The camera in my pocket, Part Two

The shadow of the tree across the street drapes over a sprawling adobe on Hinde Street in downtown Taos.

Continuing our journey through the forest of iphone images that have supplanted full frame photographs are these examples. Not to fret. I have three SD cards at the 10:00 o’clock position in my field of vision just waiting to be processed. So, the real photo dry spell referenced last week will have ended for the time being.

This is the gate to the historic Couse House on Kit  Carson Road in Taos.

Pioneer Title at nightfall after the quite incredible Robert Plant and Allisson Kraus concert in Kit Carson Park. Peggy was there for Plant's leather pants while I attended for the music.

The stoplights at the corner of Paseo de Pueblo Sur and Cañon Road in Taos.

Hay bales and the obligatory Taos Clouds as seen at Casa Immel.

One card is of photographs I took at the recent opening of photographer Bill Davis’s show at the Barreis Gallery in El Prado, NM. The second is of the recently hayed Immel rancho. And the third is from a portrait session with my dear friend Lindsey Enderby and his companion and caregiver Pam Morgan. That one, I hope, will be worth the wait since Lindsey and Pam requested the session and formal portrait thingies are nervous making. The photographer, moi, feels considerable pressure to produce photographs make them happy; namely that they look better than they actually do. I know that’s what I want when I’m photographed. This portrait ordeal, I mean session, proved to be a test. I’m usually adept at getting subjects to relax and to give me a beaming smile. For the most part Lindsey wasn’t having that smile nonsense.

When I described the session and the lackluster results Peggy asked if I remembered the portraits I took of our elderly Minnesota neighbors Helen and Tom in 1972. I said that I did. She reminded me, “Those portraits were pretty severe. Tom and Helen didn’t smile at all but the portraits were really handsome.” I can only hope that history will repeat itself more than fifty years later. And handsome is better than happy anyway. Or is it the other way around?

But for now, you’re saddled with a handful of smart phone pics from the camera that resides next to the car keys in the right front pocket of my jeans.

I do wish I could find Helen and Tom’s portrait, the one made with a Kodak 2D 8”x10” view camera built in 1941. That’s when I was born, too.  I’m still here and I still have that handsome 82 year old camera.