Boston and the Wisconsin State Fair.

Here are some pictures from my trip to Boston and from Wisconsin's best summertime event; the State Fair.

Sparks and Sounds.

Something about taking pictures of fireworks seems poetic -- capturing a moment that is only meant to last for the briefest of seconds. There's something beautiful about a summer night, a spectacular view, good company, and exploding lights in the sky over thousands of awe-struck spectators.

White Stars

The Summer View from My Roof

Summertime Watchers

Red Star

Northward Burn

Multi-Ball

Fiction is Better than Truth.

The view from the roof of my apartment will be the thing I miss the most about living here. Let it never be said that Milwaukee is not a beautiful city when it wants to be one.

28 x 28: February Twenty-Two

Scraping the absolute bottom of this picture barrel. Apologies again, but today was insanely hectic. Tomorrow; new content!!

I Wonder if they Talk to Spacemen

28 x 28: February Twenty-One

I have a big test tomorrow so I am doing a special edition 'B-sides' version of yesterdays photos. Essentially these are the pictures that I liked, but didn't like enough to share yesterday.

Nighttime Stroll

Mo's Crossing

Just Another Street to Nowhere

28 x 28: February Twenty

So I had a very successful photo experience tonight, and I tried to employ some of the ideas of the art exhibit I saw and subsequently wrote about last night. By this I mean I tried to get people in these pictures just going about their business. For the most part I got some interesting pictures and I am posting up the best ones here for all to see. Some of these work really well as color images, but keeping in line with winter and the thematic throughline I've been presenting here during this month I've decided to show only the black and white images.

As an awesome side note, I am super happy with the last picture in this series (Classy Motion Blur) and even though I just said something completely different; I am including both black and white and color versions.

Angry Lady in a Crosswalk

You Don't Say

Safety First Then Teamwork

Not Quite Through the Looking Glass

Difference of Direction

Classy Motion Blur (Color)

Classy Motion Blur (Black and White)

28 x 28: February Nineteen

"They weren't pictures of people. They were pictures of the way I felt." -- Ted Croner

Sometimes life throws such oddly resonant and serendipitous moments at you that you don't even see them coming. Tonight I had the pleasure of attending the Milwaukee Art Museum's Street Seen exhibit. This was a special event with (loud) music, drinks, food, and various other activities throughout the art museum. It's a regular event called MAM: After Dark. To say the least, it was a fairly schizophrenic affair filled with tons of people and not a particularly clear notion on what it was one should be doing. From an interesting if not bizarre interpretive dance group to craft tables with no discernible purpose, one wouldn't be blamed for finding it hard to find the tone of the night. The sheer amount of people present in a relatively small space and the fact that we arrived slightly later to the venue than normal only exacerbated the calamity. Of course, if one were to just relax and take a step back, it's quite easy to see that the most logical thing to do in an art museum is view art. This was my first visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum, so I was not entirely sure what to expect in terms of what I would see. Part of me has always assumed that art museums are just places where oddities and simplistic renderings get passed off for a lot more than they actually happen to be. I tried my best to keep this notion in check as we decided to see the centerpiece attraction for tonight's event: Street Seen.

Street Seen is a collection of photographs from six different photographers showcasing various pieces demonstrating city life and culture during the years following the Second World War. Photography is one of those art forms that I find it hard to denote any one photograph as art. By dint of what it is, I feel like the classification of such work falls squarely into a subjective category. Regardless, I viewed the exhibit with as open a mind as I am able, and I must say I was quite taken aback. While every four or five pictures simply seemed to me to be pleasant accidents touted as much more, there were some every now and then that struck me as simply amazing. I suppose I should clarify that 'pleasant accident' can both be a good thing and a bad thing. Photography is capturing a moment the way you're seeing or experiencing it, and because moments are fleeting most of the best pictures that will ever be captured will be accidental. The very same photos I was so astonished by were most likely also completely random; a cosmic conflux of elements all coming together at once with a lucky human being aware enough to snap a shutter at the right moment. Happy enough to be wrong about the content of an art museum (for the most part), I plodded along silently critiquing or envying each photo until I came upon the works of one Ted Croner.

The photographs of Ted Croner and the accompanying information about the photographer gripped me in a way I had not expected -- which is to say this is the resonance and serendipity I was speaking about at the beginning of this writing. Ted Croner, upon returning from the War, dedicated himself to being a photographer and took up shop in the heart of the country; New York City. Enrolled at a famous photography institute of the time (a name which escapes me at the moment), it wasn't until one night when Croner borrowed a specific camera (twin reflex, I think) and set out to take a few shots at a diner that he discovered his photographic 'voice'. Upon this discovery Croner commented that he wasn't just capturing people doing things, he was capturing how he felt. I've quoted the exact line at the top of this posting, but those of you who have read this blog for some amount of time may remember that my own view of the world and taking pictures of it is something freakishly similar to Ted Croner. It wasn't until I further discovered that the photographer also relished the post production aspects of his craft that I was very nearly floored. Apparently Croner was a huge fan of experimental manipulation techniques during the development of his work. Altering shadow darkness, exposing negatives longer, double printing negative on the same sheet -- Ted Croner was essentially doing exactly what I was DECADES before I ever thought of the idea. Needless to say, his photographs were the absolute highlight of the entire night for me. Here was a person who not only lived in an era that I personally find exponentially more visually entertaining, but he was much more skillfully and confidently capturing images that I so far only dream to aspire to.

I suppose the point of all of this rambling on and on about finding a kindred spirit in a medium I am growing progressively more fond of is that sometimes it's nice to know that something you believe in is not only shared, but respected. In one fell swoop, the photographs of Ted Croner at once stoked an inspirational fire that has not been so driven in quite a while and also bolstered my personal confidence in my approach to the art form. Life can be a surprising journey from time to time, and it's little moments like the one tonight that can draw the focus on something much bigger you were never aware of. It's hard to accurately describe the kind of feeling such a moment creates, but it's one worth writing about and it's one that I would encourage everyone to go out and find.

Also, I have to again apologize for yesterday's entry. Yikes. Nine more days!

28 x 28: February Seventeen

Snow Place to Walk

28 x 28: February Nine

There's some snow falling today... Just a little bit. Also, I think I may be on a black and white kick.

Snowfall Stoicism

Thoughts on a Snowy Day.

Happy New Year everyone! Originally I was going to post up a 'Best Of' list for 2009 on January 1st, but life got in the way as it always does. Suffice it to say that 2009 had some very good things and some truly horrible things, but managed to end on a high note. Good? Great.

Today is January 7th, 2010. For those of you in Milwaukee, Wisconsin today you should know that it's a snowy day out. For some of us this will be a complete nuisance, and for some it will be a day of fun and enjoyment of the slowly falling flakes. Looking out my window over the city and watching the day progress, I've gotten to thinking. No deep thoughts that will produce paragraphs and paragraphs of words jumbled together to represent my thoughts, but some ideas.

A good snow day is one which the snow falls down slowly and gracefully -- when the wind isn't blowing right through you and the temperature doesn't completely freeze out any of the joy in your heart. On a day like this the usually grey and miserable scene outside is covered up and hidden. Especially in the city it's refreshing to watch the overwhelming greys of the buildings, skies, and pavements give way to a white blanket of snow. It's hard to be too gloomy on a day like today, assuming you don't have to get places on time or drive long distances.

Finally, a good snow day is a blank slate. A whitewash over the city, but more importantly a canvas to have a really fun day. Sledding, taking pictures, taking a walk... just admiring the world when it looks like this. And so I'm left thinking about what the day will yield for all of us -- for me, for you who may be reading this, for people I don't even know. These questions exist everyday existentially, but on a day where we're all being snowed on it brings us all closer together whether we realize it or not.

So what will we do today? It's a rare and temporary clean start, a visual gift, and most importantly a blank piece of paper to write a very specific story. Have fun today everyone, Happy New Year (belated), and here's to a 2010 together!

(At the risk of becoming redundant, this will be the last picture I post up on this blog in this style. This picture represents my brain on this day, and if the words featured above it make about as much sense you have my sincerest but amused apologies.)

Picture: Saturday Morning Sunrise

It's funny how some of the most stunning imagery in a day is only available for about three quarters of an hour at night and in the morning. While I was out taking this (a rare occurence for me to be up so early), it dawned on me that the idea of a burning ball of gas hundreds and thousands of miles away that provides life and light for our entire planet is actually both very profound and absurd.

Good morning, everyone.

The World in my Mind

This post serves as both one of those new ideas I've been mulling over, and a slight diversion from regular goings on here at my blog. I cannot say if this will become more frequent from now on, but the kind of content found here may begin to vary as per my very first post. No worries though, I'll try and keep movie reviews and such coming as they interest me.

My dad recently told me that, to him, photography is a person's attempt at showing others the way that they see the world. I've carried this around with me the last couple of weeks and it occurs to me that it is very profound in its own way. At a most basic state, a photograph is really just a still representation of something that exists in this world. In other words you could say that it is mundane. When one thinks then as my dad does, a picture becomes something much more interesting. The way a picture is taken, its subject, and even the location all inform the viewer of the unique way that a person views the world; the mundane can suddenly mean a lot more. Taken this way, the act of photography is actually intensely personal, however intentionally a picture is taken.


With this thought process recently in mind, I set out to not only take a few new pictures, but to search out some of my old ones and figure out something about myself. Why did I take the picture? What did I feel? And what was I trying to say to everyone else about my world view? It's actually a very interesting process to discover something about yourself that you may have only been subconsciously aware.

I consider myself a bit of an artist, or more realistically someone with an artistic mind. I often find myself looking for detail and symmetry. Colors that really stand out. I especially like light and especially that at night. With this in mind I found it intriguing that it apparently seems in almost all of my own photography I'm desperately trying to capture whatever it is that I am seeing and feeling in that moment. The funniest part about this endeavor, as with most art, is that I often times struggle to succeed. Very seldom does it seem I ever really capture the essence of my own vision. I find this frustrating, but admit freely that sometimes the most beautiful moments can be captured by accident. Allowing myself to accept this fact, I poured over the last six months of pictures stored on my computer with an eye to spot not only the beauty in any particular moment, but my own emotional and artistic intention...


... And found lots to look at. Sometimes the picture felt close to what I was aiming for and in some cases I'm so far removed from those moments that the pictures become something else. Nevertheless I started picking out images that I felt I was relatively close to capturing and decided to see if I couldn't maybe coax the last bit of personality out of them. In other words, make those visions uniquely mine to the world. This involved a heavy amount of photo manipulation on my part. Normally I am trained to scoff at the practice, but it occurs to me that by adjusting these images I am only making the effort to expose in some manner the feeling of the things I am seeing.

Now, in a lot of cases the editing began slowly and I attempted to keep the changes minor. In some cases this was all that was necessary to achieve my desired effect. In others I made a discovery that perhaps the moment I was in and the picture I was taking were an attempt to emulate the scene I wish I could see. It's natural to want your own perfect version of life and it's also natural to never really achieve that. As I slowly pushed the contrasts and the color balances in differing and more dramatic directions I realized I could turn the world I've seen into the world in my head. There's something oddly poetic about the process that I really appreciate -- taking the real world and adjusting it ever so slightly to match the ideal version in my brain.


I realize the practice is slightly counter-purpose to photography. There are some that would argue that when you take a photo, you're trying to capture that moment as real as it is forever. And while I can imagine the practical applications of such a practice I cannot help but be bored by it. If, as my dad so helpfully put it, the purpose of photography is to share your unique view of the boring everyday, then maybe what I've done is an extension of that. Some of the pictures featured here say a lot about me, or at least how I'd like to think I see existence. They represent places I've been and, at the same instant, places I'll never be. That's a really tough nut to crack, but I can't help but believe that it's a lot like living.

The City From My Roof

You're going to have to click this picture to see it in a bigger resolution, but today was an amazing day in Milwaukee. It's recently dawned on me the intricacies of the city and I find myself appreciating it a little more than I have in my previous 22 years. Anyways, this is the view from my roof; a view good enough to warrant my renting of this particular apartment.

*Disclaimer* There was some tweaking down in Photoshop to filter out some of the grey from the sunlight and inject some warmth into the whole thing. The view is still fantastic.