Upside Down

 

 

 

 

Before I get to Upside Down.  One thing that isn't upside down is the five year tradition of getting the tintypes done.

They and the process have a precious gravity to them.  You can feel age and what gravity does to age.

Made some frames.

Sometime ago I bent down to pick something off the sidewalk and looked up.  The world was upside down.  It startled me.  One, well, the visual thing but two, was for decades I looked at the world visually upside down.  I had forgotten.

The simple lens in a view camera turns what it sees upside down and reversed on the ground glass. At first the upside down view throws you off, you turn your head to try and right the image.  But at some point I realized that the upside down view was accepted by me as normal.  If I thought it about while viewing the ground glass, even for a fraction of a second, it would flip back to being upside down.

I hadn't pulled the view camera out for a couple years now so thought I'd look at things upside down again.

What's upside right now ain't no view of the world.  The world itself has flipped.  Lies become truth,  wet becomes dry,  cold is now hot.  Maybe it's the swing of the big pendulum.  Maybe it because of the inherent failings of humans.

Squaring up a seat portion of the chairs.

It was an interesting process.  I did this job once with the 8x10.  For the shot, we bought a used car, rented five cars with drivers and transported that down to an animal trainer's facilities in Salinas.  He had a elephant we rented the elephant to sit on the front portion of the used car in a parking lot with rented cars scattered in the lot.

So I shot that with the 8x10 clamped to the handrail of a cherrypicker with sun starting to set.  I don't know how I did that after trying to move it around in the studio these past few weeks.

It's packed away again.  Tried to give it away somewhat recently to Henry.  He sort of said no thanks.

Anyway......rambling.   Had a party here, T&N's Burner Crew.

My name in Ice!

The harvest of 3003 of the last of summer.

And the first rain. 

And roses from the front.

To finish up.  Early morning sun on the espresso machine.

And the world in the process either of righting itself or the other way round.  I can't tell from the photo.