Interlude: A Question of Balance

Featured Photo: “Still Life – Negative|Positive Image”  San Antonio, Texas—1978

Well, that didn’t turn out quite like I had expected. I’ve just completed my epic recounting of the trip my sister and I took to California’s Yosemite National Park in October 2023. I wrote a total of 30 posts covering just four days in and around the park, plus two travel days. I initially thought there might be four or five posts—one for each day—or possibly eight, since we saw so many sights while there. I never imagined I would crank out 30 posts! The first post of the series was published on November 26, 2023…

…and the final post was two weeks ago, June 16, 2024. I took more than six months to tell the tale of six days!

Zooming out to the bigger picture, July 2, 2024 will mark the one-year anniversary of the very first post in my blogging journey. Wahoo! A period of 52 weeks with 45 blog posts in all. (Yes, I missed a couple of weeks.)

And what do I have to show for my effort? Well, the 30-part Yosemite series, along with a 13-part Introductory series, and two Interludes (including this one). If I continue writing at that clip, I’ll never have enough time to share all the pictures and stories that I would like to.

I have certainly kept busy with the blog, spending lots of time writing, re-writing, editing, and finalizing the posts. I’ve sorted through a few thousand of my photos to give color and context to the stories. I have scoured the internet for information when I didn’t know as much about a subject as I should. I have searched for images to supplement the posts when I thought a photo was missing, which might help visualize the writing. Looking back on this past year, it seems I’ve worked on my blog almost to the exclusion of everything else. And this, even though there are lots of other activities I want—and need—to pursue.

And what has all this meant for you? First and foremost, I realize I have not been a good steward of my original blog concept: a picture and a thousand words. How about some statistics? Each post included a Featured Photo, along with many more pictures to enhance the overall narrative. So far, the total number of pictures per post has ranged from 7 to 27, with an average of 15.

As to the number of words, I have played pretty loose with my original target of 1,000. (In my own defense, it’s hard to limit a story based on an arbitrary number of words. And of course, I’ve made liberal use of the phrase “To be continued…”, stringing together posts into longer narratives. And even with these continuations, I feel the individual portions of the story need to play out to a logical stopping point.) But the number of words? The range is from a low of 939 to a high of 2,890. I was under one-thousand words just twice; I was over two-thousand words five times. The average number of words per post was 1,550—that’s 50% over my goal.

To my faithful readers (and the occasional visitor), I want to thank you for taking the time to follow my writing so far. But it seems clear that I need to make some changes—both for you and for me. So, I’m going to take another break from blogging—maybe a few weeks, possibly a few months. I want to re-imagine how I’m doing this blogging thing. I’d like to better focus on the photos I consider my best. I think I should post shorter episodes from a wider range of my journeys, rather than trying to make each trip a continuous and comprehensive story. I will try to cover more territory, both figuratively and literally. And I need to consider how I’m spending my time overall. It has become a question of balance.

And how will I try to balance my time during this interlude? I am continuing to travel in 2024; I’ve already been to my younger son’s college graduation and helped him move to Chicago. I want to visit my older son in Los Angeles. I have reunited with friends from college (now living in Pennsylvania) and friends from my teaching days (now living in Georgia and Alabama). I drove with my wife to Ohio to see the total eclipse of the sun. I’ve traveled with friends to Belgium and with family to Italy. And I have more trips planned to Tennessee, North Carolina, Maine, and back to Belgium. These trips are adding pictures to my ever-expanding photo library; I have taken another 7,000 pictures since I began this blog a year ago! As you can imagine, I need to continue sorting through the images to find those that are best suited for blog posts.

I want to continue digitizing and cataloging my records and compact discs, and to keep listening to the wide range of music in my collection. I really should put up hooks to store the kayaks my wife and I recently bought for fun and recreation. And I want to take the kayaks down and actually get out on the water more often, now the weather is warmer. I want to keep taking walks in our local parks, for the exercise and the beautiful scenery. And I hope to write a few more scientific articles about Compendial Affairs, to continue the professional legacy from my career in the pharmaceutical industry.

So, that’s what I wanted to let you all know. About the time I will be taking off. Another interlude. And as for the sub-title of this post—A Question of Balance—that came from the 1970 album by the Moody Blues, which is in my collection. I was recently reminded of the album title during a conversation about classic rock music with my son and his roommate.

But writing this post, I contemplated which photograph might be appropriate to the title: balance. A photo about balance. And then it came to me, today’s Featured Photo. My mind cast back to my college days at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where I took a photography class my junior year. During class one day, we had been given an assignment to create and photograph a still life image.

That night, in my dorm room, I arranged the still life, using a collection of items that were readily at hand: an empty beer mug; a small glass partially filled with milky water; a wine glass of deep red cabernet with a silver ribbon knotted just below the bowl; and a bright red apple with a dried-out, greenish-brown leaf still clinging to the stem. In a bathroom shared with three suitemates, on an off-white counter with a narrow shelf above, I positioned the objects at varying distances to bring depth-of-field into my composition. I placed pieces of black and gray cardboard cut into square and rectangular shapes behind the farther objects, which covered the mirror above the shelf. Working with my wonderful Sears 35-mm SLR camera, loaded with black-and-white film—because that was what the class taught—I took the photo, using only a small lamp off to the side to provide the ambient light. I felt this would probably turn out to be my best effort for the project.

Still, I rearranged the components of the still life and snapped a few more shots, adding a bedsheet and bath towel, with the mirror now exposed, and another mirror positioned to reflect the apple.

And then, throwing more fruit into the mix, I flipped the small, second mirror to its concave side—to enlarge the objects.

It was the next afternoon, with the pungent smell of chemicals saturating the darkroom, that I developed the film and after it dried, I secured the strip of negatives in the carrier tray of the photo enlarger. I focused the image onto the projection plane, turned off the darkroom lights, placed a sheet of photo paper in the frame, and switched on the enlarger’s light for a few seconds to expose a print of my still life—a positive image.

As I rocked the developing tray with its chemicals gently back and forth, watching the image slowly appear on the photographic paper, I was pleased by the range of black and white and gray in my creation. I finished the process using wooden tongs to transfer the photo paper to the stop bath and the fix bath, then hung the paper up to dry. Then I remembered something we had just learned in class about making a negative image—I no longer recall how it was done—but I thought that would make for an interesting contrast, so that’s exactly what I did.

Back in my dorm room, with the positive and negative images in hand, I mounted the separate photos on thick matboard of black and white, then taped them together, emphasizing and contrasting the photograph’s black and white images, the dark and light, the yin and yang, the balance. Although the picture is nearly 50 years old and has lain unseen in a box for most of that time, it remains one of my early photographs that I can still call to mind.

When I found that still life photo in the box I had saved, I began flipping through other mounted pictures taken for the same class. I came across a few memorable photos, including the one below, intentionally confusing and deceptively disorienting.

I was standing with my camera on a hill beside a low stone wall, which ran along the highway near my college dormitory. I was looking toward a forest of trees in the nearby park and observed the late-afternoon sun casting a shadow from the wall that fell perfectly parallel to the hillside. I started to take a photograph of the unusual appearance of the light and shadow, then reconsidered. I rotated my camera about 45° and pressed the shutter to capture the image above.

But given my description, you can perceive what I initially saw by rotating the image back 45°, re-establishing the orientation—the natural balance—from that moment: the trees are standing tall and upright; the dark band of shadow falls from the wall on the right at a 45° angle, parallel to the sharp slope of the hill; the reflection of tree-trunks are just visible in a small, level pond near the lower left corner of the image.

There were other photos that brought back memories. One Saturday, I walked to the wonderful McNay Art Museum near Trinity’s campus. Their collection is housed in the original McNay home—a 24-room Spanish Colonial Revival-style mansion, situated on more than 20 landscaped acres, all donated by the museum’s founder.

The building itself is beautifully designed, with traditional décor influenced by Spanish and Mexican architecture.

The impressive collection today consists of over 20,000 objects, focused primarily on 19th- and 20th-century European and American art by Picasso, Gaugin, Cassatt, and Hopper, among others. But that weekend in 1978, the museum was hosting a craft fair. There were tents and tables set out with works for sale by local artists: painters, photographers, wood- and metal-workers, and sculptors. I found one sculptor shaping clay into the small head of a mustachioed cowboy, with a bandana tied around his neck and a cigar clenched tightly between his teeth. I asked if I could take a picture, focusing on his hands at work, then printed the photo in sepia and mounted it on espresso matboard to replicate the red-brown color of the wet clay.

Live, local music and dancing were also on offer. I came across a group of young girls, all decked-out in beautiful matching dresses with rainbow stripes—ribbons and flowers in their hair—getting ready to perform a traditional Mexican dance. They posed for me as they waited to take the stage: one girl with castanets in hand and a painting of a flamenco dancer in the near background, perhaps revealing her own dream…

…and another who just stared at me with wide eyes expressing all the innocence, sincerity, and nonchalance of youth.

The images I captured outside at the craft fair, along with other photos taken inside of the museum’s décor and art works have also stayed with me all these years. And under the box of photos, I discovered an old sketchbook that originally contained 100 sheets of paper.

Inside, I had saved about 20 paintings—I’m not sure what kind of paint—that I had done for an assignment in a Modern Art History class, also during my Trinity years. I make no claim to being an artist, so the 20 I saved were probably the only ones worth keeping. Still, my collected sketchpad received a grade of “good” from the professor. Anyway, a few of these “modern artworks” also seemed to display a degree of balance, whether a black-and-white construction within a painted frame…

…or angled shapes of diminishing sizes painted in primary colors—each tinged with black—converging on an irregular black box…

…or the confluence of red and yellow—never reaching orange—stretched corner-to-corner, with a black border attempting to constrain the edges.

All a question of balance. And now, it’s time for my interlude. If you take a moment to subscribe to my blog, you’ll get an email notification when I eventually publish my next post. And when you see what comes next, hopefully you’ll notice changes that offer a broader range of pictures and stories. Until then, happy summer and cheers!