The Participation Generation

The old-photos blog Shorpy has had a few pictures up lately showing everyday folks making music back in the 1940s. The one at left shows a pick-up band at a Florida trailer park. An earlier entry shows "boys in the bunkhouse" gathered around a stove and a guitar.

These resonated for me with parts of an interview with Levon Helm I heard this morning on my commute. It was a rebroadcast of the December 11 edition of Fresh Air. Terry Gross was working through Helm's history and talking about his new album, Dirt Farmer, reflects the influences of his early life.

Levon Helm, once the drummer and a singer with The Band and a solo artist of some repute, has established a new tradition of regular in-studio house parties featuring a variety of great musicians at his place up in Woodstock. They started as a kind of rent-party a few years back when he was working through bankruptcy and recovering from throat cancer. They echo a style of house-party that was a part of his Arkansas childhood back in the 1940s and 50s.

Helm, musing on those sorts of parties and the fact that his father used to perform at some of them, used the phrase "participation generation" to refer back to a time when anyone might pick up a guitar, a fiddle, a washtub, or a beat-box and join in a pick-up band.

That's part of what I see in these photos.

Update: Here is an even better view of the jam session shown above.

Fall's Folliage Continues to Please

I Guess Everything IS Bigger in Texas

The old-photo blog Shorpy has a post up this morning showing a 1914 photograph of a municipal Bat Roost in San Antonio, Texas. It took me a few moments to notice the man standing on one of the cross-timbers of the structure and to realize just how large the thing is. We don't see timbers that large much anymore. Certainly not in utility construction. Have a look also at the close-up of the posted explanation and anti bat-slaughter ordinance.

Update: According to Dave, over at Shorpy, the supports that I took for timbers are in fact poured concrete. I'm disappointed to have been wrong, but still impressed at the size of the Bat Roost.

It Has Been a Colorful Fall

With the return of some sunshine today, I made an effort to capture a photo of one of those bright red or yellow trees that we've been seeing the last week or so.

Somewhere, there's a tree with leaves that have turned so deeply they shine like rubies. It stands alone in a field or someone's yard with darker-hued and taller trees ranged behind. The sun hits it square causing the leaves to flash crimson against a deep green background.

I know it is out there, I just need to find it.

On my way to Dover this morning I was ahead of schedule. I took the opportunity to turn right at Milford Neck and head towards Thompsonville and South Bowers. I found a few spots that hinted at what I was looking for. But not quite.

I took a walking lunch in Dover. When clouds were out, the wind was cold and raw. The sun came out, though, and made a brisk walk comfortable. I found a few street trees that came close.

The yellow tree at one end of the old Green (right) might also be a candidate.

I didn't find the exact tree I wanted, but had a good photo-walk. I met a squirrel who suspected me of planning to steal his winter stash of nuts. I finally got a shot of the cross atop Wesley United Methodist Church; I've been looking for the right angle for some time. And I caught a nice image of the flag that flies at the memorial at the junction of Kings Highway and State street, just off of Loockerman Street.

I'm still looking for the shot that means "Fall, 2007" to me.

A Walk on Rehoboth Beach

I had a chance to spend an hour on Rehoboth Beach this morning. I took a walk along the beach the length of the boardwalk. The beach wasn't as deserted as it will be later in the winter, but it was clear enough of folks to make it attractive to me.

The beach was broad and flat, with a fair amount of pebbles exposed. Both, I think, the result of the recent passage of the remnants of hurricane Noel. There was a smallish surf, and one surfer.

In DC

I'm in Washington, DC, for few days for a conference of the Census State Data Center Network. We're meeting at the Census Bureau's new headquarters in Suitland, but staying at a hotel in northern Virginia, just across Key Bridge (left) from the District.

We took buses from the hotel to Suitland this morning. We were dropped at the main entrance where we all had to make our slow way through security. That took a while and the conference started late. Ultimately, we managed to make up the time and by lunch we were back on schedule.

In the afternoon we had break-out sessions. I was in a conference room trying to understand the higher (for me) math needed to make sense of the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) when the fire alarm went off and we had to join hundreds of Census workers in an orderly evacuation and a less orderly milling-around outside for about half an hour.

I don't think it was a drill, but I never heard what caused the alarm. I wouldn't be surprised if it was my brain short-circuiting when I tried to understand PUMS data.

We got back to the hotel around six this evening. I had time to wander across Key Bridge and take a short photo-walk along the Canal.


Tomorrow, we'll be back out in Suitland. I'll try to keep my brains from shorting-out again.

Luckily, There are Sunsets

Life can be hard. Work doesn't always go well. School can be a challenge.

There are tooth-aches. And head-aches.

Some days are diamonds and some days bring the sort of almost geologic pressure that scientists tell us creates diamonds.

We're not always going to be happy.

On the other hand, if you keep your eyes open, there's often something very pretty to see.

A Walk At Cape Henlopen

The staff at Cape Henlopen State Park re-opened the Point at the Cape this morning. I knew I had to head out for a wander when it re-opened, so I was rolling through the fee booth just at 8:00 a.m.

Christina was with me; she's been my frequent beach-combing partner. Christina likes to gather shells and pebbles and I like to gather photographs.

The Point of Cape Henlopen juts out from Delaware into the Delaware Bay and towards distant Cape May, in New Jersey. The Park staff closes the Point each summer to allow the rare Piping Plover a peaceful place to mate and nest and fledge out a new generation. Once the birds move on, the beach is re-opened to wanderers and to "mobile surf fishermen" who drive out on the beach in their trucks and vans to fish from their tailgates.

We weren't able to make the full trip around the point. A part of the Bay side of the point remains closed for a few remaining nesting pairs and to allow a rare plant a chance to grow a bit more. That, in effect, doubled our walk.

I found myself adding pictures to my "Distant Ships" collection. There were two ships coming in towards the Bay from the south. And another headed outbound past the lighthouse. The Pilot Boat was headed out to meet them, making its way through rough seas.


There were also several headboats (group-charter fishing boats for which anglers pay "by the head") and two sailings of the Cape May/Lewes Ferry.

The beach was somewhat empty when we started out. There were just a few truck-born anglers on the beach and a handful of other beach-combers. Things got more crowded by the time we returned to the Point parking lot, after two hours walking.

We found seashells and plenty of pebbles. Some of the shells were worth collecting, including a nice partial conch. We found driftwood and beach grass and some wildlife (both alive and dead).

Christina spotted a tiny, nearly translucent Ghost Crab skittering away from us in a panic. I took his picture when he paused; you can see his little stalk-eye staring up at me.

It was a nice walk. I got a good photo collection out of it. With the rest of the Point due to reopen on October 1, I plan to head out again a few times this fall.

Random Images, and Music

Here's a neat art project: a randomized music video that draws imagery from the whole of flickr.

The fellow who created ASTRONAUT -- Felix Jung -- has taken a music track by a friend and used keywords based on the lyrics to fetch semi-random images from flickr, based on tags given to those images. He has built a web-movie, using Flash, that incorporates those images into a simple music video of the song.

Flickr users can add tags to their images as a way to organize them or categorize them. For example, I have quite a few photos tagged with "Vermont." There are even more tagged "Vermont" by other users. Using tags, I can quickly see all of my Vermont photos or look at photos of Vermont from other users.

Felix Jung has taken this a step further, as he explains in his post about this project:

Each time the Flash file is loaded, new images are randomly pulled from Flickr. I've hard-coded 53 keywords at set points in the song, and when the page is first loaded... calls are made out to Flickr to retrieve these keywords. With each call, I vary the parameters a little bit.

The song includes either the word or the concept "distant" towards its end. Jung has taken that as a keyword and called flickr photos tagged with "distant." There are 4,664 photos so-tagged as I write this morning. The parameters Jung refers to are changing ways to randomly sort and select from the found images. That way, different images are chosen each time the movie is played. This morning, my playing of it turned up this image.

It's a simple thing, but makes nice use of the many images that flickr users are adding to the public face of flickr each day.

We sometimes forget about the potential for the web to be a global, interactive, collaborative marketplace of ideas. We add content -- through blogging or posting photos, sound or video -- partly to satisfy our egos and be "published." But we also should remember that we are adding small bits to something larger that grows in ways we cannot forsee.

This is what is at the heart of the philosophy of the Creative Commons.

At least part of our pleasure in this Internet thing should be to see to what unexpected use other folks put our creations.

A Flower

The sun came out this afternoon.

Half a Century Later...

The first digital image was created 50 years ago this spring at the National Bureau of Standards (now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST). It was a very small scanned photo of researcher Russell Kirsch's 3-month-old son Walden.

That was the first step in a journey that has led to on-line photo-sharing sites like flickr and to high-resolution aerial photography and to citizen journalism and an on-line explosion in the arts.

Of course, it also led to pervasive digital pornography and photo-shopped political frame-jobs.

But you take the good with the bad.

Views From an Observation Tower

Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.

Yesterday I climbed the Observation Tower at Fort Miles in Cape Henlopen State Park and took a 360-degree set of views from the top.

The tower is one of a network that stood sentry along Delaware's Atlantic coastline during World War II. They were used to watch for enemy warships and direct coastal defense battery fire should an enemy appear. The system was never called into action, though I believe at least one German U-Boat surrendered at Lewes at the end of the war.

This is the only tower that is still open to the public.

I started facing more or less west and took a photo through an opening in the chain-link fencing that keeps people from going over the edge of the tower. I took a wide side-step to my right and took another. Took another step and another picture. And so on, around the tower.

Sometimes I Like to Join the Crowd

I joined in a worldwide "all take a photo at the same time" event today.

The project, ShutterClock, was the brainchild of Ronan Murphy, who is finishing his college career (I think somewhere in the UK).

That's Ronan on the left there, in his entry into his own project, which he describes fairly simply:

We want people to come together as a simple community divided only by distance to globally capture their world at an organised time. In return we will see galleries of images from all over the world, taken at the same moment but from their point of view.

I learned about this idea from the flickr blog this morning. It sounded like fun. All I really had to do was keep my camera by me at the end of the afternoon and keep an eye on the clock. The project was set for people to take their photos at 8:00 p.m. GMT (4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).

As it turned out, my photo was of a prosaic "afternoon in the office" sort of moment.

That's my keyboard and screen, with the agenda for a meeting I'm hosting on Monday morning on the left.

I uploaded my photo to the ShutterClock group at flickr. Some folks sent pictures directly to the ShutterClock site, where there are a selection of the photos. There was even a phone number to facilitate submission directly from camera phones.

Sometimes it's fun to be a small part of something larger.

Some Things Never Change

Please forgive me for returning one more time to the Lewis Wickes Hine collection of early 20th-century photography, as posted on the photo-blog Shorpy.

I found this picture of girl factory workers in Cleveland in 1910 utterly charming; these could very easily be fourth-grade students at any school in Delaware today.

Little girls will always be little girls.

Home Again...

We pulled back into our humble non-Caribbean home at about 2:00 a.m. today (4/14). We've been unpacking, doing laundry, and posting vacation photos. I'll work on some detailed vacation reporting starting tomorrow.

Whose Great-Grandads Are These?

I've been enjoying a photoblog called Shorpy which finds and posts photos from as close to the start of the 20th Century as it can get.

Today, the site featured as series of portraits by Lewis Wickes Hine of young boys at work in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1910. They were part of Hine's work for the National Child Labor Committee.

There are a 15-year-old newsboy found on Tatnall Street, a 12-year-old found at 4th & Pine Streets, a 14-year-old Western Union Telegraph messenger found on Linden Street, a 10-year-old newsboy found on West 5th street, and an 11-year-old peanut vendor.

Take time to read the descriptions, which appear to be taken from Hine's notes. They are fascinating. They include details such as "Don’t smoke but visits saloons."

It seems unlikely that I've ever met any of these boys' descendants, but I can't help but think that some of these faces look familiar.

An Apparition

For some, its the Virgin Mary appearing in French Toast. For me, it's the state of Delaware appearing in a puddle. I'll take what I can get.

A Busy Day Off

I took the day off from work today. Colleen had a normal school day, but Christina was off from school for a teacher in-service day. Karen is out of state at a Music Therapy Conference.

I spent the day just as I wish I could spend most days. I saw my daughter off to a fun day at a friend's house. I did some back-road exploring on a sunny day. And I took a brisk hike in the pine woods at Cape Henlopen State Park.

Christina's friend Morgan had invited a small core of fifth-grade girls over for a day of crafts and cake and fun at her home north of Milton. So, after getting Colleen off to high school, and a quiet morning of the news and the laundry, I ran Christina up to Morgan's house.

I knew she was in for a fine day when Morgan and her young sister Emma came bouncing out their front door as we pulled into the drive. They were, quite literally, jumping for joy.

So, I headed west, intending to see where roads I've never driven before might take me.

I wandered up through the village of Lincoln and was swinging south again when I saw smoke in the west. I let the smaller roads lead me west and north again until I found a small brush fire being brought under control.

Now the challenge was to get back to Lewes, following as few familiar roads as possible. I took good advantage of Old State Road, a two-lane that was replaced by DuPont Highway, and other small back roads. My goal, as always, to see new things and perhaps to photograph them.

I stopped for a light lunch in Milton and headed for Cape Henlopen State Park.

I have been meaning to complete a wander I took in the back part of the Park two weeks ago. I had gone out from the campgrounds, along an old military road, toward the Salt Marsh Spur. This is a thin neck of upland that extends out into the Salt Marsh between Lewes and the Cape. I was slowed by very wet conditions, and had to turn back without following the whole of the spur trail.

This time, I went in via Herring Point and made the full three-mile round trip out the spur and back in just over an hour.

The fellow at the Nature Center told me that there is said to be an Eagle building a nest out the spur. I kept my eyes on the tops of the trees and snags, but I didn't see it. I wasn't particularly quiet moving along the trail. I didn't have the time, or the skill, to be stealthy.

After returning to the car, parked by the old battery at Herring Point, I headed back out to Morgan's house to pick up Christina.

We came home tired, but satisfied with our day.

Flag

This photo, and its partner, remind me that there are pictures to be taken at almost any time. Even when I think there's nothing to be seen.

I took these Monday evening, while in Annapolis for the Mid-Year Meeting of the National States Geographic Information Council. We'd just been dropped off outside Phillips Seafood House, in the center of town, for our "offsite social."

It was a slightly overcast, cool, and (I thought) unpromising evening. But there was still daylight (saved from somewhen) and I was in the harbor area of one of Maryland's oldest towns. It seemed worth a wander around, at least.

I found a few good pictures, and it was nice to stretch my legs after two days of intensive meetings. But I didn't think there was anything special until I was just about to enter the restaurant.

I turned back for one last look and realized that the sun was just behind an American Flag from where I stood. So I waited and timed the wind and its unfurling of the flag.

The jet in flight was a lucky accident.

Wind in Trees

I took a walk on Sunday. Back in Cape Henlopen State Park. It was windy and cold, so I went inland a bit, on the trails through the back dunes and marsh areas.

The wind was blocked by the trees. It was blowing strong in their tops. The tallest trees were swaying and knocking against each other like huge claves.