"Mr. Campbell" by Wes Aldridge
All things considered, tonight was pretty good. A new photog friend wanted to go out and shoot. We headed downtown and decided to try and help-out society. There are always homeless folks sleeping on some heating vents down by the Ryman Auditorium on 4th Ave., so we went to Tigermarket and bought sandwiches, bottled water, fruit and coffee to take to them. When we got to the "usual" spot, much to my surprise, no one was there. We literally drove around downtown Nashville for more than two hours trying to find people in need of the goods we had to offer. It was unbelievably difficult to give away free food and drinks tonight. After giving out a couple of items to a pair of men, we headed to Hillsboro Village to meet some friends.
We parked and saw a gentleman that looked as if he could use a warm drink and something good to eat. We offered, but he kindly denied the help and said he had some food and he would be OK. He told us two of his friends were over at the Acklen post office and they needed food more than he did. I thought that was true human compassion exemplified by him. He obviously didn't have one of the loft apartments above the Pancake Pantry and doubt his Porsche was in the shop tonigh. But none the less, he told us to take the food to his good friends.
This is where we met Mr. Campbell, or Scotty, if you will. He was a hoot. Some might say it was from the beer on his breath, but he seemed to have a pretty happy outlook on life. He laughed, chatted, sipped his beer... and we all just talked and talked. He did say that he was "houseless," rather than what most people would consider "homeless." I think I undestood what he meant by that. A house is a structure a person dwells in, but a home is where the heart stays. I think Scotty's heart stayed with him, no matter how tough things got.
This shot really ironically worked out very well tonight. Scotty said that he had worked for the Postal Service in the past. Tonight, he was seeking warm shelter in a post office. His photo turned into what I consider a perfect, true environmental portrait of Mr. Campbell. I love the position of his body in the frame and the post office kiosk behind him blurred out from shooting the 50mm at f/1.8. But really, the thing I love the most about it is his smile from having a good time talking to a couple of new young photographer friends and knowing that he had something to put in his stomach for a day or two besides a 40-ounce IceHouse beer.
"The Coming Touch" by Wes Aldridge
This was an interesting surprise. I hit the intersection of Ellliston Place and 22nd Ave. and saw Michelangelo's Pizza. On the wall, you guessed it, a painting of Michelangelo's "The Creation" from the roof of the Sistine Chapel. This shot isn't a photographic masterpiece by any means, but I found the subject matter pretty odd for Nashville. I had walked around downtown for a few hours and was terribly uninspired to shoot anything. I tried hard but gave up after I really couldn't feel my icy feet anymore. On the way back to the house, I saw my shot. This one was much more about the hunt than the actual photograph.
"The Watcher" by Wes Aldridge
Eyes were tired, bloodshot. Needed to be rested.
"Old No. 7" by Wes Aldridge
I wanted to capture the distorted essence of qn everyday item tonight. Naturally, I turned to Old No. 7 and found the answer to the present pressing issue.
For this shot I of course took my 50mm lens and flipped it backwards for a reverse mount. I love the extreme blur effect. It is way out there and right up my alley.
"The Rhythm" by Wes Aldridge
Its much more fun to capture the motion of the drummer rather than just a still image. Its as if you can feel the energy and see the sound.
"Dirty Statue" by Wes Aldridge
I was shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee today in the art district and decided to shoot some at the Hunter Museum of Art. I saw this one statue, a bronze nude, and decided to interpret it in the real wrong way. I wanted to be lewd and vulgar with a piece of public art... just to be a jerk!
Here it is, a vulgar shot of public art. I am a jerk. And so it is done. This has been a hard couple of days and there is a funeral to attend tomorrow.
"Cold Glow" by Wes Aldridge
Today was mucho grande. I shot in four cities, in two states. I started in Murphy, North Carolina, then was off to Andrews, North Carolina, then to Blue Ridge, Georgia, and finished up in Blairesville, Georgia. The weather was awful. It was just rain, no snow. Good thing I didn't have much exterior shots I needed to get today. Tomorrow I will finish up my Southeast Resource Magazine shoot with an all-day go at it in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
My shot today is of a small wooden cross that I saw in Blue Ridge. I put a blue gel filter on my flash and sat it behind it and shot it up at an angle. I like this one, I just don't have much to say about it.
"En Memorium" by Wes Aldridge
This one is for Brother Jack tonight. Sadly, he won't read it because his Life was prematurely snatched from him from last night. "In coelo quies est"
Jack was one of Us, and if you aren't, its really hard to make you understand just what that means. We are a different breed that most "normal folk" can't cope with, or in some cases fear to. We need little sleep, less food, and more and more and more of everything savage and ruthless in life. We live hard and play faster and come up for a fresh gasp of air only on rare occassions amidst the chaos that we wallow in.
Don't get me wrong; we don't lurk in shadows but we more so luster in glistening beams of Night's starlight. We are rockstars, high-powered mutants, superhuman, or maybe just plain monsters, but I guess those kinds of titles are left to the observer of such beings. Its uncanny that we so eloquently flirt with the razor's edge and somehow never seem to cut deep enough to truly wound ourselves. We've done lots, tried more and pushed it about as far as people dare to endure just to see what happens when you get really close to something you can't forsee. Hell, we all do, all of Us that is. I'm not sure if you consider it a fatalist point-of-view or simply living extremely dangerously with total disregard for anything sacred, but we were never afraid of what could come. Oh, I am sure we all once were, back a long, long time ago. Since then, the innocence and respect of our consternation has fleeted far from our eyes, and even farther from our minds. I think when you scare Fear away, its about as close to immortality as you can get, at least for a while.
Jack was one of Us, and now Jack is gone. It leaves me wondering where I float. If it can happen to one of Us, surely it could happen to all of Us. Maybe immortality is a thing you don't truly gain, but perhaps you can string it out for yourself if you dare. Today I think the frailty of humanity makes us only as tall as our shadows. They grow longer in the normal ways that shadows manifest from the sun, and they are longest right before the sun goes down. In our realm, the game is to let the shadow stretch as far as possible, and god we let it stretch so far, but don't let it disappear. Yet at the same time, we don't grow afraid because we think we can cast a shadow forever. There is some kind of cold-comfort in being the monster. When your eyes dialate to their fullest you can see so much more and then Fear becomes your friend. What we see would terrify most of the populous into hysterics or mass exodus. They would run and watch over thier shoulder just to make sure the beast wasn't nicking at their heels about to over take them.
Maybe its all an illusion, this great Power we possess. It doesn't occur to Us that it might be delusions of grandure and so we keep on pushing it, our bodies, our minds, our luck. We hammer down and grit our teeth screaming full-throttle into the fire, and for what reason? Simply because we think we can.
In any event, the passing of Jack has made me more cognizent of my brittle life-line. An old friend called me tonight, noticably upset. She wasn't upset as much about Jack, but more so about Us, about me. She said she didn't want to get that same phone call about me. It was a sobering comment and now I am left with decisions to make, steps to take, a life to live.
How long and hard can it go? I definetly bought the Ticket, and the ride is in full effect... but for how long?
"Wink in the Window" by Wes Aldridge
At sunrise I was in historic Dalton, Georgia (some know this as my homeland) trying to get a photograph to go along with a story about revitalization of various downtown areas of cities we are covering in this magazine. I decided to get a shot of the recently restored Wink Theatre. The lights on the marquee were great and it worked perfectly for the article. I got a nicely lit sunset shot with a warm sky and lights burning bright for the story, but I wasn't finished there.
I caught a glimpse of the lights from the marquee reflecting in the hood of a nearby car. I instantly went into artsy photojournalism mode. I wanted to get a cool reflection. Think I found one. This shot was a reflection in the door window of a coffee shop across from the Wink. I thought it was neat so I metered it out, I think it was somewhere around 1/15th at f/2.8 at ISO 400... and of course, I handheld it instead of using a tripod because it felt more spontaneous.
In the shot, I focused on the theatre in the reflection, but in the foreground a white cross hangs from the glass along with a no smoking sign. Not sure if it has some grand subliminal meaning, but I just liked the composition.
"88 Keys" by Wes Aldridge
Yeah, not much to this one. Just a shot of a piano keyboard. It was done with the telephoto zoomed in at 200mm at f/2.8 with the camera on the tripod. The depth of field looks like about a single key. In the perspective of angles, I guess that is interesting.
"Goodies" by Wes Aldridge
This was a test shot that I did in a bakery tonight. I was building the shot and realized the fruitcake looked really nice, but the Rocky Road candy bars really weren't the most attractive thing under the lens. I took them out and built about 3 other items into the shot. One thing that I really like in the shot was the background I chose. A wall had shelves with loaves of bread on them. I shot with my 70-200mm telephoto from a distance at around f/4.0 on a tripod to blur out the bread in the background. Don't know why, just thought it was cool.
Now, its time to hit the hay... big day ahead of me tomorrow.
"Paper Dolls" by Wes Aldridge
Ok, first of all, this is actually a photographic and not any kind of a computer made graphic. Hard to believe I know, but its true.
Our ladies in Ad Production have really gotten into the Christmas spirit. They turned one set of cubicles into a gigantic gingerbread house. I can't begin to explain it to you, you simply have to see that anomaly for yourself. Now, back to the photo at hand...
The creation in the photograph is a small table sized "frozen lake" that the ladies are ice skating on. It is made of what seemed to be blue cellophane with a blue sky background with clouds. The figures are cut out dolls made from construction paper, complete with the print outs of their faces from our staff photography archive. They are on wire stuck through the cellophane into a styrofoam board of some kind. Wow.
The shot looks really trippy and fake. I just added a little off camera fill flash with a hot shoe extension cord with a coffee filter rubberbanded over the flash head to diffuse the light.
"Chet's Audience" by Wes Aldridge
Tonight I wanted to record some reality with my light capturing box, so I went downtown. I walked the sidewalks and alleyways for about two hours in the 30-degree temperature. It was cold, much too cold for me to be aimlessly hunting a shot, but of course I kept on searching.
I came upon the intersection where a bronze statue of Chet Atkins sits on a stool playing a guitar with an empty stool beside him. Though tonight, the other stool wasn't empty. A man (whom I talked to later and found out he was homeless) was sitting there motionless in a deep stare. It was as if he was listening to Chet play. I slung the camera up and popped a shot before he saw me. I walked by the guy and we small talked and I went back to the Jeep.
I drove by the Ryman Auditorium and saw a sad scene: several men were huddled together lying on an air vent to stay warm in the bitter night air. I knew exactly what I needed to do. I drove a few blocks up to the TigerMarket and bought some large coffees and sandwiches and bananas and headed back to the group of men on the street.
I walked up and more guys had shown up to warm there since I had gone to the store. I gave them the food and drinks and asked them to please share. They graciously agreed. I sat down there and talked to them for a little while. It was getting late so I wished them good luck and headed on my way.
I knew that the $16-something-odd dollars I spent on the food wasn't much, but hopefully it will help those men get through a cold Nashville night.
"One Way" by Wes Aldridge
I started thinking a lot about family tonight. Just simple contemplation. So I decided to post a pretty artsy shot from the street musician portrait session I did of my brother. I think there is one way for him to go... just hear the music.
"Legislative Reflections" by Wes Aldridge
"War Memory" by Wes Aldridge
This afternoon I felt defeated, almost depressed. Just watching the sun go down before I leave the office nearly makes me sick. There was nothing I wanted to do today more than shot some photos, but I was stuck in the office finishing up a database from my last shoot and starting to plan my next trip.
I stayed late to try to get ahead of the game to schedule appointments because light was gone and fighting rush hour was pointless; there was no sunlight left to shoot under. I came home and watched some television. Around 11 p.m. I started to feel this overwhelming urge to go down to Legislative Plaza to get a shot. I really can't explain the feeling I had, something forced me to go down there. I bundled up and jumped in the Jeep and headed downtown listening to Shinedown's version of "Simple Man."
When I got there, I saw my angle immediately. I sat up the tripod with a 25 second exposure at f/22 at ISO 100 with my 16-35mm lens. The exposure of the first shot I took, the horizontal above, was dead on the money. I used the reflections of one of the calm pools where fountains spout during the daytime to get the War Memorial building and the Capital building. The vertical shot was at the same exposure settings of just the front of the War Memorial building. I liked both of the shots, so what the hell, I posted them both.
I really like these shots, but I am not satisfied with them. I want to reshoot them when there is either a sunrise or sunset in the sky behind the buildings instead of pitch black. I could see it in my mind; waiting for that perfect moment when the ambient light in the sky faded with enough dull color to even out with the flood lighting on the faces of the buildings. Wouldn't that be wonderful? I know that getting that shot wasn't highly likely before New Years Eve and the end of the year-long photo project. This is part of the sickness in my head, probably in other photographer's heads as well. We just have a way of seeing a picture, even if it isn't really there... and then agonizing over it if it isn't possible at the time.
"Colonial & Dr. P." by Wes Aldridge
Take a visit to the Old Town. I am sure there are stories to be heard and times to be told about. Every place has its own tale, no matter how sleepy and tired it may seem. There is something hidden and barely whispered on the lips that live there.
"Old Wheel" by Wes Aldridge
I found this old wheel, rusted and aging. But I am tired and still under the weather, so I need to rest.
"Bending Religion" by Wes Aldridge
Last day of the Huntsville assignment. We got some great photos, in my opinion, and now I am glad we are leaving. Traveled back to Nashville. Feeling very sick, but trying to fight it off. Slept since I got home and took plenty of meds.
This shot comes from a church we drove by in Huntsville. It was the strangest church I've ever seen. We stopped to take a shot and Brian let me use his fisheye lens. I had wanted to get a shot with it for the blog for a while, and I think it was finally the perfect time for it. The structure worked perfectly with the bending effect of the lens. Note the wall painting of Psychedelic Jesus on the wall. Reaaaaaally trippy.
"The Circle" by Wes Aldridge
Today was strange, too tired to explain.
The magazine is finished now, thank all things good. Home will come soon.
Can you see the circle?
