BASTILLE DAYS 2019

Milwaukee has a great tradition of ethnic festivals, primarily occurring in the summer.  One of those festivals is Bastille Days, celebrating French culture.  It always takes place on the July weekend closest to Bastille Day, July 14th.  This was the festival's 38th year.

Unlike most of the other festivals, Bastille Days does not occur at Maier Festival Park on the Lake Michigan lakefront.  Instead, it takes place at Cathedral Square, along with the adjoining streets, in the downtown area.  Frankly, it isn't much of a festival in the tradition of ethnic music, entertainment, and food.  Rather, it is basically an opportunity for vendors of any sort to hawk their wares and sell their food along with a smattering of entertainment--essentially a fair.  Still, on the Sunday afternoon that we went it provided us with a chance to enjoy a beautiful summer day and for me to take a few photos.

As indicated, much of the space is given over to vendors of whatever, not necessarily in the French "style."

The festival takes place at Cathedral Square, named for the Cathedral of St. John, the Evangelist, which sits adjacent to the square, giving me an opportunity to get a couple of shots of this modest-sized, but beautiful Catholic church, an exterior detail and a standard shot of the interior.

We did catch one act, a juggler who called himself the Fire Guy.  He was quite good as a juggler and kept up a humorous and family-appropriate banter.

My favorite shot of this post was a photo of a manikin sporting a straw hat. 

I converted the image to a black and white to emphasize the shadow pattern that the sun was creating on the manikin's face.

John M. Phillips

SCULPTURE MILWAUKEE 2019

This is the third summer that Milwaukee has featured a public sculpture display.  This year there are 22 sculptures positioned along Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee's main east-west downtown avenue.  On a couple of occasions during the past few weeks, I have wandered up and down Wisconsin Avenue taking photos of the sculptures.  I thought I would post what I took, which includes all but a couple of the pieces.  Here, in no particular order, is what I got.

A Greater Perspective, by Elmsgreen & Dragset

The sculpture is the stylized telescope, not the Milwaukee Art Museum brise soleil.

Holiday Home, by Woods

Kitchen Trees, by Wurtz

Silly, actually.

Cleft, by Paine

Penguin, by Baldessari

Hot Dog Vendor, by Grooms

This was my favorite sculpture, probably because of its outstanding whimsy factor.

Hera, by Matelli

This was probably my second favorite, because of the authenticity of the melons.

Large Boxing Hare, by Flanagan

Handy Darling, Handy Warhol, by Haas Brothers

I got a little carried away on this sculpture, looking for creative ways to present the piece.

Seraphine-Cherubin, by Ernst

Pensive, by Bailey

Magical Thinking, by Simpson & Georigiadis

Heavy Metal Stack of Six: Trichrome Blue, by Bulloch

Boring, frankly.

Tilted Channel, by Shechet

This did nothing for me.  Besides, it's ugly.

Gild the Lily, by Rolon

Interior of the atrium of the Chase Tower.

Sun & Moon Protector, by O'Brien

Tango Dancers, by Grooms

Nice, I thought.

Curvae in Curvae, by Pepper

I thought the pieces this year were generally better than those in the first two years.

The "show" is free to anyone willing to hike the the mile or so along the avenue.

John

WATER LILIES AND FROGS

The other day I visited an undisclosed venue that prohibits photography shot there from being posted on the internet.  However, I am posting these photos because they are generic and not specific to the venue, which featured a number of ponds that were populated both with water lilies and with frogs.  I shot a few of each.

First the lilies.

There is nothing special in these images of water lilies, flowers that I have shot any number of times, and that may speak to my lack of creativity.  I did underexpose the shots some to bring out the definition in the flowers themselves.  Here is a third, which features a guest that I did not notice until post processing.

Speaking of frogs, here are a few more images devoted to them.

Ho hum.  I took this and all the other shots on this post with my workhorse 24-120mm lens.  It is apparent from the shot's angle that I was not at a great distance from the frog.  Even so, this shot required a good deal of cropping.  As did the following two shots.

My experience with photographing frogs has not been a particularly fortunate one.  They generally are very skittish and will leap away when I get anywhere close.  That was not true of these guys (or gals).  The frogs were only a few feet away and seemed relatively brazen in their indifference to my camera.  In reviewing the series of shots that I took, it is clear that I kept getting shots closer and closer.  This was about the closest that I got before these frogs had had enough.

One technical point on these last two shots:  They were both taken at a relatively narrow aperture of f/11, which should have produced good depth of field.  That seems more true of the first shot than the second.  In the second shot the frog's face is in good focus, but the legs are not.  I was not bothered by that, as I was most concerned about the frog's eyes.  The frog in the first shot seems to be in better focus throughout, but I think that is because it was taken in profile.

Finally, I spied the following tree limbs posed against the sky in a pattern that I found appealing in black and white.

John

BROMELIAD: ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

A while back we bought a bromeliad as a house plant.  I loved the colors and took a number of photos trying to capture the plant's colors and overall configuration basically from the side.  More recently I decided to take a few shots from directly overhead.  Here is the first of those.

It should be kept in mind that these are extreme closeups, taken with my 90mm macro lens.  The greatest challenge with such closeups is depth of field.  This optical limitation poses problems as it is simply not possible to keep everything in sharp focus when the subject has depth, as with this bromeliad.  (The only other option would be to try to take a series of shots at different points of focus and combine them in a composite image.  There is software to handle such projects, but my success with such attempts has been not so good.)

My lens allows me to use an extremely small aperture, in the case of this first shot, f/64, as small as the lens is capable of.  Even so, much of the image is out of focus.  For example, the orange leaf in the upper right of the image is quite out of focus.  That and other more distant leaves do not bother me.  However, my goal was to keep in focus the edges of cluster of small leaves in the lower left.  However, when I focused on them the tips of those leaves, which have browned out and which were closest to the lens went out of focus.  In my experience it is OK to have more distant features go out of focus, but when the closest features (the tips in this case) are out of focus, it becomes a distraction to the viewer who assumes the photographer made a mistake.  So in the end I set the focus on the tips and let the focus on the edges of the small leaves go soft.  For the record, the exposure for this shot was 2.0 seconds at an ISO of 200.

The next shot was taken from a slightly greater distance to include (almost) the tips of leaves in the lower portion of the image.  The shot was cropped a bit on the top and right side.

The metadata for this shot were f/57 for 1.6 seconds at ISO 200.  This is my favorite of the shots.  I actually like the fact that the leaf tip in the lower left is just off the edge, creating a bit of a tantalizing effect.

The final shot was taken from a bit further away at f/51 for 1.6 seconds at ISO 200.  Perhaps a bit too much extraneous stuff?

John