Interwar Postcard

 

Train Coach D, by and © St Stev, used under a Creative Commons license.

Via Scott Kelby, I read David Bergman’s write-up of a recent trip to shoot several football games, including some emphasis on Brett Favre after he was traded to the Jets. Most interesting is that Bergman’s tale is essentially one of logistics – how to get his full kit, and himself, ’round the country and arrive in shooting shape. He seems to be a master, embodying the old military proverb that “Good generals study tactics. Great generals study logistics.”

I shot this on the day that Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President. The title is from Laurence Binyon’s poem, “The Fourth of August,” which conceived the First World War in the noblest of terms:

Now in thy splendour go before us.
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us
In the hour of peril purified.

The cares we hugged drop out of vision,
Our hearts with deeper thought dilate,
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.

(more…)

   
Jackson’s View, by and © monkeytime.

After reading Mark Alberhasky’s post on not missing great shots because of either waiting for the greater shots just around the bend or putting off shooting until one has one’s best gear in hand, I made sure to have my beat-up Canon SD450 charged and in my bag before leaving today for the office. (H/T to Imaging Insider.) Lucky that I did, because the skies over Santa Monica were damn near photogenic at quittin’ time. This view from my colleague Jackson’s window was made with the SD450 on full Auto mode.

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth, by and © monkeytime.

I seem to have decent luck shooting pelicans. Perhaps this makes me a crypto-Catholic. The pelican figures prominently in some branches of Catholic mythology as a model for Christ, piercing her side and feeding or resurrecting her young with blood from the wound. This lore of the pelican apparently predates Christianity.

Interestingly enough, the pelican also appears in Christian writing (and perhaps Jewish writing) as a metaphor for isolation and desolation. Psalms 102 says (verses 3-7, King James Version):

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.

By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.

I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

It is not clear that the original writing actually referred to the sea-bird we know as the pelican, but most English translations seem to use the word pelican (notably, the New International Version does not). The Vulgate appears to use the Latin equivalent, and the Septuagint the Greek.

Get my good side!, by and © monkeytime

Over at Strobist, David Hobby cuts through the non-essential numbers (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) and focuses on the core of balancing ambient light and flash. 

Lloyd, above: I dropped the ambient two stops and shot on flash, ungelled. Nyahhhh!