Slow Photography

Caught on Film: Jimmy Connors returns serve to Stan Smith .  Kodak has been a vital and important part of photography all my life. So, it was a thrill to learn this week's news that Kodak Alaris is bringing back T-Max Professional P-3200/TMZ film is coming back, March 2018 in 36 exposure rolls, after being discontinued 5 years ago. Film is Kodak's heritage. Tennis is my heritage, but at the other end of the racket. I started playing amateur tennis when I was 9, but the pros, including Connors, were heroes who lived on another planet, visible through the distant telescope of TV. I craved a Wilson T2000 racket so I could hit as hard as Jimmy. Now, I had the chance to cross over, and see bad boy Jimmy Connors up close. For 160 consecutive weeks, he ranked #1 in the world and when played in Denver, Colorado my senior year in high school, he was the men's singles champion of the Denver Open for the 3rd year. At the time, playing for the Manual High School tennis tea

GETTING THERE: After sailing to Long Island, Bahamas in February 2018, we rowed our dinghy .4 miles (650 meters) east from the anchorage to a sponge fisherman's area ashore at Gray's Bight settlement, Long Island. First called Yuma by the Arawaks, and later named Fernandina by Columbus, Long Island is 180 miles southeast of Nassau.  Explore the Shrimp Hole and see the shrimp bodies reflected by the undersurface, an experience like floating in space, in this video:                 Play   Video "Exploring the Shrimp Hole, A Salty Paws Adventure" THE SHRIMP HOLE: We'd been previously to Long Island's famous Deans Blue Hole, one of the world's deepest at 663 feet. However, swimming in the shrimp hole was surreal. To get there, you can drive South from Thompson Bay. Since we were anchored, we landed a dinghy and took a short walk across the Queen's Highway and through the grounds of Saint Mary's Spanish church past the g

Snorkeling, I float in twelve feet of sunlit Bahamas water. The sand below is crisscrossed with past wave ridges and present wave shadows that intersect in a matrix of dancing light and dark. A single sea biscuit rests on the bottom. It seems to call down the suns rays to the sandy bottom. The biscuit is a skeleton from a black sea urchin.  Five grooves radiate from its mouth, now filled with the tiny shells of a marine creature. It looks like the center of a flower. I swim closer. A photograph blooms. In the Bahamas, a sea biscuit shell is a good marine bio indicator. It is a marker, a natural measure of any toxins in the sea. When analyzed, the shell's composition lets us infer the amount and intensity of metal contaminants like lead and cadmium that have accumulated in the ocean. Jim Austin Jimages www. shootslow.blogspot.com

Two Gods Jim Austin Jimages " When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."   ~   Anais Nin The truths we hold as self-evident can make us strong. Yet, we can easily carry them to extremes. When our truths about our creative process emerge from darker places, they may hinder our curiosity. To open our vision to other novel vistas, we may need to let go of what we hold tight. In an old Anglican church, shadow and sunlight patterns danced on a wall around the decaying windows. Clouds floated across the sun. I wondered if the essence of this illumination could be expressed in a picture.  Watching these rays of light and shadows move across the wall, I slowed  down to steady my mind and the camera. Colors were vivid. Greens and yellows emerged from the darker hues. I noticed the broken shutter with vines growing in, as if through an eye. Mother nature came in one tendril at a time, throug