Taking Pictures

I belong the Amateur Photography Club at the Memorial Park Community Center in Johnson City. We are is just a bunch of seniors who like to shoot pictures. The nice thing about modern electronic photography is that an amateur can take dozens of shots of the same thing and experiment with settings but the price is the same to view any of them. Getting that one good shot out of 100 attempts is not expensive.

I have an armload of film cameras in the closet. I first took the photographic bait in the late 60s on a trip to Mexico. I sensed I wanted a record of the trip, of course, because this was a first (and only) trip. Those memories are fading and the photographs lone gone. My current camera is a moderately-priced Nikon. It takes practice to uncover all the mysterious workings of any camera. The nice thing is that practice only costs you is time.

What has changed, as we all know, is that cameras don’t look like cameras in a device called a phone that doesn’t look like a phone to produce an image that is not “graphic,” meaning not “on paper.”  

It ought to become apparent, it you look at the photos in the Johnson City Sesquicentennial headquarters, of how photographs will be important 50, 100, or 150 years down the road. If something you think ought to be preserved, take a photograph. That may be all that is left in another half-century. We can’t photograph everything. When you add up all the pictures that tell stories, those with people, the problem becomes enormous. For instance, the mundane is more than enough: street crews, war memorial services, walking the dog, interesting houses, fashion, cars, jam sessions, sporting events, festivals. There is no way of knowing what will still be in vogue in 50 years and certainly no way of knowing who will make decisions about what is important to review.

I have a photograph of the alley between Numan’s and Capone’s. Down this block-long alley, bounded by a tree at the Northeast State campus end, in late afternoon, is nothing extravagant, but it is a place overlooked until that one time when the light is right. I think it is the kind of thing a person would walk by without giving it a thought. Or, driving by the White City Laundry without noticing it?

This hobby, like all hobbies, creates an awareness, in this case an awareness that there is more to see and subsequently more to photograph. It isn’t that you have to be a shutterbug or an expert. What is does take is stepping outdoors, sometimes early in the morning and sometimes late in the evening, to get the good light. You might think downtown Johnson City rather un-photogenic but in low-level light some of the places and detail pop out.

I wandered Main and Market Streets one Saturday morning last summer before the Farmer’s Market opened and just started taking picture after picture of store fronts. That’s not very original but by the time I was done I had a collection of some rather interesting architecture and signage. While the downtown could use a severe remodel the older architecture is still worth a look.

But, the city has grown in a way that means good images can be someplace else besides the historic downtown. Each little shopping area represents part of the near past that we can only hope is still part of the future in 50 years. The Mall might be a housing subdivision in 50 years. West Market might be the new center of town and the old downtown reborn as a theme park. Some new parks will replace some old parks.

Drive down the back streets. Go to an intersection in the morning for the low-light effect and shoot in all four directions. Then start walking. The world almost literally opens up to the camera.

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Sailboats? In east Tennessee?

(Actually, we have quite a few on our two TVA lakes but that's not the reason for this entry.)

I was working up a draft, the other day, and part of the story involves naming a sailboat.(Set in the Gulf of Mexico the story is about an adventure of Seymour Hemingway and Audrey Wilde.) Of course, all boats have names. Seymour had to come up with a name for his new boat since the previous sailboat (the Busted Flush) was sunk by Katrina. Any good sea story, over the years, has immortalized the names of the boats. So, I decided to list a few of the ones I've read.

I am not a sailor. My cousin had a sailboat that we (his dad, actually) rebuilt and sailed at their summer home in northern Michigan. It gets in your blood. We'd go to the boat show at McCormick Place in Chicago and just dream and dream and dream. I grew up in the midwest where most of the U.S. Navy comes from (including my brother) --it's how we got to see the world-- and now living in the hills of east Tennessee I get to see the ocean on our annual birding trips to the South Carolina coast.

In no particular order: Hornblower and the Hotspur by C.S. Forester. I have the entire Hornblower series. Read 'em with fascination as a kid. The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes. Innes wrote wild, complicated adventures. Mary Deare is one of my oldest books. HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean. MacLean wrote this largely autobiographical story of his WW2 service in the convoys from Scotland to Murmansk, Russia. It is both vivid and scary. The Ghost is Wolf Larsen's boat that rescues then kidnaps Jack London in the Sea Wolf. For all the mystery readers in the world, is there any other boat besides the Busted Flush, Travis McGee's houseboat? John Wayne probably wasn't much of a sailor but his sailboat was in The Wake of the Red Witch.

Hotspur
Mary Deare
Ulysses
Ghost
Busted Flush
Red Witch

Any suggestions? Contact me at cfm46@mounet.com