A photograph and its story

Lushd, that mother in the B&W photo looks like a tough person - you can see the fear in the eyes of those men :D , and I like the time progression effect between the first and second photos.
 
Thanks Shutterflower. I forgot to mention that the colour picture was taken by one of the party - Mike - married to the blonde woman, sitting at the table (she's Tessa, another cousin). He was blown away by the Leica having never seen anything like it. I showed him how it all worked and he came up with this image while having a go with it. I think it's a good picture, especially for unfamiliar technology.
 
Not as poignant as some, but unfortunately I haven't got round to scanning most of my photos yet.

1992... Some friends invited me out for a day's sea fishing on a boat. That's me in the foreground: you can feel the misery!

I got on the boat at 7 am, and soon began to feel a bit green about the gills, and then spent the next 12 hours as you see me in the photo - much to the amusement of my friends, who delighted in dangling worms in front of me! That was a very, very long day! I'm a bit wary about small boats now!!
 
That's quite a story, Rich! The "green around the gills" condition has clearly spread wider in the course of the day...
 
gotta keep a good thread alive

gotta keep a good thread alive

This is a snapshot I took on the recent Eurotrip. It's in our hotel room at the very uncomfortable Comfort Inn in Paris. We shared the bed for 9 days. It was FREEZING outside, so we kept the window closed most of the time, and the bathroom had no ventilation - so keeping the moisture from showers down was hard. The room was basically just a big, warm, moist box of smells.

To add a little excitement to that, we went out and bought lunch one day, gathering bits here and there from a number of shops on the streets towards Montemartre and Ouen. . . . . . . we bought Camembert. A particularly pungent and unpleasantly odorous cheese. The grapes were nasty and seedy. The chicken was dry and slightly odd tasting/smelling. But the Mango was the best I've ever had. And the same for the bread.

In order to survive the next few days, we hung the cheese in a bag out of the window. It was cold enough outside to freeze anything - so we figured it would be safe.

Notice the open window. Smelly cheese.
 
Great idea for a thread and here is my contribution...unfortunately with an SLR....

I had just moved to California as a consultant and was living at a hotel for months...

On the weekends I drove around just to look at things. At one trip up North with a girlfriend of the time I picked up some funny, to me, looking thistles and weed and put them in the trunk.

Didn't think about them for weeks until I one weekend found myself sick and stuck in the hotel room. Pulled them out and decided to try my hand on macro photography for the first time. Had anyone seen my 'setup' they would had cracked up...there I was...in my checkered pj pants..thorny weed glued to a lightbox and my camera shoved stuck between a chair and the wall (didn't have a tripod) and me hovering above trying to take a photo :)

Turned out I liked the photo and whenever I see it I can remember the exact location where I picked the weed up and even down to the details of what we did that day five years ago. I of course remember the girl as well. Bitter sweet.

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shutterflower said:
... A particularly pungent and unpleasantly odorous cheese. The grapes were nasty and seedy. The chicken was dry and slightly odd tasting/smelling. ...

Hmmm... and people complain about the food in England.
 
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well, the food was actually great. The cheese TASTED fabulous. The smell is the hard part. The chicken . . .well, I've had worse here in the States. The grapes were normal for their variety - I just picked them to try something new.
 
Here is another

Here is another

Staying hungry.

This is a shot I took while down in California, south of LA, in San Pedro near Palos Verdes. My cousin is at Westpoint, and lives in CA otherwise, so we very rarely see eachother, and whenever he and I are in the same area, we go out taking pictures and enjoying our home town(s) in and around the beautiful beach towns. This was last time, we went out and drove along the coast, stopping here and there to admire and photograph the scenery, and came to this big abandoned parking lot where it looked as though some large building had been demolished. I think he said it was an aquarium or something like that.

So, he was taking pictures amongst the rubble when I decided to get out the 4x5 Cambo/Fujinon Super Wide Deluxe setup and take a portrait (first real shot through the lens - ended up being the second to last before i sold it).

So this is my cousin, sitting on some rubble, taken with one of the rarest wide angle lenses for 4x5 on HP5 or PanF, cut down to 6x9 to fit in my scanner. The neg is flipped, so he SHOULD be facing the other direction, but I never got around to flipping it. Lazy.


THE OTHER IMAGE is a trip my family took to Roslyn, a small town in the middle of nowhere, WA where they filmed the majority of "Northern Exposure." I have depression (chemical thing), and it comes and goes, and this particular weekend, I had it bad. We went out to see the world, and decided that we'd wander into the hills above Roslyn. . . actually just about two blocks out of the town, up one of the roads. We came across a very interesting graveyard, BIG, all segregated into nationalities and 'lodges'. Strange place.
 

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Interesting shots and stories, George... I like your cousin posing on top of the rubble! And the Roslyn cemetaries are indeed fascinating to examine; you should return in late spring when the snow is gone and the wildflowers are blooming. An interesting community heritage too, with Croatians, Italians, and a large Black American contingent pioneering this mining town.
 
This is the photo that really kicked my career into high gear. I was a student at the time and photographer on the campus paper. I always carried one or two M bodies and a few lwnses. I walked out of class and discovered a student gathering under way and went over to take a few pictures. Things escalated and more students came and I started taking pix. I went into the admin bldg next to the gathering where things were getting freaky. The admin guys called in the riot police and when I walked out of the building I was distracted by a friend who I talked to. Another friend tapped me on the sholder and I discovered this behind me. I lifted my M with 21mm Super Angulon and snapped one frame. There was no time to focus or set exposure and I only got one frame before the fellow put his hand and head down. The shot was picked up by roughly 200 papers on the wire service and then later ran in Esquire Magazine twice. One was full page and the other in promo material about top photos and stories of the year. To this day I am still selling the image as stock.
 
This is really a wonderful thread, reading through it and looking at the pics is simply fantastic !

And now I'm down to the 'box of prints under the bed' to see if I have something worth posting here :)

Thanks !!!

Oscar
 
That's very powerful, Brian. There is a good example of where the meaning behind the image magnifies its impact infinitely.
 
Great shots Sweeney. Is it just me, or are pictures of laughing children just the best shots in the world?!! :angel:
 
I started hanging out with a different group of kids, some of whom were still in high school, and eventually I met this really bright kid who was living with some sort of distant relative because both of his parents were gone somehow, probably dead in an accident or something vague. All he had left of his parents was a $50,000 trust fund that was to be his the day he turned 18.

And he was one of the cleverest kids I had ever met, a real divergent thinker, very funny and intellectual, and a hell of a guitar player. He graduated from high school, turned 18, received his money and moved to the university district in what seemed like a span of weeks. So, since he was living closer by, I'd occasionally drive over to the three-person basement apartment in which he was staying and talk to him about life, girls, why he should put his money in a CD, which college courses to take, etc. Predictably, though, the basement became known for cheap beer and debauchery. That went on for a few months.

He told me once: I'm tired of this, I feel like I'm stagnating, I've gained all this weight from the partying, this isn't how I want things to be. So I'm going to get my act together, enroll for next quarter, and get fit. And I've been researching CD's and I think I'm going to put my money away. What a relief that was! And then the next week, a distraught phone call at 7:30, from somebody with whom I don't usually speak:

Conor, did I wake you up? I'm so sorry... Andrew Holman is dead.

Wow.

Apparently he had started on a weight-loss supplement a few days prior and began a vigorous workout routine and then, maybe because he was sore, maybe for recreational purposes, took some muscle relaxants. Within a few hours he had died of cardiac arrest, at the age of eighteen. His roommates found him lying in his bed, no sign of violence.

For many of my friends, this was their first experience with death, and it was hard, because we're young, and prior to this, death was something that hadn't even yet happened to the majority of our family pets.

I took this picture one night just before he announced that he was planning to turn his life around. In the picture he's just taken a drag, paused, suspended on film directly before his exhale. He's smoking an American Spirit, the smell of which still reminds me of the basement and the story of how fragile humans really are. RIP Andrew.
 

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A tragic story, Conor, and a powerful pic. Not knowing him, the pathos in this is that despite being intelligent and thoughtful and knowing for some time that he would come into this money, he did not follow a plan for leveraging those assets into a constructive future for himself.
 
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