Outtakes, rarities, and alternate cuts

 

As usual, after a week or so of themed photo rolls, I am left with an assortment of images that didn't quite fit in anywhere. This is like with retrospectives in the career of a great rock band, I don't know, like REM, except condensed into a week. Somewhere near the end of it all they put out an album (or in the case of Bob Dylan, 75 lavish box sets) that make use of all this unused, alternate material.

That is what I am doing today!

For the aficionado this is all very exciting! I mean, until one listens to the box set of outtakes and says:

"Oh, I see why they left this all out before."

Gosh.

I hope that doesn't happen to you today.

All the animals of shadow falls

Due to my back problems, heavily exacerbated by my cruel and cartoonish fall at Shadow Creek, I have not been carrying my camera with me on my wilderness walks. I have my phone camera, but it doesn't quite cut it for the demands of epic wilderness photography. For instance last week I saw a large, gorgeous turkey down by the river, in the area I call Shangri-La. Did I take a picture with my phone? Sure, but I can't find it now because it just looks like a random shot of riverside greenery.

I'm sure there's a turkey in there somewhere.

Unless it was one of my many shots of random greenery?

No matter. I did what I always do:

If I can't find the picture I want to take, I make the picture of the picture I want to take.

And so, with that said, here from this morning's walk, are the many animals I ran into down by the Shadow Creek.

Well, not all of the animals. There were mosquitoes too, but I would not dignify them with a picture.

 

In which we go to France

 

I have lately been doing a lot of photo organizing on my phone. There are so many thousands of pictures on there now that I can't even get to half of them when I am making my mash up photos. So I created two simple, new folders: one for featured subjects, like Snoopy, that I hadn't used yet, and one for backgrounds that I hadn't used. Sorting through all these pictures also made it more clear what I was missing from my collections. For instance, among my 600 or so background photos I found a shortage of European street scenes, and a glaring shortage of Impressionist painting scenes. 

Being at the library I looked around for likely library books to photograph from.

I found The Hundred Most Beautiful Villages in France and The Paintings of Mary Cassatt. Bingo.

As to the villages of France, they are featured in all of today's photographs; a mostly cheery and summery collection of French village scenes given a slightly mystical significance.

As to Mary Cassatt?

Yes, I know she painted a lot of Mother and Child pictures, but I didn't know this:

Of the 500 or so of her lifetime paintings, pretty much zero are landscapes of any kind.

A lovely painter though.

Anyway, here's my France:

Three views of contemplation

 

At the risk of producing another "process" blog post, I'd like to show you three pictures of Charlie Brown.

It's the same Charlie Brown, all three times, as he sits on a little pillow or cushion, gazing out thoughtfully, in the exact same way, every single time.

A lot of times, when I'm making these pastiche pictures, I'll start with one of my stolen little figures, Charlie Brown in this case, and then I'll start pasting him into the most likely of the various environments I have. Sometimes I can't find anything that exciting. But sometimes everything seems to work. Knowing I'll only be able to show my figure in one of the pictures, hopefully the best one, I try to tear myself away to something new, instead of pasting him in over and over again to a bunch of, slightly redundant, unshowable pictures. Usually, even if I end up with three different pictures I like, I just have to choose the marginally most successful of them and move on.

But today I thought:

What if I show all three?

WHAT IF I SHOW ALL THREE!!!!

Today I am showing all three.

I like how each environment subtly changes the nature of his expression.

In an Edward Hopper painting:

Looking out at the Mississippi River:

And in the Mall of America:

The slow end of America

 

 

Having run through the evolution of one of my pastiche photos, I now have a few more pictures along similar themes, but presented with less talk. You may or may not like these pictures. If I have learned anything over the 200 years of this blog, and through the posting of over 160 million blog posts, it is that I have no idea whether what I write or show here will cause a fourth reader to exclaim "Hey, this stuff is great! I should come check it out again in a few years!" or which will cause one of my four readers to exclaim "I really must remember to check the air pressure on my tires."

Today we are mainly featuring a series of lonely ghost town pictures, though I may throw in a few other shots if I see some that are unrelated to today's theme but nevertheless make me exclaim "If I don't put this one into the blog today, I'll probably never bother or remember to in the future."

I know it doesn't sound like it, but you're in for such a treat today! These are about the loneliness and desolation of the irresistible collapse of the American experiment. I think everyone has fun with that.