The Best Revenge

These are the best until-now unpublished photos from 2010. Another year gone, and you ask yourself the same questions as always: What do I have to show for it? Let me give you the answers I've pried out of the frozen ground.
















Happy New Year. Thanks for reading, folks.

For Rent

All I Want in this Creation

Eclipse

So I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "Hey Cooper, did you get any eclipse photos?"

Hell no. I hate Twilight.



This here is the moon, seen from my front porch, like a million years ago. I'm posting it now because there was an eclipse a few nights ago that I didn't shoot because of cloud cover and on account of it being like negative forty degrees outside. But the internet is still abuzz about it, so I want some of the traffic.

No, seriously, I'm really disappointed. A total lunar eclipse on the Winter solstice. What could be darker than that? So I missed it, and I'm bitter. Not helping is the fact that it's December 22 and I've yet to do a lick of shopping. In fact, I've been procrastinating for the last two hours. I'm not equipped for this kind of thing. First, you need riot gear. Second, you need money.

Scattered and random, that's this post. I'm in a terrible mood, readers, and I try not to post when I'm like this, but hell. Sometimes you just have to bitch and moan.

Three years ago I went out and bought the Nikkor 55-200 f4-5.6 VR. This of course broke my personal rule of never owning a lens with a maximum aperture smaller than f2.8. But I was shooting a good many weddings at the time, and I needed something that could reach out and touch someone. So Ken Rockwell told me that lens was pretty good, and I guess he was right, although admitting I own it is kind of hard. It scored pretty well in my clothesline test:



Not only that, it's good for portraits as long as the light is nice. And if the light isn't nice, no lens is good for portraits.




But it's my longest lens, and I wouldn't even attempt a real moon photo with it. Besides, how many moon photos do we really need in the world? Can I make a better one than all those nerds with telescope-mounted 5Ds? Doubt it. No offense, nerds.

So I'll post the best eclipse photo I ever shot, which ran on Citizen-Times.com with the caption "Commuters travel under a lunar eclipse something something blah blah can't remember" back in '07. Of course, you can't see the eclipse at all. It's almost impossible to photograph the works of man and the moon and retail detail in both. Given my limited skills and resources, I'll focus on the earthbound.

DarkTopo Restored to its Former Glory

I spent all of today's waking hours fixing my colossal mistake of a few months back. It's one I don't plan to repeat, because this has been a giant pain in my ass, especially because I couldn't even remember many of the photos that were lost.

Bonus to you, readers! That means there are NEW photos where the old ones used to be. Have fun reading back through for fresh images. Definitely a few here.

Another mistake I'll admit to making is this one:



It's a tiny, one-pixel line in the bottom corner of a print that was part of the AshevilleHDR exhibit, which is by the way still up in the Asheville Community Theater. In any event, I wasn't as diligent as I should have been with my layers, and this horrible besmirchment of my usual standards actually ended up getting printed. Luckily I caught it before it hit the wall . . . unluckily, I caught it AFTER I'd put it in a frame and sealed the back.

It is, of course, invisible in the print. Didn't matter.

So that's the rigorous level of excellence to which I hold my best-written and most-inspirational blog. Or you could look at it as a mix of OCD case-study and performance art. Whatever. Keep reading.

Return

If you've been a longtime DarkTopo fan, you know that when the blog gets quiet, something big is in the works. What's different about this time is that, though something big was indeed in the works, it had nothing to do with photography. I wanted to tell you about it sooner, but there's that old joke: Chuck Norris doesn't go hunting, because hunting implies the possibility of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.

I wrote a novel. The larger obsessive institution is called NaNoWriMo, and it breaks down like this: Write a 50,000-word work of fiction in the month of November. That's 1,667 words every day.

I gave a lot of thought to making the project public, or perhaps even publishing it here on the blog. But, like I said, Chuck Norris goes killing. I wasn't sure I could do it. As you might have noticed, I can exercise a good bit of determination when I want to, but who knows what might happen over the course of a month to make that kind of sustained productivity impossible? Certainly not I. So I've kept quiet, until today, when I finally printed the manuscript. All 387 pages of it.

I've spent five days filling the plot holes and working out some of the prose. Now it goes off to my crack team of editors, who I have hand-picked from various academic and art backgrounds. And I am taking some well-earned time off.

Writing is the inverse of photography. It's the medium which requires the least engagement with reality, and is the least expensive to practice. I also completed the entire project sitting in my own home, except for one morning when I went to the doctor's office and wrote in the waiting room while they took three hours to diagnose my sinus infection. I can say with certainty that I completed the whole project sitting down.

So it feels a little like I just hung a show, except I'm not physically exhausted, no one has seen it, I didn't have to serve food, and I still have at least double digit sums in my bank accounts.

But my "November" photos folder is right next to empty. It's really sad, knowing I missed a month of photography. On the other hand, this story is told. So, rest assured, the blog will be back to its riveting regularly scheduled programing very soon. For the moment, here are the most important of the few photos I shot in the last 35 days: