Message Forum

Bonnie Altman (Templeton)

Dear Uncle Rolf,

We were so disappointed not to meet him in Dubai.

08/19/14 08:53 PM

#779

Dale, beautiful picture! We hope to get there one day.

08/20/14 12:03 AM

#780

Philip Spiess

Nelson: Ha-ha! The Odyssey as an excuse for twenty years late for dinner! And how many hours was it in Venice when you stopped off at the opera house before you got home to your bride and starving young children? (Sure enough, someday soon I'll rummage in my archival boxes and cough up those pictures of "The Oddity of Useless," our 8th Grade Latin play, with Jean Snapp as Penelope and Steve Berman as Telemachus -- and, of course, yours truly as "Useless.") And wasn't the Empress Messalina one of the great "Lays of Ancient Rome"? (At least everybody said so.) I read Beowulf every five years; I'm at Line 17 (my grasp of Anglo-Saxon isn't so good!)

Dave: I'm confirmed in my original WHHS opinion -- you are too cool! These photographs, each and every one, are unbelievable. You have the eye, man! (As to "Where else would anyone want to be at 6 a.m. on vacation?" -- The answer is obvious: In bed!)

Dale: And your photograph is not to be sneezed at, either! (I wonder, does one ever see a quick-flashed rainbow when one sneezes? Never looked.) Beautiful! As Oscar Wilde once put it, "Nature's effects in the sunset were almost as good as a painting by Turner."

Dave, again: I thought your uncle's name was Pierce (less Dubai than Dubious). On another thought: Didn't you have an older brother or cousin that I (and presumably Bruce Fette) served on Stage Crew with? He was my mentor for my first several years on the Crew, but he was also a classic Stage Tech geek.

08/20/14 08:57 AM

#781

OK, I am begging you people with the golden camera lenses now. My city is once again under fire sporadically, so I never know when it's safe to hobble out on my walker or not. I think I've seen enough sample photography from us to make a small booklet to show, but I'm afraid to leave my house, literally.

Nancy had a terrific idea. Dave, Dale, Paul - and I'm sure I'm forgetting some people - have fabulous talent for photgraphy of nature. And I am sure that people like Phil and Danny Brown, to name only two, have highly developed aesthetic sense and tons of experience in editing and organizing.

How about our class have a project of putting together for eventual public sale a book of nature photographs that we ourselves have taken. And there is room for editors also. We will be turning 70 in two years approximately, how is that for a target date? At least for a first book? (I think big).

Entitle the book something like: "Our World, 70 Years of Beauty"..... but of course many titles would work as well or better.

Except for the Biker Chick, Dave Bucholtz's fabulous eye for the perfect shot of the simple glorious genius of Nauture deserves a central role, but I am positive that there are oodles of us who are drawn to this genre. Even a dummy like me.

I myself would like proceeds from sale of this book to go to - what else? - Walnut Hills. I have my personal favorite areas that I would like to see supported, such as tutoring those with Learning Disabilities, but I imagine some kind of scheme of x% of sales by year's end to LD support, y% of money to support sports projects, etc.

I hope I have not offended anyone by volunteering them for this project. I just cannot bear the thought of so much beauty and talent just sitting around doing nothing. Like money not earning interest.

So, what do you think? Please keep your thoughts as to my sanity out of the discussion, OK? :)

08/20/14 10:33 AM

#782

Too much meat in the previous responses to be brief…

Judy, thanks again for the compliments. Your suggestion for a book is worth considering. However, I thought that the biker chick should be the cover. What’s an ocean next to a half-dressed woman on a Harley?

Phil: my brother Bill was your mentor. Brown shoes, briefcase, and bottle glasses. Classic Stage Crew. He’s an architect in Redwood City, about forty miles south of SF and works now as a spec writer, taking blueprints for huge projects and turning them into the simple directions that contractors follow. He did SFO’s International Terminal, a two-year project. He’s planning to retire at the end of this year. Still wears brown shoes and drives a Camry well below the speed limit.

Phil again: (OK, the rest of you with a real life, skip to the next response). The “eye” of a photographer is not a talent nor is it in any way innately connected with the skill that photographers might possess. Had I studied at WHHS or in college as hard as I’ve studied light, I would have never become a photographer. The eye is really a product of experience and hard work. (Incidentally, when photographers get together they never talk about cameras, only about light and its effects. When you’re taking a three-dimensional world and arresting its movement and reducing its dimensions by one, you have to be a translator of light, movement, and you have to be able to recognize how the camera sees that.) And you’re wrong more than you’re right.

For example, this is what I did for the oceanfront photo posted above. First, I had to find what I thought would make a good image, finding the cliffs and looking south. Then I had to find out when the tides would be right, knowing that both low and high tides would have produced an effect different from what I had imagined. Then I went down to the cliffs the two previous mornings. Once, the ocean was so calm that the final image was uninteresting. The second time I arrived too late in the morning, so once again, no interesting photos. The third time I took about fifteen images, and because the swells of the ocean aren’t predictable, many of the images aren’t as good as this one. I was fortunate to have caught a couple of larger swells in the thirty seconds, which caused the froth-like effect in the water. Then, because each image took thirty seconds to produce and another thirty seconds to record on the camera’s flash card I could only do a handful before the light came up. Had the wind been up, or the ocean a little more restless it would have been easier. I also was toying with some other compositions, and they weren’t as good as this one. To get everything in this image, I had to back up to a position on the cliff that wasn’t terribly comfortable, and then I would have liked another foot or two.

As far as the tidepool shot goes…I have a zillion more that weren’t nearly as good, as I didn’t have tripod with me, and many are blurred. Handheld photos with a heavy camera usually suck.

08/20/14 04:04 PM

#783

Dave, that tidepool shot is a gold!

08/20/14 08:58 PM

#784

Larry Klein

Dave - your description of the photographic process reads much like many of my attempts at making a small slam in a bridge tournament event. Timing, reading the opponents eyes, timing, counting, more timing - all a part of the process. Love your photos.

08/20/14 10:47 PM

#785

I just found this old two season calendar from 2003. I hope that someone can find some use for it.

08/20/14 10:59 PM

#786

Philip Spiess

Dave: Great response. Although my sister got all of my father's artistic talent, and although I am not a great or professional photographer like yourself, my many years as a cultural historian addressing (among other things) aesthetic responses to objects and art, and as a (modest) photographer of architecture in particular, and as one who taught the History of Photography (briefly, as part of a course on "Archival Management"), I take all your points, well made.

Of course, one does start with the eye, identifying that "this would make a good picture," or "I've got to get a picture of that!" For years, as I crossed the National Mall in downtown Washington to catch my ride home, many times I would be out just before or after a typical Washington summer rain storm. The sky behind the Capitol dome would be a dark slate blue, but the west front of the Capitol would be lit up by the golden afternoon sun; it looked exactly like a Wedgewood cameo. "I've got to get a picture of that," I thought, but as many times as I saw this lovely vision, I never had a camera with me. Dang!

And I take your point about light. I understand how the study of what light does and how it works inspired the invention of the camera, and I have read John Ruskin's magisterial Victorian work, Modern Painters, which deals with how many artists saw and treated light. How many times on trips have I taken a photo in dismal light, knowing it would turn out terrible, but knowing I would never be back, probably, to that place. How many times I have squatted under a tree or elsewhere, trying to capture the particular view of a building that I wanted, but waiting for the sun to come back out of a cloud, only to wait again after the sun had come out and I'd adjusted my view, only to have the sun to have gone in again.

As to movement and position, again I've had some experience with that: just waiting for cars to go by before I can capture the building across the street without any blockage. And position: I've often had to stand in the middle of an intersection with cars whizzing around me to get the shot I wanted; in poor neighborhoods, I've even had rocks thrown at me as I photographed because locals thought I was a real estate developer who was going to destroy their neighborhood! And once years ago, on Auburn Avenue in Cincinnati, as I was photographing the Victorian houses there, I was suddenly accosted by a well-dressed African-American man who grabbed my camera and said, "I've got it! -- and so could someone else! Do you know what you're doing, displaying a camera like this in this neighborhood? -- you're going to lose it!"

All of which is to say that, understanding what you said above, I'm all the more impressed with your abilities and expertise!

08/21/14 03:54 AM

#787

Dave, has a collection of you photographs already been published? If so, is it (are they) available for purchase? If you answered "yes", please provide information on who to contact so I (we) can get copies. Thanks.

08/21/14 10:10 AM

#788

Laura Reid (Pease)

Dave, I loved the biker chick....keep her in the book.....

08/21/14 10:23 AM

#789

To Nancy, Linda, Larry, Ann, Laura, Barbara, Phil, Judy, Bonnie, Stephen, Gail, and any of you who have expressed your appreciation and enjoyment of the photographs I’ve posted, a heartfelt thank you.

Some thirty years ago I thought that I might like to try to make a living photographing landscapes and I had the rare opportunity of being an assistant for Ed Cooper, a prominent American landscape photographer who was, in Ansel Adams’ last interview, one of Adams’ favorite photographers. We set out on a ten day January trip in Ed’s modest RV, down Highway #395, (a north-south highway on the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains) starting at Lake Tahoe, through Sequoia, past Mount Whitney, the Alabama hills, then down to Death Valley. At Bridgeport the temperature in the morning was -25 degrees, and I took one photograph before my shutter froze. We would shoot every day from sunrise to sunset, not stopping to eat, and at night, while I changed Ed’s film holders (he shot with a bulky 4x5 camera), we dined on trail mix.

The trip was arranged spontaneously, as the night before we left, a huge snowstorm had blanketed parts of the Eastern Sierra that normally sees little snow, so Ed was hopeful that we’d be able to find and capture some unique scenes. We did. A week or so later Ed’s images came back from the lab, and he sorted through them quickly, hardly pausing as he dealt each one into a sales category—calendars, church bulletins, posters, Chamber of Commerce brochures—all the prospective buyers to whom his clerical assistants would send these images, hoping for a sale. “Why aren’t you even looking at them?” I asked, marveling at how quickly he was dismissing these beautiful images. “I know what they look like,” he replied. “The fun was in the doing.”

This is a roundabout way of explaining to Nancy and Linda that I don’t have a book, and really, I don’t think I ever will. The fun for me is in the doing, and once I’ve done it, I’m thinking about the next image. Before the WHHS message forum, I’ve never even shown these images to anyone. (I took the photograph of the butterfly ten years ago, and my wife had never even seen it).

I know that I’ve been dominating the message forum in the past few weeks, and I’m certainly willing to step aside, but honestly, I’ve really enjoyed posting them here, and I’m gratified to see your comments. As I mentioned in my little essay last week I’ve always been somewhat intimidated by the accomplishments of my classmates, and I’m pleased to see that in my own way I can hold my own. Thank you.

This is the one photo I took at -25 degrees...

08/21/14 11:53 AM

#790

Dave - OK, I get it about how with you, it's all in the taking of the picture, the composition, the light, the angle, everything like that. So good - YOU supply the pictures, and one of our stellar "editors", Danny Brown, Phil Speiss, and who knows who else since people are a bit shy about coming out into the light, anyhow, an editor decides what the theme of the book of pictures would be; an analogy of life, or just the seasons of the year, or seeing nature as a child, as a teenager, then as a 20-something, as a 40-something, a 60-something.... that would be interesting, I think and maybe accommodate a good number of Dave' humongous collection along with contributions by other photographers (Dale's rainbow was outstanding!), others of us can work on marketing, blabla, there is always something to do. It would be so wonderful to have a GROUP project like this that is not only satisfying and something beautiful, but also could make money for WHHS.

C'mon......

08/21/14 11:56 AM

#791

And would someone kindly let me in on how to post a picture on "message forum"? I couldn't figure it out, but my patience quotient is quite low.

08/21/14 12:07 PM

#792

Bonnie Altman (Templeton)

One last thing before you string me up: I want to share with everyone my excitement with my TENS machine. A physiotherapist was just here explaining to me how to use it - I am quite severely technologically challenged - not to mention sleep deprived thanks to Hamass-holes (thank you Ira Goldberg, that was brilliant). Anyhow, I am now sitting here and writing without pain, and it is a mechiya (sort of like G-dsend). Now I have to play around with channels to figure out where to place the electrodes so I can walk with less or no pain.... Greatest thing since sliced bread in my world....

And if anyone out there has personal experience or knows someone with experience with spinal nerve stimulation transplant - which my doctor said was sort of like having a permanent implant in the spine of TENS electrode - PLEASE email me. I am desperately searching for answers to pain relief without surgery. Nancy Messer, are you listening - ahem - reading me?????

08/21/14 02:50 PM

#793

Judy, I think the photo album is a great idea. Everyone could send 5 great photos.

08/21/14 05:13 PM

#794

Judy - See my entry #637. I didn't know how to post it either. You have to already have scanned the photo in your computer to be able to put it here.

TENS units are nice. The only times I used them was when I was going to physical therapy. I don't know anything about having them implanted. Maybe a physical therapist could give you some info about it.

The book is a nice idea but how are you going to get all these people who are all over everywhere to coordinate with each other to get things done?!!

08/21/14 05:15 PM

#795

Judy, to the right of the word "Source" in the Message Forum is a little box with a sketch of mountains at the bottom and a sun or moon over them. Click on that, and it will allow you to choose an image. After selecting the image, hit "upload" and that will allow you to post a photograph or another image.

08/21/14 05:27 PM

#796

Dave - relating to putting things on the Message Forum - and taking things from it - is there a way to print just one item here? I wanted to print your butterfly and ended up printing that whole page of entries. I want to print a number of your photos but don't know how to get just them.

And you just keep all those photos coming!

08/21/14 05:41 PM

#797

Nancy, if you're on a Mac I can help you. One of your applications is called "Grab". I used it to copy just the selection from the newspaper clipping about my dear pierced Uncle Rolf. You can drag a cursor across just what you want to copy. Even easier though is to send me your email, and I'll just email you the file.

08/21/14 06:15 PM

#798

Dave - I don't have a Mac but I'd appreciate anything you can provide. My email is messern@fuse.net. Thanks

08/21/14 06:20 PM

#799

Judy - look at Wikipedia - Spinal cord Stimulator. I think that's what you were referring to. I didn't read all of it - it's very technical but it's a starting point.

08/21/14 07:10 PM

#800