Most of the negative strips in these two contact sheets have gone astray and the search is on for the Lost Janis Joplin Images.
A transparency scanner and Photoshop CS5.1 make it possible to rescue images that just couldn’t be printed well in a darkroom. For me, at least. I was never patient enough to get really good at printmaking.
A close inspection of the film tells me I was shooting bulk-loaded Tri-X that night.
I shot this photo when Janis Joplin and Big Brother & the Holding Co. played Indiana Beach, north of Monticello, Ind., on Aug. 14, 1968.
According to the contact sheet, I shot nearly 50 black & white images, but I can only lay my hands on about a dozen. I suspect I still have them, somewhere in a shoebox full of negs. I obviously need to track them down and make some more scans.
Packing for rallies and camping adventures just got a helluva lot easier with the arrival yesterday afternoon of my Big Agnes Q-Core air mattress.
Only 10” long, it takes up an insignificant amount of space compared with the 25” wide Thermarest. That frees up more cubic inches in the waterproof bag that holds my tent, sleeping bag and air mattress, lashed to the luggage rack of my bike – space that could let me carry an extra jacket or whatever else makes sense at the time.
And a special thanks to whichever member of the Indianapolis BMW Club who mentioned that REI was having a big sale that ends on the 31st. The sale discount saved me $28.06.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already signed the U.S. Small Arms Treaty that abrogates our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
The only thing that stands between us and the U.N. confiscating all of our firearms is the fact that treaties have to be ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Watch this chilling video and, if you want to do something about it, contact your Senators and let them know we want no part of the treaty and the U.N.
I call this “Mike’s Barber Shop” because that’s what it says on the front window.
Mike’s shop was on the north side of Broad Ripple Avenue between College Avenue and Guilford Avenue on the northside of Indianapolis.
I shot this sometime in the 1970s. The only other thing I know about the photo is that – according to the clock in the mirror – it was about 5:23 p.m. I think it was winter, and therefore dark outside, hence the absence of reflections in the glass.
I was in charge of Indiana State Fair coverage for The Indianapolis News from 1975 through 1985.
One of our staff photographers – might have been Tim Halcomb or maybe Jim Young – got this shot of me and colleague David Rohn on the Midway sometime around 1975 or 1976.
Judging from the shadows, it was late afternoon, since we’re walking west.
Our beautiful, amazing, talented (add superlatives here) granddaughter Lisa is 8 years old today.
We hope to host her and as many of her parents as possible here in July.
Until then, Happy Birthday, Lisa!
Four hippie wannabes at an early Be-In at Dunn Meadow on the Indiana University Bloomington Campus.
It was the spring of 1967 and interesting things were in the air. I shot the photo with my Minolta Hi-Matic 7 – my first 35mm camera. The ensemble includes (from left) my longtime Delphi friend Ed Cook, Judy Deeds, Jim White, and a guy whose name I don’t recall.
Whitey was the only one that I know for sure went full-bore into the hippie scene. He and another friend went to San Francisco for the 1967 Summer of Love and never really came back. A math major who graduated from Indiana State University with a 4.0 GPA, Whitey threw it all away for a bohemian lifestyle. The last time I heard of him, he was homeless, living on the beach in Fort Myers, Fla.
Ed, a Wabash College grad and a Sigma Chi, had a career as a pilot in the Air Force and flew 747s for UPS before retiring for good to southern Indiana.
Judy went to California, but I never heard what became of her.
I got married, raised two sons and had a career in newspapers.
Here’s a telephoto shot of North Meridian Street in Indianapolis from the steps of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in September, 1968.
That’s the old Federal Building on the right. On the left is the Meridian Garage and the Indiana Bell Building. The west side of the street looks nothing like this now.
You can click on the picture to see it larger.
Here’s my ATO fraternity brother Bill Broadstreet pretending to have a psychedelic experience in 1967.
I shot a color slide of a piece of fabric a friend had, then projected it on whoever was handy. This night, Bill Broadstreet was handy. He went on to be a music teacher in the Indianapolis Public Schools system. He died in the 1990s.
You may recall that I blogged on March 29 about a fatally flawed effort by the Gannett Benefits Center to update retiree insurance beneficiary information. They sent a flyer with a form that omitted any place for the retiree’s name. Anyone who completed one ended up sending in the name of their beneficiary with no way to know whose beneficiary it is. Smart, huh?Recently, you were solicited to provide Gannett with updated beneficiary information. If' you’ve already responded to that letter we sent in March, please take a moment to call the Gannett Benefits Center at xxx-xxx-xxxx to confirm we have your beneficiary information.“Confirm?” No, that’s just a way to get the info from the dopes who didn’t realize the first form wasn’t worth filling out. “Second chance” my ass. This is the first real chance. Why not just say you fucked up and get on with it, rather than try to lie to us?
This letter serves as your second chance to provide us your updated beneficiary information if you haven’t previously completed this task. Please fill out the simple tear-off form below and return it in the enclosed envelope on or before June 8, 2012.
I’ve been struggling for the last few weeks to get my computer back to the level of functionality that I had before the hard drive crash on April 30. Today’s challenge is my Nikon Coolscan IV transparency scanner.
Nikon orphaned it when Windows 7 came out, but I had a software fix that had it working before the crash. I tried to replicate the fix and, so far, haven’t been successful.
The only way I can make it work is to use the XP virtual machine mode in Windows 7 Premium. Microsoft recognized that people had a lot of software that wouldn’t make the jump to Win7 when they upgraded from XP, so they created a feature replicating an XP operating system within Win7. But it’s absurdly laborious to make a scan and move it from the virtual machine to Photoshop CS5 on the regular machine.
Here are a couple of scans of long lost images of my son Sean when he was just starting on his musical career. The top photo is Sean performing on the auditorium stage at Orchard Country Day School in Indianapolis where he went from second through eighth grades.
And here he is with his first electric guitar – an Ibanez copy of a Gibson Les Paul. I always loved the look of that guitar and Sean quickly learned to do great things with it.
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Later: I emailed these two photos to Sean and got this email in return:
I see the ESP is in full effect.
Yesterday afternoon, I was telling Ruth about South Pacific and how there's a show within the show, and how we performed SP at Orchard and I played "Blackbird" in my first-ever public performance.
The next morning, this photo was in my inbox.
Thank you Obi-Wan Marshall Flora.
I was rooting through a box the other day when I came across the Tiki God that I thought was way cool back in my sophomore year in high school (1960-61).
It was something I found in a magazine that looked exotic and evoked a vague Polynesian vibe.
I suspect most of my classmates just wrote it off as more evidence of my eccentric nature. Nobody made a big deal about it and I don’t recall any other Tiki Gods popping up in my school to make me a serious trend-setter. Nope. It was just me and my stupid Tiki God.
Here’s a photo from the 1961 yearbook, the Oracle, showing me wearing it and leering at Miss Stiles, a student Latin teacher. I was also wearing my favorite ultra-fashionable shawl collar sweater that day. I really liked shawl collar sweaters. I hope they come back into fashion for men someday.
The girl in the white blouse sitting in front of me is Sharon Hensley, my girlfriend at the time. If she had an opinion about my Tiki God, I don’t recall her ever expressing it.
But she did dump me in the spring of 1961, so maybe the Tiki God was the problem after all. I’ll have to ask her at our 50-year class reunion next year.
My new Browning cold weather sleeping bag arrived on Monday, in plenty of time for the BMW RA rally in Copper Mountain, Colo. next month. The problem is that I’m not all that keen on freezing my ass off getting in and out of the bag and waiting for the day to warm every morning. Also, the bag takes up a lot of space in my waterproof “camping stuff” bag, which will necessitate replacing my Thermarest air mattress with a Big Agnes Q-Core air mattress.The latest watercolor from our granddaughter Lisa in Las Vegas. She’ll be 8 years old on the 30th. I printed it and put it on the refrigerator door.
I pre-registered for last year’s BMW Motorcycle Owners of America national rally at Bloomsburg, Pa., but had to skip it when Maria developed serious back problems. (I count myself lucky, since those who went had to suffer through a murderous heat wave.)
But not going to the rally meant I wasn’t there to claim my patch and pin. I’m not all that keen on patches, but I really wanted the pin for my collection.
I contacted the MOA earlier this month to see if I could buy one and Rhonda Glasgow of the MOA Country Store said she’d send me one gratis – well, almost gratis, since I already paid for it with my registration. It was waiting in my post office box when I returned from the European Riders Rally on Sunday.
Thanks, Rhonda!
