Hungry Slinky
I had a lot of fun with this nylon slinky. In a series of pics he slowly evolved until he became the Hungry Slinky. Once he satisfied his hunger, he left town on the Slinky Express (no COVID theme there). The photo hung in the Outside-The-Box Exhibit in Oxford, PA in February 2022, and then was juried into the 12th Annual Joseph Miller Abstract Photography Exhibit in Virginia along with the Slinky Express photo. Contact me after you sanitize your hands if you want to know how I set up this shot.
The Joker
This is the appropriate photo to close out 2021. Here is the back story. I shot this on an Ocean City bus in the summer of 2021. The background is the divider from the lower to upper portion of the bus. This crazy guy with the Joker mask (we had to wear masks on the city bus) gets on the bus and he agrees to allow me to shoot his portrait. I liked the color version, but it had some wild distracting reflections off his sunglasses. Two different photo critics told me they liked the photo, but the reflection was just too much. Solution - get rid of the sunglass glare and make it a BnW photo. The BnW version was then juried into a portrait exhibit and hung at the Blank Wall Gallery in Athens, Greece in February 2022.
New Normal 2021 Retrospective
In a continuing effort to provide a collection of my photos for family and friends, I again self published a collection of some of my photos from the past year. I titled the 2021 collection - New Normal 2021.
I am trying to move away from the COVID theme that has permeated my blog, but the damn virus just won't go away. With any luck we may have turned it from a pandemic to an endemic. Like Social Distance, I anticipate that New Normal 2021 will be a hot read in 10 years or less. If you want a copy you can order the softbound or digital version from Blurb at this link. https://www.blurb.com/b/10959033-new-normal-2021
If you have any problems getting a copy from Blurb Publishing, just email me as I should be able to get a copy to you as long as they are in print.
Ashlyn's Portrait
This portrait of my grand daughter, Ashlyn, won first prize in the portrait category of Harford County Photo Group's second annual photo contest. Once Ashlyn found out I got money for first place, she started negotiating her modeling fee......
Coastal HWY at Dusk
My 2022 started on a good note. L.A. Photo Curator makes an annual selection of the top 40 photos from all submissions for the year. My photo of Coastal HWY at Dusk was selected as one of the top 40 photos of 2021. The curator said, "These images were submitted to specific themes over the year but they alone really have so much to say - they stand on their own regardless of a theme. A good photograph is not just a pretty picture. It's an entrance into an intimate space, another world, a timeless moment frozen that moved the artist to make the photograph. And what was it that made the artist choose this moment to share? We don't know, but like all art it's all subjective and there are different meanings and messages for us all. I hope you will take some time and sit with these images that in my opinion are special enough to be called iconic."
