This casual portrait of my young Dad was made in the backyard of his parent’s—my grandparents—home on Montford Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland sometime around 1940. I don’t know if it was my Mom who made this shot but since he’s smiling it could have been and I like to think that it was.

I’m pretty sure that the first book I ever read was The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff that was originally published in 1933. The first English translation was published in 1933, which I didn’t read until 1949 when my second grade class from St Catherine of Siena school visited the Clifton Park branch of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. I was hooked right away.

Last Saturday I decoded to take a chance and shoot some (infrared) photographs for the first time without Mary helping me. Armed with a Lumix GX1 that had been converted to infrared by Life Pixel using their Hyper Color filter, I set off to make some images at McCabe Meadows. How did it go? It was OK and not without some mobility challenges and pain but I shot enough RAW+JPEG images (48) to write this post.

I think you also meet the nicest people when shooting with a tripod. Once when I was at McCabe Meadows shooting infrared images with the Pentax K-1, a women who was carrying a DSLR asked, “what’s up there?” I held up the IR filter I was using and told her I was making an infrared picture of the tree. We had a pleasant chat and within a few seconds a cyclist passes by, stops and asking “is there a nest up there?” And so I explain it to him too…

A rat rod is a style of hot rod that imitates (or exaggerates) the early hot rods of the 1940s, 1950s and early-1960s. … It goes on to say that most rat rods appear “unfinished”, as only the vehicle’s bare essentials are driven.—Wikipedia