Photography Technostalgia Jon Hillenbrand, May 19, 2010October 17, 2019 You know that feeling when you look at older technology and marvel at the intricacies of their jeweled engineering? I have named this feeling technostalgia. Today, I was playing with a very old lens, an 85mm f/2 AI-S Nikkor lens which has no motors, no chips, no auto-focus, no communication with…
Photography Hooked up Jon Hillenbrand, May 18, 2010October 17, 2019 Funny how things work in the Corporate World. After 5 years of being blocked, Flickr was recently freed from the shackles of Big Brother’s proxy at my work. All it took was a single phone call from someone obviously much more important than I. Now, instead of having to bring…
Photography Evolve Jon Hillenbrand, May 13, 2010October 17, 2019 I had to shoot an annual meeting for a women’s group the other day. The client wasn’t asking for anything special, just some images to put on a newsletter, in a website or wherever they could find space. So I took the requisite pairings and crowd shots but then later concentrated…
Poetry The Red Doorway Jon Hillenbrand, May 12, 2010December 30, 2015 The red door dustily banged open temporarily scrubbing the dirty grout of the men’s conversation. She paused there in the opening, a sudden wind taking its cue to wrap around her silken form the particles of the failing daylight. Her swollen pout threw daggers at the men, her final words a
Photography The Allure of Garbage Food Jon Hillenbrand, May 8, 2010October 17, 2019 Some of you will simply not be with me during this post. But today I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and she mentioned that she was going into a Costco to buy some food in good ol’ American portions. So I excitedly asked her to…
Photography Fortune’s Fool Jon Hillenbrand, May 4, 2010October 17, 2019 Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, but at the end of the work day today, the cleaning woman showed up and started speaking with such prophetic wisdom that I found myself listening intently to every sentence in her half-Haitian-half-English tongue. She’s just like an oracle in the old…
Photography The Two Year Time Lapse Jon Hillenbrand, April 25, 2010October 17, 2019 The BBC, inspired by such films as Baraka, has brought a revolution to mainstream documentary filmmaking, specifically Planet Earth and now Life. Many of the mind-blowing shots are done on location, but several would be impossible to do out in the randomness of the great outdoors. The below behind-the-scenes video demonstrates…
Photography New Look Jon Hillenbrand, April 25, 2010October 17, 2019 I’m giving a new look to my blog. The photos will be larger, EXIF data like shutter speed, f/stop, ISO and camera type will be posted in the left column and links to other blog entries are now at the bottom of each page. Background and text colors of the blog will…
Poetry The Perils of an Open Mind Jon Hillenbrand, April 23, 2010December 30, 2015 Absolutes of ideology are succulent butter to people who are in the checklist stage of preparing to sail with Greenpeace, pasting enlarged dead baby photos to poster boards, annoying their coworkers into voting for someone or screaming about the dangers of running with scissors.
Photography Leadworks of Time Jon Hillenbrand, April 17, 2010October 17, 2019 Tonight I had dinner with someone who asked me about having a backup plan if the whole photography thing didn’t work out. I thought for a while and responded that most of my career has been spent in the less-affluent side of things due to the fact that I never…
Poetry The Direction Jon Hillenbrand, April 4, 2010December 30, 2015 Morality is a giant flock of birds, every one joining and leaving as necessary to fulfill their immediate ambitions, the overall shape and direction coming from the collective emergence of the many. There are those who would enliven the flock and those who would laugh at its destruction. Today I…
Photography Easter Bunny Kills 9. Escapes. Jon Hillenbrand, April 3, 2010October 17, 2019 After an exhaustive five-minute Google search on egg-related death statistics in America and coming up with almost no usable results, I stumbled across a very interesting fact about the Black Widow Spider. As some of you may already know, the Black Widow Spider is named for her truly confusing behavior of killing…
Photography Unfettered Brain Jon Hillenbrand, April 2, 2010October 17, 2019 Tonight as my sister, niece and I looked out from the roof-top deck at the rising dusk, my niece said, “Good morning, night.” Even though she is three, I am inspired by her sideways approach to everyday things. One day, after I sang the phrase, “too many monkeys,” during a…
Photography Flag Day Jon Hillenbrand, March 31, 2010October 17, 2019 A good photo is knowing where to stand. – Ansel Adams As someone who is often asked for advice on photography, I usually tuck this quote in right after giving an overview of the bucket analogy, three-point lighting and the two-thirds rule. To me, it all comes down to this: knowing where to stand. …
Photography Techo-f****d Jon Hillenbrand, March 31, 2010October 17, 2019 I just wrote a whole blog post with tags and photos while laying here in bed typing with my thumbs into my “smartphone”. Amazing how far technology has taken us. But after taking the photo, the application crashed erasing the whole post and ruining the whole mystique.