On the Fly, Literally, Double Meaning

One of my favorite photos because it shows how lucky you can get with a decent digital camera. Here's the set-up; it's late January. We're ending a nine-hour tour of Yellowstone National Park, riding in a snow coach - a cute little 10-seater with tractor treads in back and two skis in front for steering. I'd finally claimed the front passenger seat for myself, thank you very much, with camera in lap, at the ready. We're heading west along the Madison River, bumping along at maybe 15 mph, and I see this flash of white heading east, zooming along at who knows what speed. I lift the camera and shoot, bang (so to speak), right through the windshield, and this shot is the result. Tundra swans are fairly rare but they love Yellowstone. Magnificent birds!

Eating Gophers for Lunch

Gruesome, if you're of the gopher persuasion, lunch if you're a heron. This happens every spring, across the street from our house on the edge of the city limits. Heron can't catch fish in muddy high water so they stalk gophers. Typically they stand still as a pencil behind a gopher hole; when the gopher sticks his head up, he gets stabbed with the heron's beak, lifted up all a'wiggle, then stabbed fatally. The heron then tosses his meal up in the air and catches the gopher head first and ... swallows. One spring we saw one heron swallow two gophers in thirty minutes. Talk about overweight!

OK, it's not fine art but it is what cameras and long lenses sometimes do. 

Click on Richard Chapman, then on this photo to see  the whole sequence of eight photographs.

The Bear Went Over the Mountain - or tried to

The cute little black bear, maybe 200 pounds, tried to go uphill and over the top but there's a rule out there that says never, never try to get inside a herd of around 30 bison lest a couple of them get really ticked and decide to teach your sorry derriere about the rules of animal etiquette. The closest buff almost ran the poor bear down, and in one of Lois's shots the buff actually head-butted the bear's butt. We thought for a moment we'd see bear carnage but happily, she got away. Who knew bison could run soooooo fast?

For the whole sequence of the bison and the bear, click first on Richard Chapman and then on this image ...

Sunset from the South Rim, Grand Canyon, Arizona

One of my favorites, taken (probably) in 1999 on slide film. Fuji? Maybe. I don't think the color was enhanced in Photoshop but does it matter? It's not forensic photography. Besides, I have several other images that are just as intense, just as red.

Ansel Adams Quote from Ghost Ranch, New Mexico

I copied this from a card next to Adam's print of Thunderstorm, Ghost Ranch, (Georgia O'Keeffe's studio), on exhibit in December, 2007, at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

"It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, the detail so precise and exquisite that where ever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago."

To see the photograph, click on the title, then scroll down.....

Brief Photo Bio - The Nikon Years

I got my first Nikon camera, a Nikkormat, in the mid-60s. The 50 mm lens was pretty fast, around f1.4, and bursting with excitement I dashed off to the San Francisco Zoo and shot a roll of Kodachrome. Or so I thought. Turned out I'd not threaded the film properly into the take-up spool. Feeling dumb's no fun. My next lens was the 105mm portrait lens, one of Nikon's all-time best, (f2.5) followed by the so-called Micro-Nikkor macro lens (f3.5) - another of their all-time best lenses. I used the 105mm almost all the time for landscapes - I live in the Rocky Mountain west and shoot "up and down the spine of the Rockies," (quoting myself on an earlier website), where big things aren't usually close at hand. Mountains, for example, or neat stuff in Monument Valley, say, or Canyon de Chelly.

I ended up with four Nikkormat bodies and several more lenses, including a 30 year old Nikon 85mm - 250mm zoom (f4 to f16) - a huge honking thing that weighs over two pounds. The polarizer alone cost around eighty-five bucks. I was terrific at composition but terrible with exposures so it felt like most of my good work was accidental more than planned.

In the late 60s I took several courses from an irascible Missoula bartender named Lee Nye (a graduate of the Brooks School of Photography). All our work was in b & w, Tri-X pushed to ASA 6400 and developed in our own little darkrooms according to a formula he'd invented. Cropping in the darkroom had everything to do with teaching me to see photographically, for which I've been eternally grateful. Thanks, Lee!

And now? I have a small boat-load of Nikon stuff for sale. If interested, drop me an e-.

A Non-Photoshop Day in Montana

Photo by Lois Doubleday, yesterday

Picasso's Comment on Paleolithic Artists

The famous cave paintings in several locations in southern France and northern Spain are between 11,000 and 37,000 years old and they are generally thought to be the earliest known examples of paleolithic art - perhaps even of all art. Imagine - thirty-seven thousand years! Judith Thurman in a June 23 article in The New Yorker ("First Impressions") says that Picasso reportedly remarked to his guide during his visit to Lascaux (discovered in 1940), "They've invented everything."

This includes not only grease lamps to light their rock wall canvases, scaffolds to reach high, the principles of stencilling and Pointillism, powdered colors and brushes and stumping cloths; they invented "the very concept of an image."

I'm tempted to say the Old Stone Age artists were Imaging That - and though they were, I won't.

Thirty-seven thousand years ago! Sheesh!

Brief Photo Bio - The Argus Years

I started off with an Argus C-3, a sturdy old 35 mm workhorse with a slow lens. Probably f3.5. Focus was with a wheel you turned to get double images in the view finder to merge into one image. (No through-the-lens stuff and no built-in light meter.) It worked well for high school journalism and shots of the Eiffel Tower (I was a teenager living in Paris - army brat) but the lag in processing time, especially for slide film (Kodachrome was one's only choice), meant feedback was weeks later. Kodak's processing labs were few and far between and I wasn't inspired to shoot a lot. Too much trouble. Sometimes a roll of film would sit in my camera for a year. Or more.

Whine whine. Publish Post

End Notes

I'm writing my own obituary. It's a work in progress, of course, and some stuff I can't write - when did I depart this mortal coil and why? Blanks to be filled in by others. But when I left my loves and friends behind I went to the Great Golf Course in the Sky where, if the gods of golf approved of my devotion if not of my talent, I and my as yet unnamed foursome will get preferred tee times. If they disapproved, then I'll get stuck behind slow players who walk about clueless-ly.

Stay tuned. As long as I keep adding to this, all's well. May it be so for you, too.

A Bad day on the White Rim Road, Canyonlands, Utah. And I am NOT Hunter S. Thompson. 'Tis a pity. Photo by my wife and traveling companion, Lois Doubleday, who nearly died laughing after I cut off my hair. Constant wind with gusts to 60 and blood-sucking midges drove me over the edge after three days so out came the scissors, snip snip snip.