Alleged Jaguar

So artist's renderings of what is allegedly the all-new Jaguar EV have leaked.

It looks like an unlicensed Barbie Cullinan trying to dodge a trade dress lawsuit from Rolls Royce.

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Sign of the Times

Jaguar apparently shopped around for a new logo and the one they bought was, um... questionable. It's vague, communicates nothing, and sticking a capital "G" in the middle of a bunch of lower case letters is a crime against typography.

Designer: “What are your company’s core virtues and strengths?”

Jaguar: “Tradition. Luxury. Excellence. High performance…”

Designer: “Cool. Here’s a logo fit for a Spice Girls cover band.”

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Tab Clearing...

• "These aren't my pants."


• Looking at your old photos.


• The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood

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Le sigh...

Blog Poster: "I went to the Walmart in a census-designated-place in upstate NY with a population of less than 2k and wow, the camera section in modern big box stores has really shriveled up."

Commenter: "Well here in Austin, Texas, a state capital city of a million people and a regional... if not national ...hub for creatives, we have three camera stores!"

Ah, internet. Don't you ever go changing on me...

For reference, Indianapolis had two local/regional camera chains when I moved here in 2008, but one is now gone and the other has shrunk down to just its mothership storefront downtown.

Indy has about the same population as Austin, but isn't quite the regional mecca for artsy types as the Texas capital, especially with us having Chicago right up the road. Plus we have Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus (OH and IN), St. Louis, and Louisville all an easy half day's jaunt or less away. We punch way out of our weight class in the cool cars department, but we're pretty typical of a middlin' big American city when it comes to the arts and creative stuff.

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Tortured Poet

These roses are red
Yet those violets aren't blue
Haiku is hard, man

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I LOLed.

A very tall tree in a neighbor's yard had gone the way of all living things.

I'd been eyeing it nervously for some time because a largish limb had come off in a storm, only to have its plummet interrupted by getting snagged in some lower branches. There it hung, right over the sidewalk, like some giant toothpick of Damocles. I'd idly wonder, strolling under it on windy days, if this would be the day that it completed its groundward journey, leaving me pithed like a giant, pale, baseball cap wearing frog.

Anyway, they had a tree company out the other day and they stripped it of its remaining limbs, leaving the giant, forked trunk standing naked in the yard, awaiting the next run of good weather so they could finish the job.

Bobbi, commenting on the remains of the oak, said "It's the Treenus de Milo."

(Personally, I think it more resembles the Winged Victory of Some Ol' Tree.)

Stargate

There's apparently a stargate in downtown Indianapolis, on the state government campus, right behind the Indiana Statehouse.

Fuji X-T2 & XF 16-80mm f/4 R WR

David Merrill and I strolled around downtown taking photos yesterday and he was like "Let's go to the stargate!" and I was moderately embarrassed that I was entirely unfamiliar with said sculpture, what with having lived here for years at this point.

Now I'm low-key obsessed with getting the ideal shot of the thing...

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Photo Books

Over the last couple years I've begun to accumulate photo books...

End of the Caliphate is probably the most traditional photo book of the bunch. A coffee-table-sized hardcover tome, it's light on text, other than a short introductory essay by Anthony Lloyd and an afterword by the photojournalist, Ivor Prickett. What it's heavy with is glossy, gripping photos by Prickett, who spent a great deal of time embedded with Iraqi SF as they evicted the Islamic State fighters from Mosul and northwestern Iraq.

Shooter: Combat From Behind the Camera, another book of coffee table dimensions, is more text heavy, combining the reminiscences of SSgt Stacy Pearsall, USAF Ret., with the photos she took while embedded with U.S. Army troops, mostly in Diyala Province. 

Car Sick is book-as-art. It's a collection of photos by Tim Vanderweert, the blogger at Leicaphilia, whose eye and wit we sadly lost almost exactly a year ago. I didn't provide a purchasing link because unless you stumble one of the limited number of existing copies getting re-sold out there, they're all gone. Tim agonized over the quality of the printing and almost certainly lost money on these.

The most recent addition is Vinyl Village, a softcover photo essay by Jim Grey, who blogs at Down the Road. Jim's mostly lived in cities and only recently moved to the Indianapolis 'burbs. The book is an illustrated essay based on his musings while walkabout in his new environs during the Year of the 'Rona. It's a print-on-demand type book, rather than a glossy art book, but as the photos are more documentary-type black and white film photos, that's not as much of a distraction as it could be.

Maybe someday I'll have enough photos to make a book.

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Moving Pictures

The photo editors at the New York Times put together their selections for the year in pictures.

Say what you want about the Gray Lady, when it comes to photojournalistic talent (and writing quality) it's still the big leagues for a reason.

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Take A Picture or Make a Picture?

Jim Grey at Down the Road has a good eye for interesting details on cars. Whereas 99% of my car photographs are simple shots of the entire car from a quartering angle at about sedan-driver's-eye height (designers tend to take pains to make this an attractive view, since it's how you see most cars), Jim gets in close for the neat bits of styling.

I think it's pretty artsy, but he's got a good point in his post yesterday about what makes actual art.

I've noted before that I'm probably hindered in my progress as a photographer by being too much of a camera liker.

I should sit down with my Blackfork Guide again. ("Six things that happen in your photograph whether you want them to or not.")

Artsy...

Beaded water on painted sheet metal makes for an easy artsy subject.

These were shot with the Pentax Q10 and the 8.5mm f/1.9 01 Prime lens.

8.5mm is the equivalent of a "Nifty Fifty" on the little 1/2.3" sensor. (Well, 47mm equivalent, actually...)

Faking Black & White...

I keep the Samsung TL500 set up to record two files with every shot. The camera records one in RAW format, which for Samsung uses the ".SRW" file extension, and one fine quality JPEG. You can set custom color balances for the JPEG like Soft, Vivid, Forest, et cetera. It took me a little bit of scrolling and testing to figure out that "Classic" was Samsung-speak for "Monochrome".

So that's what I use: One RAW file is recorded and a monochrome JPEG. Being as this is a 2010-vintage pocket camera, it takes it a hot minute to write that 24MB .SRW file. If you just wanted to turn the camera on and pop off a quick shot or two then shut it back off, you'll be waiting a few seconds for the green "Busy" LED to stop blinking before it'll retract the lens and power down.

The Classic setting gives you a pretty stark and contrasty B&W effect.

Here's what the scene actually looked like, via the processed RAW file:

QotD: Pot Of Message Edition...

From an article by George Packer at The Atlantic:

"Art that tries to give political satisfaction is unlikely to be very good as either politics or art."

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Six Blown Horses in the Lotus Position

Lotus Evora GT
Nikon 1 J4 & 1 Nikkor 10mm f/2.8
1/800th, f/2.8, ISO 200

Urban Myth...sorta.

Alligators lurking in the sewers of Manhattan is one of the hoariest urban legends there is. It even spawned a godawful B-grade monster movie in 1980, which is everything you'd expect from that schlockiest era of cinema.

It seems that, as with most legends, there's a tiny kernel of truth from which it sprouted...

He discovered an ad from the 1930s in Popular Mechanics offering live baby alligators for $1.50 to sate a “rage for Baby Alligator pets” sweeping the country.

“Just hatched in the deep marshlands of the South, at an amazingly low price. These corking little pets will be shipped to you by mail, carefully packed — safe arrival guaranteed,” the ad read.

On Feb. 9, 1935, a group of teenagers in East Harlem spotted a gator down a storm drain, lassoed it and pulled it up with a clothesline — all eight feet and 125 pounds, according to the New York Times. When it snapped at them, they beat it to death with shovels.

“I’ve described this as New York City’s greatest true-ish urban legend,” Michael Miscione, who served as the Manhattan borough historian from 2006 to 2019, told Time Out in February. “It is an urban legend because there aren’t any alligators in the sewers, but there was at least one alligator in the sewer.”

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Tab Clearing...

• In the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, exTwitter is a sea of disinformation.


• The Greatest Sculptor You Never Heard Of


• Get a load of the size of this frickin' tree!

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The Camera Eye...

There's a great photo piece on older photographers at the New York Times. It's worth a look, so here's a gift link so you can check it out.

While I wouldn't consider myself "older", I'm definitely not any younger than I used to be and that's lent a certain vibe to my picture taking. I'm more concerned with documenting the people and places in my neighborhood, for example. 

I want people to see my friends and neighbors, my city and state, through my eyes, and a camera is the easiest way to do that. Certainly it's the one that requires the least typing. I like painting a picture with words, but you know it takes a thousand of those to equal a single photo. A thousand words is a lot.

ARTSPARK

When friends came to visit the other week, we strolled through the sculpture garden at the Indianapolis Arts Center up in Broad Ripple village.

I had my Nikon Coolpix A with me. I'm still working at seeing in wide angle.

Black Titan by John Spaulding

Dave Merrill checking out Twisted House, by John McNaughton

Sad news...

I just learned that Bruce McCall passed away.

You might know him from his illustrations for The New Yorker, who eulogized him yesterday:

Bruce McCall, the artist behind the cover for the May 15, 2023, issue, died on May 5th, at the age of eighty-seven. McCall, who insisted upon chewing his beloved Groucho Marx cigars long after a taste for tobacco stopped being even remotely acceptable, was a dear friend and a poet at heart. His artistic sensibility was formed far beyond the strictures of art school, first in the stark and frigid landscape of Ontario, then in the stark and frigid world of Madison Avenue advertising. His work as an ad man lent him an extraordinary drawing fluency and speed, and a knack for copywriting—his paintings are often filled with a droll humor splayed across billboards and signs. Ardor for the shining mirage of Detroit, Michigan—on the other side of Lake St. Clair—never left his heart. He loved cars, and drove everywhere in congested Manhattan traffic long after most everyone else had opted for public transportation.

I first encountered him on the pages of Car and Driver, where he was a frequent contributor.

So it goes.

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'Tis a Silly Place

“The Lumping Womble Billy in the Wold was out and about in Yompers Dingle yesterday!”

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 2, 2023

Of course, any mention of anything Morris-related makes me want to re-read Reaper Man.

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