Down the Road Tested

Climbing guide and sailor Alain Comeau at Schartner's Farm.

Renaissance man John Snyder at Schartner's the same day.

As to Still Lifes, my early efforts in the digital age skewed to those and to portraits. I called the still life category Alignment because I believed that the core of what I was doing was composition or as I prefer design. I even said so in my artist statement in my website as early as 2002. The importance of design or framing is true of headshots, too. And that framing is done entirely in the viewfinder. That's a discipline I've lived by for six decades. Another is to shoot at f5.6 about ten inches from the subject. Only the face is in focus as seen here.

The title Monumental Heads is one Edward Weston gave to his portraits of notable members of the ex-pat community in Mexico in 1920s. Those were heady times when one’s coterie included Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Weston's partner Tina Modotti and Leon Trotsky among others. 

Today the words led me to my subject. I fully intended to continue with Still Lifes (Alignment) but once I typed the words Monumental Heads I was propelled in that direction.

A pensive John Snyder.

An equally thoughtful Comeau.

Weston is said to have believed that a featureless sky was the world’s best light for a Monumental Head. So, I marched John and Alain into the strawberry fields at Schartner’s Farm in North Conway, New Hampshire to riff on Weston’s contention. I couldn't have chosen more willing and charismatic characters for that first foray with man beneath the sky. Both of these guys loved the camera and the camera loved them. The camera in question was the $7,700 Canon1Ds I'd just bought and the images are courtesy of my beginning Photoshop class at North Conway High in 2002. 

This post qualifies for the Road Tested category by the narrowest of margins. Schartner's Farm was half a mile south on Westside Road from our cabin in the woods. A road's is a road.