When my wife asked me to recommend a book about photography to her sister, I suggested Discover Your Self Through Photography by Ralph Hattersley. This was written in 1971 long before digital photography and smart phones and eschews the traditional approach to f/stops, shutter speed and film speeds prevalent at the time but it reaches deep inside to, in fact, help you Discover Your Self Through Photography. Then there is…

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…