(This review of Rebecca Senf's Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams appears in two parts. This is part two. Part one can be found here.) If a deep dive into the Parmelian Prints wasn't treat enough (or new enough) for you, Making a Photographer explores in-depth Ansel's…
(This review of Rebecca Senf's Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams appears in two parts. This is part one. Part two can be found here.) Rebecca Senf's book on Ansel Adams, Making a Photographer, is a treasure box, full of surprises. The first surprise is that it…
A cropped version of The Magic Trick, Part 1, made in the mid-1990s. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a sentence. As I lay there a second sentence will come, then a third. Then I can sort of see the whole thing laid out like…
It's two hours out of the way along small highways, heading directly south of Columbus. Despite growing up in Ohio, and coming back to visit every year, I'd never heard of the town of Peebles. That's not as surprising as it might sound--southern Ohio is a different state than northern…
It doesn't look like much at first but it is astonishing nonetheless. A rampart of earth, grass-covered with trees here and there rises up before you, a gap in the rampart beckoning you in. And you go in, and it's all flat, mown grass inside, with trees. The earthen rampart…
It's Halloween month and who can resist a couple of animated, Chinese-made, plastic skeleton hillbillies dueling away on their banjos as is their wont?
Not only will I write about travel and photography on these pages but from time to time I'll share my own work. This is The Geyser, from earlier this year. It is a ten-minute video of the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park, shot in 4k on a tripod-mounted…
There's something wrong with the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. I had taken a wrong turn and was trapped on the wrong highway through the endless forests of Pennsylvania when I passed a brown sign for the memorial. Oh, that's right! I'm near where the plane crashed on 9-11. I'm…
In my review of the Peak Design Travel Tripod I mentioned that I had lost the hanging hook, the cap on the bottom of the center extension pole, the first time I had used it. I had taken the hook off to extract the hidden iPhone holder and when I…
Ah, books. Such an old technology yet photography books--art photography books--are in something of a golden age. There is a flood of them, too many to even know all of the titles. I buy my share, although they seem far easier to buy than to actually find the mental space…