 |  | | | | |  Welcome to this month's Adventures in Photography! For this episode, I have been beckoned by old, orphaned images that have existed in obscurity for years. The art of photography is broad--from real estate, architecture, portraits, sports, landscape, stock, etc. Sometimes I find that, as I concentrate on portraiture, I neglect the quieter side of the art: shooting things and places. If you've practiced photographing things and places, you may already know how therapeutic it can be. Exhibit A: The Green Roof. There is an old southern practice of painting a ceiling blue. Do you know why? It's because the ghosts (who aren't very smart) think that the roof is the sky and, since they pass through physical matter without restraint, fly straight through the roof and will therefore leave the inhabitants alone. None of that applies to this image, save that colored ceilings are pretty cool. This space deserved more time and attention than I was able to offer, but of the images that I collected, this one with the pigeons in motion was the most interesting to me. It makes a dashing desktop image.
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| Exhibit B: The Floating Chairs. After a series of January rains in 2002, the water in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, refused to recede. I decided to stop being lazy and took a drive around town and was rewarded for my efforts by these 'floating chairs'. The water in Murfreesboro has a hard time soaking into the ground because the earth below is mostly limestone covered with a few feet of dirt. I once had a buddy who moved there from California and was terrified of tornadoes. He purchased an underground shelter and thought he would be able to bury it by renting a backhoe. He quickly learned that he would also need to hire a professional to dynamite an enormous chasm the size of a mobile home in his backyard in order to install the shelter. |
| Exhibit C: The Bottom of the Lake. I saw the movie Deliverance at an obscenely young age and it left me terrified of mountain rivers. I saw it again at age 20, and despite all of my teenage desensitization, it still gave my soul a chill. This image was created in east Tennessee on the bottom of Patrick Henry Lake. The Tennessee Valley Authority had let the water out of lake to perform maintenance on the dams, and behold, the world beneath looked akin to the aftermath of nuclear devastation. |
| Exhibit D: The Copa Microphone. This is a portrait of my Shure Beta SM 58 microphone. It has endured my slobbery singing for nearly a decade. It is the subject of my latest record's album cover, 'The Copa Club'. You can hear it in action on the live recordings available here. For this image, I punched holes in background paper with a screwdriver, and then focused on the microphone with a wide aperture, making the light that shone through the holes look like night club lights. The smoke was created using a stick of incense and a sauce pan (to keep the smoke accumulating near the microphone). Thank you for reading this far! May your July be delightful and blessed. Rory Need something else to do? Become a fan of my gospel cigar rock here. Enjoy my blog here. |
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