Category Archives: Photography

November 1

01 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Favorite Things, Ongoing Projects, Photography

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To be interested in the changing seasons
is a happier state of mind than to be
hopelessly in love with spring.
[George Santayana]

Autumn in Fort Wayne

I wage a constant battle with my attitude about autumn and winter. This year, I might be winning. Of course, starting November in northern Indiana with 76 degree temperatures helps. I remember 10 inches of snow on this date in 1966.

I’ve been busy working on my new Website and have decided it is like cleaning house. The more that I do, the more that I see that needs to be done. I especially am attending to broken links. I’ll have a grand opening soon.

Meanwhile I had the first cataract surgery. I’m scheduled for the second next week. This is a blessing. I already see so much better and can tell what color changes I need to make in my work.

Did I mention I invested in a snow blower? It is peculiar what excites some folks, isn’t it?

Fond Farewell: Robert Pence

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Favorite Things, Photography, Thoughts

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Friends are relatives you make for yourself.
[Eustache Deschamps]

Robert Pence

I have always known Robert Pence. I’ve counted him as my friend for seventy years. I bid him farewell just before Christmas with the gratitude that I’d had the opportunity to count him as my friend for as long as I did.

When I was a small child, he was enough older that I looked up to him and considered him brilliant. When I first left home to go to college, it eased my homesickness to know he was nearby on the same campus. When we were both in the military, it was a comfort to know that he was stationed just up the coast. When I edited a magazine, he took magnificant photos for the cover. When I needed air in my tires, advice on home repairs, or information about anything, he helped me.

I shared his fascination with antique machinery, railroading, computers and the minutia of history. I admired his talent with composition and attention to detail in his photography. He enlarged my world, helped heal the bruises of life experiences, and shared the depth of his spiritual self. Although we weren’t relatives, one of the greatest complements I ever received was when he introduced me by saying, “This is my sister….”

After all of these years, I still look up to him and think he was brilliant.

Eastertide

23 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by in Favorite Things, Photography, Thoughts

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Loveliest of trees, the cherry now    
Is hung with bloom along the bough,    
And stands about the woodland ride    
Wearing white for Eastertide.
[A. E. Houseman]

Another walk in the park was breathtaking on this first really warm day. I took these photos with my iPad2—a new adventure indeed. Here is another site in the park (at five foot-seven inches, I would have to stoop to enter the door):

Replica of Abraham Lincoln's boyhood home.

The rest of the story… I first read this poem when I was twenty, and fifty more springs sounded like a lot. Every year since, I welcomed spring, relished its beauty and remembered this poem by A. E. Houseman. Now that I am close to seventy, I wish I could tell Mr. Houseman that threescore years and ten of appreciating springs absorbs them into a person’s soul so they can be vividly recalled even in the dead of winter. Spring, like love, becomes eternal.

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Hoosier Autumn

27 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by in Photography, Thoughts

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But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock–
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.
[James Whitcomb Riley]

Robert Pence, photographer, recorded these and other images of our Hoosier autumn on his tour of Salomon Farm Park, Fort Wayne, Indiana. For more of his photos, select this LINK. Bob also took the fisherman photo in the masthead—the fisherman is my son James and the photo was taken about 18 years ago.

Beauty

18 Sunday Jul 2010

Posted by in Favorite Things, My Client's Sites, Photography, Thoughts, Writing

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Love of beauty is Taste.
The creation of beauty is Art.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]

A photographer friend of mine. Jim Miller, is on a working vacation in Colorado. When I say working, I mean he is taking photographs for books and videos that he is producing. Some folks really do have dream jobs. Meanwhile, he emails postcards back to those of us who stayed home. I used the first one for his homepage at Willowgreen.com but when he sent this one, I went all soft and selfish, and displayed it here. Isn’t it beautiful? It is taste and art all rolled into one.

Blanchard Blessing

01 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Favorite Things, Photography, Thoughts, Writing

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Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life.
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.
[Lord Byron]

This is the Methodist church in Blanchard, Iowa (pop. 62) after a ferocious storm. My friend, Ray Hoffman, lives down the street and snapped this photo just in time. He submitted it to a local radio station. It is today’s photo of the day on KMA’s Website.

If you live in an urban area, you might enjoy a taste of small town, mid-America with a quick tour of the KMA site. It certainly reorders priorities from what one finds in city life—kind of like going on a vacation.

Photographer Friends

04 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by in Favorite Things, Photography, Thoughts

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There are always [at least] two people in every picture:
the photographer and the viewer.
[Ansel Adams]

rose_garden

Fort Wayne Rose Garden photographed by Robert Pence

I admire good photography. I am the viewer in the quotation by Ansel Adams. I took several photography courses in college and soon realized that I’d never devote the time and attention to the art of photography to become really good at it. Therefore, I take the role in photography that I do in music—I am the appreciative audience.

The photo above and the new masthead were photographed by Robert Pence. He photographs many urban scenes as well, and has a natural eye for geometric composition that I admire. I’ve added two new links to his photography online. See Urban Indiana and Robert Pence Images in the column at the right.