Today is National Fountain Day when we celebrate the timeless beauty and functionality of the fountain pen. Join us and enthusiasts around the world as was we embrace the use of fountain pens. I celebrated by gifting myself an Esterbrook pen celebrating 75 years of Peanuts.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.—Henry Graham Greene (1904-1991)
I am not now nor have ever considered myself a dedicated landscape photographer. Oh sure, I dabble in it when shooting infrared landscapes and have lots of fun doing that but living here in Colorado it’s impossible not to be some kind of a landscape photographer, even a half-hearted one like me who does it mostly for fun.
Landscapes are All Around Us
While it may be a oversimplification to say that anybody can make a great photograph in Monument Valley, the truth is that the art of landscape photography often gets confused with the real estate business because of its emphasis on location, location and location.
Once upon a time here’s how I approached this genre … Years ago when I was a student at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, I attended a class on Color Photography and the first assignment the instructor tossed at us was “landscapes”. Back then I wasn’t all that interested in landscape photography, although I occasionally enjoyed photographing landscape with infrared film during that time too.
As a serious student I ended up developing a series of principles on the “what” and “how” I would use when I made landscape images. It might be considered to be one of the first of “Farace’s Laws,” although I never thought of that at the time.
Here are the guidelines that I used back then and still follow today. They are not cast in concrete and are presented here only as suggestions for your own explorations
- Photograph locally
- Use a wide angle-of-view
- Create the maximum depth-of-field
- Saturate the colors
When I completed that landscape photography assignment oh-so-long ago, it’s subtext (to me) was that I was only going to photograph landscapes that “I could walk to from the front door of my house.” As a point of reference, at the time, I lived in the Western part of Baltimore City. After projecting my slides for critique in class, everyone, including the teacher, was singularly unimpressed. That’s when I announced my assignment’s subtitle and that’s also when the teacher and my fellow students asked to see the images again. That’s just the kind of effect you want to have on whoever your own audience may be—“can I see that again?”
Although it’s more of a physical challenge for me these days, I try to take a walk around a nearby lake or maybe in McCabe Meadows. although I’ll confess to being a wimp on really or cold or hot days. I usually take a camera along because I never what I’ll find along the way. Using some of these images plus some photographs I made before moving to Daisy Hill, I created a presentation called Right in Your Own Backyard for the FOTOfusion conference several years ago. In it I showed many of the photographs shot during these walks and sometimes the audiences, as they did back when I was in school, ask to see them again.
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