As regular visitors to this blog might recognize, there have been rather a lot of photos of old and worn trucks that I have taken and posted.  These are all from the same couple of places here in Boulder where these semi-trailers are rented out as storage spaces.  It may be my favorite place in Boulder and certainly a source of inspiration.

Today, just patterns from the wearing of paint off plywood:

most of the truck photos are gathered in a set on my Flickr page if you are interested:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgerwing/sets/72157612821390755/

This is a quick watercolor sketch I did last week of the Chicago skyline from the north side of Belmont Harbor.

this view is always interesting early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is shining on either the left or right side of the buildings.  The distant view is possible because of the distance that the harbor entrance creates, making a layer of Lincoln Park trees run along below the layer of tall buildings.

Different cities inspire people in different creative mediums.  I think of New York as a writer’s town.  By far the most sketching I have ever done was a two-year stint working in Boston.

Maybe the picturesque plazas and squares in Boston establish those views for sketching in a way that the grid of streets in New York and Chicago doesn’t allow.

The watercolor above  is a bit unusual in that most of my looking around Chicago has been done with a camera.  The hard, straight rationality of Chicago’s grid of streets and the regularity of office windows may lend itself more to the shifting light and perspective best captured on film.

I’ve now lived in Boulder longer than I did in Chicago.  And so, Boulder’s medium of expression?  I guess I’m still working on that.

I recently drove from Louisville, Kentucky back to Louisville, Colorado, straight through the agricultural Midwest.

bridges over the Ohio River, about 1/3 of a mile across, in Louisville, Kentucky

small town movie theater, southern Illinois

grain elevator and silo, central Kansas

sign, Kansas

birds on wires, outside of Topeka

shed, somewhere in Kansas

this trip took me from where I grew up, Kentucky, to my home in Colorado and from the damp, verdant Ohio Valley, through the flat midwestern prairie to dry, dramatic Colorado.  And, from seeing my elderly and ailing father to my two little daughters.  A long trip.

This week has started off cold and rainy, a proper harbinger of Fall and the anticipated return of the beautiful silhouettes that the local cottonwood trees make against the landscape.

a photo from last winter, here in Boulder County.

by Mark Gerwing

After a very busy week of site visits and construction changes, it is difficult to see the buildings we have designed as anything other than a series of problems.  Getting to the original image and feeling of the design is the goal, but it is always interesting to see the trees, knowing the forest is yet to come.

this is a color photo, using Fuji 160 negative film, shot on a Diana F+ camera.

This ‘toy’ camera has a significant color shift in colored film negatives that seems to mimic the experience of moving into and out of shadows much better than the color-correction programs imbedded within digital cameras.

The dark shadows shift to blue and sometimes purple, fully saturated.  So while the tones of the image aren’t ‘true’ to the materials when viewed in isolation, the blue shift is more akin to the momentary blindness one experiences when moving into shadow from the sharp, metallic sunshine in Colorado.

I have taken an awful lot of photos, really starting with the ability to get free film and processing when I worked in a camera store during college back in the mid-1980s.  With few exceptions, I have set up my crude darkroom in houses and apartments in Kentucky, Boston, New Haven, Chicago and Colorado.  The ease of making images with digital photography has radically changed how everyone takes photos.  The rise in the interest in older photo methods – Diana and Holga plastic lens cameras, alternate processing, etc. – is an interesting reaction against the ‘cold’ technology of digital imaging.

Holga double exposure, brick house

My Holga does not take ‘good’ photos.  It vignettes the edges, is liable to double exposures, lens flares, and has multiple and apparently changing light leaks.  None of these things can I easily do with my digital cameras.  I’m not exactly sure why you would want to do this, but it does take making images back to the slightly magical days of darkrooms, film and chemicals where the images slowly appeared on the photo paper in the developing liquid, like treasure spied on the bottom of a stream.

Holga image, loaded with 35mm film

Holga, multi exposure portrait

photos by Mark Gerwing

as part of an ongoing interest in the repetitive nature of container trucks, their similarities and differences

photos by Mark Gerwing

landscape portraits, as seen through an abandoned shed

maybe a ‘found’ Cornell box

sentinels, like good dogs, waiting for their owner to return

Photos by Mark Gerwing

a couple of recent images from my ongoing photos of trucks

photography by Mark Gerwing