This is such a short blog entry that a long introduction would be misleading. Those who hate random binges of nostalgia can rejoice. During 2014, I had to make a number of work trips to Chicago and on August 11, I made one of them. During the Ohio portion of my drive, I managed to take a few photographs. Some of those I have included here. That’s all she wrote.
In which our intrepid hero encounters some bad noose…
This year I “celebrate” my 20th year of studying extremists in the United States, something that began as a completely unplanned and odd little outgrowth of my dissertation (which had nothing to do with extremism or, for that matter, the 20th century). By January 1995, I was spending a lot of time looking at domestic extremists and the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing essentially changed my life forever, causing me to focus on extremism and terrorism, first voluntarily and soon professionally. I’ve done that ever since. But my very first encounter with extremism occurred decades earlier, when I was a child.
In which our intrepid hero finds himself homeward bound as a long day winds down…
This blog is all about journeys and explorations. Most visibly, it is about me exploring different parts of Ohio and recording what I see. It is also about me exploring photography itself and trying to become a better photographer, despite my inherent limitations (such as considerable impatience). I have been trying to educate myself on cameras, on photography, and, more recently, on post-processing and HDR. From the vantage point of this writing, in early February 2014, some six months after these photographs were taken, I have seen improvement on my part and I hope there will be more.
Landscape photographers like to refer to the early morning or the time around sunset as “golden hours,” because the light is a soft, warm light that lends itself to attractive photographs, and because the dynamic range of light at those hours is close to what cameras can naturally reproduce. An alien anthropologist who studied Earth only through its landscape photography might be forgiven for thinking that Earth was a planet of perpetual sunset.
In which our intrepid hero finds himself transported to days long past…
I am always aware of my photographic limitations. Not only does the methodology I employ (roadside photography) have many drawbacks that limit the number of good photographs I can take, but my own inherent limitations reduce that number still further. As of this writing, I have been taking these sorts of photographs for only around eight months; these particular photographs were taken after only three months. So much of my photography is either of the “even a broken clock is right twice a day” variety or of the “interesting subject, not so good photograph” variety. I acknowledge that. On the other hand…
