Physical and emotional ramblings of a commercial artist married to a family therapist …
Had a great time today with the daughters of two of my friends from our newspaper days together. As part of my celebration of the holidays, I decided that I’d offer my friends the opportunity of having some fun in front of the camera. and hopefully they and I would get some good b&w portraiture at the same time.
They were naturals in front of the camera!
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A good friend [who appears in the column at right, Bill Kenny] just turned me on to a BBC website where you can be told where you are in birth order amongst the 7 billion people who now inhabit the world. Now that’s a very good use of the technology. I guess that would make my brother around the 1.5Bth and maybe my sister the 1.9Bth [ 
sorry guys!]
OK, so what does that mean? The BBC also put seven video reports on the same site to give us all a bit of perspective on the way others live around the world and what the population explosion means to them. It’s always so eye opening to see the way others live in different parts of the world!
For the past three years Audrey and I have been members of a local CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] farm in our area. We pay one fee in the early spring and then once a week on Tuesdays we drive down to the farm and pick up our allotment of freshly picked fruits, vegetables, root crops, herbs, lettuces, eggs and other things organic.
I went up to Vermont this past weekend with a friend who has a house in Woodstock. Early Saturday morning we went out to Jenne Farm which is supposed to be the most photographed farm in New England or North America [there are over 2,520,000 listings on Google!]. Seems every camera club in the world [literally!] goes there at sunrise to shoot the sun as it comes up over the hills. I’m just blown away that so many people go to exactly the same place to get exactly the same picture. Apparently there’s a brochure that was written forty years ago that actually tells people exactly where to put their tripod legs and I’ve heard that people will fight over getting that specific spot. People from all over the world!
Pixie with her scar
Pixie has had a mast cell tumor on her left flank for about four years and it was getting to be about the size of my fist and looked as if it was just about to burst so we took her to the vet to have it removed last Friday. It wasn’t attached to anything and was totally in that flap of skin between her left leg and her torso. Surgery went well although it took a bit longer then the vet was expecting.
As I mentioned last week, I went out to Tyler Hill, PA to do a shoot for Flashes of Hope at the Camp that The Valerie Fund operates for their kids each summer. I organized this shoot two years ago and had to pull together six photographers to shoot the 140 kids that they had. We shooters had a good time but I was a bit stressed out because I didn’t know four of the shooters and was worried the whole time about the quality they might or might not bring to the event. It, as usual, was needless worry as they all did a fantastic job!
I had a Camp shoot for Flashes of Hope this past week out in the northeastern part of the Poconos in Tyler Hill, PA and because we would have an early start, and it’s about 2.5 hours away, I went out the afternoon before the shoot. Stayed in the lap of luxury at The Hotel Wayne in Honesdale, PA. [graciously paid for by FOH!]. I really do love to travel for business because I’m often staying out in the hinterlands and life is seen very differently there than in the urban centers like NYC, Chicago, or Charleston.
We’ve been growing high bush blueberries for close to thirty years now and every year in the Spring, I have to go out and put up our anti-bird netting in an attempt to save some of the berries for us rather than give them ALL to the birds. This year it’s been especially difficult because I’m trying to reuse the netting from previous years and there are all sorts of little holes in it that I simply cannot find!
Over the weekend of the Fourth, I was out there every day attempting to get all the gray catbirds who had found their way into the netted arbor, out of the netted arbor … something very similar to herding cats … or lawyers and doctors [all for very different reasons of course that have nothing to do with intelligence !]
I’m a bit behind with this one … We had a perigee moon back on March 19th and Audrey and I decided to head up into the Watchung “Mountains” [what we from New England would normally call "hills"] to Washington’s Rock. Yup, that Washington! In case you didn’t know it, there’s an incredible amount of Revolutionary history all through Central New Jersey as George crisscrossed the state and finally wrote his “Farewell Address to the Army” letter at Rockingham in the village of Kingston, NJ where I had an office for many years.
So, Washington’s Rock was a location in the Watchung “Mountains” where Washington left troops who would be able to signal him any movements of the British troops pretty much anywhere east toward New Brunswick and Perth Amboy and north to New York.
Audrey and I figured it would be a pretty good place to see the moon coming up over the horizon. Turns out there were a number of others who had the same idea and most of them brought their cell phones to photograph the moon or were there simply to watch it coming up. Of course I had to bring along the big glass and the 400 pound tripod that never moves to get my own version of the moon coming up.
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Crosswalk on College Ave in New Brunswi
I was headed over to campus the other day to do some candid photography, probably around midday when the pedestrian traffic across College Avenue was especially chaotic [I used to think that Harry Chapin had been a student at Rutgers because he had written a song "Old College Avenue", then I realized that EVERY college has it's College Avenue] . I was just coming up to a crosswalk between a number of academic buildings and one of the busier campus bus stops and I saw the usual [for New Jersey] sign in the middle of the road telling drivers that the pedestrians have the right of way. And all of a sudden I just did one of those head swivels you see in the cartoons … what the hell was that icon on the sign … did I really see what I thought I saw? Was it the same on both sides? It looked as if it had been made that way, not drawn in by some college prankster …
I ended up doing the photography I needed to do and then drove back down to the other end of College Ave just to confirm whether or not I’d seen the sign correctly. I did check the other signs in the other crosswalks I passed as I drove down the road. They were all “normal” or they had the regular icon of a person crossing the street. And, yup, it had the same thing on both sides and it WAS made that way.
So now I don’t know if the Rutgers Police Department thinks the students are angels or what …?!?!
Somewhere in rural New Jersey
Hi, I'm Nat Clymer and this is the blog where I put my musings and ramblings of thirty plus years as a commercial photographer and observer of humankind.