This is the whole frame from which the previous picture came (click on the right hand arrow to see it). Cropped area shown.

Ever do that? I sometimes root around in my pictures looking at details. Sometimes an area of a picture suggests itself as another picture. So then I'll work on that, try different crops, see how they work (editing is best done with the eyes, not the mind. Never just assume with the mind. Look at it and let your eyes decide).

The Washington D.C. area photographer Frank DiPerna (1947-2020) owns the best-ever quote about cropping...he said, "I absolutely never, ever crop, unless I want to."

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Just playin'.

Lee Friedlander once said that he takes a lot of pictures because he just wants to get the camera out and play with it. I'm paraphrasing madly--I read the comment on a wall placard at a Friedlander exhibit in the basement of the Corcoran Museum ion Washington D.C. many many years ago.

This is about 1/8th or 1/10th of the frame which is why it doesn't enlarge.

UPDATE: FYI, I just added the full frame of the picture this came from, with the crop area outlined. Click on the left arrow to see it. (Well, I guess you have to go to my Photostream first? I don't really know Flickr very well.) You can see what a small area of the frame it was.

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Something different on my 8,000th trip up Pre-Emption Road (the straight line from where I live to Geneva, New York). I assumed it was a controlled burn, but heading north from here a volunteer fireman passed by going the other way, blue lights flashing, so maybe not.

I can get kinda hypnotized standing there looking at all the constantly varying patterns the smoke makes. So I forced myself to make just a few frames and get on my way.

This doesn't look quite sharp to me, not that it matters.

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(Best viewed on a calibrated monitor under subdued/darkened room light. For me, that means "at night." To look good under brighter room light in the daytime, I'd have to make this lighter and more contrasty. Maybe I should prepare a version like that.)

The so-called "super moon" (when the moon is closest to the Earth) rising above the hills outside of Penn Yan. I got lucky on this shot; I scouted locations the day before and got there at 6:22 when the moon, a ghostly pink, broke the horizon. But I misjudged the direction of the moonrise, so I had to extemporize, gunning the car around on the empty roads like a madman to find a good viewpoint in time. If they were watching, I wonder what the good folks in the Mennonite farmhouse near this spot thought I was doing! Of course they recognize cameras just fine, so bringing the tripod and camera out would have solved the mystery. I have a lighter version with the moon closer to the horizon and I was going to post both, but as I mentioned I have a thing for dark pictures at the moment and I ended up liking this shot the best.

This would have made a lovely color picture as well; the moon was a pale, pure orange and there was still a fair amount of blue left in the sky. It was the end of an absolutely clear-sky day, without a trace of cloud anywhere. I recognized it was my chance to get the moon close to the horizon, and came prepared.

Taken at f/16 to get sharpness from the corn stalks all the way to 226,000 miles away. The rendering of the dry corn stalks is very nice too, when you enlarge them.

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Lately, mostly for myself, I've been playing with little bits of brightness in swaths of brooding dark. Here we're looking up a long hill and the sun's been down for a while, and a large cloud that had positioned itself directly above the road (out of the picture to the right) twenty minutes ago seemed to wither before my eyes into a little drifting remnant, but it was still catching the dying sunlight as the Earth turned its face away. What made me smile is the still-bright sun glancing off a grain silo half over the horizon. I took this shot and one other and that little accent of light winked off.

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