A photograph and its story

[sf]

There are so many pictures that are more than just street scenes or travel photos or landscapes or portraits or whatever. There are some photos that we have taken that mean a great deal more - which capture a particularly poignant moment in a life. There are also photos that just have funny stories.

Let's post those images that have stories - and a little story to go with each one.

It could be a really interesting thread, with all the diversity of location and style and perspectives we have here. All the different minds and eyes would make for a really rich thread.

I'll begin. I'll keep it short.


This is a picture of my cousin, I took it with my RF645 on my most recent trip to England. We had no money for taxis or bus rides, so we walked everywhere. We also saved our food for sometimes days on end, and carried stuff around in plastic market bags. This day, we had walked from town into the hills, through a number of farmers' fields, and were heading toward my old home near the moors, as far from town as one can get before leaving it. I was taking pictures of the countryside, and he decided to pull out a snack. He is eating, with chopsticks, chinese food from the night before (at least 12 hours old at this point - and the greasiest I've ever experienced). And the food had just been sitting on a chair in our room, not refridgerated.

Chinese food on the moors. Definitely a once in a lifetime experience. And I got it on film, because no way was I going to eat that!

 

[sooner]

Thanks for sharing both the photo and the backstory. It is a great contrast and statement on globalization to see a guy eating Chinese food--with chopsticks, no less--in the English countryside. Moments like this make photography different from a lot of art hanging in museums, IMHO, and I appreciate the added context.

 

[Kin Lau]

Great pic... I love the mud on his pants, and the look on his face that says "what am I eating here" 🙂.

 

[iñaki]

I like the photo and the story too. Good thread, I´m waiting for the next story/photo.

 

[sf]

Then maybe post something? Maybe this is too much work . . . .

 

[vrgard]

Okay, here's my pic & story

Okay, here's my pic & story

My wife and I spent Christmas this year in Texas with my brother's family which includes my 2 1/2 year old goddaughter. A couple of nights after Christmas she announces that she wants to walk down the street to "see baby Jesus!" Turns out a neighbor a few doors down had one of those creche manger scenes made of plastic figures with lights inside. So, we walk down the street to see the baby Jesus and I grab my Leica M6 & 'cron 50mm loaded with 400 ASA film to see if I could get anything in such low light conditions. Here's one example of what I got of my goddaughter who didn't hesitate to climb right into the manger scene (yes, we asked the homeowner if it was okay). Needless to say, this picture will always be a great reminder of that Christmas and what a sweet little girl my goddaughter truly is (and yes, she does turn me into a doting sap of an uncle! 🙂 ).

 

[aad]

Great idea, Shutterflower. Does it have to be rangefinder?

 

[Don Parsons]

Baby, meet your big brother.

Baby, meet your big brother.

In this photo, my wife is handing our 1-day old daughter to our son. I love this one for the looks on their faces. The second one is of him holding her for the second time. I almost lost it when I saw him start to well up in tears...

My daughter is 2 weeks old yesterday.

 

[vrgard]

In this photo, my wife is handing our 1-day old daughter to our son. I love this one for the looks on their faces. The second one is of him holding her for the second time. I almost lost it when I saw him start to well up in tears...

My daughter is 2 weeks old yesterday.

We can all talk about the technical and/or artistic merits of any given photograph, but sometimes it's the subject of a photograph that matters most to the person viewing it. Here, Don has captured a moment that will be remembered for many, many years to come. And that has a value all its own. Congrats, Don, on the addition to your family.

-Randy

 

[raid]

I have just received a Leica Standard from 1934 and from someone else I got an equally old Leitz Elmar 50mm lens. Here it is ...

 

[raid]

A second view of this beautiful and pure camera:

 

[VinceC]

One day in 1990, a few months after the Berlin Wall opened, I was working in Nuernberg, West Germany, when someone in my office said there was an East German fellow down on the street selling pieces of the Berlin Wall out of the back of his Trabant. Indeed there was. And it seemed only fitting to photograph him with a Soviet Kiev IIa and a 1961 Jupiter-12 35mm lens. (My recollection is this was taken with Jupiter, but the windows in the background show a lot of distortion for a 35mm lens, so there's an off chance it was taken with a 28mm f/6 Orion lens, which I also owned.)

I always thought this picture captured some of the cheerful feellings folks briefly had during those months, before the world returned to its usual calamitous ways.

 

[reagan]

The gentleman with the plastic dessert spoon in his pocket passed away last week. Other than the fact that he'll be missed by many, his funeral celebrated a good life. He was 86 years young, married to the same woman for 60+ years, raised two good sons and had so many friends, the memorial service was standing room only that overflowed into the parking lot. What was remembered the most about him was... he loved to sing.

This photo taken last May, which I shared with his sons, is a favorite of mine, I guess because I know these guys and have sat across a table like this several times as they told one story after another... and laughed... and sometimes sang.

"two old friends, one big story"
Zorki.3M
Jupiter.8

 

[reagan]

P.S. ~ Great shots and stories all! Thanks for sharing!

 

[Chaser]

Dr. Reichow Had just finished the testing stages of a line of vision enhancing contact lenses for Nike. These lenses had been tested on athletes like Ken Griffey Jr. and some other Nike signed professionals and the lenses were starting to get a decent amount of press. My sports writer had been working on an indepth story about the lenses and had been trying for over a month to get him to agree to a photo op. He was very hesitant about being in a photo himself but agreed to have one of his assitants pose. We were on a tight schedual with his time because he was only able to meet with us a few hours before he had to board a plane to europe. After some coersion, smiles, and polite suggestion we got him to dawn a lens and pose for a few really quick shots. We parted ways and when i got back to the office i reviewed the pictures on the lcd of my nikon d1h and was excited to view them full size. I turned the camera off, and pulled the card out put it in the card reader ... and nothing came up. Somewhere between camera and reader the lexar had self destructed. Now only about an hour before his departure my writer and i headed back to Dr. Reichow's office to see what we could do. We were met with some strongly negative body language followed by some heavy sighs. After some small talk and tech jargon about cameras and worst nightmares his demeanor changed and agreed to comeback downstairs from his office and let me take a few really qucik shots. This time armed with a canon 10d and a 50mm lens i got off a handfull of shots and thanked him perhapse too many times, i was really fresh to the PJ world perhapse 3months in or so, and ran back to my computer and loaded the files with my eyes closed and muscles tensed.

 

[Doug]

We were driving through Yosemite toward Tioga Pass last October when I saw this high rock dome with a few photographers on top, pulled into a viewpoint parking slot, grabbed my camera and ran up the steep rock slope. About half-way up, panting, I stopped and shot this photo. I went the rest of the way up and chatted with this guy a bit as we both took some shots of the scene.

He is from New York, in Yosemite National Park to attend a photo class/seminar. He was entranced with this particular spot, while his group had gone on across the highway to an even higher rock slope like this... I could see them way up there maybe a mile away as we descended and he hurried to catch up with his group.

I've been pondering whether I should also include a photo of what had interested the other photographers... I guess I should... 🙂

 

[sf]

We can all talk about the technical and/or artistic merits of any given photograph, but sometimes it's the subject of a photograph that matters most to the person viewing it. Here, Don has captured a moment that will be remembered for many, many years to come. And that has a value all its own. Congrats, Don, on the addition to your family.

-Randy

That's kind of the idea, here, with this thread. Instead of talking about the technical aspects of an image, instead of picking at the lens, camera, lighting, whatever, let's look at what the image means to the photographer, what story is behind it.

 

[FrankS]

Great thread/read. I hope it continues. Perhaps it deserves to become a sticky?

 

[sf]

Another one to keep things going

Another one to keep things going

Have you read anything by the Bronte sisters? Like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre in school? When I lived in England as a child, we lived in the same hills as the story in Wuthering Heights takes place. Only about 5 minutes down the road from Haworth where the Bronte's house sits as a museum. I remember as a boy, wandering those moors, wrestling the lumpy peat bogs in oversized boots, exploring centuries old ruins, getting lost in dense fogs, creeping through neighboring farmers' fields of sheep and goats, and just generally doing what a young person in such a situation should do.

When I returned to England this winter, I decided to go back to that old town and try to find the old house. I wandered in the 4 directions out of town into the hills, looking for any familiar sight, anything to remind me of the way. After two days of that, I finally found myself on the proper hill, and having walked for many hours over those lumpy fields, jumping stone walls, and sneaking through huge muddy yards, I was thirsty and made my way to a little 10x15 foot shop where there was some wine, water, beer, and some British beverages that don't make sense. I decided to ask the lady at the counter if she had heard of Brian Livingston (the man with whom my family lived during our stay in England when I was a child). She said, after a few seconds of pondering, that she had in fact heard of him. As I was paying for my water bottle, a man walked in and she asked him. He too had heard of the Livingstons, and prompty drew up a little map of the roads, with churches as landmarks, on a piece of trash cardboard.

Apparently, the Livingstons had done well in business, and since moved to a mansion in Manchester, sending their children to a "posh" private school, away from the decay of the British youth culture - which is magnified in remote towns for some reason.

So, we followed that map, and I suddenly found my bearings, memories from the 80s popping back into the head as we made our way toward "Weather House" as the house is called - apparently known in the town for its famous location and its general size and oldness. And being as far from civilization as anyone can get in the area. It is located near the crest of a hill, just below the fog line. Sort of tucked up against the sky and the hills.

We walked, with a bottle of some heavy as syrup ale, some cheese, and a pastry from a bakery that I had visited 14 years earlier, to the house. Down the road, past the row of flats, past the muddy cricket field, right past the church and the graveyard, past countless sparkling images from my childhood, and into the hills.

This picture is taken at the mouth of the driveway looking down the road, where we used to catch banana slugs and pick currents, and watch the farmers at work. That's my cousin walking. It was cold, windy, and wet. And we had to make it back to the B&B before dark.

 

[Steve B]

Olmstead Point

Olmstead Point

Doug, thats one of my favorite vistas in Yosemite. You can see half dome, clouds rest, fairview dome, daff dome, tenaya lake, mt. conness, mt. dana and many others. I knew before I even looked at your pics where you were talking about. I took this pic from the higher dome above the road.