Random Browser Fun
Saturday, February 21, 2009
I got a new toy. My D40 and I have had a lot of fun together in the past two weeks or so. It was even along to eat phở with us today.
I never before got into photography, for whatever reason. All these years, friends and family have been interested in it, but it never had any appeal for me. That’s a rare thing, I pride myself on believing. Now that I’m playing with it, I’m really impressed at the immediacy with which you can try out an idea. It used to take me hours of labor to determine that my idea for a composition was lame, when I was painting, or drawing. Thanks to the camera, it happens in seconds!
I think photography is especially important for those of us with loved ones that are far off, and know us mostly through the internet and telephone. If you take and share pictures, your online personality becomes much richer. It’s more fun to see a picture like this, I bet, than to read whatever drivel I’d write about my trip to see Shannon in Prague, (no strollers were harmed):
In unrelated news, our neighbor’s tree got damaged over the holidays, apparently, and they came back to a mysterious huge pile of wood in the street in front of their house. Nobody knows who the chainsaw-wielding bandit was, but he left them with trouble: the city won’t take such big chunks of stuff in the usual lawn clippings roundup. Well, we have a fireplace, and we might even still be here next year when the wood is seasoned… so we took most of it and dragged it into our backyard.
Now, there’s one thing I never realized about wood — it gets larger in your yard. I spent a hefty chunk of time, (enough for a nice rosy sunburn in January), over the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend sawing and splitting. All I could think of was Utah Phillips singing “chop some wood, do ya good… you’ll get pie in the sky when you die”. (”that’s a lie!”). Below you see the work not finished, but well past begun.
I sawed with an inexpensive Japanese-style pull saw, and I do think it was less work than the bow saw was back in the day. The thinner branches you could chop off with one yank, and half believe you were selling ginsu knives.
The final mount of wood teeters beneath our tremendous evergreen, dwarfed, but not diminished:
I’m having so much fun with our new compost heap. Janine has left her jobs, so she finally has a smidgeon of free time. She picked up an official San Jose compost bin, and set it up in the yard. She mowed our fall leaves, and we put them in first, and we’ve been heaping espresso pucks and salad remains and other random kitchen scraps on ever since. It looks so cute ticking away in the corner, making dirt for us:
It feels incredibly good not to throw that stuff away anymore.
In unrelated, (and unphotographed) news, I had jury duty this week. They didn’t take me for reasons unknown, but perhaps obvious. It was fascinating, though. You gotta figure, they’ve got a relatively unbiased sample of the general adult population in the area. And I got to listen as eighteen of these souls answered questions about their relationship to the law, and alcohol, (it was a DUI case).
I felt like Buddha leaving his parent’s compound for the first time. Three of eighteen had a DUI conviction. One fellow, (the sort that would definitely make me worry about my elbows), had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. One of the DUI chaps had spent a year and a half in AA. One woman was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of a drunken husband, and the scary guy had been beaten by a drunken father. One girl had recently had her mother and sister killed by a drunk driver. Almost everybody had been a victim of a hit-and-run accident. One young fellow had been robbed at gunpoint last month. About a third were unemployed. And on, and on. Just these eighteen people!
Our society definitely seems to have issues. Now Oscar, who is from Guatemala, tells me that ain’t nuthin’. But it was an eye-opener for me.
Oh, that reminds me, one other reason I picked up a proper camera. I’ve been on an Andy Goldsworthy kick, and I want to learn to take proper pictures, so my hours of knitting together kittens will not be wasted!
These pictures of my first bit of yard art were taken on my old point and shoot olympus, which fits in a pocket, but I just can’t get the effect I want from it. With some luck, years from now, I’ll be telling the world how it’s not the camera, it’s the man behind it! But, well, right now it’s the camera.
We were over to visit Kennan and Janet over the weekend, and he dragged out his view camera, which he built from a kit. If you’re not sure what I mean, picture one of those big cameras with the bellows in the middle and the photographer under a black cloth snapping a photo of a grim frontier family in their Sunday best… but a touch smaller, and without the Hatfields. It’s the sort of camera Ansel Adams used for a lot of his stuff. The scene you’re focusing shows up upside down on a plate of foggy glass on the back. To tell if it’s in focus, you check the details under a loupe from under your black cloth. Kennan, ever ingenious, invented goggles with a long black sock attached, which are much handier than the cloth. Way cool.
Anyway, I leave you with one last random picture, this time of rare rainy day in our nearby Quicksilver park. The poisonous places are often most pristine.
is working.