Category Archives: a24

Lifeguards, Long Beach NY

by Paul Shay

There is something contradictory about lifeguards. They represent authority and serious responsibility but also good times, youth and summer. There are long periods of idleness interspersed with action and occasionally crisis. The serious gaze of the lifeguard in the foreground is echoed by the people behind him, while the lifeguard on the chair faces the other way as she blows a warning on her fluorescent orange whistle.

Original slide shot during the summer of 2002 with a tripod-mounted Sputnik with Provia 100P, exposure unrecorded.

Tours!

by John Thurston

Down on the docks, the cruise ships tie up and the passengers disembark. Those who bought package tours on the ship need to find the right person with the sign for their tour. Those who didn’t buy their tickets on the ship, can talk to one of the tour representatives in the kiosks. The cruise lines would rather sell the ticket on-board (as they pocket a large commission on each sale), and make a point of warning their passengers of unscrupulous dealings elsewhere. I’d rather deal with these guys who are here rain or shine, every day of the week.

This was a fun image to make. I was framing the image and chatting with the barkers in their kiosks.  All day long, they see the tourists clicking away with cameras, but my TL120-55 on a tripod was a bit different and caught their attention. I tried framing this with the TL120-1, but I really think the 55mm lenses let me better capture the scene.

Tripod mounted TL120-55, April 2010.

Cranberry Crush (with crabapples)

by John Thurston

The back of the mount says “TL120”, but it lies. This dates from 2005 and I didn’t have a TL120 until 2006. I found another unmounted image from this same roll and it is obviously from my Rolleidoscop.

The girls are working on crushing Crabapples (which they have just picked off the tree in the yard). They had a recipe for “Cranberry Crush”, and lacking any cranberries, decided to see what they got using local ingredients.

I am working on framing an image, and trying to figure out how to drive the flash. My flash technique is terrible and this marginal success I can attribute only to luck. I have no idea how I managed to get the exposure this close with a Vivitar 285 bounced off the ceiling.

Wall

by John Thurston

In some earlier folio offerings, I’ve shown the raining ceilings and the smooth rocks. This image is all about the ice.

Up close and personal with the face of the glacier, you can see the facets and scallops created as it melts. The sand and rock in the ice has possibly been there for thousands of years. Its journey is nearly over and it will soon melt out and fall to the ground.

I’ve been trying some different methods of duplicating slides. This is a Gammatech duplicate made from a flat-bed scan on my Epson 4990. While it isn’t bad, it can’t compare with the original. But, for $10, it certainly isn’t bad.

August, 2010. Tripod mounted TL120-1.

Glare From the Noon Light

by John Thurston

Yes, this is the noon light, not the moon light. Early in January, the sun doesn’t get very high in our sky. It rakes in very low, and there are often shadows mid-day caused by the sun being obscured by some mountains. In earlier folios, you have seen where the ice meets the land. This is where the ice meets the lake.

Catching the dawn light on the glacier is a tricky business. By definition, it involves starting the mile and quarter trek across the lake (either by skate or by ski) before dawn. It requires a bit of nerve to lace up my skates and set out across the lake in the dark with a pack loaded with camera gear. Once there, in the pre-dawn light, the challenge is to find the image that will be there when the sun arrives.

In this case, I caught the light on the extreme face of the glacier.  There is nothing for scale, but the hummock to the right is probably only four feet high. That makes the face about 30 feet high. The lake ice in front of it (as well as where I’m standing) is a mass of re-frozen crumble. At any time, the glacier may slide forward and wrinkled the ice for many yards. The lake is also littered with bergs which have fallen off the face. If that should happen, the resulting waves will leave broken ice for half a mile. I have never been there when it happens, but the evidence that it does happen is recorded in the ice at my feet.

This was shot with my TL120-55 on a tripod in January, 2010.