After a long break, I am back posting to the blog. I have a show at the school in October, so I'm gearing up for that. Scanning starts again next week, and I'm going to post a new photo every day till the show.

Today's photo is of musician John Hartford ( he wrote 'Gentle on My Mind', made famous by Glenn Campbell ) taken in March of 1972. ( I think I was in Kansas City. )

What I'm showing isn't so much the photo, but the difference it makes if I use Adobe's CS4 Bridge software and 'Open in Camera Raw' to bring the image into Photoshop. I really like the Raw controls, and the reason is in the following 2 photos.

The first photo was scanned as a Tiff, and opened directly into Photoshop. I couldn't get any detail on his face or the front of the guitar.

This photo was an early scan, off the first roll we did, and we've gotten better at it since then, but even with a less than perfect scan, I was able to get the following image from the same Tiff file that I used above. Notice the detail on his face and the improved wood grain on the guitar in the bottom image.

I now have to resist the urge to go back and redo all the images I've already worked on since I have so many more to go.

Remember, it's a new image posted every day from now on till the show.

Back in 1992, I watched them paint this DKNY mural in Soho. I worked in the neighborhood and saw it every morning. (Soho in Manhattan.) I always liked it, and it grew on me after 9/11.

Abercrombie and Fitch now leases the building. I walked by last week just as they finished painting over the mural. It's now a large black wall.

My mother passed away last week. (April 14th, 2009) She had just turned 97. Thankfully, I had just been to Iowa to visit. (funeral photos are on Flickr.) 

She had a long, often hard life, yet even so she never lost her enjoyment of the world around her.

Here are some photos from that life:

Here's a young Wavie Ellen Miller in the late 1920s, before college, before the great drepression wiped out her college money. She worked her way through school and then taught at a one room school-house.

Here's Wavie and daughter Mary Ellen, circa 1945.

Here's the Garden of Mom, circa 1985

Here's one of my last photos of Mom. She wasn't sure who I was, maybe one of her brothers, but she still had a smile and a glint in her eye.

Enjoy your rest Mom. It's well earned.

It always helps to get some distance to see more clearly. A recent  trip home to Iowa provided some nice aerial views. Here are some photos I've taken through those thick airplance windows.

I've only had a few chances to get shots of Manhattan during takeoff. Here's one of upper Manhattan under a blanket of clouds.

Moon and clouds

This white mushroom was growing just outside of Chicago.

This field is in Nebraska or Iowa. Even through the scratched and smudged window the camera still captures the dried stalks of corn and tracks from some errant truck.

Leaving Iowa, I was hoping to get aerial views of the wind fields that have cropped up along interstate 80. The plane took off from Omaha and we went into the clouds and then it was all white, all the time. There was 100% cloud cover so I couldn't see a thing.

Here's a wind turbine from the ground. This thing is huge, I'm guessing 200 feet plus if you count the blades. And there are hundreds of them.

It's nice to see renewable energy taking off like this. Change is happening.

Summer ended; Work started again. My scanning funds ran out. I was going to scan two or three nights a week and keep posting new photos, but with my creative energy gone when I get home, it's now been two months with no updates posted to this photo blog.

So I'll post current photos.

I've taken plenty of photos lately. There was a school play (1026 photos), and a volleyball playoff (556 photos) and other school sports events. I took pictures of my son Max and the Haverford team at a fencing tournament (999). Here's a few of the fencing photos.

My younger son Kyle managed to cut his hand open on a fence. Here's the 'after the emergency room' photo. Click here for the 'before' photo - not for the squeamish! (And why I always have my camera with me.)

And for dessert we'll have a Christmas Cactus blossom and a cute cat.