Who knew the Queen Liked Racing

More race shots from Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing including a rare shot off the Queen of England helping out in the pit!

High Plains Raceway

St Francis, KS

Cope, CO

Cope

Goodland, KS

Just a few pictures shot with my Digital IR converted Canon point and shoot.  On the way out to Colby I stopped into High Plains Raceway and it was WRL ( World Racing League) weekend.  Then onto Eastern Colorado - Cope, Colorado.  In Kansas I went thru St. Francis .  Before work I shot some scenes in Goodland , KS

Shot using my Kolari Vision IR converted Canon point and shoot.  Had the 720 filter on.

A diptych is a combination of two images placed immediately next to each other to make an artistic statement or comparison. The photographs can be identical or they can be different; there are no hard and fast rules – they simply have to be next to each other.

When I bought the Kodak H35 Ektar half frame point and shoot it wasn’t so much with the idea of saving money by getting two exposures on a normal 35mm frame, although there is that to think about.  It was actually to see if one could actually get a diptych in camera.  It’s a bit of hit or miss to get two similar subjects next to each other AND in the same vertical vs. horizontal orientation.  The examples here were shot relatively randomly.

Denver Art Museum had a great exhibit of and about Georgia O’keefe’s photography.  Most of us including me ( until seeing this exhibit) think of GO as this great painter who was married to Alfred Steiglitz a central figure in 20th century photography.  She was however her own photographer relying on her circle of friends who were also photographers to expand her repertoire.  Todd Webb was one such friend.  She was more concerned about shape, position and light than learning the technical aspects of exposure and development.  The photos in the exhibit  were at times very small, almost like what you would get from a drugstore processing.  The O’Keefe family had always embraced photography but it appears that Georgia’s serious efforts began when she was in her 60’s.  

Shot by Todd Webb

Todd Webb

This weekend the Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing club held their annual race to benefit the Child Cancer Foundation.  Here are a couple of photos from the event.

Preacher and his wife robbed of $1 million in jewelry during sermon

It isn’t shocking that someone is robbed in broad daylight but what the F’in Jesus was this preacher doing with a million in jewels!  That’s the story.

I have the perfect song for this situation.

Now you fashion-lovin’ Christians sure give me the blues
You must unload, you must unload
You’ll never get to heaven in your jewel-encrusted high-heeled shoes
You must, you must unload


For the way is straight and narrow and few are in the road
Brothers and sisters, there is no other hope
If you’d like to get to heaven and watch eternity unfold
You must, you must unload

I’m starting this blog without having seen my first roll out of this camera.  It is a plastic 1/2 Frame camera.  Instead of 24 mm x 36 mm negative frame - it shoots 24 mm x 18mm  - this now gives it a vertical format instead of a horizontal one. It also doubles the number of farms per roll.  It is a point and shoot with a simple lens.  They suggest shooting it with ISO 100 or 200 film - it does have a flash for indoor shots.  

I just finished this roll while traveling to Kansas.  For my C41 I’ve gotten lazy and just pay the money to have TheDarkroom.com do the work.  I have the C41 kit by tomography sitting at home but in order to use it so it doesn’t go bad one would have to save 10 rolls at a time to develop.  Anyway it also makes it hard to wanna do it myself with the service and quality coming from The DarkRoom is so good

I am pretty impressed with the quality of this little plastic beast. Might be worth using on Ektachrome given the high cost of slide film - probably would stick to shooting it in outdoors.

The images above are uncut straight from the camera diptych frames.  This can be difficult to get them this way but you could shoot 3 shots and at two of them should form a pair.

What Is a Diptych?

Here is the diptych definition, put simply a diptych is an object that is made up of two parts, a singular piece of artwork formed by a pair of panels joined together. Diptych artwork can feature paintings, photographs, drawings, carvings, or any flat piece of artwork.

My favorite Bison rancher, Dan O’brien doing a Public Service Announcement about people continuing to think that they can get close to bison and survive.  Every year typically in Yellowstone several tourists are injured or killed because they do not heed the warnings from the park rangers.

On my way home from Goodland , KS I went thru some amazing cloud and rain formations.  Nothing serious or dangerous but just interesting shafts of rain back lit with the setting afternoon sun.  Here they are -  some are slightly redundant but interesting nonetheless.  OBTW they were all shot in color and then taken into BW as I think this makes them more dramatic

Just got into my Hotel Room here in Colby, KS for my two day stint working.  The A/C was on full blast with the shades closed.  While I appreciate the cold on a day of 100 degF it was a bit much.  After getting the A/C turned down - I opened up the shades to find this.  What else would you expect in Rural Kansas?  Glad to see the land being used to grow something.

Motel in Saratoga

Hilary and I getting ready for DMB

The Man Himself

At the Diner

Manlius Swan Pond

Oneida Lake -Sylvan Beach

Indie and Luna

24 sec. shot clock

Rodney at the Cafe

Luna

A brief trip to Syracuse to visit with family.  Was able to see my one and only grandchild, Ivria.  Spent time with Alex and Lisa, her parents.  Then it was off to Oneida Lake where I stay with Hilary and Kris.  This entailed a Dave Mathews Band concert at the Saratoga Performing  Arts Center.  There was visiting with Luna and Indie, Hilary’s new but large dogs.

I believe that many corporations are bad - I only have experience  with one medical corporation up close and that’s Centura which is an amalgamation of CHI ( Catholic Health Initiative) and the Adventist Church.  As the petition states orange Flight for Life plane and helicopter colors are themselves their own brand.  They’ve been around for over 50 years and now administration wants to change colors to better fit in with their brand.  Estimated cost to repaint the fleet $1 million or more. I was only given a 3% raise this year - about a third of inflation.  But they have money to repaint equipment that doesn’t need this.

A couple of months ago this same CEO pleaded with staff not to bring in the union.  This is why you need a union because clearly Administration is clueless as what a health systems priorities should be.  I am in the enviable position of being a part time worker .  So if Centura ever reads this:

1] It’s called freedom of Speech

2] It’s called truth to power

3] Peter Banko save your BS proclamations about God’s love and the work we do on his behalf.  Try walking the walk for once

Why do I shoot E-100?  Well I wasn’t for awhile - it’s expensive at almost $20 a roll, costs $3 more than C41 to develop at TheDarkroom.com and I used to think it was hard to shoot because of it’s limited exposure latitude.  All of this is true but I shot a last remaining roll about a month ago and I was amazed at the beauty of the output.  I don’t think I could shoot a steady diet of it but for certain projects it’s worth it.  For difficult lighting just bracket your exposures.

Well foks I’ve finished another boot.  This is good for me as I have tons of books but don’t read that much.  I also have tended to start 3 or 4 books at once intending to finish them but haven’t so far.

I told someone that this book is for me what some people read and call a trashy romance novel - I didn’t learn anything, couldn’t quote anything per se.  But it was fun.  I’ve read about 6 of his books and it’s like meeting an old friend - you get reacquainted with his family.  This time the topics are about the pandemic, his aging father who grew up in Cortland, NY and I think may have attended Syracuse University or spent time in Syracuse ( who hasn’t spent time in Syracuse?) 

So was the book good?  It’s sort of like asking how the peanut butter was - it’s a staple.  Yes if you have read one of his books you have read them all and yet they are each in their own right very entertaining. So let’s just leave it at that.

Another new film to try out - this time is Kosmo Foto Shadow Agent - an iso 400 BW film.  I am having a hard time keeping track of some of the new offerings - are they new film stock or just repackaged film from Eastern Europe?  Anyway this one seems to be OK to shoot.  I developed it for 5:30 in HC110B but I think next time I will develop it for 6 min. OR shoot it at ISO 200

A well researched book about why there is anger in the rural areas of this country.  Claims and assertions are well supported.

“My argument is that understanding rural America requires seeing the places in which its residents live as moral communities. I do not mean this in the vernacular sense of “moral” as good, right, virtuous, or principled. I mean it rather in the more specialized sense of a place to which and in which people feel an obligation to one another and to uphold the local ways of being that govern their expectations about ordinary life and support their feelings of being at home and doing the right things.”

“Rural communities’ views of Washington usually emerge in two competing narratives: on the one hand, the government ignores us and doesn’t do anything to help with our problems, and, on the other hand, the government constantly intrudes in our lives without understanding us and thus makes our problems worse.”

[The obvious irony is that I don’t see rural agricultural areas surviving without government subsidy for crops and crop insurance.  I also haven’t heard of farmers declining to take government handouts that these subsidies represent.  There’s a disconnect between Medicaid  and Crop subsidies - both support segments in our society]

“Diversity for diversity’s sake is rarely valued, and if it is, it means something incremental and usually symbolic. Rural communities may not be as racist or as misogynist as critics sometimes claim, but the racism and misogyny are built into the patterns of life that nearly all-white communities have come to accept. And a part of their anger is assuredly the view that the promotion of diversity is a further intrusion of big government.”

[The lack of diverse opinion means there’s little chance that rural inhabitants have a chance to hear opposing opinions.  ]

“A truck farmer in a town that was nearly 50 percent Hispanic was proud of the diversity in his community and acknowledged that the apples and cherries on his farm depended on Hispanic labor. But he too thought more should be done to keep Hispanics out. They need to be stopped at the border, he said. Social scientists call this kind of exclusion “othering.” It ranges from negative stereotypes to overt discrimination. By no means do all rural Americans engage in”

— The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America by Robert Wuthnow

What I was hoping to learn  is whether the author is able to develop a cogent argument as to why the rural areas have turned further to the radical right and have become stalwarts of Trumpism.  One would be lead to believe that the level of anger and distrust is so potent that rural voters voted for anything that is not already in Washington.   This would explain in some ways the 2016 election of Trump but not his continued popularity into the 2020 election. I call this “Blind Rage” as there is no accounting for how the rural resident identifies with Trump.

Saw this on a Billboard on I-25 going south right before the Colorado Border coming from Wyoming.  Someone is pissed that Colorado has codified Abortion as a Women’s right.  Meanwhile polls of Wyoming citizens show almost as many favor abortion as don’t.  Here would be my billboard heading North into Wyoming: