September 1972 on the Music Charts

 Moving into the last third of 1973, the continuing series of hits -of-the-month, moving to September1972.  Fifty years ago (Yikes!)

There were 5 weeks in September of 1972, and there were 60 songs that spent time in the Top 40.  That's a tick up from the past couple of months, for what it's worth. And over those 5 weeks, there were 3 songs that topped the charts: Gilbert O'Sullivan's  "Alone Again, Naturally" rebounded to #1, after ending August with a week at #2.   It spent 6 weeks total at the top1.  matching Roberta Flack and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" which was #1 for 6 consecutive weeks in April and May.  Three Dog Night took over the #1 spot for 1 week, with "Black And White", and "Baby Don't Get Hooked On Me" by Mac Davis topped the last 2 weeks.

Here's the top 10 songs (11 with a tie) of the month, ranked by average chart position over the 5 weeks of the month. 

• Baby Don't Get Hooked On Me - Mac Davis - 2.8
• Black And White - Three Dog Night - 5.6
• Alone Again (Naturally) - Gilbert O'Sullivan - 5.6
• Back Stabbers - The O'Jays - 5.8
• Saturday In The Park - Chicago - 7
• Go All The Way - Raspberries - 12.6
• Rock And Roll Part 2 - Gary Glitter - 12.6
• Honkey Cat - Elton John - 14
• Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress) - The Hollies - 14.2
• Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) - Looking Glass - 14.6

Very solid Top 10 this month, I have 9 of the 10 in my collection.

Meanwhile, Twenty-Four (24) songs made their Top 40 debut. Here they are, ranked by debut chart position:

• My Ding-A-Ling - Chuck Berry - 31
• Everybody Plays The Fool - The Main Ingredient - 32
• Ben - Michael Jackson - 32
• Play Me - Neil Diamond - 33
• Use me - Bill Withers - 33
• Garden Party - Rick Nelson And The Stone Canyon Band - 33
• Tight Rope - Leon Russell - 34
• Thunder And Lightnin - Chi Coltrane - 34
• Speak To The Sky - Rick Springfield - 35
• Witchy Woman - Eagles - 35
• The City Of New Orleans - Arlo Guthrie - 36
• Freddie's Dead (Theme From "Superfly") - Curtis Mayfield - 36
• Get On The Good Foot-Part 1 - James Brown - 37
• Starting All Over Again - Mel And Tim - 37
• Listen To The Music - The Doobie Brothers - 37
• If I Could Reach You - The 5th Dimension - 37
• Why/Lonely Boy - Donny Osmond - 38
• If You Leave Me Tonight I'll Cry - Jerry Wallace - 38
• Don't Ever Be Lonely - Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose - 38
• Nights In White Satin - The Moody Blues - 39
• You Wear It Well - Rod Stewart - 39
• Burning Love - Elvis Presley - 40
• Easy Livin' - Uriah Heep - 40
• Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues - Danny O'Keefe - 40

The Museum Of Me - 001

 We spent some time this weekend cleaning the basement, trying hard to be ruthless and purge decades of accumulation.  One of the hazards of living in one house for 33 years, I suppose

Anyway, I came across some old Major Matt Mason toys.  Major Matt Mason was a toy linein the late 60's, smallish "action figures" (don't say dolls!) with a space theme.  And my brother and I had pretty big collections.  Many years ago, when cleaning out my parents' house we found all the old "MMM" stuff, and sold most of it on eBay (back when eBay was fun!).  Some of it drew pretty big dollars,

Anyway, in this weekend's cleaning I found a few pieces that didn't get sold back then, and have been in our basement for probably 20 years.  Here's some photos which I sent to my brother.  None of this is museum quality, a;; of it was well used by my 7 or 8 year old self.Here's the pics, a glimpse into my youthL

Major Matt Mason, and his Jetpack

The Astro-Trac

Some sort of vehicle, couldn't find a name

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"Museum Of Me" is a cool concept, borrowed from a song by Savory Flakes.  Check 'em out on Bandcamp!

BetterPhoto Winners, July 2022

 Well...  no winners this month.  I've had a good run, 5 month in a row with 2nd place winners.  I have no gripes, I tend to struggle in July (and August)., and have been struggling with my photo-mojo recently.  It'll came around, though.

I did have 3x photo make "Finalist", shown below:

Check out the Better Photo winners here:

Grass growing on a fallen tree

 

Almost, but not quite...  I was feeling pretty good about this one when I spapped the shutter...  But once I pulled it up on the computer, it just didn't quite make it.  Oh, I think it;s OK, but just OK.  O think the muck in the water distracts from the scene, it would've been better if the water was clear.  But you take what you're given and try to make the most of it.

There's acyually quite a lot of post processing here, more than I'd normally use.  The last but was sort of happenstance.  I had processed, and saved the image, and was posting to Instagram.  I was resetting for 1:1 sizing (in instagram), and mis-clicked 16:9 ratio.  And I decided I liked that a lot better.  So I went back to Photoshop (Elements) and re-cropped to 16:9.  

Anywat, what do YOU think?  Is it garbage, a secret masterpiece, or just "meh"?  Let me know in the comments.

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And, here's the original straight Out Of Camera (SOOC) version.

Spam Spam Spam Spam

 Every once in a while, I check my spam folders to make sure nothing got misplaced.  It's been ages since I've seen that happen, but still easy enough to check.

Lately, I've noticed an uptick in the good-old Nigerian scam.  With a 2022 twist:  Now they've upgraded from a Nigerian Prince to a woman, a victim of the "Russian civil unrest in Ukraine ",,,,  The wife of a contractor.  Sadly, the poor woman has "already lost [her] family, [her] husband, son and daughter to the cold hands of death"....  Fortunately, her husband transferred a "reasonable" amount of funds to a Security Company in France" 

Well, since life in Ukraine is so risky these days, this woman has decided to entrust me, a random stranger, with the care and custody of the funds for investment purposes in my country!  A mere 8.5M euros. She adds "I know that a million words would not make you help me,nor would a million tears but I want you to bear in mind that I'm sending you a strong message as a widow which I have come to plead with you to please help me in this situation."

I will say that the spelling and grammer are much better than the old Nigerian scams used to be. 

It is an interesting twist that there is no actual mention of what's in it for me.  Just a request that I claim the funds "as a good business partner" to her late husband and I provide "care and custody" of them.  Maybe the scam has determined that people are catching on to the reality that nobody is just going to give a fortune to a random stranger?  I guess I could reply and see what my cut of the 8.5 Million would be.....   But that would be stupid, since it is a transparent scam.

The sad thing is they send out millions of these queries, and it only takes a handful of people to fall for it to be worth their time.  Maybe I'll buy a couple of lottery tickets, at least I know how much I'l lose, and there is an actually chance (miniscule, but >0) I might win a few bucks.

Solitude

 A little bit of a throwback, and another before-and-after.  2 years ago this month, my wife and I tool a long weekend trip to Michigan, saw some kighthouses, and spent a day at Mackinac Island.  There;s several posts in the archives, seee them here.

Anyway, I was digging around on the iPad today, and found this photo from that trip.  It never got processed at the time, becasue it didn't quite "click".  Today, I decided that a rather dramatic crop might be a good start to what I felt.  So I pulled the image up in smapseed, and played around.  I'm pretty pleased with the inal result:

This is a humble little iPhone photo, not sure why I don't have a version from my Fujifilm, but I don't.

So, here's the sequence:  I leveled it a little, cropped it square, and also cropped tighter to eliminate most of the trees in the foreground.  A couple of tweaks to brightness / contrast to correct the camera's auto-exposure.  Then some heavy lifting that I don't normally do:I used the healing tool to remove the last bit of the trees, and a freighter that was barely visable in the (far off) center.  Adding a little spot-contrast to the kayaks.  And lastly, dropped the saturation a bit.  And that;s what I posted to instagram.  

I sent it to the "real" computer this evening, resized it to 1024 px / side, and did a little Levels tweak to true up the exposure on a big screen, and posted to betterphoto and 365project.

This is a LOT more processing than I normally do, but I'm pretty happy with the end result.  And I had funpulling it together, and that's really the point of it all.

Below is the original, Straight-From-Camera for comparison,

August 1972 on the Music Charts

   Continuing the series of hits -of-the-month, moving to August1972.  Fifty years ago (Yikes!)

There were 4 weeks in August of 1972, and there were 49 songs that spent time in the Top 40.  That's a fewer than the past couple of months, for what it's worth. And over those 4 weeks, there were only 2 songs that topped the charts: Gilbert O'Sullivan's  "Alone Again, Naturally" carried over from the last week of July, and spent another 3 weeks at number 1.  Pretty impressive, but still lags Roberta Flack and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" which was #1 for 6 consecutive weeks in April and May.  "Brandy (You're A Fine Girl)" by Looking Glass took over the top spot for the last week of August.

Here's the top 10 songs (11 with a tie) of the month, ranked by average chart position over the 4 weeks of the month. 

• Alone Again (Naturally) - Gilbert O'Sullivan - 1.25
• Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) - Looking Glass - 1.75
• (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want To Be Right - Luther Ingram - 4
• Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress) - The Hollies - 5.25
• Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast - Wayne Newton - 7.25
• I'm Still In Love With You - Al Green - 7.75
• Where Is The Love - Roberta Flack - 9
• Coconut - Nilsson - 10
• Hold Your Head Up - Argent - 12.75
• Goodbye To Love - Carpenters - 12.75
• The Happiest Girl In The Whole U.S.A - Donna Fargo - 12.75

kind of typical 1972, lots of brilliant songs, and a few that are forgotten for a reason...

Meanwhile, Eighteen (18) songs made their Top 40 debut. And time there's some great stuff headed up the charts that will be making an impact in next month:

• Black And White - Three Dog Night - 23
• Rock And Roll Part 2 - Gary Glitter - 34
• Baby Don't Get Hooked On Me - Mac Davis - 35
• When You Say Love - Sonny and Cher - 36
• Pop That Thang - The Isley Brothers - 36
• You're Still A Young Man - Tower Of Power - 36
• Back Stabbers - The O'Jays - 37
• Power Of Love - Joe Simon - 37
• Run To Me - Bee Gees - 37
• Join Together - The Who - 38
• The Guitar Man - Bread - 39
• Sweet Inspiration - Barbra Streisand - 39
• Popcorn - Hot Butter - 39
• This World - The Staple Singers - 39
• Beautiful Sunday - Daniel Boone - 40
• Saturday In The Park - Chicago - 40
• Go All The Way - Raspberries - 40
• Honkey Cat - Elton John - 40

Pierre's Markette

 Pierre's Markette, The photo on Google Streetview (dated 2016) shows the name on the facade, and it seemed to be open.  But it's gone now..

I presume the name is a hat-tip to nearby Pere Marquette State Park (and Lodge)

 This was taken just a 3 minutes after sunset (per Google), and shot using one of the B&W  film modes in my Fujifilm X-T3.  I did a little crop, and then some postprocessing in Photoshop Elements, and Topaz Studio's B&W filter.   I've found that I like the dynamic adjustment in Topaz's plug ins, but they've largely been discontinued as the company is focusing on AI products.  I understand, but still makes me sad.  Looks like B&W was discontinued in late 2020. This is the kind of thing that keeps me limping along with my outdated computer:  the outdated software that does exactly what I want, and that I've invested countless hours learning to do exactly what I want...

Oh well..,  The straight from camera version is nelow if you want to compare. 

Here's a screen grab from streetview, dated September 2016:

Here's SOOC version:

Bridges, Cuyahoga River, Cleveland - BetterPhoto 2nd Place Winner, June 2022

 

BetterPhoto announced the winners of their June 2022 contest yesterday (7/31) and I managed a 2nd place.  I uploaded 20 images to BP in June, and 18 of them received some recognition:  11x Editors Pick, 2x Staff Favorite, 4x Finalists, 1x Second Place.  Hard to complain about that!  

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I spent a few days in Cleveland in June, and managed a day to wander around the Edgewater Park / Windy Park area.  This is looking up the Cuyahoga River from the east edge of Windy park.  I really liked the lines and angles of the bridges, and was able to catch the kayakers as they passed under the train bridge.

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Camera: Fujifilm X-T3 Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500) Aperture: f/11.0 ISO Speed: 400 Focal Length: 55 mm

Sunflowers Near Sunset

 Sunflowers Near Sunset

Columbia Bottom Conservation Area plants fields of sunflowers, which are very popular.. This photo was taken about 1 hr before sunset, the crowds were really rolling in, I had a little challenge getting an angle without people posing amongst the flowers!

I did a square crop of the same image for Instagram, which do you prefer?

There's actually a fair bit of digital darkroom here, the lighting was pretty challenging.  In a perfect world I'd've had a tripod, and done separate exposures for the flowers and the sky.  Another option would've been a graduated neutral density filter.  But I selected an exposure that split the difference, then adjusted both in photoshop,  Along with some other "typical" tweaks.

Here's the original, straight from camera shot:

July 1972 on the Music Charts

   Continuing the series of hits -of-the-month, moving to July 1972.  Fifty years ago (Yikes!)

There were 5 weeks in July of 1972, and there were 59 songs that spent time in the Top 40.  That's a fewer than June, despite the extra week.  And over those 5 weeks, there were 3 songs topped the charts: Neil Diamond's "Song Sung Blue", followed by Bll Withers' "Lean On Me", which held #1 for 3 weeks.  The month was closed out with Gilbert O'Sullivan's  "Alone Again, Naturally" at number one.

Here's the top 10 songs of the month, ranked by average chart position over the 4 weeks of the month. 

• The Candy Man - Sammy Davis, Jr. - 1.75
• I'll Take You There - The Staple Singers - 2.5
• Oh Girl - The Chi-lites - 4.5
• Song Sung Blue - Neil Diamond - 5.25
• Nice To Be With You - Gallery - 5.75
• Sylvia's Mother - Dr. Hook And The Medicine Show - 7.5
• Outa-Space - Billy Preston - 8.75
• (Last Night) I Didn't Get To Sleep At All - The 5th Dimension - 9.25
• The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - Roberta Flack - 9.75
• Morning Has Broken - Cat Stevens - 11

Another so-so week at the top, but lots of good stuff bubbling up.

Meanwhile, Twenty-Two (22) made their Top 40 debut. And time there's some great stuff headed up the charts that will be making an impact in next month:

• Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) - Looking Glass - 27
• I'm Still In Love With You - Al Green - 30
• You Don't Mess Around With Jim - Jim Croce - 31
• Happy - The Rolling Stones - 31
• Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress) - The Hollies - 33
• Alone Again (Naturally) - Gilbert O'Sullivan - 34
• Coconut - Nilsson - 34
• Baby Let Me Take You (In My Arms) - Detroit Emeralds - 34
• The Happiest Girl In The Whole U.S.A. - Donna Fargo - 35
• Sealed With A Kiss - Bobby Vinton - 36
• Breaking Up Is Hard To Do - The Partridge Family - 36
• Gone - Joey Heatherton - 37
• Small Beginnings - Flash - 37
• Mary Had A Little Lamb - Wings - 38
• Goodbye To Love - Carpenters - 38
• Lookin' Through The Windows - Jackson 5 - 38
• People Make The World Go Round - The Stylistics - 39
• The Runway - The Grass Roots - 39
• Motorcycle Mama - Sailcat - 39
• Hold Her Tight - The Osmonds - 39
• We're Free - Beverly Bremers - 40
• Hold Your Head Up - Argent - 40

Film!

 Over the past month or so, I've shot a roll of Tri-X (black and white) on my 1980's vintage Nikon FM-2. I just received the digital files this evening. Clearly, I'm out of practice in the old ways, quite a few misses in exposure and focus. But there will be a few keepers. I quite like this one. Only slight post-processing, a tweak of levels and a minor crop.

I'll probably shot some more, but most likely color. It was a little hard to find a place to develop B&W.

Sailcat - Motorcycle Mama

 Anybody remember this song? Motorcycle Mama by Sailcat... The band and song name seemed familiar, but I couldn't quite remember. I pulled it up on YouTube and I kind of remember... Entered the Top 40 (at #39) this week in 1972, on it's way to an eventual peak at #12.

Sailcat - Motorcycle mama

Meanwhile, what other songs about motorcycles? There must be hundreds. Here's a couple, leave your thoughts in comments!

• Motorcycle Mama - Neil Young
• The Motorcycle Song - Arlo Guthrie

Old Barn, Ohio.

 

Old barn, Before and after. Or perhaps after and before. First picture is after tweaking, second is the original straight-out-of-camera. An oldie, from March, 2021. Taken along a back road, not far from Luray, OH. This has been festering on my hard drive, I decided to pull it onto the iPad and see what I could do with Snapseed ap. I’m satisfied. 

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And for comparison, the straight Out Of Camera version :

Butterweed in the Woods - BetterPhoto 2nd Place Winner, May 2022

 

BetterPhoto announced the winners of their May 2022 contest yesterday (5/1) and I managed a 2nd place.  I only uploaded 15 images to BP in May, and 13 of them received some recognition:  8x Editors Pick, 2x Staff Favorite, 2x Finalists, 1x Second Place.  Hard to complain about that!  

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Columbia Bottom Conservation Area is one of the local spots I frequent for photos. Located at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, but across the Missouri from the actual point of the confluence (which is in Edward "Ted" and Pat Jones-Confluence Point State Park). The park is a bit up these days, several of the roads and trails were damaged in floods a few years ago, and haven't been restored. Including the road to the actual confluence, which is about 1 mile from the turn-off.. On this day, I decided to walk down the closed road, just to explore. I didn't get far before finding a scoured out area that was too wet / muddy to walk though, and too overgrown to edge around. So I headed aff the road along an open swath and came to this area where the trees were a bit thinner and the undergrowth was exploding with bright yellow butterweed. A nice bit of happenstance.

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Camera: Fujifilm X-T3 Exposure: 1/500th sec Aperture: f/5.0 ISO Speed: 400 Focal Length: 48.4 mm (72.6mm equivalent) When I took this, I was planning the full ETSOOI treatment (edit the stuffing out of it). But when I pulled it up in digital darkroom, I decided NOT to to go the heavily affected route. This is just "normal" tweaks.