Erik’s Blog

As soon as I learned that my friend and grocery store manager, Andrés, cultivates mushrooms, I knew immediately that we had to do a timelapse photography project with his next batch. The particular species he cultivates is Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom. He buys preprepared bails of hay wrapped in plastic, to which nutrients, mushroom spores, and water have been added. Holes have been cut in the plastic on the top and sides of the bail. Before you can see any mushroom growth, the whole bail gets warm to the touch, as the nutrient consumption begins inside. When the little fungal sprigs started appearing in the holes, Andrés came to me, with a big grin on his face, and said, “Today’s the day!” So I returned that afternoon and set up the tripod, flash, and intervalometer pointing at the bails of hay in his grocery store’s warehouse right down the street from where I live. And then we waited…
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Recently I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun playing with some bubble solution that Nora was given by a local shopkeeper. Besides the obvious, the bubbles are my favorite of Nora’s toys. It took her a while to break out of her awe at looking at them enough to intentionally pop them, and she still hasn’t understood the process of blowing through the hoop to create them. But that’s fine; I’m content blowing them for her.

I have more ideas about photography of bubbles than I have time to implement them, but last night I finally got around to my first attempt. For some reason my off-camera flash wireless connection wasn’t working, so I decided to turn off the room lights, set a long exposure, and manually fire the flash. Of about twenty shots, these are the best three.
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It’s been just over a year since my last experiments with taking off-camera flash shots of my daughter. All yesterday she was reminding me, both in looks and behavior, of the title character of that 1993 Dennis the Menace movie, so I decided to take some photos of her during her playtime before bed. Recently, when my flash is on my camera, I can’t get her to look at anything besides the flash, so in all of my photos of her, she’s looking just above the camera. This problem is what gave me the idea to try my off-camera flash transmitter to see if I could capture her looking more at the camera or at least not looking almost into the camera.
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On a recent walk I snapped a photograph of the local postman’s scooter. The mail in Colindres is delivered mostly by foot, with mailmen and mail-women walking around town pulling a little pull-cart, like the ones housewives pull to and from the grocery store. There’s one mailman who zips around on a scooter, parking it in the middle of a neighborhood and delivering letters from it to the nearby houses. I really liked my photo of his scooter and decided to play with it in photoshop, adding a pseudo-tilt-shift focusing effect to the scooter, with some desaturation of the background. I liked it so much that when a mailbox caught my eye, sitting alone with a tree, the following day, I snapped a photograph. After some similar photoshopping, the mailbox and tree really look to be keeping each other company. With these two made, I decided to go, yesterday, and snap the other mailbox (there are only two in town that I know of). Lo and behold it, too, was accompanied by some inanimate friends. And thus, I present to you, Correos Still Life.
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Last week a sprout of grass sticking out of a bricked town square caught my eye, particularly the shadows it made, so I took a picture of it with my iPhone camera. I liked the photo so much that I decided it might make a worthy subject for a real camera outing, so some days later I took a few more photographs. What’s really sad is that the sunlight in these photos is from noon. That’s how low the sun is in the sky, and how long the shadows are, these days.

Feel free to make your own profound metaphor about Nature resiliently fighting back against human Urban Progress. Or don’t.
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What happens when a photographer walks around town on a windy and sunny day with, not a still camera, but a video camera? Photographs…that move.

On my walk yesterday I had quite a few American Beauty moments¹ where something as simple as a flower dancing in the wind made me stop and admire Nature. When I filmed the first few clips, I didn’t know how I would put them together, but by about the fifth one, the idea for this video was formed.
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I’ve been wanting to make this particular timelapse video for a long, long time. Oddly enough, it was a Viagra commercial I saw the other day that played a candle burning in reverse (obvious imagery) that made me finally decide to do it. I used some birthday candles that we’ve been using for Nora’s birthday parties, which, by chance, are “sparkler” candles that not only relight themselves when extinguished, but also send off sparks every so often. The camera was set to take a photograph every three seconds, so the majority of the sparks were missed, but several of them where captured. What surprised me about them was the obvious rotation of the burning projectiles, resulting in squiggly lines of fire in the photographs. Behold!
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I had never really drunk much alcohol before going to Denmark as a naive 20-year-old. There in Scandinavia, I fell in love with the two main lagers available, Tuborg and Carlsberg. Upon returning to my homeland, now of legal drinking age, I sought them out, only to find no sign whatsoever of either brand. Once, shortly thereafter, I was on a business trip in Chicago when I entered a bar that had a neon Carlsberg sign. I rushed up to the bartender and asked if they really had Carlsberg, but he told me that hadn’t had it for a couple years and that the sign was left over from some publicity from ten years earlier. Apparently Carlsberg had stopped exporting to the US just before I’d learned of its existence.
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The brainchild of my blogrollmate, Lance, he and I and three other people he knows are participating in a photoblogging project that we call Obiter picta. From the About page (as a lawyer, he couldn’t resist the Latin play on words):

Obiter dicta are incidental words, things said in passing. Obiter picta is a collaborative photo blog updated Tuesday through Friday. The participants’ contributions are not coordinated in advance. Any consonance or dissonance perceived in the themes, content or composition presented here is coincidental.

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There is really only one obligatory photograph that must be taken when you visit Bordeaux, the one on the covers of all the tourism guides. It’s of the Place de la Bourse taken from the other side of the reflection pool. They have a large, maybe 20m x 40m reflection pool between the Place de la Bourse and the river that is maintained with about a centimeter of water. It’s pure high-grade photographer catnip.
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