Photochopping

Last evening we went for a short ride on the Holmes County Trail. A couple of miles out we met a young woman on roller blades. After she went past it occurred to me that she would make a good candidate for Trail usage photograph. It happens to me a lot that I see a good photograph after the opportunity to take it has passed.

We turned around. I was riding my old Schwinn Collegiate 3 and various pressure points on my body were starting hurt. I kicked it into high gear and started to pedal…Hey! This is not bad. I felt better and was a little surprised that the old bike would ride that well. Then I saw the woman on roller blades out ahead of me and realized that I might have another chance to get a photograph.

The long and the short of the story was that she was constantly moving away from me so the only way to take the picture was from the moving bicycle. That of course resulted in a whole series of blurred photographs.

Later as I was editing them, throwing away the files, this one caught my eye. I cropped it and did an auto adjust of the contrast and color. I like it.

That got me thinking again about the contrast between digital and film photography. When I shot film, I would sometimes throw the lens seriously out of focus and stop it down a little to saturate the colors, just for a little different view of the subject. Or perhaps shoot through a wet or frosted window. I still do it with digital but with digital images, all of that, and more, can be done in software, sometimes derisively known as Photochopping. Both known as and done, sometimes even by me.

This photograph looks photochopped…some kind of blur or soft focus effect. But this is the original base image. Does the distinction matter? Does it matter that I didn’t intentionally make the photograph the way it turned out? And where do you draw the line? Cropping, straightening, contrast, and color adjustments are OK but special effects are too much. These are questions that photographers, collectors of photographs, and others with pecuniary interests in photography like to debate.

It has always seemed to me that the image had to stand on its own. Photoshop and other graphic manipulation programs are part of photography. The photographer uses his/her skill with all the tools available from camera to final medium including their eye for design and composition to create the image. Even if the image is serendipitous…

Glorifying Guns

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went for an early morning ride on the Holmes County Trail. A couple of miles north of town we found a little red fox kit in the middle of the trail. My first thought was that it had been hit by an Amish buggy. Then my wife said, “Here’s another one.” Then I realized that they had been shot.

The incident upset me, for lack of a better word. I wondered what kind of person shoots little red foxes. They were out in the middle of nowhere, not like they were in the chicken house killing chickens. They were shot illegally, out of season and on a public thoroughfare. This was not hunting. It was not self-defense. It was not destroying a pest. It was just plain wrong.

I am not against gun ownership. I own a few myself. I don’t like it but you need to have one on a farm. I’m not against hunting. In fact the state could allow more whitetail deer to be taken in our county and it wouldn’t bother me a bit. But I don’t glorify guns. In today’s world they cause a lot more problems than they solve. The unfortunate truth is that there are a lot of gun owners around who are not responsible. It is incidents like this, and more serious ones, that turn moderate people toward stricter limits on gun ownership and use.

And then this last weekend along I-74 in Illinois, fashioned after the old Burma Shave signs…

When danger lurks

Remember Sonny

The rabbit’s foot didn’t save the bunny. 

—  www.gunsavelives.com

Little ditties like this are not convincing…gun owners need to accept responsibility for the privilege of gun ownership or risk losing it. At its root, a gun is a tool of violence, no matter how you slice it. To glorify guns is to glorify violence. Look at movie advertisements…there is often a big hand gun right out front…glorifying the violence of the movie. Is that the world we want? A responsible gun lobby could be lobbying against that kind of promotion. They could be lobbying for stricter enforcement of gun violations, against violence toward both human and animal.

Those actions would speak to me…