This picture reminds me of a design exercise involving order and chaos that my graduate adviser taught to art students at Northwestern. It involves containing as much disorder as you can create within a very restrictive grid. There's a tension that exists in that balance both visually and creatively. Photography is interesting in this regard, because it is so much about that one moment of solidifying shapes and signs and light into a rectangle. But it's also about manipulating that rectangle - sometimes tortuously, changing crops and tones and color balance. I'm just glad that part is in a computer for me now - though I do miss how printed images emerge from the paper like magic.

Exploratorium

The Exploratorium is one of my favorite places to photograph. The mix of technology and old architecture, kids and old folks -- where it seems everything old, really is, new again. I like to take the kids there and watch them rediscover new things in the exhibits. Seeing that magic of learning through their eyes is a wonderful and exciting thing.

The building itself is such an incongruous place. Turn of the (20th) century girder, shell construction - like an old airplane hanger, salvaged statues, all in huge bays big enough to house two floors of exhibits all in the open. And the light is a fantastic mix of filtered natural light and exhibition lighting.

In my eye

I think it's fascinating when I find an image to be captivating, but no one else seems to. This one was taken on a walk around the town where I live. There was something in the tones and the color, and in the stark sunlight on the white that seemed to play with the typical hazy nostalgia of places like this. No one seems very interested in it though.