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

When I was attending the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore back in the film days, I created a series of “upside-down” images that were made by first shooting a photograph of urban architecture, then turning the camera upside-down and shooting the identical scene using the classic film a double-exposure techniques to create a sort of optical illusion.