Prairies, Weird Rocks, Atomic Canons, and the Oz Museum: Another Kansas Photo Road Trip

So over the past few years, my colleagues and I have taken groups of students on short two or three-day photo road trips over into Kansas and the Flint Hills region. Usually we do this over Spring Break and it’s cold, windy, and generally unpleasant. This time though, we decided on an autumn trip, which gave us much better weather and the opportunity to shoot star trails at a very unique location.

After an uneventful drive to Emporia on Friday evening, we gathered the whole gang for diner at Montana Mike’s Steakhouse. Our next morning would take us to the Tall Grass National Prairie Preserve before sunrise…a challenge for most college students…but ours were up to the task! We were rewarded with great light and interesting cloud formations. Once the sunrise light had faded to mundane morning light, we split into three parties and hiked separate trails until our rendezvous around noon back at the farmhouse. Lunch was enjoyed at yet another gas station (this seems to be a recurring theme in our trips!) that also doubled as the Flint Hills Restaurant in Strong City.

By late afternoon on Saturday, we arrived in central Kansas and checked into our rooms in Salina. Now the excitement was about to begin! We descended en masse upon a lonely Subway shop with only one employee working and then packed our suppers into our camera bags and headed north to Rock City, near Minneapolis, Kansas. This was Wilson’s and mine second trip to this otherworldly spot of sedimentary rock “concretions”. The stars (and the Milky Way) were stunning. Other heavenly bodies also appeared: shooting stars (or are they falling stars?), man-made satellites (two), high-altitude jets, and finally a nearly full moon.

Sunday morning we all had a leisurely breakfast at IHOP and then we headed east to Junction City to climb the ridge to shoot panoramas of the Atomic Canon and Fort Riley army base. Here the students and faculty parted ways and we (the faculty) sought other adventures at the Oz Museum and abandoned 19^th century one-room structures near Wamego, including the nearby Beecher Bible & Rifle Church! The afternoon was rounded out with a nice find of 19^th century photographs (including a carte-de-visite by famous Wisconsin photographer H. H. Bennett) from an antique shop in Alma. Below are photos from our road trip…enjoy!

Dr. Tom photographing the sunrise at Tall Grass Prairie Preserve. © 2011 Terry Ownby

Sunrise on the prairie. © 2011 Terry Ownby

Star trails at Rock City, Kansas. © 2011 Terry Ownby

Star trails with gift shop at Rock City, Kansas. © 2011 Terry Ownby

Journey into the Land of Oz. © 2011 Terry Ownby

 

Panoramic overlooking Fort Riley with its M65 Atomic "Annie" Canon. © 2011 Terry Ownby

Bringing autumn into the studio

As the wheel of the year slowly turns, autumn is my favorite season during that cyclical journey. The drop in temperatures, the clearness of deep blue skies, the changing leaf colors, the rustle of falling leaves and their musty smell when kicked under foot; all these descriptors fascinate me and some times I attempt to bring these sensations into the studio.

Fortunately for me, I have a project in my advanced studio photography that challenges my students to create scenes in the studio that could be perceived as having been photographed outdoors on location. Not only do we need to consider appropriate subject matter, but also we need to give attention to the details of props, backgrounds, and most importantly, the lighting. All these elements should work in concert to recreate a believable fluid outdoor environment inside the controlled parameters of the studio.

This past week I demonstrated to my advanced studio class techniques to control the mixing of various Kelvin temperatures of light sources to help achieve the believability of an outside/inside shot. I included natural elements as part of my supporting props to help create the sense of being outside. After the class demo was completed, I remained in the studio another hour and kept fine-tuning the shot. It was a short period of involvement that allowed me to slip into the creative right-brain mode of working and to forget about daily problems, schedules, dinner, and all the mundane minutiae of life. Photography therefore, can function as a catalyst for not only our visual pleasure, but in some instances, for all our sensual encounters, whether in the studio or out in the environment.

Below is a simple still-life shot from my class demo, followed by a similar shot produced the prior year for the same assignment.

"Harvest table, Autumn 2011" © Terry Ownby. Lighting demo for my advanced studio class using mixed Kelvin temperatures.

Behind the scenes of "Harvest table, 2011." © Terry Ownby.

"Harvest table, Autumn 2010" © Terry Ownby.

19th Century Photo History

This is just a short post about a new blog I started over the summer. Nearly two decades ago I started collecting 19^th century photographs and developed a keen interest in the history of photography. In 1995, I launched a business focused on collecting, researching, and dealing in 19^th century images. I called it Antiquarian Images, Ltd (AiLimited). The collection grew rapidly to include: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, melainotypes (aka tin types), cartes-de-visite (CDV), cabinet cards, and miscellaneous albumen and carbon prints.

Unknown. "Uncle Gaylord & Aunt Amelia Warner, New York farmers". Sixth-plate daguerreotype, ca. 1845-49. Collection of Terry Ownby, PhD.

By the end of the decade I shifted the focus of my career from photographing advertisements to teaching photography and consequently AiLimited was placed on an indefinite sabbatical. Although during the intervening years I never stopped collecting interesting 19^th century images, mostly CDVs and cabinet cards from different states and territories within the U.S. and especially from the Civil War and Reconstruction Era of American history.

John M. Munn, Cairo, Illinios. "Confederate officer with cigar," ca. 1864-1866. Collection of Terry Ownby, PhD.

This summer I took AiLimited out of the mothballs and launched a new blog devoted to researching and writing about images within my collection. This fits nicely with my doctoral research, which focused on how photographic images can be used to construct or reconstruct an individual’s personal or social identity. From a visual ethnographer’s standpoint, this becomes an exciting challenge…much like detective work except it’s all in the historical past. One unique aspect of this type of research is that it allows me to use my past training as a professional genealogist when recreating the life story of either the patron posed in the photograph or that of the photographer that created the image.

This academic school year I finally get to teach the photo history course here at the University of Central Missouri. I am really excited to teach a subject for which I have a unique passion. For anyone who may be like-minded or even mildly interested in photographs from the earliest years of the photographic era, I would encourage you to join The Daguerreian Society. I originally joined in 1995 and had great experiences discussing with and learning from other Society members around the country. The Society’s annual symposium and auction is coming up soon and this October it will be in Florida’s Gulf Coast city of St. Petersburg. Hope to see you there!

Check out Antiquarian Images, Ltd. blog at http://ailimited.wordpress.com

Matthew B. Brady's Studio. Autograph of Southern attorney and judge, A.M. Hughes, ca. 1864. Collection of Terry Ownby, PhD.

Lightning in the Land of Oz!

Friday morning Wilson and I headed west out of KC in a horrible thunderstorm, but by the time we reached Topeka the skies were beginning to clear. Our road trip destination was near Salina, Kansas. There were multiple photographic venues on our agenda: the Lindsborg Swedish Midsummer Festival, Mushroom Rock State Park, and Rock City (near Minneapolis, KS). When we reached Salina, the temps were well into the high 90s with equivalent humidity levels! We first headed north to Rock City Park, which is privately owned, and were astounded by the size of these “concretion” boulders strewn about the landscape. Shot several daytime images there, then headed into Minneapolis for a fine Mexican lunch.

Rock City Park, © 2011 Terry Ownby

Next, we headed west again and made our way out to Mushroom Rock State Park…humidity levels were even more dire! Disappointment here as there were only 2 1/2 “mushrooms” in the 5-acre park. But never to give up, I noticed an abandoned prairie farmstead up on a lonely hill. With no one around, we made our way up to it and found a treasure drove of photo opportunities waiting. I concentrated my shooting inside an old barn. Great textures!

© 2011 Terry Ownby

© 2011 Terry Ownby

After dinner in Salina, we decided Rock City would be our nighttime destiny for shooting star trails amongst the concretions. We arrived at 8:30 pm, about a half-hour before sunset, in order set up our gear and make composition decisions. There were these incredibly nasty little gnats  that ignored all our bug spray! Miserable. Clouds kept building and about 10pm the lightning started up to our south. We kept watching and shooting and eventually the storm moved in close and to our east. Instead of star trail photographs, we ended up with some great mysterious looking lightening shots with the sedimentary concretions in the foreground. I kept my camera’s WB set for daylight and the blue that appears on the rocks was from my LED flashlight. The eery green cast came from the nearby mercury vapor parking lot lamps. Of course, the colors in the sky were provided by nature, herself! Enjoy!

© 2011 Terry Ownby

© 2011 Terry Ownby

© 2011 Terry Ownby

Analog and Digital Technologies

Just a short update to my last posting on the Technology Series. After input and dialogue from my friend, Wilson Hurst (who’s finishing his MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts), I revised the overall look and feel of the analog portrait. I’m much happier with this stylistic approach, especially when juxtaposed against the stark white sterility of the digital technology counterpart. Visually, the diptych characterizes Neal Postman‘s notion of Technopoly and America’s surrender of culture to technology. Thus, presented below is the first diptych of the series.

© 2011 Terry Ownby

Technology and Its Ideological Implications

Today I created a test shot for a new photographic series I’ve been wanting to produce. The photographs will address technology from an ideological perspective. Specifically, Neil Postman’s Technopoly plays a significant role in this framework. As one of the 20^th century’s more interesting cultural and media critics, Postman warned against technology’s ability to eclipse humankind through what he called the “tyranny of machines”.

This series of images depicting various forms of technology will be paired as diptychs contrasting analog and digital technologies from across various scientific disciplines. As such, I hope to investigate social and institutional ideological stances and influences that creep into our sense of personal self-identity without our awareness. In other words, we assume this aspect of life to be normal.

The image below is my first test-shot in the series and it depicts a 50-year old Paragon Engineer’s Transit, manufactured by the Keuffel & Esser Company. K&E, as it was known, was founded in 1867 in New York and last produced this particular model of transits in 1969.

© 2011 Terry Ownby

Vineyard book finally published!

Over the course of the past year, I have given my readers updates regarding the progress of my book project about a vineyard. Specifically, it’s about Baltimore Bend Vineyard, near Waverly, Missouri and the seasonal changes and activities over the course of a year. It’s been a fun journey!

Technology has certainly come along way since I started photographing three decades ago. But more importantly, this technology now allows the photographer or writer the ability to publish their books without the hassles and expense of finding a publisher willing to advance your work. On-demand publishing brings to anyone interested in publishing their work the ability to do so without printing thousands of copies. This new technology and business model allows one to print only one copy of their book, or hundreds. The author is total control, which I find very nice.

Below are the front and back covers of my second monograph: Journey Through The Vineyard: A Photographic Year At Baltimore Bend.

© 2010 Terry Ownby

Is there a difference between Micro and Macro photography?

Lately on Friday afternoons after my grading is finished (most of the time), I’ve been trying to head out on short photo safaris with my colleague Wilson Hurst and the occasional student. Last week the lighting and weather conditions were great, so we took off to the northeast from campus, about a half-hour drive, to a beautiful reservoir just outside of Concordia—Edwin A. Pape Lake.

The low angle of the sun was creating interesting light patterns throughout the well-manicured wooded park and I found some interesting fungi to do some macro work. I pulled out my trusty Nikkor 55mm f2.8 MICRO lens and proceeded to lie on the ground for the extreme close-ups.

Sometimes photographers wonder what’s the difference between lenses that have Micro or Macro stamped on their lens barrels. At the university’s photography equipment check-out gage, we have a number of Canon and Nikon lenses, with the former stating MACRO and the latter stating MICRO. Turns out, both verbiage is correct, provided of course the lens is capable of photographing an object at a 1:1 ratio. In other words: life-size.  If the lens isn’t capable of this type of rendering, then you are simply doing close-up shots and not life-size. So what’s the difference between the terms? It’s just marketing ploys between camera manufacturers.

The great thing about these types of lenses is that it allows the photographer to explore intimate, miniature worlds that commingle with our perceived “normal” world of human beings.

© 2010 Terry Ownby

© 2010 Terry Ownby

© 2010 Terry Ownby

Fading Summer and Alice’s Rabbit Hole!

Clear skies and a warm afternoon were a perfect combination for getting off campus Friday and photographing in the nearby state park of Knob Noster. So my colleague and friend, Wilson Hurst, along with one of our dedicated UCM Photo students, Phil Williams (who helped me extensively on my vineyard book project), headed off to visually explore the temporal moments of the waning days of summer. This semester is slipping by incredibly fast, as in just a few days we’ll experience the autumnal equinox, the day my Celtic pagan ancestors celebrated the turning of the seasonal wheel back in east central England and Wales.

Our first encounter was a lovely grove of pine, possibly red pine. As we photographed in this beautiful setting, the drone of vintage propeller-driven fighter planes loomed overhead, as the flight of aircraft practiced aerial maneuvers for an upcoming air show at the nearby Air Force base. Immediately the combination of the vintage aural message from above, the heat and scent of the pine grove below, transported me mentally into the Spanish Civil War scene of Hemingway’s 1940 novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls; one of my favorite reads while attending grad school at Webster University in Saint Louis.

Next, our adventures took the three of us into the deciduous forest and peninsula extending out towards the lake. Here I encountered beautiful mushrooms and fungi on the forest floor hidden in its decomposing organic detritus. Fortunately, due to my thinking ahead, I switched lenses to my Nikkor 55mm Micro 2.8, for some extreme close-up portraits. This fantastic lens allowed me to focus on the fungi within less than 10” (0.25m). As I lay there on the moss and leaves, I expected to see at any moment little gnomes or faeries sitting on the brightly colored woodland thrones. Instead, suddenly my thoughts turned to Jefferson Airplane’s classic hit, White Rabbit with visualizations of Alice going down the rabbit hole into a surreal experience of the psychedelic Other World. This led me to experiment with temporal shifts in my image making by slowing down the shutter speed to around two seconds at f32 and moving the camera in varying directions and speed.

At one point the three of us rendezvoused next to the lake and ended up in a heady discussion on Sartre’s existentialism and Barthes’ semiological notions of myth and orders of signification. Had any of the rural locals overheard our philosophical discussions, they surely would have thought us all to be a bunch of crazy idiots babbling non-sense! C’est la vie,  such is life for the never ending visual academic!

Pine Toll, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Throne One, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Throne Two, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Alice’s Rabbit Vortex, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Falling Forrest I, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Falling Forest II, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Leaves Falling, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Summer Ice, © 2010, Terry Ownby

Mammy’s Head’n to Texas!

Images from my Incongruity series keep reaping acclaim and exhibitions! A shot from last summer’s road trip to New Orleans garnered an exhibit venue down in Johnson City, Texas. The photograph, Mammy’s Cupboard was shot down in Natchez, MS, and will go on display later this month at the A. Smith Gallery. The national competition, called “Domicile”, was a juried show. I also found out the image will be used on their promo cards, which are to hit the postal mail soon.

© 2009 Terry Ownby