OFF IN TEXAS III

Ken "Wolfie" Wolf
Marietta, Indiana 3 August 2012

Traveling through Indiana on state road 252, we were detoured onto a county road that took us through Marietta. As we turned the corner into the town, we were surprised to find an old store with a lot of anti-Bush and pro-Obama proclamations scrawled on various surfaces. While mounting cameras to tripod, a woman who was wet with sweat from mowing her lawn came over. She introduced herself as the deputy mayor of the town, and wanted to know if we knew why her mower wasn't working right. Asked if she had to clean the filter every time she mowed the yard? She said if we were interested in old falling down buildings, the old buggy factory around the corner was something we should check out, and then went back to her mowing task.

Just as I was making the above image of the store's front, Ken "Wolfie" Wolf comes around the corner of the building. Thankfully he was not as crazy as we first thought. He owned the building and he was the author of all the writings. Said it was his building and he could write anything he wanted on it. I asked him why he was carrying that fly swatter. "I hate flies," was all he said. Said that he had had 9 heart attacks, really on six counted, "I don't count the three little one." He added he had been to three doctors -- the first one said it'd be OK to have two beers a day; the second one said the same; so did the third. "By my count, that's 2+2+2 -- that's six beers a day."

LOOKING BACK 2

San Francisco Bay July 2007

I've never played around too much with panoramas except for maybe when I first began shooting color with large format back in the mid-80's. I used a 6x12 cm roll film back on my 4x5's for that. That back's 2:1 ratio is not considered panoramic, most pano shooters define true panoramas start at a 3:1 ratio. Me and my friends at the time referred to the 2:1 ratio images as "long skinnies" for lack of any better pigeon hole. However last summer while in California attending a family reunion, Ellen, Libbie and I were doing touristy things like driving down Lombard Street in San Francisco and taking in the bay view from the Marin County Headlands side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It makes a nice tourist image, and brought me to the conclusion that I have little need, nor desire to make panoramic images. There are 12 full-frame, vertical image stitched in CS3.

Looking Back

Monterey Pennesula, California July 2007

Last summer I had a great road trip driving 14K miles through 23 states from here in central MA out across the middle of the country to CA, up the coast and back across the northern tier. The average price of gas was about half of what it is now, and even then some through my driving from the east coast to the west coast a bit extravagant. I spent almost twice as much on lodging and meals as I did gas, but now the price of gas would win out. But I have been thinking about last summer's images. I made the trip to photograph cemeteries, old cemeteries with quirky, ironic, and funny names -- a project (some image here and a few more here) I've been working on for many years. However, I never hard printed the "other" images made on that trip. My May 22 post is one. The above image was made during a brief stop so my daughter and her two cousins could observe some sea lions lounging on a beach along the Monterey Pennesula. On the way back to the truck, this woman was standing on the railing with those hot pink toes against her brown skin. I shot from the hip with my super wide lens.

New Creek, West Virginia June 14, 2007

Just because I need to post something. It is late and I had to drive more than an hour beyond the point I was tired because West Virginia doesn't have motels in its small towns. No cemeteries, yet, that will happen tomorrow. All day, I kept trying to wrap my few remaining brain cells around stopping and making an image, but almost nothing appealed to me. ...until I saw the above image. I had to post something because Paul Butzi has said he's going to check in on this blog as the trip progresses. Stay with me, Paul.