Author - Paul Schatzkin

Waiting for the Super Moon

August 29, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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This past Saturday night (August 29), the Earth experienced another one of these occasional “Super Moon” events where the full moon is a few miles closer to the Earth than is normally the case.
I got permission to go up to the 30th floor terrace of the William R. Snodgrass Tennessee Tower State Office Building at the corner of Charlotte and Rosa Parks Blvd – it’s one of the highest points in all of downtown Nashville, and is the vantage point where I shot my entry in the Mayor’s Skyline Photo Contest back in 2013. Some of you might remember that shot:
Music City Sunrise - October, 2013 Click to embiggen

Music City Sunrise – October, 2013 Click to embiggen

Well, the management at the Tower has changed, but I nevertheless managed to finagle my way back up there for the moon rise this past Saturday. So here’s me, 30 floors up, waiting for the moon…

According to my trusty photographer’s ephemeris, the super moon should be coming up right over the river in about 10 minutes. Image shot with iPhone 6 and edited in Snapseed.

 

Another Sliver Of A Second In The Backyard

August 23, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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There was a little more sun on Sunday (!), so I got the camera out and went after the little hummers again. This time @ 1/1000th….

Another sliver of a second in the backyard#hummingbird #nature #backyard #freezeframe #lazysunday

@NashvilleTN #nashville #nashvilleguru #igersnashville #nashvilleTN #nashvilleinstagram #nashvillegram #tennessee #musiccityliving #musiccityusa #nashvillelife #thebest_capture #ig_masterpiece #nuriss_tag #waycoolshots #featuremeinstagood @instagood #igcapturesclub #ig_masterpiece #ig_great_pics
©2015 [email protected] aka @driver49

Hummingbird 1 – Coming In For A Landing

August 22, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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Throughout the summer, Ann diligently maintains a half-dozen hummingbird feeders on the deck behind our house. This means that she is mixing new hummingbird nectar almost every day. I think she’s been through about 50 pounds of sugar so far this season, keeping the little fuckers humming.
So over the weekend I finally got my camera out, mounted the telephoto lens, and sat back with the remote control and shutter on burst. Every hundred frames or so you get a good one.
For the record this was shot with the Olympus OMD-EM5 Mark II, at 1/500th sec @ f/2.8, ISO 1600; the file was transferred to my iPhone and all the editing was done with Snapseed on the phone. I haven’t even looked at the files on the big computer yet…

Coming In For A Landing#hummingbird #nature #backyard #freezeframe
@NashvilleTN #nashville #nashvilleguru #igersnashville #nashvilleTN #nashvilleinstagram #nashvillegram #tennessee #musiccityliving #musiccityusa #nashvillelife
©2015 [email protected] aka @driver49

Chasing The Sun (2)

August 20, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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Yup, another sunset on the road home to Pegram…

Skyfall 150820@NashvilleTN #nashville #nashvilleguru #musiccitysunsets #igersnashville #heartnashville #nashvilleTN #nashvilleinstagram #nashvilleincrowd #nashvillegram #nashvegas #tennesseeinstagram #tennessee #musiccityliving #musiccityusa #musiccity #615 #nashvillescene #nashvillesky #nashvillelife
©2015 [email protected] aka @driver49

Chasing The Sun

August 20, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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In case you haven’t seen enough sunset photos in your social media stream, here’s another.
Ann and I went kayaking on Percy Priest lake on Saturday, 8/15.. and then followed the sunset home to Pegram…

The sunsets on our Summer Vacation Weeh
#nashvillesky #nashvillelife #nashvilleguru #igersnashville #heartnashville #nashvilleTN #nashvilleinstagram #nashvillegram #nashvegas #tennesseeinstagram #photooftheday #thebest_capture #ig_masterpiece #nuriss_tag #architectur #travel #awe_inspiringshots #pro_ig #global_highlights #igworldclub #ig_select #editoftheday #capture_today #waycoolshots©2015 [email protected] aka @driver49

Crazy/Healthy

July 6, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
commentary, Digest, personal
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I have published a new article to the Medium website: death

It’s called Crazy/Healthy

“Dude, you are crazy healthy,” the anesthesiologist said after examining my chart. That’s also pretty much what the nurse said who had taken down the medical history. That’s what the doctor who was going to perform my procedure said.

First, to dispel any alarm: I was at this clinic early on a Wednesday morning in May for a routine ‘screening’ procedure — the sort of thing that a man in his mid 60s will have to endure as a consequence of having lived into his seventh decade, provided he harbors serious aspirations of living in to an eighth or even a ninth decade…

Click here to read the rest.

New Desktop Portals for June

June 23, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Art & Science, Digest, photography, travel
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Greetings, Time-and-Space Travelers,

I know, when I started this program I said I’d send out some new “desktop portals” every month. I’m just a little slow on the uptake this month… but it is still June!

So I have two new images for your computer and mobile gizmo.

For your computer, I present the Beauly Priory, a small monastic ruin on a peninsula called “The Black Isle” near Inverness in the Scottish highlands.

Desktop-Beauly16-PA064846click here to download “Beauly Priory”

If you are a fan, you might recognize the site, which I just learned has been used as a location for the “Outlander” TeeVee Series. It has an even greater signifance for me, personally – because in a very real sense, this is where “Portals Of Stone” began. I first visited the site when touring Scotland with my wife in the fall of 2012, but I didn’t have nearly as much time as I wanted to photograph the ruins. I remember very clearly thinking to myself as we drove away, “I need to come back here…” – which I did about six months later.For your mobile device, here is one of the very first portals that appeared after that return trip to Scotland in the spring of 2013:


This is looking out the main entrance of a ruin called Hermitage Castle in The Borders region of Scotland. The castle served as fortress for a variety of families and has a somewhat colorful if brutal history; the site also figures prominently in the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, for it was here that the conspiracies that led to her undoing were first hatched.

Click here to see more of Hermitage and the other Castles and Abbeys from my 2013 expedition.

I hope you enjoy these images and you will download them and use them on your gizmos.

click here to download “Hermitage Stargate”

* * * *

Before I go, I have one other bit of news to share:

We probably met when you stopped by my installation at the “O” Gallery in the Arcade during one of the First Saturday Downtown Art Crawls over the past year or so. So it is with some sad reluctance that I let you know that that installation will be coming down at the end of the month. My last day there will be this coming Saturday, June 27. I’ll be there from 1-4:00 PM, and after that I’ll be taking everything down. If you’ve ever thought you might like to have one of these pieces to hang on your wall, come by Saturday and, well, you know… let’s make a deal…

I have no idea at the moment where I will display this work next, if anywhere, so if you’ve got any ideas or suggestions, by all means, pass them along.

I will try to get some more desktop files for you next month, but it’s already so late in June that I might just wait for August. In the meantime…

Thanks, and see you “on the other side of the Portal…”

–PS

The One I Let Slip Away

June 23, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, personal
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In 1969 and 70, I was part of three crowds of more than a half-million people, including the massive demonstration to protest Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in May 1970. So I'm in this picture, somewhere...

In 1969 and 70, I was part of three crowds of more than a half-million people, including the massive demonstration to protest Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in May 1970. So I’m in this picture, somewhere…

Not sure where to begin this.. so I’ll start with this llink:

The One I Let Slip Away

….and offer this by way of explanation:

A couple of months ago, I was suddenly inspired to revisit “the archives” – two large Rubbermaid tubs filled with paraphernalia that I started accumulating in the late 1960s… during my senior year in high school, and my first year attempting to go to college.

I don’t remember now exactly what motivated me to dig into those archives, but getting in there has been something of a turning point.

I look at the stuff in that now and realize I sent myself a time capsule from 1969. And in that time capsule are the beginnings of a (partly fictional?) memoir about coming to age at the end of the 1960s. That’s what I’ve been working on for the past couple of months – a book that I started writing 45 years ago. What I’ve posted above is an excerpt…

Two weeks ago I dove into a stack of letters from a girlfriend I met during that period, and the experience was unexpectedly visceral. I tried to capture the essence of that experience in a couple of pages of free-form verse, which I published to Medium.com this morning in the piece I linked above.

In that post I think I found the emotional heart of what I’ve been working on.

Beyond that, probably the less said, the better.

Storehouse: A Pilgrim Amid The Ruins

May 23, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography, travel
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Screen Shot 2015-05-23 at 11.27.43 AMIt turns out that mostly what newborn babies do is sleep (and eat and poop, but who’s counting?).

Which means there is a lot of time to fill when hanging out with a newborn.

So I used the time to work on something I’ve been thinking about for a while: I’ve joined a site called “Storehouse” which makes it really easy to create and share photo essays. I’ve been thinking about compiling an post about the day I spent at Fountains Abbey last October, and finally got around to doing just that while we were in Portland.

So have a look at “A Pilgrim Amid The Ruins” on Storehouse.