January 2020: Street Photography At the Vet's Day Parade /  by John Ritchie

I missed a December phlog, instead I did a photo documentary on a cat spay and neuter clinic I was fortunate enough to attend. Check it out if you haven’t already.

For the first phlog of 2020, let’s start with some Street Photography! In November I went to the Albany Veteran’s Day Parade for the first time. It’s a huge parade and went on for hours. My goal was to do street photography, not necessarily to document the parade. There are a lot of kids in these photos, but then there were a lot of kids in the parade too.

November 2019 Phlog: In Wisconsin /  by John Ritchie

In September we spent a week in Wisconsin. While there, we toured both Taliesin and House on the Rock (in the same day!). They were each fantastic in their own way.

Taliesin

While in Phoenix a year ago we toured Taliesin West. As with that time, we came away wanting to renovate our house. We love Frank Lloyd Wright’s simple but elegant architecture. My goal photographing Taliesin was to extract my own artistic images from the environment, not to document the place, consequently I don’t have many photographs. With the few I’ve published here, I emphasize the fabulous use of geometric shapes.

House On The Rock

House On The Rock is like touring a giant weird fantastic dream. I could spend days there, we didn’t even get through the whole thing in an afternoon and there’s so much fantastic visual clutter it’s overwhelming. The carousel alone is worth hours, and that’s even without being able to ride it! Of course they can’t let you do that, since, according to Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” novel, it’s a gateway into the world of gods. I can believe it!

The photographic challenges in House On the Rock were to isolate the image from the visual clutter and the dim available light.

"October" 2019: Phlogging Pullman Photos /  by John Ritchie

Ok, it’s November, but this is still the October Phlog. At some point month creep will force me to roll a month, but not yet.

Early in October I had the opportunity to spend a week in Pullman Washington. I didn’t do a ton of photography there, but I did see some school buses with their butts hanging out.

Bus Butts

I went out early one morning (amidst flurries of snow) for a night-time photo shoot in downtown Pullman. I was not the only one out there.

Here are some of the other images I made.

September 2019 Phlog: The Ones That Squeezed Through /  by John Ritchie

Suddenly it’s the end of September and I haven’t published a Phlog yet. But this time it’s not because of a dry photo pipeline, it’s the opposite: I took around a thousand images this month and haven’t had time to process them. I’ve been on several shoots with friends, went on a trip or two, but have largely been stockpiling the images for later processing. My current processing lag is greater than a month these days, it looks like I need to continue streamlining my workflow. Here are a few that squeezed through the pipeline, mostly taken in August.

August 2019 Phlog: Newport, Salem and More! /  by John Ritchie

These are photographs from several different trips I made in August as well as some pictures I’ve been working this summer. Not pictured here are images I made at the Junction City Scandinavian Festival, which I felt needed their own blog article.