My Favourite Photos: Part I (film)

I've taken a lot of photographs over the years. Some few of them are, I think, pretty good. Just by chance: I don't really know much about photography as art or science. I just take pictures, and sometimes I get lucky.

I enjoy them, anyway, even if they're not technical master works. Maybe I like the subject, or the composition, or some other ineffable quality about them.

I've started quite a few times to collect the ones I think are best. Each time, though, I get bogged down in the sheer number of pictures. (There are something like 10,000 of them, mostly since I got a digital camera in about 2007.) So I've given up on the idea of having them printed in a coffee-table book. I've decided what I will do instead -- since this post, like any subsequent post in this series, is just for my own enjoyment -- is just go through them all, more or less chronologically, and put up the ones I particularly like. (I hope other people enjoy them too.) 

This post covers the time before I started using digital cameras. Back when I used film, I didn't take that many pictures, as it cost a lot to get them developed, and most of them really weren't very good except as memories. These few are the best of that batch:

1984

 This is a shot of my feet on a chair in Piazza San Marco in Venice. I had just finished that bottle of wine, so was in a mellow mood, despite being on my own in such a place. If I remember right, I was pissed off at the two people I was travelling with. Something to do with expectations and luggage.

Twenty years later, seeing this picture after converting everything to a digital form, I decided I liked the idea of pictures of my feet in various places, and so started an album called "Feet On the Ground," which now contains more than 40 pictures of my feet in various places where the thought of taking the photo occurs to me. Many of them provoke unusually powerful memories of places. (The ones that don't are taken on ground so unremarkable that I have to read the captions I wrote to know where they were taken.)

 

1984

 I took a pretty good number of photos in Oxford, being partial to the architecture of the place as well as its academic aura. Unfortunately, when the film was developed, everything came out with a sort of yellowish cast to it. Maybe it was the quality of the light on the cloudy day I was there; maybe it was my ignorance of photography; or maybe it's because everything around the old part of town actually is kind of yellowish. Whatever the reason, this one picture is the only one I took that I think has any kind of quality to it. The composition was easy, because of the slit window in Carfax Tower that looks across to the Exeter College chapel a short distance away.  But I still take credit for composing it. 

 

1984

 This is the interior of The Monument, a tower built in the 1670s to commemorate the Great Fire of London. I just happened across it while walking through the town, and (back when I was physically able) could never resist the opportunity to climb things like this. The view from the top wasn't particularly compelling -- the only thing I clearly recall seeing is some old battleship moored in the Thames -- but this remains one of my favourite photos from my first visit to London.

1986

Elk Mountain. I had just moved to Wyoming, and was travelling west from Laramie to do some field work in the Wind River valley, when I first saw this mountain from the freeway. It's at the northern end of the Front Range, which in Wyoming is called the Laramie Mountains. Interstate 80 loops around it on the way west, causing the aspect of the mountain to changes dramatically as you move along.

Coming back a few days later, I snapped this picture. In every season and at every time of day or night and from every point along the freeway, this mountain's appearance changes so much you would hardly know it's the same mountain; but from every perspective it possesses a certain grandeur that sets it apart in my mind from all the other beautiful mountains I've seen. It represents all of Wyoming to me, and even though I only passed about a year and a half living there, it's one of the places in the world I most love.

 

1987

 

I was living in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I went with a group of friends to see what Frontier Days, the town's big annual celebration, was all about: mainly a rodeo (of which the only thing I remember is something called the Chuck Wagon Races, sort of a demolition derby for Conestoga wagons), but there was also a car show (the first I ever went to), and this: an air show by the Air Force Thunderbirds. Despite having only a little Kodak camera and not much in the way of talent, I managed to get several good pictures of the aeronautic daredevilry, good enough that I can recall from the photos what was going on, and how exciting it was to see. Sadly, the aging prints I have of those pictures have suffered over the years, but this one still is in good shape, and I'm proud of not only having captured the action but at having gotten enough of the contrail in the frame to make for a pleasing photograph. 

 

 

 

 Fast forward a dozen years. By the time I took this picture, of red, white and blue flowers on the balcony of our house in San Antonio, I was using a fairly nice Pentax SLR camera, with interchangeable lenses and a few artsy-fartsy filters. This one uses something called a "spot filter" to give it the blurry effect around the central point of the frame. It's probably the only time I got a really good picture using that filter, and I like the picture enough that, when I switched to a digital camera I bought such a filter for the new machine. (I think I've used it once to good effect, and overused it on way too many other occasions.) But I mainly like this picture because it's the only time we ever had really nice flowers on the balcony.

 

We took a day-trip out of Phoenix once, down to Tumacacori, Arizona, and on the way stopped here, at Mission San Xavier del Bac, on the Tohono O'odham Reservation outside Tucson. An interesting place altogether, but for me the best part of the visit was getting this photograph. I forget what I did to make the sky look so dark in the background -- it was actually a washed-out too-bright blue, as is usual in that part of the world -- but with the white of the church's walls I really like the contrast. Just wish I hadn't had the date stamp turned on; in fact, this picture is one of the reasons I hardly ever use that date-stamp function anymore.

 

 

We took a trip to New Orleans once with our next-door neighbours, and while we were there we went on a cruise through the bayous south of the city, where I snapped this picture of a derelict hulk. I think it captures the Romantic aspect of that watery world nicely, and it's a little more arty than the tourist photos, even the good ones, that I usually get when I visit my home town.

 

 

 This is the best picture I took in Boston, when my wife and I went there in 2003. I love the coolness of the season captured in this picture, taken in the Boston Commons, and the urbanity referenced by the high-rise apartment building peeking over the trees. We don't get scenes like this in South Texas. We also don't get the deep greens seen in this undoctored picture. 

Our trip to Boston coincided with the 2003 Women's World Cup; I don't remember now whether that was why we went in the first place, but that tournament was re-scheduled after the SARS epidemic forced its relocation from China to the US. Because of that late move, the tournament was held in September and October, instead of the usual July and August schedule. So maybe it was chance that had us in town at the same time as both the WWC and the Yankees-Red Sox playoffs, when we became Red Sox fans. This photo brings all those memories back.

 

 

 This is a picture of Antelope Island, in the Great Salt Lake, taken during our first annual Condo Week trip in September, 2004. I'm pleased with the haze effect caused, I suppose, by a combination of clouds on the horizon and light reflecting off the oily-looking lake. 

At some point on that trip, I also took a picture from a high spot, looking down on four or five buffalo walking in a line along the shore of the island; but I don't know what's become of the print of that picture. It's not in my on-line album for the trip. Maybe it's not as great-looking a shot as I remember it being, but if I ever find it, and it lives up to its place in my memory, then I'll put it in this blog post. Meanwhile, I'm pretty happy with this view of the island from somewhere on the lakeshore.