bill sullivan

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Wisconsin may leave you pleasantly surprised. Skipping the obvious (the Mississippi), I would suggest you start by finding out who Aldo Leopold was and what drew him to the Sands area of central Wisconsin which is traversed by Interstate 94. With sandy soil, this is not the best farmland. Back in the Depression, the Federal govt offered by buy the land of these farmers so they could buy land that would be more productive, but people resisted. They liked the place. Take a look at Necedah and vicinity, at least on your map and guidebooks.

 

A couple of years ago, when my wife and I drove from Minneapolis to Indianapolis, we turned south at Mauston and ended up at Spring Green which is where Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen is. (Taking the tour is not cheap, however.) From here we navigated northeast to State Route 113 which utilizes a small ferry to get cars across the Wisconsin River to Lodi. [i thought so much of the dinner we had at a country place called Fish Tales that I bought one of their teeshirts and still wear it.] We skipped Baraboo on this trip (and also the touristy Wisconsin Dells), but Baraboo holds the Barnum and Bailey Circus Museum and the extensive grounds of the International Crane Foundation with ample photo ops if you dig big birds. I have also prowled the outskirts of Baraboo and found Leopold's old homestead but unless the man interests you I wouldn't recommend it. I also enjoyed some fine birding one rainy afternoon in Devil's Lake State Park which has some fine old glacier-cut cliffs overlooking the river.

 

Over at Eagle, my wife (I must give her credit) made me go to Old World Wisconsin with 600 acres and some 50 houses, barns and other bldgs built by immigrants from Europe. We also learned about the local geology when we stopped at the Kettle Morain Nature Center.

 

Have a nice trip.

My reaction is that you are showing too many tulip pictures. I'd like to see you cut it down to a few, maybe one or two, that you like. If I had to pick one, I would go with nature07, the first of your yellows. I like the angle. It looks like a mouse took it. Elsewhere on your site, you've got some nice stuff. Have you sent any of your photos to the Photo Critique forum?

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I think you are asking if modifying a scene as you did is cheating or a concern from the point of view of photography, and I am going to say no. Within hours, a good wind likely will rise and remove the footprints anyway. You are photographing a scene and you want it to appear free and clear of the hand (or foot) of man. That is a goal shared by most if not all of us.

 

As for which one you should keep, I think I will vote for the more vivid colors and decaying dead branches in the upper one. I don't dislike the lower one, but because of the large shrub on the left and the ground area in shadows on the upper right, it's busier. To make it simpler, you might try cropping most of the shrub off the left and some of the area in shadows on the right, even if it means cutting off some of your rock outcrop. See what you think of the result.

Lex: I liked your previous phrase, "a compelling complexity."

Webster's Third International Dictionary (the unabridged one) defines kitsch as "Artistic or literary material held to be of low quality, often produced to appeal to popular taste, and marked especially by sentimentalism, sensationalism, and slickness." It gives two sources of the origin, one the German word kitschen which it says means to slap (a work of art) together, and German dialect where it says it means to scrape up mud from the street.

 

The first of three definitions given by the Third Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is "art or artwork characterized by sentimental, often pretentious bad taste."

 

The Quintessential Dictionary by I. Moyer Hunsberger defines it as "Art, literature, etc of a pretentious but shallow kind, calculated to have an immediate popular appeal."

Dear Dark,

 

I wish you had been more specific about what you mean by kitsch or what you see as the "ugly" sides to a picture. If you are talking about colors that are too saturated for your taste, one solution might be to switch to a less saturated film (or raise your ISO setting if you shoot digital). Another would be to open the image in your software (such as PhotoShop) and convert it to black and white or perhaps simulated infrared. If you understand how to add a New Adjustment Layer in PhotoShop, you can do some playing around with that. If by "ugly sides" you mean things in a landscape photo that are man-made, I have been known to alter the landscape with the PhotoShop Healing Brush tool, not to mention the Marquee tool.

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A different kind of painted desert<div></div>

Gloria:

 

I often go to my local Museum of Photographic Arts and look at the old photos from 100 or 150 years ago. If people took pictures like these today, we would laugh at them, but these old pictures are regarded with reverence. Secretly, I would like nothing more than to have people looking at my pictures 100 or 150 years from now with the reverence with which people regard photos from the 19th Century.

 

OK, so I am lost in my favorite nature spot (the desert). I assume this means I come from a civilized place, that I know what art is, and what an audience for my photos is. If this is the case, I think I would continue to make photographs because I suppose I would always hope that I or my photos could somehow one day return to the civilization I know. Nature photography and nature writing got started when people went to the wilderness or wild places and made pictures and wrote about them for people who couldn't be there. This is the Olympic torch we all carry. I might not have a fresh idea every day or even every year, but I think I would continue to photograph (and write) with the hope that my stuff would get back to people womewhere. Isn't that what we all secretly hope? OK, so it might take another century or two and I might not be around for the museum opening, but having left something of value I think I could die a little happy.

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I agree with the words written above in favor of Pentax cameras and lenses. Regarding your friend's bad luck with Olympus, I think you have to look at the fact that Pentax is a diverse company, enjoying a good reputation in medium format in addition to P&S and 35mm. They may seem stupid when them come up with a name is "*ist," but they somehow seem stable and solid to me. I don't see them falling out of the race like Olymnpus. This is just a gut feeling. I am not one of the shareholders nor am I privvy to any financial analyses of their company.

 

What I think about the overall Pentax system is this. I bought my first Pentax 35mm camera 25 years ago. A photographer friend advised me to go to the camera store, pick up and handle all the cameras I could, and select the one that felt best. I came home with a Pentax. I still like the way my Pentax feels.

 

I like the value for money, too. Sure, there are a lot more lens options for Nikon and Canon, but how many lenses does a person need to buy?

 

I can't answer your question about buying a Pentax DSLR again because I have never bought one. With limited funds for photography, I have felt that better lenses were a better investment than replacing my film body with a digital. But that's another story.

I forget the exact wording of the ruling in California, but anybody

who wants to build a tall building in the state west of Interstate

Highway 5 must go through a combination of Hell and Chinese Water

Torture, whichever is more severe. Apparently, that is what the

builders of this structure did.<div></div>

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