Mark Power Blog

OK, time to ‘fess up. This dispatch is from really from further north, Silver Spring, MD,  and there is snow on the ground and the tropical grace ( and squalor) of the Keys  is but a collection of languorous memories.  

 

click on “open image in another window” to see larger picture.

 

And happy memories or so I thought until I began to look at the photographs. Apparently once I raised  camera to my eyes another photographer emerged, one perhaps influenced by a daily reading of the New York Times in which  day after day, clouds of doom and gloom hung over every page.  In any event, most of the photographs are on the melancholy side, a mood completely absent when I didn’t have a camera in my hands. 

 

 

 

 

 

In fact, to be in the Keys was to be in denial. Key West seemed little unchanged from years past; roosters strutted the tropical streets, happy tourists filled every restaurant with their margarita-fueled laughter and conspicuous consumption glittered from every window. 

 

 

 

Tourists of another day: “Instant relatives for a dollar”. 

 

We were particularly taken with the window of  the Duck and Dolphin antique shop in Key West, where all the cultures of the world seemingly came home to roost.

 

 

I had my eye on  a art deco crucifix, memorable if only because it was so far removed from the original: a persecuted Jew destined to change the world, hanging from a cross of wood.

This romantic Christ, the creation of a French artist in the late 20s, was gold plated and cost about $2800, way over my crucifix budget. I will be happy with a framed print on my wall, conscious that like many of us, I am settling for less these days. 

 

 

 

The sun worshippers were out in force, gathering in Mallory Square to salute the descending globe every evening surrounded by court jesters and jongleurs that probably aren’t much different from their counterparts in medieval days. Cats leap through hoops, clowns totter on stilts, pretty women eat fire, a turbaned fakir shuffles his cards. It would not have surprised me to see a few Egyptian sun gods strolling through the crowds,  golden orbs sitting atop their jackal heads. That would have tempted me to raise my camera but in lieu of gods I found myself photographing bare walls and a lone rabbit in a setting as artificial as a Hollywood set.

 

 

And back on Cudjoe Key, after spending days fishing or lolling in hammocks and reading Ken Follett and Tom Clancy ( I found his detailed descriptions of weapon systems to be oddly soothing) my Other Self rose up and decided to photograph along Route One, the one hundred and fifty mile long snake-like highway that connects the Keys to the mainland. I began in color but it was the kind of color that soon faded to black-and-white.

 

 

 

 

As I said it was as if someone else took these pictures because when not photographing, I couldn’t get enough of the balmy air, the wild palms, and the emerald sea stretching as far as the eye could see. But as Fellini once said, I don’t direct these movies; they direct me. 

 

 

After Cudjoe Key I ended up in the real Florida, Lehigh Acres, a vast exurb of Fort Myers ( twice the size of Manhattan), recently described as the “Ground Zero” of foreclosures.

 

      double click on “open in new window” to see larger images. 

 

Unfinished construction, Lehigh Acres, Fl.

 

Both the New Yorker and the New York Times have written recent articles on Lehigh Acres, and even President Obama made a lightning visit to Fort Myers last month to see what was going on. 

Abandoned foreclosure, Lehigh Acres, Fl

 

What is going on is the American Dream turned inside out. Most of the houses, built between 2004 and 2006, at the height of the housing boom, are one story concrete block-and-stucco structures, sitting low on the ground.  I imagine they would withstand a hurricane pretty well  but evidently the developers weren’t prepared for the economic hurricane, a high wind  tearing silently through the mostly deserted streets.

 

 

Lehigh Acre streets, flat and as long as airport runways, are laid out in grids as precise as those in video games. Some are paved and some are not. Flood control canals hide behind some streets, some filled with water; most dry as a bone.

 

Floods are a long way from people’s minds these days.  If Key West was a green that hurt the eyes, Lehigh Acres is a parched  brown that hurts the spirit. The palms droop despairingly, the overgrown Florida lawns are broken up by fire ant nests, and for sale signs hang unread everywhere. 

 

 

The unbelievable fact is that some houses in Lehigh acres have lost  as much as 200% of their value.  Many are “underwater” foreclosures, so called because the  houses are abandoned because they are worthless, not because people can’t keep up the payments. And once they walk away, in many cases leaving even their possessions behind, some dream of schemes of how to buy another house.

Real estate prices  in Lehigh Aacres are probably lower than their equivalents were during the depression of the 30s. Twenty-five thousand can get you a two bedroom house with two baths and fifty thousand will get you a pretty good three bedroom with a lanai and a pool, lanais being Florida speak for enclosed patios. 

 

The optimism of yesterday

 

The reality of today ( from a real estate website)

 

But if you yield to that enticement above you’d have to live with the silence. It’s the absence of  cars that make it so quiet.  People didn’t really walk away, they drove away, leaving behind garages filled with discarded appliances.

It’s also the absence of children; you see discarded  toys in the backyards that more resemble unkempt cemeteries.

 

 

Another oddity in Lehigh Acres is that there are no fences to delineate properties; one  overgrown lot segues into another. On every block you see houses abandoned in mid-construction or sitting on half-graded lots.  But many abandoned houses look new; you have to look carefully to see the signs of neglect: the empty driveways, the ripped apart cages in which air conditioner units once sat, the satellite dishes lying on the ground, the abandoned pools turning green as algae flourishes.

Abandoned pool and lanai

 

Back in Washington life seems as unreal as it did in the Keys. Our aging suburb ( as it usually described)  doesn’t look any different although the houses are said to have lost about 4% of their value. 

Silver Spring, Md

 

 People around here are hunkering down, not walking away … yet. The Federal Government, our local rooster industry, lurches along, flinging  heaps of money into the air, and we are told that in another  year or two the sun will rise again. Called “rooster” because our government reminds me of a practice in some Asian funerals: when a deceased person is being carried to the grave, a rooster is perched atop the remains: if the corpse stirs, the rooster is supposed to crow…    

 And although we returned home  to find a blizzard whistling about our ears, we notice the snowdrops are poking their heads above the ground. Soon it will be Spring. We’ll get out our Florida T shirts and shorts and make a resolve to stop reading the New York Times. It will be  the year of the Rooster ( not to mention the Ostrich) until that hurricane begins to steal down our streets.    

 

 

Yes, it is cold today in Florida…and windy; even the birds are blown about in the impossibly blue sky. If your only sense was sight you’d think it was delightfully warm; the wind-blown palms sparkle in the  sun as if it were 80 degrees out instead of 57.  But at least two hardy souls refuse to believe the evidence of their senses.

 

 

 

 

One of the attractions of a beach vacation is adapting yourself to that that strange environment known as a  beach house. As with most other beach houses I have inhabited from New Jersey to Florida, our genial host makes an aggressive attempt to whip us into leisure-time frenzy. There is a sign saying the Tiki lounge ( our kitchen) is serving various tropical drinks. A plastic parrot advises  us to forget about work. An extravagantly  be-hatted girl urges us to be nice or go home. 

 

 

 

 

But the predominant theme is Piscean:

 

 

 

Finned creatures of every garish color and shape swim through every room, inhabiting  every depth from floor to ceiling. These are the fish of our dreams – or should I say nightmares? – which bear little resemblance to actual denizens of the deep.

 

 

 

 

 

Living in this beach house is like being underwater in a aquarium designed by Walt Disney, an aquarium that for a while strangely smelled of pine-sol.

 

 

And if it isn’t fish, it is palm trees -palms on the chairs, on the shower curtains and occasionally on the walls.

 

 

But still no match for the real thing…

 

 

More to come …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m going to give the blog a bit of a rest while I drag my cold-wracked body off to Key West for a much needed R&R.

It has been a miserable Winter here in Washington, a succession of  dull gray days with temperatures conistently below freezing, a monotony only matched by grim newspaper articles detailing how many millions are out of work and facing foreclosure.  The only excitement in these dreary days was the inauguration which we saw on TV feeling some warmth from  watching the Obamas do the foxtrot in their cool outfits.

 

The Obamas…NOT! But rather a happy couple in Fort Myers, Florida

  Actually our destination isn’t Key West but Cudjoe Key, an island or two before you get to Key West. What can I tell you about Cudjoe Key before I arrive there? Not much because in past trips I only drove through Cudjoe on the way to Key West.  But here are a few stats to ponder: 

Cudjoe has a  population of about  1700 although I’m sure the number in season will probably double or triple. There are various explanation for the name of the Key but one I prefer is that it is named after Cudjoe  (a common West African name) a runaway slave who lived on the island in the 19^th century. Not many African-Americans have followed his example; the last census says there are only 67 black people on the island. Perhaps they have all decamped to Key West which has a thriving black community.

This is James Chapman, a life-long resident of Key West, a purveyor of curious objects which fill his front yard all the way into the living room. He is aptly named as in England an itinerant peddler of goods was called a chapman in the old days.  He also is a mine of  information about Keys history, particularly the history of the African-American community. 

Mr. Chapman’s front yard, Key West

I’m sure I will see Mr Chapman again on this trip because he graciously allows parking in his side yard which is very convenient when visiting a nearby popular restaurant, the Blue Heaven in Key West.

 

The front porch of the Blue Heaven. Photo courtesy of the restaurant.

 

Reviving ourselves at the Blue Heaven 

 

Leaving now…

Hopefully to see this

  

 and this!

More later, assuming they have internet on the Keys…

 

Christmas Day, 2008, detail.    Mark L. Power. Camera settings too numerous to list. Right click on image  then choose “open image in new window” to see entire picture.

The above was taken with a Christmas present to myself, a new Panasonic LX3 digital camera.

It has a nice wide-angle lens from Leica, the menu controls, while numerous and deep, are fairly accessible, or more importantly, seem intuitive, at least the ones that count, and the fast lens and the camera stabilization is a boon to one that often shoots in low light levels. My one major complaint is it offers too many choices.

I am speaking as a professional who has owned numerous analog cameras, from 35mm to 11×14 view and many in between. Each of those cameras and their lenses offered a certain optical look, a  way of rendering reality, and the search was to find a look that fit your vision  best, or less grandly, with the way you saw the world. The learning curve, once you were past the basics of photography, was fairly simple. With the help of a light meter, you would set a shutter/fstop combination and that, along with trying different lenses, was about all you needed to determine whether the camera fit your style.

But in the digital world the engineers have taken over and provided camera refinements to a level that is close to insanity.   The LX3 is the seventh digital camera I have owned. I currently use two; the Sony A350 and the LX3. Each camera was successively more complex but not necessarily better – I still like many pictures I took with my first digital camera the Fuji MX-700 which had all of 1.5 million pixels. In terms of features, it was pretty much point-n-shoot.  Now I have the LX3 and of course it out performs the Fuji in almost every respect except pocketability.

I can accept the choice of three viewfinder formats, the multiple perspectives a zoom lens offers,  the choice of five light metering methods, a number of autofocus choices, the five or so flash settings , a number of  sensitivity settings, numerous white balance combinations, a choice of resolutions, as well as a number of automatic settings, all of which is pretty standard on most digital cameras. I’ve come to accept this complexity as the price of progress.

But with the LX3 that’s just the beginning. You’re then confronted with ’scenes’, 24 in all, each which presets color balances and fstop/shutter/focus combinations to match certain situations ranging from landscapes  to face detection to “starry night” – in each, the camera becomes the photographer and maybe that’s fine for someone starting out although I think if you use these automated assists you are going to substitute the camera for your eyes and not learn very much.

Yes, I can skip the scene settings which I’ve done on previous cameras but there’s always the nagging questions for the curious.  I wonder what  ”pets” would do for portraits of human beings? Make them look hairier? How about ’soft skin’ for a mountain range?   So you end up trying all the possible combinations which exponentially are many more than 24. And once you’re past that exhausting task, the LX3  is just getting warmed up. You’re also confronted with ‘modes’ , six in color ( plus three black-and-white ), all of which offer different color and contrast combinations. Each of these modes has adjustable contrast, sharpness, noise levels and saturation ranges. When will it end?

Of course, I could just set the camera on ‘program’ or ‘auto’ and these decisions would be made for me  and I could just go on my merry way taking pictures. But I am an artist, not an automaton and as a professional I have to investigate the combinations that work best for my vision and that means testing them all to see which ones I don’t want and which ones I will only use once in a blue moon. ( A hasty look at the ’scenes’ – no, there’s no ‘blue moon’ setting although I’m sure that’s on some engineer’s drawing board.)  Another exhausting round of testing and by then another camera will come along with some feature I’m demented enough to think I need and the merry-go-round starts up again.

 

 

In the good old days if you bought  a camera and put it through its paces, you could be secure in the knowledge that its tempting replacement wouldn’t be along for a number of years  and by that time your machine of choice would fit like an old shoe. Nowadays you hardly have time to try on a shoe before a new style comes along that you’re deluded enough you think you need. I owned the LX3’s predecessor, the LX2 for less than two years before thinking I had to have the improvements the new camera offered.

But that’s it: LX4, you can come and go, I’ve had it. But what about the LX5 which is rumored to have an  ‘inner vision’ setting? Well…

There’s more discussion of one of the LX3’s peculiarities on Mike’s  THE ONLINE PHOTOGRAPHER site for December 6.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html

Oh, yes, I almost forgot -

Happy New Year, everybody!