Ester Louise Maynard b. September 25, 1925

When I was a kid growing up in Plymouth, Michigan, we had a house at 615 Fairground Street and our phone number, once we finally got one, was Glenview 3-6034.
The Fultons, who lived next door had GL3-6032. The Maycocks, directly across the street had GL3-6036.
That’s how Michigan Bell did it back then. They assigned you a phone number based on your address.
Sometimes, you could pick up the phone and hear your neighbors talking. We didn’t have we they called a “Party Line,” at least that’s not the way I remember it, but the phone system was just not what it is now.
The house was built in 1929. I know that because it was stamped into one of the posts holding up the roof on the back porch.
The house was owned by my mother’s father, Harry Maynard.
Harry Maynard, my grandfather, loved two things in life more than anything else.
First, Harry loved fishing, and there were lots of places within walking distance of 615 Fairground Street where you catch bass, bluegill, sunfish, perch and all manner of “panfish.” He also loved ice fishing. Just because it’s 10 degrees below zero outside and the lake has a 3-foot sheet of ice over it does not stop a fisherman from his favorite passtime.
Harry had one of the most extensive collections of fishing tackle I have ever seen. Or at least it seemed that way to a 6-year-old boy who adored this man. All of his tackle was already many years old and had probably aided Harry in catching countless panfish and probably even helped sustain him and his family in down times.
The second thing that Harry loved in life was wine.
I’m not talking about Chateau Mounton Rothschild or Domaine de le Romanee-Conti. I’m talking about MD 20-20, Bali Hi and Thunderbird. Harry was not a wine collector, Harry was a wino.
I don’t mean to dishonor the man on the freaking internet but the fact that he was buried, next to his wife Mary, on June 20, 1964 in Riverside Cemetery, Plymouth, Michigan, is directly related to his decades of over indulgence. He lived 60 years.
Mary Maynard, who never took a drink, was buried there on August 6, 1948 at age 38.
When Harry died my mother and father had the house at 615 Fairground Street. We had all been living there for years already. My mother grew up in that house. I grew up in that house.
I have photos of my mother in her high school graduation gown standing in the driveway where I played with little green, plastic soldiers and parked my stingray.
When my mother graduated from Plymouth High School, in the same building that I attended 9th grade, in 1943, she would have been 17 or 18 years old but she already looked much older than that.
My mother looks like she’s 30 in photos I have of her when she was 6. She had the same face from the time she was a small child until the day she died in 1993.
When I dream of her, which is quite often, I see her face, just like it was when she was 17 or 18. Just like it was when she was 30 or 40 or 50 or 60. She has only one face to me. It’s the face in the photo above which was taken when she was 17 or 18. I love this photo of her.
Ester Louise Maynard-Gapen was buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Plymouth, Michigan on November 23, 1993, right next to Harry and Mary Maynard.
She lived 68 years but today, she would have been 82.
And I miss her, a lot. 

Of salmon and fisheyes

I can hold a camera pretty still.
And for that matter, a Glock, an AK or a over-full martini.
After years of practice and coming back to a darkroom — I’m dating myself here — with what you hoped was going to be an Pulitzer image, only to discover later while looking through an Agfa loupe, that there was just too much camera shake in that photo of the firefighter carrying the infant out of the still blazing building while trying to breathe life back into her lungs, to be useable.
Well, maybe that never happened but you get the idea.
I’ve missed enough shots in my day to learn how to hold a camera still, in low light — heh — in no light.
Heck, with a wide angle lens, I can hand hold down to 1/2 second and longer. Of course that’s given I’ve got some way to prop my elbows against my body and a light pole or a Toyota or a public information officer to lean against.
If there’s enough light to provide any detail at all, I can get a sharp enough image out of it as long as the subject is still. If the subject is moving around, nothing I can do about that.
Case in point, above.
Sometimes I like to smear colors around.
Mostly, I like things to be sharp, when I want them to be.
Kitties don’t like to hold still, especially when they’re trying to inhale Friskie’s salmon dinner while you have a fisheye lens shoved up their nose. 

Fun with fisheye

I said yesterday, that I was of the mind that posting a picture a day, every day might be a fun thing to do.
Day 2. I’m tired, I don’t feel like posting a picture a day.
Oh, all right! I said I would and so I shall. Just don’t expect that every single image is going to blow your hair back.
As I stated, there will be a lot of kitties. Just not today.
Today I got out the ‘old’ Nikon 995. Thought it would be cool to play around with the fisheye I bought for it, something I haven’t done for a couple of years now.
There’ll be more of these.

Green



rainymacros13, originally uploaded by visualkaos.

Funny, I never used to like green.
I don’t know how this could have happened. I like to think that I’m in tune with the Earth. And although the atmosphere of our planet is something like 75% nitrogen, which is basically blue, some people just equate green with Earth.
Some even refer to it as a green planet.
Planetary tourists and other first time visitors to Earth would be overwhelmed by it’s blueness on approach. This is particularly true of immigrants coming here from places that are dominated by hues in other positions on the color wheel.
For example, Martians would get a chill down their spine, provided thay had a spine, when getting their first glimpse of the brisk tones rushing up toward them as they approached Earth’s stratosphere.
Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide.
Nasty stuff. Think about the view from the Sepulveda Pass looking toward the westside on a hot summer day — in 1969.
Co2 makes for a not-so-lovely rusty melancholy.
And as Elton John once said, ‘Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.’
It’s clearly not alone in this category but green, is an earth tone.
Nothing is green on Mars.
But there is lots of green on Earth.
Chlorophyll for one.
I once owned a key lime martini green van but that’s another story.
I have at least 3-4 different tones of green shirts hanging in my closet. I don’t own a single green T-shirt, even though I prefer to wear T-shirts over ones with collars.
I love nearly every kind of green food, although I don’t consume nearly enough of it.
I’ve been trying to convince Linda for years that she should color at least some of her hair green.
But when I became a photographer and a designer, I avoided green.
This is not to say that I preferred primary colors in my photographs or typography or whatever.
I always loved Earth tones.
They are my colors.
But I would never use green. Green just seemed icky to me.
Cold and forbidding green, I thought, was just unfriendly.
When Linda came along I learned that her favorite color, the color that she looks best in, the color of the majority of her clothes, food and the color that always seems to show in designs she’s done, is green.
Soon, I began to see the light.
With a wavelength roughly 520–570 nanometres it sits, big as shit, smack in the middle of the visible color spectrum, I should have noticed it before!
I started experimenting with it. Just some nice, safe dark, grass greens at first moving on to more kelly greens and eventually finding appreciation for the likes of … sea foam.
I know, it’s crazy.
Now I use it almost every day. I put it in my photos, typography and meals.
I’m calmed by it now and I couldn’t be happier.
I like an olive color mixed with a burnt orange.
I also like olives but not burnt oranges.
I have Linda to thank for turning me on to green.