through Ithaca and on to Geneva.  It was raining today as we retraced our route on our trip home, and there was fog on the road and clinging to the hills.  It was a wonderful, atmospheric landscape and I wished I could have stopped about half a dozen times to photograph along the road, but I didn't.  This is part of the road south of Ithaca.  I think I have captured a sense of the landscape.

The Sentinel

This is a sculpture by Albert Paley, on the campus of RIT, called "The Sentinel".  I went to RIT today to visit.  I have photographed this sculpture before, but it looks different on an overcast day, against a gray sky.  I had framed the image in the viewfinder, and then realized that a man was about to walk in to the picture!  I thought "Oh no! He is going to get in the way of my picture!"  But instead, he sat on the end of the bench, and made the picture more striking because having him in the photograph, you get a sense of how large the sculpture really is.

Easter in Antartica!

We are in Rochester still, and bought Easter Lilies today at church.  When we came out of church it was snowing!  OK, so it was only flurries, but still...  So to document this insanity, I took one of the Lily plants out to the back yard at Vince and Jo Ann's to photograph it showing the snow that had  fallen on the pine branches in the background.  OK, so it's not Antartica.  So sometimes I exaggerate.

100 Years of Technicolor

Do you remember as a kid when most of the movies included a label that said "Filmed in Technicolor?"  This is the 100th year since Technicolor was invented, and The George Eastman House has a wonderful exhibit celebrating the achievement.  The Technicolor process was one of the first methods used to shoot movies in color.  This "Two-Color camera" in production between 1921 and 1930 used the first process which involved filtering the light from a subject and capturing it in orange light and green light on the same piece of black and white film.  The color was not very saturated, and the process did not register blue colors at all.  Later the three-color camera came into being and the color was stunning.  The Three-Color cameras were amazing because they used three separate rolls of black and white film, one for recording red, one for green and one for recording blue in the scene.  The exhibit included a number of these huge cameras, as well as film clips, film stills, and all kinds of explanatory material about how the process works.  To the left of the image of the camera is a huge enlargement of a strip of the finished film, used for projection.

The White Church

I spotted this church across the open farm fields in Romulus, NY on the way to Rochester.  Something about the way it stood up higher than anything around it, and the fact that the steeple was different from any that I had seen before.  So I took a detour to go down the road and photograph it. I spent some time photographing it from different angles and this view is my favorite.  Then I moved in closer to see the sign, to find out what church it is.  So here is your puzzle - what church IS it?  I am guessing Presbyterian.  Then the next question is, is this church still active?  Things don't look good given the condition of the sigh, I am afraid.

Iron Horse

The long time owner of the greeting card company that we toured has collected western paintings and sculptures for years now.  There is a whole sculpture garden with bronze figures of both animals and people.  Then there is this!  The title of this sculpture is "Ironfire" by the sculptor Dixie Jewett.  The placque also said that before she was a sculptor, she was a bush pilot in Alaska!  That got my attention.  Anyhow, the light was not quite right for photographs of this magnificent assemblage, so I did two photographs.  Please click on each of the images to see more detail, and to see the incredible creativity she used in making a beautiful horse out of collected pieces of repurposed metal.  This is just brilliant!  Please take the time to look for familiar objects within the sculpture.

Clyfford Still's Books & Me

In the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver the paintings are in galleries on the second floor.  On the first floor there are storage facilities, and a number of displays of letters and art materials and books.  I was looking at this display, and decided to photograph it because I loved the light on the books.  While I was shooting I realized that my fingers and camera and head were reflected in the glass of the storage case.  But instead of trying to eliminate it, I decided that having me in the photograph made the whole image more interesting.