Tag: Brooke Townsend

The Subtleties of Astrophotography: Sorting out the noise of light and living

Don’t worry, my daughter is a concealed carry holder who routinely shoots in dangerous areas such as Over-the Rhine and in Chicago—so she knows how to handle dangerous situations.  In these following photographs I didn’t worry about her.  She did take her sister along on some of the shoots which was smart, but even though she knows the risks, she has enough experience to mitigate the impact of those risks with her knowledge of firearms.  The thing I worry about more is the legal mess a young woman would get into after having to shoot someone in self-defense.  She has the personal safety angle covered—the legal angle is the biggest concern for me.  However, I hardly ever get to see my kids anymore because they are always out doing things like this.  Professionally my oldest daughter Brooke has literally been booked for photo shoots every weekend and many week days lately and has a full schedule extending into 2019, and it keeps getting worse with bookings.  She’s become a very good photographer in a very competitive field and now she is turning up her comfort zone into the very difficult field of astrophotography.  As she shared her images obtained during the third week of July I knew she had done something very special and was headed in a direction that was putting a fine point on her professional uniqueness.   To hear from her personally click on the video below or read her article about how she captured these really phenomenal images of the Milky Way in the night sky.

http://www.brooketownsendphotography.com/journal/2017/7/18/gvgxr4wjglf1mj8ejw2sb13rkp1tl3

For people who have become victims of our horrible education system and our generally destructive trend socially to highlight stupidity as some badge of honor so not to make stupid people feel bad about themselves, the Milky Way is the galaxy that we live within through the vastness of space.  We are loaded on a spiral arm of star clusters spinning around a massive black hole which is at the center of it.  So to capture the perspective of that arm in the night sky is quite an intense feat of light, focus and natural environmental conditions.  It is not an easy thing to do so it makes me very proud to see my daughter attempting to do just that.

My kid is not yet 30-years-old and while her peers are out making fools of themselves partying it up like a bunch of idiots—she’s out doing things like this in her spare time which  is increasingly happening after long days of professional endeavor between photo shoots.  If you watched the video you can understand why I couldn’t be prouder of her—listen to her speak.  It’s like listening to a fine symphony of music to hear her utter complete sentences and using a nice vocabulary coming out of the mouth of such a nice young lady. If she weren’t my daughter I’d be extremely impressed.  However, she is my daughter and I know what she has pushed herself through to arrive at this level of professionalism—but it’s still nice to take a moment to consider how magnificent she really is as a person.   She’s a pace setter and she’s emerging as a very unique photographer in a field of professionals who have been doing it for years and are quite good.  What’s giving her the advantage isn’t just the conceptual side—it’s the conceptual application that she naturally has mastered that is doing it.  There are a lot of people in the world who know how to take a nice photograph.  There are people professionally working in Hollywood as cinematographers who would greatly struggle with the light she was working with to capture these images.  But it is how she sniffs out a photo from nowhere that is setting her apart from the crowd.  In the world of tomorrow—which is literally getting nearer with every sunrise, Brooke is the photographer of her age to record the optimism of all that’s coming.  Her playfulness at living comes out in her photographs and that is something you can’t teach.  A person either develops this trait or it’s not there revealing only mechanical applications of a heartless artist.

Just as she said in her video, there is a lot of light noise in the night sky and so it is true as well in most professional fields.  It doesn’t matter if the profession is acting, being a musician, business tycoon, or housewife; you have to work really hard to separate yourself from the noise of our society.  Everyone is living their life and hopefully they all think of themselves as great and try to be the best that they can be every day.  But as nature has it, not everyone can be the best so to put yourself above the fray, you have to work really hard and make it so that you are continuously pushing yourself.   My daughter and I have had these long talks for many years so she understands what she needs to do, but it is always nice to see her doing it.  Just as she had to drive hours out of the way to capture these photographs at just the right time of year and at the correct time of day—so too in life—you have to go further than other people and be willing to always push for that extra bit to get there to arrive at the definitions of success—because there is a lot of noise from people who try to be good at things from the rolled down windows of their cars.

I’ve showed Brooke a lot of movies over the years and she is well read and has been exposed to the finer things in life—so she has context on the details of what makes things—good.  But I was surprised to learn that her favorite movie was Interstellar recently.   That was the Christopher Nolan film that I wrote about several years ago which I drug my family to on an opening night because I thought it would have an impact on their lives.  I’m glad it did, but it still surprised me that it was her favorite movie out of all the movies she’s been exposed to.  She told me that recently in one of those rare moments where she and her husband were able to come home and have some dinner and watch a collection of political speeches about NASA, that it was Interstellar that most touched her and I just think that’s magnificent.  You might have noticed that she inserted a song from the Hans Zimmer masterpiece musical score from that film on her article for context.  When the first space stations open up to the public and hotels start popping up on the moon in a few years, I have no doubts that Brooke will be one of the first to be there.  And that quite simply makes me very proud.

Most parents are proud of their kids—and that is mostly a selfish emotion.  After all, who wants to raise children only to think they are pieces of crap?  To think otherwise would be to concede to failure.  So it’s not unusual for parents to be proud of their children mostly out of the necessity of justifying all the hard work that goes into the job.  But when a child evolves into something that is uniquely defined and hungry for living life in their own endeavors it is something to celebrate. It just so happens that in Brooke’s case she is my kid and she has given me a lot to be proud of, and she’s just getting started.  It makes me very proud that she speaks so articulately, that she is running around at 11:30 PM looking for the right light in a night sky for a perfect picture not for some magazine or other paid endeavor—but because she has a natural passion to do so.  And it makes me proud that she’s not naive enough to do these things without being heavily armed to defend herself.  The results of all those elements are showing up in her artistic endeavors and whether or not she was related to me, it’s a beautiful thing to witness.

Rich Hoffman

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The Call to Adventure: A 52 Week Project which photographs authenticiy

It was strange recently getting yet another notification from the Ohio courts of Butler County that I’ve been selected for jury duty because my name ends up in the hat so often due to my voting patterns.  I noticed while filling out the form which included my wife and kids that none of them have what you might call—“traditional” jobs.  My wife is a happy housewife, my oldest daughter a professional photographer who is very highly sought after and my youngest is an illustrator.  As I write this she, (my youngest) is doing a commission piece on the Batman villain The Joker shown below.  But none of the ladies in my family have a “traditional” job where they go to work, punch in and sell away their day for cash.  I know that’s the typical way that we measure economic success, but I’ve always been a big supporter of that type of freedom—especially for women because they tend to invest more into children, households and the emotional nurturing of a family as a whole.  When people are free of that primary concern of having to sell away their time for money, it allows them to invest in less tangible aspects of family building, so it makes me proud to see that among the women closest to me, they are all on that type of path.  They don’t have a “boss” out there they must yield to, and that is something I think is very important to family development, because it makes them the authority figures of their own lives which is why that question is asked on a jury selection form.  Attorneys obviously want to know that the people in their pool are “normal” people miserable like everyone else—so the way I answered that question likely will knock me out of the selection process.

My photographer daughter has really impressed me; she is taking her business to a new level as seen in these included videos.  She’s doing something called the 52 Weeks Project where each week she is picking a subject to photograph then she shows how she comes up with the shots and how the editing process goes on arriving at the final product.  She’s a full-time mom, but on both of these efforts she was up at dawn before her little boy woke up wanting breakfast and conducted these pictures for her project squeezing in a lot of creativity into an already packed day.  She’s been busy with booked appearances for several weeks now and coming up shortly after this publication she has a photo shoot in Chicago.  So what you see here is a very developed photographer who is expecting herself to be one of the great ones.  What she does is out of pure passion which I liken back to having the ability to be free of having a “boss” in her life who governs her away from home while on a time clock. That freedom has allowed her to expand her personal life in ways that I think are quite extraordinary—and necessary to achieve the level of art that she is shooting for.

Even her subjects are unique in the scheme of the photographic community.  Her first entry into the 52 weeks project was “A Call to Adventure” which I thought she managed to squeeze a lot out of while working in a very limited area within Cincinnati.   For those who don’t understand why a “Call to Adventure” is important it’s a classic motif most appropriately defined by Joseph Campbell in the telling of mythologies.  Usually after the first act of a movie or the introductory phase of a novel the main character is faced with a jumping off point from the static patterns of their normal life and into the promise of adventure provoked by some dynamic force. For some people the “Call to Adventure” might be as simple as a stranger approaching you from the back of a cab at a stop light while you’re walking to work in New York and asks you to help them get to the airport.  You must then decide to help or not because if you do, the static patterns of your day will be disrupted and that could have unpleasant consequences.  Then for others it might be an opportunity to fly to Cambodia to do sex traffic rescue work in some steamy jungle nightmare, but while there you make a new archaeological discovery that changes the world perspective on our knowledge of history.  The “Call to Adventure” is often how you can dramatically enrich your life for the better with vast experience, but to do so you must step away from your static patterns and allow dynamic forces into your life.

For instance, a friend of mine who worked on the Trump campaign in 2016 called me on a very busy day last week and asked me if I could appear on CNN the next day.  I had scheduled a lot of events and I really didn’t have the time.  After all I had an oversea meeting planned at the very same moment I was supposed to be on with Anderson Cooper.  So did I answer the call and go on CNN which was likely just going to do a hit piece.  As it turned out the CNN people were very gracious and were not the kind of gotcha people who Rush Limbaugh surmised when he talked about the event on his show.  I did the CNN segment along with some other peers and it got people talking and was fun to do.  I still managed to get all my work done—although it was different from my usual day and I could point to many times in my life where answering the “Call to Adventure” directly led to some very unusual experiences which ultimately enhanced my life.

I have learned over time to never get too rigid about things.  The “Call of Adventure” is something I consider so important that I often go out of my way to find it with a very laissez-faire approach to living and personal management.  I may start the day with all kinds of planned activities but by the end of it, I end up doing things I never thought I would at the start and that comes from saying yes to the “Call of Adventure.”  So it made me particularly proud to see my photographer daughter out there capturing not only dramatic photos but articulating that difficult concept artistically.  She, standing at the entrance of a forest goes back to some of the great Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages where the knights would all enter the forest of their various adventures at different points basically to establish that no two paths of adventure were the same for other people.  People must pick their own paths in life to be living truly authentic lives so here was my kid showing this rather difficult concept to explain with a simple photograph.  But as you can see from the editing process, it’s not so simple.IMG_4644

This brings me back to the importance of my girls not being encumbered with a traditional job—especially while raising their children.  If they put their children in daycare, there would be many fewer opportunities for the kids to experience the wonder of a life lived authentically, because the static schedules of daily living prohibit it—and true intellectual learning is often crippled in children as a result.  But for a mother who is there ready to answer that “Call to Adventure” at the slightest provocation a simple trip to the grocery store on a sunny summer in July might lead to a lifetime of discoveries that stay with young people forever because if the schedule of acquiring food is relaxed there may be opportunities for adventure that come up along the way—someone might need help changing a flat tire or a snake may be caught under a car in the grocery store parking lot and need help getting over to the cool grass before somebody runs it over.  You just never know—but there is tremendous value in following the “Call to Adventure” and it makes me feel very good to see that my daughter has matured to a point where she can understand it well enough to photograph.  That takes talent!

Rich Hoffman

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Photos of a Modern Gunfighter: The many benefits of a healthy passion

 

IMG_0159You might have noticed dear reader that I have some different pictures on my websites.  It has been a long time since I’ve updated any profile pictures and it was appropriate to reflect my new stage in life.  So my daughter at Brooke Townsend Photography.com set up a time to do a photo shoot with me and the result was some of these pictures that you are now seeing.  I have a complete life, I do a lot of things—I’ve been all over the world and done a lot of important tasks that people think are important.  I’ve raised children that I’m very proud of and I’ve been married to the same woman for over a quarter century.  By all accounts I am a very successful person bulging with skills and accomplishments that many would be envious of.  I don’t say all that to brag, but I work hard every day to be the best that I can be, and I have certainly done that.  So my daughter and I were talking about what kind of pictures to take of me—how to sum up my world views and essence into a simple photograph.  It’s not just my opinion, but those of her clients, my daughter has emerged on the world stage as a highly sought out photographer and her rates reflect the quality and uniqueness of her work, so I trust her professional recommendations.  She and I set out on an early spring morning recently to capture my essence that best represented this stage of my life and the result is what follows.IMG_0217

Of course I can pretty much buy whatever I want these days so it should say a lot that the possession I most love is my fast draw holster rig for my .45 Vaquero.  It is specially made and is my single most cherished item that I currently have.  With that said we focused on it for these photographs because as I said some time ago, I consider my new career to be that of a gunfighter.  Standing up for the Second Amendment, taking constitutional positions that are regarded legally as Anti-Federalist instead of Federalist—and my love of history really prevents me from any other type of career.  I like to stand up against bullies, at every level of the social spectrum—in manners of career, politics, and private life—that life as a gunfighter is really my only choice.IMG_0303

Being a gunfighter to me isn’t what it was during the period of the Old West.  It’s not about killing other people—it’s more of a sport, like being a basketball player, or a football star.  Being a gunfighter is what I enjoy most in this case within the sport of Cowboy Fast Draw which I practice at every day in some fashion or another.  A lot of men my age get heavy into golf—and I can see the appeal.  It can be magical to go to Dick’s sporting goods and pick out top-of-the-line golf clubs and spend many afternoons playing rounds of golf with the material acquisitions acquired through financial success.  But that is too stereotypical for me to really enjoy because so many people do it.  I need something that represents my unique life, and a gunfighter embodies my decisions much better—to the level I am quite excited about it.IMG_0254

My daughter did a wonderful job of capturing the light in a way that embodied how I feel about this stage.  If I look proud wearing the gun and holster rig from Mernickle it’s because I am.  For one reason or another I spent ten years planning on how I could incorporate these things in my life.  Most of the reason was that I worked too much so I didn’t have time for a hobby, or career as a gunfighter—because it takes a lot of work to do it right.  It’s the same situation with my .500 Magnum from Smith & Wesson.  I thought about those guns for a very long time and finally picked them up when I was able to make a clear decision to commit some time to caring for them as a sport.  I’m not the kind of person who just buys things to have them, then puts them on display in my home for other to look at.  I actually have to make them a part of my life.  The Mernickle holster rig is something that I plan to make a part of my daily life, so it is now a constant companion to me.  I thought about it so long that of course finally wearing it made me proud.IMG_0283 (2)

I think it’s a shame that firearms in general have such a negative stigma applied to them.  To me guns are all about great precision machining, and science—the combustible elements of lead projectiles mixed with gunpowder in closed dimensional quarters guided by human skill toward an intended target are the keys to their utilization.  To get an idea of what I’m talking about click the picture on the sidebar next to this article, the one where the gun is pointed toward the camera.  That is a reaction timer test that records your ability to identify a target and react to it within thousands of a second. A good time is anything in the .100 range, from the time you see the light to when you click the mouse button.  Mastering those types of skills don’t just help you in shooting sports, but in all aspects of life—because it forces your brain to think faster and to work more efficiently.  The difference between a time in the .300s and .100s is barely perceptible to human measurement—but by practicing, you can begin to feel it when you get a good time and when you don’t.  For instance, it might be remembered that I survived a very serious motorcycle crash last year.  It was only because of lightning reflexes that I managed to walk away with all my body parts and only a few cracked bones.  My $12,000 motorcycle was totaled, but I still made it to a very important business meeting an hour later because of how I develop myself though my hobbies—with an emphasis on speed and accuracy through working with bull whips for so many years.IMG_0248

Dedicating time toward the skills it takes to be a gunfighter has a spillover effect into all aspects of life, so I see it as a tremendous benefit.  While it might be out-of-step with mainstream thought, my gun rig with my Vaquero is my most prized worldly possession and my daughter did a good job of capturing it in our photo shoot.  I wear it all the time at home and whenever I’m in my garage, it has become mandated to always be at my side while on my property.  Whether I’m in my shop reloading ammunition, or target shooting for hours on end, my new Mernickle holster rig has become emblematic with my personality, so we are making it an important part of my life going forward—which is reflected in the pictures that will be taken of me in the future.  Guns have always been a part of my life, but they’ve always been in the background.  Now they will be very much more a part of the foreground.  As society has become more progressive, those of us who love traditional American concepts should stand up proudly on its behalf.  And that is what I intend to do with each year that emerges hereafter.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Photographic Genius at Newport on the Levee: The art of an adventurous soul

My daughter, Brooke did a marvelous thing, she is one of the featured artists who is displaying their work at the Stonebrook Winery at Newport on the Levee. They put her photography work on a wall there and she wanted to bring her mom and me down to have a look.

It wasn’t difficult. As I’ve discussed, my wife and I love Newport on the Levee. We love the Irish Pub there, and we love Mitchell’s Fish Market. In fact, one of the best dishes my wife makes is Voodoo Shrimp that the cook at Mitchell’s in Newport gave her personally. We love the view of the city from Newport on the Levee, so it is with great pleasure that I learned that my daughter was a featured artist.

Here’s her website:

http://www.brooketownsendphotography.com/

My daughter is a tenacious photographer. The world is her playground and everything is a subject of her art. In fact, she and her sister are excessively creative people who have a unique perspective on the world, and they capture those perspectives in their work.

My son-in-law, my wife, and my two daughters hit the levee in the sporadic rain as frequent lightning sizzled across the sky. This created some unusually wonderful light over the cityscape of Cincinnati while along the river was an Italian Festival complete with funhouses, Ferris wheels and Italian food of every kind mixed with the fresh rain and persistent fragrance of the Ohio River.

While walking through the winery, it was a pleasure to see patrons looking over my daughters work while sipping from their glasses of wine. I sat in a rocking chair hand-made by a retired engineer and relished it’s comfort as I watched my daughter answer questions about her work and discuss the aesthetic relationships between her nature photography and her self-portraits. Naturally her political photography is stunning, and her Washington D.C. pictures are unlike any I and many others have ever seen.

One of the greatest pleasures in life is to create something that wasn’t there before you made it and then share that with people to enjoy. Among those of us present, my youngest daughter is an excellent illustrator, web designer and photographer in her own right, of course my daughter being featured, my son-in-law a social network guru and entrepreneur. My wife has made a blanket for every child and married couple brought into our family for almost two decades, and I’ve written books, designed t-shirts, been a Wild West performer, a screen writer, an independent filmmaker, and I’ve started and ran several businesses, so among us we’ve had a lot of experience. Every endeavor doesn’t work out, in fact most don’t, but it never gets old to start a new venture and study the dazzle on customer’s faces when they experience something they never would have felt if the artist had not brought those emotions about through some form of art.

If you are looking for that special something to put on your wall that needs some life and energy injected there, go down to the Newport on the Levee Stonebrook Winery and Art Gallery and look up Brooke Townsend. She’ll be the most spectacular photography at the exhibit, so you won’t miss it, and do yourself a favor, and get yourself a gift of vision that will give back to you each time you look at it. And enjoy the journey of getting there, because Newport on the Levee is always a fun place to visit.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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