My Best Photograph: Elitch Gardens, Denver

Elitch Gardens, Denver.  If you click on it, it will embiggen.

Pretty certain this is the best picture I've ever taken. It's of Elitch Gardens in Denver taken during a great two weeks of skiing and mooning around in 09. I know very little about the nitty gritty of composition, even less about the technical aspects of taking photos, but this one just works.  It's amazing to me how many times I can get it wrong before I succeed in getting a picture that I think is ok. My hit rate is about 1 in 30, maybe slightly higher with portraits.  I still make the same stupid mistakes over and over, the main one being that I take too many random shots that have no subject.  But when you get a photo that really clicks, it's a great feeling.

Denver is a strange town. I liked it a lot.  Like many American cities it feels slightly empty when you walk around.  As an Ameriphile (Yankophile?) I love spending time in The States but the big cities that I have visited, outside of New York and LA, have all had this feeling.  It's as if there is too much space and not enough people to fill it.  Even Chicago, which is an amazing place, feels a bit like it's closed for business after 7pm.  There's nothing wrong with this, but my fantasy of American inner city life was based on the New York of the early 80's, I expected every American city to have side-walks thronging and with pedestrians 24/7, lines of yellow cabs and people shouting "I'm walking here!!".  I'm used to people living in cramped houses on top of each other in a country with no space, it's no wonder a city with the option to stretch out luxuriously on to the plain seems a bit more diffuse.  Then again, if you went to Coventry on a Tuesday night, you'd be hard pushed to find anyone either.

I imagine that this idea is also based on my British sense of where the action should be in a city. Traditionally,  In the UK, the place to do most things is the city centre.  You go "into town" at the weekend, that's where all the good stuff happens.  In the cities I've visited in the states this tends to be less the case.  I imagine that "Main Street" has slowly lost it's influence to the ubiquitous out of town malls that dominate the outskirts of many cities, it's a shitty process that drains the life and heart out of a place, of course this is slowly happening in the UK as well.

Elitch Gardens was closed when I visited Denver.  I walked with my camera to a massive outdoor clothing store (REI), just outside of the central business district.  I walked round for an hour and came out with an 8 Dollar discounted baseball cap.  The cashier sarcastically said, "enjoy your hat" as I was leaving.  I felt cheap.  I saw this picture as I was walking back.  I only took 3 shots but, fortunately, this one hit the nail on the head.

Correfoc flares in Mallorca

Photographs with nowhere to go

I'm going to start putting photographs up on this blog.  Because I don't much like Flickr, and I don't post enough words.  I don't know whether this is the best format, so I may repost them on a dedicated blog in the future, who knows?  Here's the first three. From a huge amount I took on a recent trip to Greece.  Cha-ching!!!

Our perspective on the past as we get older

Some people say that time appears to move faster as we get older because of the percentage of our life that we have lived. If you are a one year old, the  amount of time till your next birthday is the length of time you have already been alive, literally a lifetime in your perception.  If you are ninety nine the distance to your next birthday is just 1% of the time you have spent on Earth. This seems a feasible explanation to me.

Another thing, perhaps related to this, that I have noticed as I get older is the changes in my perception of the past.  When I first became aware of trends in fashion and music in the 1980's the fashions of just 4 years previously seemed incredibly, immeasurably outdated.  And the faces that I saw beaming at me from 50's and 60's news reels and ancient photographs and TV shows seemed to have not one thing in common with my existence. They were an alien race of people from a different world. I could not imagine they were like me, with the same feelings.  The same wants and needs. I looked at their odd clothes and the strange way they held themselves for photographs. I listened to the odd way they talked to each other on camera and i saw nothing that was like me or those I knew.  We had nothing in common.  The same went for "old" people.

But now, with half a lifetime's perspective on change, and just how similar things can be over time, I feel  an unexpected empathy with images of past generations.  Images of the 60's and 50's now have different connotations.  The clothes are unimportant, the music is unimportant, the style of deportment or language is unimportant. I see more similarities than differences.  The past contracts and rushes to meet me and 40 years seems like no time at all to be alive.

Are changes in fashion and music less great these days? Are trends gently sliding into each other more subtly than before or am i just too old now to perceive how different things are from five years ago? Are the trends and fashions of 2010 THAT different from 15 years ago? How can I really know?

Look at the two men in this image from the Cheers intro sequence. How different are they from the usual idea of the stiff faced Edwardian photography subject? They seem as real and as close to me now as anyone from 2010. Arrogantly posing, showing off for the camera. Where are these two ghosts now?