sonyrx100iv

“A study in decay and decomposition” is the way a Frommer’s travel guide described the section of Havana called Centro Habana. I staid in a “casa particulare” on the second floor of a decrepit townhouse that I can only imagine was quite grand in its day before the Cuban Revolution. I shot this image from my balcony while enjoying a cigar. The sights, sounds, and smells are all quite unique to this place, and the photograph is my way of relating the experience as best I can.

Traveling solo with a camera is like going alone to an art museum on a day off, in that every moment is undistracted and deeply personal. On such trips my camera sometimes is used freely without question or predetermination to capture fleeting moments. It’s a close association of the heart, the eye, and the machine; and every captured moment has its reason.

Can a “pocket camera” be considered a professional grade tool? Although I had a big DSLR with me at the time on my recent job in Memphis, for this vignette in my hotel bathroom I used the Sony RX100 IV, which closes down and literally fits in a pocket. For certain subjects, those that harken back to my initial photographic explorations when I was young, this pocket camera is my go-to camera. It’s fast and easy, produces high grade raw files, and has built-in image stabilization. Because of its ease of use and speed, I shoot differently with it. I sometimes am surprised at what I have gotten when I review several days’ worth of images captured on this camera. There’s more intuition than thought in the pictures. There clearly is no reason for me to shoot a picture of a toilet seat, but I just couldn’t let that light go without capturing it.

A recent 3-day cross country drive yielded many good images. This one was taken soon after crossing the Mississippi River late in the afternoon of a long and beautiful day. The low sun skirted under the storm clouds and smacked the freight train up side the head. I had started on the eastern seaboard the previous day, heading for home in Texas on back roads the whole way. In the Google Maps app on my iPhone, I had set my home address as the destination with “Avoid Highways” as a filter, and I never hit an interstate the whole way. I rolled through woods, farmland, and small towns for days. The best road trips are not hurried. In his book “Travels With Charlie”, John Steinbeck said, “When we get these thruways across the whole country,… it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” And the journalist Charles Kuralt said, “The little roads without numbers are the ones I have liked the best, the bumpy ones that lead over the hills toward vicinities unknown…I keep thinking I will find something wonderful just around the next bend.” This image was shot with the Sony RX-100 IV pocket camera. I have found it to be quite sufficient when I’m on non-professional sojourns, looking for something wonderful around the next bend.