Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

Today I'd like to share the story behind one of my favorite aircraft images. It was a case of being at just the right place at just the right moment. It was August 1997 at the California International Airshow in Salinas. The plane is a Martin 404 converted for executive use and painted in the colors of the former Pacific Air Lines. At airshows there are usually lots of people around the planes walking around in their shorts and tank-tops, sucking on sodas. It can be a challenge to get good shots of the planes without background distractions, so I would focus on details. I was composing a shot of the plane's engine when this little girl came through on her daddy's shoulders. I knew I had something here, but I wasn't sure if I had everything set right yet. I had half a second to decide whether to click the shutter or not. I didn't notice at the time, but just as I snapped the picture she reached out to touch the propeller. It turned out to be my favorite shot of ...

My online Photography Gallery and Picture Shop had a bit of a makeover this past week, so it seems like a good excuse to tell the story of one of my favorite floral images. In Carmel, California at the Church of the Wayfarer, there is a Biblical Garden featuring plants mentioned in the scriptures. I have often gone there in the spring and summer to see what's blooming. One foggy August day in 1995 I found this lily. I was trying out the 25 speed Kodak Royal Gold film, to see how it worked with flowers. There are very few color-print films that properly capture the subtle tones of a flower, at least to my satisfaction. As you can see, this film was a winner. The summer fog of the Monterey Peninsula is a blessing for this type of work. It provides a soft, even light, avoiding harsh shadows and highlights. There was a slight breeze, so I had to be careful with movement. I set the aperture as small as I dared without getting too slow a shutter speed, and waited several minutes ...

I'm going to try something new here today. I have generally kept my Mental Notes separated from my photography. Not for any particular reason, it just sort of happened that way. Oh, I have a link and slide show widget in the sidebar pointing Mental Note readers to my online Photography Gallery & Picture Shop , and occasionally I have used some of my images to illustrate a blog post, but never before have I used this venue to write about my photography directly. But lately I've been looking for ways to drive more viewers (OK, let's be honest, I really mean potential customers) to my online gallery. I've been looking to expand my social media presence, and may do that very soon, but it occurred to me that I already have a built-in audience of 3 or 4 regular Mental Note readers and an unknown number of irregular ones, so this seems like as good a place as any to showcase my images and tell the stories behind them. It's strange that I hadn't thought of it so...

One of those knockoff phone books landed on our doorstep a few days ago. It's the one called "Valley Yellow Pages." I don't know whose valley they refer to, but we're on a peninsula here. Phone books usually have a nice photo or illustration of the community contained within its pages. At first glance, this one has a nice photo of the Pacific Grove shoreline. But somebody with no sense of scale decided to blend in a separate scene of seals and sea gulls perched on a rock. The result is a rocky shoreline with seagulls larger than the trunks of mature cypress trees. I think Valley Yellow Pages should lose their right to use Photoshop.