Photography and Companionship

Just finished reading this blog posting by a friend (I hope that’s not too strong a word Mike). It’s a great story about his adventures with his (best) mate while out taking photographs in fields and such near his home.

He and his mates adventures in photography are often the subject of postings. Over the time I’ve read them I’ve realized how wonderful they sound. They very much remind me of the time I spent with my best mate, George, when we would head out and about. Granted, we didn’t share a thing for photography so that wasn’t a focal point for us, but the comradeship is the same. I miss George. If only he would move here…

Anyway…

I confess to being jealous. I want a friend with whom to run amok and do photography things. Even artsy things would be okay (as we know Mike enjoys such). Alas, I haven’t had much luck in the manner of making friends here in Ohio. Perhaps it is because one of the more typical manners by which we meet and make friends is through work. When you’re unemployed those opportunities do not occur. All I know is that I find myself smiling in a knowing way when I read the tales of Mike and mate. They so remind me of great times with my best friend, sans the camera of course.

Dreaming About Photography

Sound asleep last night while the brain went on its usual tour of the weird and wild via dreaming. I’m walking through what may be described as a long hanger with glass on either side. Apparently I was preparing to board a plane and this hanger-like structure was like a terminal.

While walking along with the other prospective passengers I noticed how interesting the building next door looked. There were openings that had been covered in some sort of yellow coverings, which contrasted nicely with the falling rain, grey skies and general mood of matters.

Thinking this would make a great photo opportunity I put down my bags and started rummaging around for my camera. The large bay door at the end of this hanger began to open and I knew my chance had arrived. I finally find my camera only to discover that it’s not my camera. It’s my bag, but not my camera. As a matter of fact it doesn’t look like any camera I’ve ever seen before and I have no idea how to operate it (not unlike real life with my Canon 40D!).

I start walking out onto the tarmac in the rain while trying to figure out any of the controls on the camera so that I might fire off at least one shot. As my attention is upon the camera I haven’t noticed that my brain has changed she scene until I look up after being frustrated by the camera. Now the scene is of a mountainous park, like a state or national park, with tourists buzzing around snapping pictures and looking at the flora and fauna.

Of course, being a dream, I think nothing of this complete change in scenery and location and return my attention to the overly frustrating camera of death.

I don’t know if I ever figured it out. And I still don’t know if or what it all means. Typical.

Lights! Camera! Shit!

Never let it be said bad timing isn’t my friend…because it is.

While driving this morning on an errand, I was taken aback by how lovely were the reflections of the recently installed street lamps, as well as the red lights of the traffic signals, upon the rain-slicked road as it stretched out before me.

As I came closer to the intersection I decided the view was too much to pass up without breaking out the always-at-the-ready Canon Rebel XTi/400D. I turned round the car, drove back about a half-mile, turned back around and pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. I pulled the camera bag up to the front street, broke out the camera and began fiddling with the settings to make the most of this cloudy and raining morning.

ISO? 400. White balance? Cloudy. Auto-focus? On. Focus point(s)? All. Aperture? 7.1. Ready!

I checked my mirrors for vehicles coming up behind me and with the all-clear noted I vacated my vehicle and found myself standing in the gently falling rain. About to venture into the oft busy two lane road (so that I might have a nicely centered shot) I look in the direction of the beautifully reflected lights when click:

The street lamps cycled off.

Mutherfu….

I can only imagine how bizarre I must have appeared to those folks driving by as I stood next to my car, facing the direction of the formerly lovely scene, yelling obscenities at the lights.

Really? Has It Been A Month?

Where does the time go, eh?

But I guess it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that I haven’t been posting to this blog about photography when I haven’t really been taking pictures. But that isn’t completely true. I actually have a pretty large catalogue of unprocessed/edited photos sitting on my computer. I have the intent to boot-up the machine and sit down and go through them all, etc., but I just don’t seem to make it to the chair. I wish I understood why the trepidation. But for now I refuse to get too worked up about it. I figure that like many of my creative moments in life it will come to me when it comes to me and there is no point in pushing it upon myself.

That or I’m simply a lazy sod.

I think I’ll go with lazy sod.

But all this laziness doesn’t mean I haven’t been something of a shutter bug. Please note:

I have found myself making no small use of my somewhat recently acquired iPhone and its camera. My previous mobile blowers also had cameras, but neither (the Motorola RAZR and Palm Centro) were of any particular use for taking pictures that one might wish to share in a forum such as the Internet. But the iPhone does a pretty reasonable job all things considered. And there is a wealth of iPhone apps dedicated to photo editing and I have downloaded a fistful and make good use of each on almost a daily basis. The above picture was captured with the iPhone while I was hiking and then edited using an app named Camera Bag.

A worthwhile moment to mention here, on WordPress, is that I both entered a local photography contest and walked away with second place within the category I entered. I haven’t entered an actual contest until this one popped up so I’m quite surprised and excited that I actually won something! The contest was via Woodland Cemetery in Dayton and winners were announced last weekend on the 11th. I had entered this picture:

It is actually a Photoshop Elements processed picture I took back in February (I think). It’s one of the first pictures I ever fiddled with in Elements, but oddly enough and as much as I liked it, I never posted it to Flickr. Probably part of being a lazy sod, you know? But still….second place. Awesome.

Here is a picture of me, looking rather rumbled and weird, next to my winning entry:

After the winners were announced it became known to me that the cemetery was offering one of those walk-about type things where a guided tour is provided of some of the more important or interesting characters buried within the cemetery. At each of the graves of said folks there is an actor/actress who talks about the person as if they were the dearly deceased. Since I was already there I opted to stick around and take the tour, which lasted about two hours. During this time I snapped some pics with my handy Canon Rebel/400, but also clicked away here and there with the iPhone, thus obtaining this picture:

It is actually a crop of the original (I removed the others on the tour) and I know…I know…he really should be in the left of the picture for a better sense of balance, but this was all done on the fly and from within the crowd of folks. The wasn’t a whole lot of time for getting the best angle, etc. so I’m lucky to have what I have. I made use of the iPhone app Photogene to perform the crop and conversion to something akin to sepia. I’m pleased enough with the results considering all things.

Lastly, the other day I was going through some pictures my cousin had uploaded to Facebook of a day trip she and her son took to some park near where they live. Some of the pictures were taken around the shoreline of a small lake and included lily pads. Lily pads always remind me of Monet, which always reminds me of the work of Impressionists. Wheels slowing clicking I emailed my cousin and asked for a full-sized copy of a particular picture, which included my nephew on a dock, laying, while playing with some of the lily pads in the water. Opened in Photoshop Elements (cuz I don’t have the grown-up version of Photoshop) I played around with it all morning to create an Impressionistic version of the image with the end result being thus:

I actually created two versions and I still haven’t decided which one I prefer, but it was a somewhat fun way to spend a few hours this morning. I say “somewhat fun” because I really didn’t obtain quite the result for which I was looking. Both versions are close, but not quite there and I eventually grew both tired and a bit aggravated as my hoped-for results were alluding me. This might explain why I don’t particularly care to do this sort of photo editing, you know?

Away, but just for a bit…

I’m down in Florida visiting my parents and helping celebrate my father’s 70th birthday.

70.

Where does the time go?

For that matter, the daughter turned 17.

Where did that time go as well?

But it’s good that I’m here and not just because I get to see the ‘rents, but because some of the tech support I provide to their burgeoning consumer electronics needs to be hands-on and cannot be done via the telephone or remote desktop like applications. For instance:

Replaced the 512MB of RAM in the desktop PC I built for my father five years ago with 2GB of Corsair memory. I then installed an additional hard drive of 500GB (Western Digital – my preferred hard drive company) to supplement the 120GB already there. Pictures really do begin to take up space, don’t they.

My mother complained that her laptop is rather pokey and she wasn’t kidding. Painfully slow is the only description for her middle-of-the-road HP dv6000. Certainly the AMD Sempron 1.8GHz chip is part of the problem, but the real culprit was the pitiful 512MB of DDR2 PC2-5300 667MHz SODIMM memory. Between the Operating System, the anti-virus suite and the usual things running in the background (and I turned off everything that absolutely doesn’t need to be running) there was only about 96MB of RAM left to run the web browser or Windows Media Player or her e-mail application, etc. Like I already said: pitiful.

So I went out today and purchased 2GB of very, very lovely Corsair laptop memory and installed such without fuss. The improvement in responsiveness on her laptop is amazing. It actually feels like a useful device and not like the lumbering device it was just a few short hours ago.

I know…not very photography-oriented, but it is what’s been happening and it is what I’m reporting and you, my humble readers, should be happy!

Really….I’m trying my best. No. Really.

Having been on something akin to a sabbatical for many, many weeks, I have been, of late, attempting to get back into the full swing of life that is related to photography.

This means not only taking pictures, which I have done a bit of, but catching up on sites such as WordPress and Flickr. It also entails the knowledge that I have loads of pictures sitting upon my hard drive, anxiously awaiting my deft touch at processing.

Ahem.

Besides feeling the simple urge to get away from photography a bit, I have also delved into other matters, which have been keeping me both busy and occupied. Part of the current problem of catching up with photography-stuff is that I’m not letting go of the new things to which I have been engaged. Thus time becomes even more fleeting and is a rather large impediment to any sense of accomplishing tasks both necessary and desired each day.

But I promise, like a holy oath, that I’m working on catching up with everyone’s WordPress and Flickr site as well as moving forward to working on my own photographs and photography blogs. Thus far I’ve found it easier to play catch up with everyone else’s work than on my own. I’m still feeling something of a sensation to push away from the computer whenever I contemplate opening up my folders and going through my own work.

I cannot tell if this is just me reacting to a perceived lack of accomplishment in my photography or if it is something more sinister. No. That isn’t right. There isn’t anything more sinister afoot. You know…..upon reflection (and I’ve spent a fair amount of time reflecting on my photography while not actually doing any photography) I might be willing to concede that there is something of a crisis in faith going on here, which is really quite pathetic.

A number of folks I follow around WordPress and Flickr create fantastic images. Images I very much enjoy and hope that perhaps one day I’ll be able to create on my own. But the impediment to this creativity is myself. As I’ve lamented previously, I’m not a particularly creative person. So, if I know this fact about myself in advance, why should I feel anxious that I’m not creating pictures that are as interesting, etc. as those done by others, who are clearly gifted with creativity?

It would be like me envying Michael Jordan his basketball skills or Thierry Henry his football skills when I’m completely rubbish at sport because I’m hopelessly uncoordinated. And I don’t envy them their skills. But maybe that is because I haven’t ever had an interest in being a sports star, where I have thought it would be nice to be a player in the world of photography. Not a big player, but a player.

But you know something (yes, I imagine you must know something)…..now that I type this thought here, into WordPress, I realize how completely stupid it sounds. Not that my assessment is stupid, as it’s likely correctly. No, what’s stupid is that I feel this way at all.

Maybe I have to look at creativity from the context of who I am. Am I being creative for my own purposes instead of judging such against those whose work I admire and think of as being creative. I guess it is, in part, that we all aspire to believe or feel that we are really good/great at something and photography is one of those things for me. But I can live without being good or great at it. As long as I can derive pleasure from the act of photography then I should be happy enough and this is where I should be focusing my energies.

There….all better.

Scientific progress goes “Boink!”

For the most part my Flickr account has been used to upload photos taken with both my trusty Canon 40D and Rebel XTi (400D for our overseas readers). But I have uploaded some photos taken in the past with my Canon point-n-shoot devices: the Powershot A95 and A630.

But I, like so many others, have a cell phone, which includes a camera. My first camera phone was the Motorola RAZR; a decent phone in most regards (if only it had been a reliable phone). My next camera phone was/is my very trust and handy Palm Centro. It shoots both images as well as video and has proven to be a great phone for the particular reasons I purchased it.

But I have now moved on after almost two-years with my black and silver-accented Centro to the latest incarnation of the Apple iPhone. It too shots video and pictures. It shoots better pictures and video than does my Centro. But my problem is I don’t know what to do with the pictures.

Clearly I can save them on my iMac. Clearly I can e-mail them to friends and family alike. One day, hopefully soon, AT&T (the only carrier for the iPhone in the United States) will finally get its shit together and allow for the sending of media (including pictures) via text messaging. (“End of summer,” they keep promising, but not definite date has yet to be announced)

But should I upload them to my Flickr account? Flickr is for sharing photographs and a photograph is a photograph, whether it comes off a dSLR, a point-n-shoot or a mobile blower. But for some reason I feel that my intent for my Flickr account would be violated, if only gently, by the inclusion of images from the iPhone.

I see some sleepless nights ahead of me…

Creative juices flowing…but it makes for a messy keyboard

Neither Flickr nor WordPress (at least this particular WordPress blog of mine) have seen much action since May. I spoke to such about a month ago here, on this WP blog, but haven’t returned as I still continued to feel uninspired. Uninspired to photograph or go through the hundreds of pics I already had loaded onto the iMac, but hadn’t yet viewed, etc.

But today, while putting together my contribution for the month of July’s group project, I suddenly felt…well…inspired. Okay. Maybe inspired is too strong a word, but I felt something akin to pleasure and/or happiness as I puttered around with my pictures; first in Lightroom and then in Elements. Yep. I used BOTH Lightroom and Elements. Unheard of for me, which you would already know if you have followed my blog for any period of time.

So I’m hoping this means I’m ready to return. Maybe not to jump in with both feet, but maybe to drop a toe or two into the waters that are photography and see what comes of it all.

Here’s to getting my toes wet!

Photography….ain’t it a bitch?

Funny…my last post said something about normal service being resumed in a week. That was well over a month ago. Believe me…I’ve thought almost every day about getting on the iMac and processing pictures for posting. I’ve frequently thought about going out and taking pictures even though we have moved into summer and I am not fond of being outside when it’s hot. Alas, nothing has motivated me enough to do anything photography-oriented.

The problems have been numerous and diverse. First, I left for Wisconsin for my grandmother’s funeral and cousin’s wedding (the former unexpected, while the latter was planned) and spent what seemed like 24/7 with my camera in hand. I took a bit over 1,200 photographs over the 10-days I was in Wisconsin. I still haven’t gone through them though. I think part of it is the emotional attachment to the moment: my grandmother’s funeral. I was happy for my grandmother in her passing. She was 94 and had become quite tired of being in constant pain. Passing was precisely what she wanted and I was happy for her that her wish finally came true. However, that doesn’t solve my problem: I want my grandmother back. Since I know that isn’t possible I’m having something akin to separation anxiety and I don’t yet feel comfortable going through the pictures. This is weird. Or so I think. I wasn’t prepared to feel this way about the photographs. But there you are.

I also confess to feeling incredibly uncreative of late. Granted, I’m not normally creative in the first place. And certainly not creative on-demand. I usually become inspired out of the blue and only a few times a year. Creativity, as I often state, is not one of my strengths. Oddly enough I wouldn’t normally consider creativity to be a component of my process of handling pictures. Shoot. Review on the computer. Delete the trash. Process (“tweak” as someone might say) and upload to Flickr. Hardly the stuff of Art, eh?

Yet, I might argue (not very well, mind you) that the process described above is, in a manner, creative. Maybe it would be better to say it’s destructive considering the number of image files that find their way into the round file cabinet (“trash”). Regardless, the process serves to create a final product: a JPEG. But I’d hesitate to call it creative when I think the term “process” sounds and feels more correct.

There is also the issue of weather. As folks who follow my Flickr site are aware, I love the winter and I very much enjoy being outside during such. I am little bothered by the cold and look forward to almost any opportunity to head out of doors with my camera. The same cannot be said of summer. Of course, summer just started, but the weather has been unseasonably warm for the most part during the months of May and June. As such I have felt little compunction to take my dog and pony show outdoors, especially when combined with the other reasons I have outlined above.

Finally, and perhaps oddest of all, there is the issue of burn out. I didn’t realize it until I was back from Wisconsin and looking at two memory cards filled with RAW image files. I suddenly realized how much time I have been spending in front of a computer and behind a camera for the past year. WordPress blogging about photography. Flickr uploads of the fruits of my labour. Reading other folks blogs. Viewing their Flickr wares and leaving behind comments. It doesn’t really sound like much when I read the lines I just typed, but I was easily spending two to four hours of each and every day doing something related to photography.

Now I imagine some folks might be incredibly jealous of my free time and wonder how it is I’m complaining about such. But if you look carefully you’ll find I’m not complaining, but simply stating I’m tired. Burned out. In need of a diversion, a vacation if you will. So instead of a vacation (which we cannot afford to take) or a diversion I instead elected to simply refrain from doing what I had been doing for the past year. I took a break.

But now it feels like it’s time to get back onto the horse and ride again. And in honour of such feelings I’m posting here, on WordPress, and heading out to take some pics later this afternoon. Now if only I can remain motivated enough to process and upload them within a reasonable time frame!

Temporary Detour…

Hello all.

Just a quick note to say that I’m not available for posting or reading over your sites, etc. I’m out of town, having attended to a funeral, and will be attending a wedding in a few days.

Busy, busy, busy…

Never-the-less, normal service will resume some time next week.

~Forkboy