Photo Weekend

Shadow White Blue #1

Not much blogging for the last couple of days as I've been keeping myself busy in other unprodctive ways...

I spent about four hours last Friday taking photographs with my new digital camera. I left home and started out on Trowbridge, photographing the ridiculously-designed "turnaround" pattern. At nearly every juncture at which cars and trucks are supposed to make turnarounds from eastbound to westbound Trowbridge, there are tire tracks (some deeper than others) on the grass where trucks have driven up over curbs in order to complete their turns.

I'm intending on emailing my photos to the city manager and suggest that the planner for that project either be fired or that the city get its (our!) money back.

Okay, so...

I headed north on Harrison and was happy to find my "Snow Job" project still intact in front of the Methodist church... I was afraid that someone had picked up the paper before the last snow that we had but was happy to see otherwise. (Hmmm... now what kind of a life does that indicate I have when a piece of paper lying on the ground makes me happy?!?) I'm hoping to document the decay of the paper from now until, well, it decays beyond visibility, I guess.

As I walked, I kept a few of my Flickr groups in mind – I was looking for opposites for the Photographer's Block (Assignment) group, and numbers for the In Numerical Order group. I found plenty of the latter but I got distracted yesterday and forgot to keep up with the group... I managed to contribute 58 and had 98 ready to go, but lost out.

I spent a lot of time near Brody complex, taking a couple of panoramic shots that didn't quiet, um... pan out.

I struck gold (or shall I say, blue and white?) at the old Bud Kouts Honda dealership. I hadn't been aware they'd closed up – I'd bought my Honda Civic Wagon there shortly after Zachary was born a little under twenty years ago and I'd often fantasized about buying another Honda from them... seeing an empty showroom and parking lot was odd. I loved exploring the shapes and patterns and textures of the used car trailer that sets in the middle of the parking lot, and I must have shot a hundred frames around that lot.

I spent the better part of the rest of the evening sorting through and editing images for uploading to the Flickr site and was quite excited about a lot of the results – disappointed in others.


Last evening, I tried catching up on some DVDs I'd rented last Thursday night... I need to get them back tonight, so I crammed three-and-a-half in last night: Dirty Pretty Things, a good but frightful film about people involved with selling their bodily organs for passports (ugh!). Audrey Tatou is in it, and I rarely pass up a chance to see one of her films!

I also watched an old, old one... The Heartbreak Kid with Cybill Shepherd and Charles Grodin. Grodin plays a newlywed who is in Miami Beach on his honeymoon, meets Kelly (Shepherd), then dumps his wife (he'd realized marrying her was a mistake mid-way to Florida) to pursue the amazingly gorgeous Kelly. Eddie Alberts (Green Acres) plays Shepard's surly father wonderfully.

Sylvia was nect on the agenda and Gwyneth Paltrow played what I thought was a pretty good version of poet/novelist Sylvia Plath. There seemed to be so much of the story of her life that was left out (not that I know that much about her), and I think that her relationship with her husband was far too surface-scratching. I recently began reading The Bell Jar and have really enjoyed her use of language so far.

I wrapped up the evening with a surprisingly wicked House Of Sand And Fog. I'd known the concept of the film but didn't realize that it would get as intense as it did. It's a good film, I think, that gets you to take sides with both sides of a story, and i found myself being empathetic for both Ben Kingsley's character as well as Jennifer Connelly's.