A Black and White Moment

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." ~ Diane Arbus

I am going to go off my normal theme for this post. I do so every once in awhile, taking you to another part of the county or state. This time I am taking you on a little photo shoot with me.

Photojournalists never have much time to play. When we work we have certain things we have to do in certain ways. We have an exciting job but we don't have a fun job. Fun is being able to play and make mistakes and enjoy whatever comes out of your camera.

Murphy has multiple minions whose job it is to make sure photojournalists don't get too bored. Seldom do things go right for us. The light does not cooperate, the weather does not cooperate, the subjects don't cooperate, you can't get the compositions right because people, things, and light can't be moved in news photos - you name it, it happens, and on a regular basis.

Working photojournalists seldom get time to play with their profession. In the evenings I am too tired to do anything except file photos, work on grants, catch up with whatever I was doing the night before, and get in some R&R with my hubby. Oh, and there is blogging.

But the other night I was feeling nostalgic. I was thinking about Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart. I was thinking about the images that I saw in the daily newspapers in the fifties and sixties(everyone read the newspaper then). I was thinking film noir one moment; then I was thinking dust bowl photos. My mind moved on to the early eighties when many newspapers were still grabbing awards for black and white images. Next I was thinking how nice Peter Gunn looked in b/w when he walked into a smokey bar.

My mind was truly jumping all over the black and white world. It was kind of like craving chocolate - you start thinking about all the different kinds of chocolate you could have if you just went to the store. I missed the good old days. What was I to do?

My husband was relaxing, watching some kind of sports program on TV. Umm? I did portray him in a rather unflattering way when I did the domesticated animal shootout (remember he was wearing an old man's winter hat and beat up sweatshirt as he was trying to caulk the tub with a cat riding on his back? If you missed the post, never mind. That is a hard one to explain.) so perhaps I could lure him off the couch into the night with a promise of a better photo. I grabbed one of his good hats and a jacket, and told him I was going to pose him around town. "Uh?" You gotta know him to understand that was the height of his protest.

Anyway, here are some black and white photos for your enjoyment. Certainly not award winning. Mediocre, to say the least, but I had fun. I feel much better now.











A guy who had been fishing on the city dock rounded the corner just as I had posed my husband. They started to chat and I told my husband to look back at the newspaper and I caught this "before" moment - the before meaning the split second before two strangers start talking to one another; kind of like freezing something that happened a few seconds earlier...a kind of time warp. After I took the photo, we chatted awhile about fishing and found out our new friend had a good catch the previous night, but no luck on this evening. People are just so nice around this town. This is truly a town with no strangers.



And then I forgot about Bogart and Powell and newspapers...

Then we moved on to Small Boat Harbor. You can't go anywhere in this town without running into someone you know. So when one of our friends stopped her car to see what we were doing, I invited her into the photo.





I could not resist doing one filtered photo. Kind of sacrilegious, isn't it?