After The Fall

I went outside around midnight. This is what I saw.

What a sky. What a moon. What beauty. What luck. Yeah, photographer’s luck crept in the picture. If I hadn’t wanted the dog to go out, I wouldn’t have seen this. She did and I did.

A word or two about the making of this picture. I don’t know why, but I took my smart phone out. Normally, I just let her wander around and I just stand there waiting for her to finish. We are only outside for about ten minutes, if that. For some reason I grabbed my phone. That’s where photographer’s luck comes into play.

I looked up and just mumbled, “whoa.” I made four exposures, holding my finger on the button the whole time. That’s an old school trick. If you aren’t properly prepared — I wasn’t — you hold your finger down and made a few exposures knowing the the ones in the middle of the burst would be sharp enough.

Why?

I’ve learned that the first exposure has a lot of motion blur in it because my body is a little excited by seeing the scene. The next one or two pictures are good because I’ve stabilized myself. The last picture loses sharpness because my body and mind are done. As they relax so do my hand muscles.

That’s how I made this picture.

I try very hard to keep Storyteller free of typos and such. I’m human. They creep into the picture. Today, I was reading the New York Times. They have plenty of copy editors and fact checkers. They did a piece on more CoVid 19 deaths than those are reported as such. That usually happens when bodies are discovered outside of the normal treatment facilities, like at home.

The published some very good graphs showing the suspected rise of deaths as opposed to normal deaths.

I looked and I looked because I am interested in my state, Louisiana. No joy. The highly thought of New York Times left Louisiana out of the data. That ain’t a typo. That’s a big mistake. That’s as bad as having a typo in a headline. Or, worse.

Of course, you cannot email the reporters, so I went one better. I tweeted to Dean Baquet, the editor of the entire paper.

Mr. Baquet is a New Orleanian. His family has been here for generations. They are mostly food people. They own a great Creole-Soul Food restaurant on Esplanade Avenue. One of their restaurants was the inspiration for “Frank’s Place,” a shortly lived sitcom. The chef at the time was Austin Leslie, who probably made the best fried chicken in the world.

We’ll see what happens.

Stay safe. Enjoy every sandwich.