Miscellany

My bicycling and photographing in the Iowa landscape started during one of my summers in Grinnell, probably in 1971. I had purchased a black Schwinn Paramount with a massively oversized, chrome-plated headlamp for twenty dollars. I started riding out of the city limits just to follow the blacktop and became utterly intoxicated by the experience of riding on country roads through the cornfields, looking not at the road in front of me, but at the “funhouse” reflection in the headlamp; a racing blur of the blue sky, clouds, and passing
fields. I thought I had a photograph of that headlamp, but perhaps not.

Three photographs to share:

Pat Farrell & his Bicycle Extraordinaire. Farrell was a stogie chomping Iowa City eccentric. He was very pleased to pose for this photograph while he was out walking his bike about thirty years ago.

Round Bales. There is no shortage of landscapes featuring round bales, but this is one of my favorite efforts, taken with a hefty 35 mm camera that I kept accessible in a handlebar bag during my mid-1970s Iowa rides.

Finally, there was a great demonstration of color intaglio printmaking in the K.U. printmaking studios today, summarized by Andy's flying, plate-wiping hands.