Emil & Ene's

There is well-known Denver restaurant that is part of the city's heritage, a converted farmhouse built off a country road within a copse of cottonwood trees suggesting a nearby water supply, a creek or a pond. Turning off Smith Road onto the property the house in the back among trees something feels wrong like you are driving and parking on somebody's front lawn.

Inside, you pass through the newest addition accommodating increased business. Sort of mobile home materials and furnishings. I never did care for the space and eagerly pass through. There were previous additions, as are done on farm houses that grow organically segment by segment, thus a disjointed nature to different areas. The menu and meals are exceedingly simple and exceedingly good. Great steaks. Great straight up simple iceberg lettuce salad with truly great blu cheese dressing. Simple and reliably good.

I've been out there dozens of times. It really is like visiting somebody's house. Somebody who lives on a farm. You see animals sometimes. Cows. Deer, elk, and the like. Birds.



The place closed early 2014 and there went history.

Now I'm sad all over again.

Dadgumit. The thing is, it forces the realization the people I went there with dozens of times are dead too. So many are. It is not so unnatural, I guess, all my acquaintances were always my senior and often by decades so it is not so odd that many of them passed, but they are gone now and so is the restaurant. When I mentioned this to two people I know who went out there to Emiline's probably more than I, they were saddened too. They have the same realization. The place is gone and so are the people we shared the place.

Some landmark restaurant will close down, or landmark wannabes, and nobody much cares, say, like Baby Doe's with its location on a slope off an exit of I-25 and its touristy marketing and its heavy-handed theme throughout. Restaurants come and go but Emilene's was the real deal, the authentic meal, the real house that grew with business and became part of Denver's real history, and  Emilene's was forever. It was there before we were born, and poof, gone. Just like that.

It was supposed to outlive us all.

And now I notice people are going to one of my pages like crazy. Every week "emilene's" search is in the top five.

The page has never been so popular.

This segment today does not really show it, but the views are coming from all over the world, not even mostly the U.S., and often in odd clusters. 

When I checked again to see what page of mine are you looking at, it made me think, boy, are my friends ever patient with me and my camera. So far, no one has complained. I mostly shoot photos from where I sit. 

Joe and I went out there that night and I am glad that we did. We would be among its last visitors.

I am usually having so much fun conversing I forget to photograph the food. Sometimes not realizing until it is gone. So I photograph an empty plate or a partial one. Dutch still life painters did that all the time, depicting sumptuously spread table of partial meals or a meal interrupted. I verbalize what I am thinking as a photographer. Lay it all out there conversationally from the point of view of student. To my surprise, my interlocutor is actually interested in the subject and I do have my own way of conceptualizing and talking about technical things. So I talk about what lens I am using and why and how their full potential is wasted by using them on my camera and why, what ISO I have chosen and why and how far that can go on this camera, what light challenges are present, how wide the aperture and how fast the shutter, the special abilities of the lens and the abilities of the camera, what I am seeing in the viewfinder in terms of light sources and effects, and how after all that, crap shots are corrected in Photoshop. 

Then get off it.

Because pretty much everybody is interested in photography to some degree or another. One's amateur insights are valuable. Because everybody's phone is a camera now. People notice that others are better at getting great shots than they are themselves and they wonder what it is they are not doing. 

They do not seem to mind when you gently steer them from the tragedy of portrait to the glory of landscape by the persuasion that you get a lot more.

Actually, I cannot believe how patient people are and how interested they are in the technical aspects of photography coming from a student. 

There's always sacrifices. Given a poor or confused light situation something's gotta give. Ideally, for best finest focus you'd want a lot of light to penetrate a stack of lenses, pinpoint aperture, fast shutter, and low ISO. The higher the ISO then the grainier and noisier the photo, but the ISO can go very high indeed. The wider the aperture the more light that can enter and the depth of field becomes quite shallow, thin as a sheet of paper. The shutter speed can be slowed but the slightest movement creates blur. 

Framing a shot involves moving around a subject and observing what the light is doing, how shadows fall and create their own composition, how the frame is filled, what gets left out, what is happening in the corners, how light creeps around edges and reflects off surfaces and flows through materials. Photographing while seated from one spot like this forfeits exploration of the subject, it gives up control.