What is the Emergency at UPS?

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When you are expecting prints (or any package, for that matter), this is not a message you want to see at the UPS tracking site: "Emergency conditions beyond UPS' control. / Delivery rescheduled." I had an order of prints that was scheduled to arrive Friday.  The package had left Mojave for delivery early Friday and ordinarily would have been here around 5 or 6 PM. Now, I have no idea when, or if I will see the package. Meantime, the window for framing is slowly creeping shut. No where near urgent, at the moment; but, certainly not comforting.

How to Spoil a Woman

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Yes, The Husband gets a little grief here, now and then. But, don't think for a moment that I don't recognize and appreciate my good fortune. I know full well that he spoils me rotten. I am a very fortunate woman. Let me tell you about one of the ways he pampers me.

For far too many weeks (since late September last year), I spent more time in bed than is normal for me. That time in bed wasn't restful. It was only to minimize the throbbing in back and legs, and there was many a sleepless night. Recently, I am doing much, much better. But, when my back first got really bad, The Husband began reading to me to help us both fall asleep. Although the reading certainly doesn't stop the aching, it is a most healthy distraction from the fears enlivened by the lingering pain. 

We began this habit of reading to one another, before we were married. Back then, we read several books this way—trading chapters reading to one another. These days, The Husband does all the work. I sink down to snuggle beneath the covers and close my eyes, while he does a superb job of bringing the story to life. The day fades away as he reads,  and the pain loses ground to the unfolding story. Soon, I am lost in the make-believe world.

Currently, he is reading The Secret Garden, a book I fondly remember from my childhood. Because I have long forgotten the details of the story, Mary Lennox's adventure is brand new for me. I doubt that I was any more enchanted by the book back then than I am now. It's a  pleasant way to fall asleep—whisked away from my own doubts and fears into a magical world—far from harsh realities.

Now, that is how to spoil a woman.

More Simple Things

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I have always loved mums and daisies. I am taken with their simplicity and down-homeness. (I know there is no such word, but perhaps there should be.) These flowers never fail to make me smile. I love them in any color, but the white ones connote even more of a clean, almost spiritual goodness—like the feeling I got as a child seeing clean white sheets drying on the clothesline behind the little wood frame house where I grew up. Is there anything better than a gentle breeze transforming sparkling clean sheets into fluttering alabaster banners sailing jauntily over a sea of green grass? As I grew older, I thought so. Now, I know better.

Storm Warning

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The big storm that was coming our way never made it. By the time it encountered all the mountains around us, it had fizzled. Rain to the south and west; storms to the north; here, an early morning sprinkle and gray skies. I can’t say that I am horribly disappointed to have missed out on what the weather forecasters were predicting, indeed what hit some coastal communities. Still, it would have been nice to have gotten some rain. We need it.

Gather Ye Rosbuds

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Robert Herrick gave us some good advice in his poem. Just today, I was reminded to

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow will be dying."

Yesterday morning, I got out in the yard early. There I was, dressed to the nines (in my pj’s and bedroom slippers with that inevitable straw hat), and having a photographic feast on daisies, geraniums, petunias, and the fledging rose bush that The Husband recently planted. I was keeping one eye on the den of evil flesh-eating red ants, but mostly focused on enjoying one delicate and just opening rosebud, along with two or three buds that were mere promises. All in all, there were six or seven roses in the making. The anticipation was delicious. Soon, there would be a splendid show of the mostly white blossoms with the subtle pink touches. I was dreaming of another morning of exploration and further experimentation with the macro lens combined with Live View. (It took me a while, but I just got interested in this feature on my 50D.) When I went to bed last night, I was already relishing the dilemma of choosing among the blooms.

By now, you have probably guessed the ending of this sad tale. I awoke this morning to discover two pathetically bare rose bushes—stripped of all but one bud. The deer were probably the culprits. The hungry scoundrels had passed over the acres of grasses, along with what is left of the daisies, for our roses. Success growing roses in Bear Valley Springs is spotty. I have heard other such gloomy tales as mine. Yet, I have also seen bushes blooming away and seemingly immune from deer attacks. It’s time to learn the secrets of those whose bushes are surviving. In the meantime, I have a few photos to help me remember the sweet and fragile blossoms that I did get to enjoy.

Look But Don't Touch

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(I hope you will bear with me on the publication of comments and replies. If I am slow to respond, I will be able to catch up Friday or Saturday.)

I don't want to get too friendly with these thistles, but they are nice for viewing from a safe distance. The trouble is that while thrashing about in the field, I invariably get to close to one of these. But, then that's what denim jeans are for, right?

What a Difference a Print Makes

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I have just had the value of making prints brought home to me in a vivid fashion.

While I never completely lost interest in prints, I had become quite distracted by the web experience and had formed the habit of rushing from one photo outing to the next and skipping the printing step. There are, after all, only so many walls to fill; and paper, as well as ink, are expensive. In my situation—months of preparing to move, moving, and not being certain now whether we will be able to stay in this house—putting holes in walls to display prints and creating more things that may have to be packed and moved again didn’t seem like a smart plan.

Besides, there is plenty to be learned from viewing images only on a monitor. What I see on my screen is a harsh enough reminder that I continue to struggle mightily with all the technical elements of photography. Lately, I have been most frustrated over my weaknesses in composition. Furthermore, while I am getting far more consistent in the exposure department with fewer and fewer outright losers, I haven’t begun to master exposures that fully capture what I felt when I saw the image in my mind. Even though I am improving in my ability to control depth of field, I continue to come up short of my goals. I experiment more frequently now with point of view, but I haven’t come close to pushing boundaries.

On a regular basis, I ask myself how is it that I can feel so passionate about what I am doing, yet that passion is not fully translated into the images I make? How long will I face this the great chasm between my intent and the execution. When Paul Butzi wrote recently that he considers himself "a Photographer of Very Little Ability", I was floored. “Holy cow,” I thought. "If Paul Butzi has ‘very little ability’, where the heck does that put me!?”

To complicate matters, I added a bright, shiny, new monitor. Next, I added the Eye One Display 2 to my list of technological challenges. Having calibrated my previous monitors using the by-eye method, and being of almost zero ability when it comes to learning new software, I was destined for trouble from the beginning. Sure the software offers an “Easy Method”, but that would have been admitting defeat, wouldn’t it? Yes, I know that the intelligent thing to have done would have been to live with my limitations and opt for the easy path. No, not my style.

I dug into the “Advanced Method”, whimpered for help from The Husband and Paul Lester when I was completely stuck and plugged away at it. The Husband was there for me and helped even though he knows nothing about color management; Paul generously shared the benefit of his experience and both of them made a difference. To put my limitations with software into perspective, let’s just say that I could swear that divine intervention powered me through the experience of learning Photoshop. Since, I often compensate for lack of talent and smarts with determination—that’s old-fashioned stubbornness, if we are being blunt—my health and sanity were spared with a few key breakthroughs and I now enjoy using Adobe’s mind-bending program. So far, no such intervention with Eye One Display. I’m still not satisfied with my calibration. A couple of days ago, I was so discouraged that I began thinking I had probably never had anything vaguely resembling decent calibration and that meant that I couldn’t possibly ever have produced any decent photographs. Everything I had ever done was garbage and a person with so little intelligence should never, ever tackle color management. (A dental appointment and the beginnings of a cold didn’t help my frame of mind.) I was ready to raise the white flag.

But, that’s where prints come into the story. Before beginning one last ditch effort calibrating the new gorgeous, but virtually useless monitor, I searched for the calibration prints I had ordered from Smugmug—they had proven invaluable in my previous by-eye calibration. Early in the search, I ran across a few envelopes of prints made over the last couple of years. Some of those prints had hung on the walls and when I ran out of walls, some had been stuck on the insides of cabinet doors in our old house. The prints all around me inspired me, challenged me, and helped to keep me on track. Looking at my failures was just as important as viewing the successes. (The stinker were inside cabinets that no one else looked in—my ugly little secrets.) Next, I opened some of the framed prints that had hung on the walls in our old house, but have languished in boxes waiting for a certainty that these walls will be ours. Too many of the prints reminded me of how much I still have to learn, but there were a few that succeeded in capturing moments of consequence to me and some reminded me that others had been happy to purchase copies of those prints. Furthermore, the prints showed that, although it might once again have taken divine intervention, I had managed to get some of my impressions on paper.

Since that day of discovery, I have shot with enthusiasm and a confidence that eventually, I will get close to calibrating this monitor and once again making prints that please me. If only momentarily. I was reenergized. By the way, it hasn’t escaped my notice that I require reenergizing about two or three times per month. It’s a herky-jerky journey, but I can only move at my own pace.

Pink Petaled Therapy

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I needed the company of flowers today. Not only that, I needed to stare at them and spend time with a couple of photos of them. Welcome to my therapy session.

Indoor Poppies in Bear Valley

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The poppies are still blooming in the Tehachapi Mountains and Bear Valley Springs has a healthy share. They add cheer to our un-landscaped property and remind me that, eventually, we will be able to put this difficult period behind us.

We drove up on Saturday and came back to LA Sunday evening and had a nice weekend. Since I am still very much in school mode, as I mentioned, I stayed busy while The Husband cleaned brush in the bright sun. Fire season in California is something we take seriously. I know that makes me sound lazy as all get out—and perhaps I should just plead guilty. However, the real story is that no matter how much I would love to be outside soaking up the sunshine, I am seriously prone to heat stroke (probably as a result of the medications I take, and mostly the ones for high blood pressure). Since I don't get hot, I will think I'm fine—I prefer hot to cold—then bam! after no time at all in the sun, my body simply shuts down to a bare survival mode. No fun. Being determined to make lemonade from the great big bowl of lemons I have been given, I am determined to explore indoor photography. Not my first choice, but I will find a way to fall in love with it.

The photo above is an example of my work in the little indoor studio I have snagged. After all, garages are guy-territory, right? Still there is a window with northern light and it's just too perfect to pass up. Consequently, The Husband, poor fellow, finds me encroaching on his space. Hey, it's a big garage. There's room for both of us. At any rate, a red paint bucket with water, a poppy plant that had to go anyway, since it was intruding on some lavender thoughtfully nurtrured by the former owner, and I had a subject.

The Verdict Is In For Me

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Today, I received from Shutterfly the book I ordered last Thursday and, while there are some advantages to working with Blurb and overall I like the book I got from them, I prefer the paper stock used by Shutterfly. For now, this leaves me with no solution for publishing a book with a layout as complex as the one I used for my SoFoBoMo book. Furthermore, the better grade of paper comes at a cost. Still, I like the Shutterfly paper that much. When I loaded my pictures for this book, I made a point of turning off VividPics and, at least for this book, that made the big difference. This time around, I had no devastating color shifts or any other disturbing changes in my prints. That's not to say I didn't make a few goofy mistakes in my frantic rush to throw the thing together, but it was a terrific learning experience and none of the mistakes resulted in a book I could never show anyone. I consider the money well spent.

Toys Are Me

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I hadn't thought too much about upgrading my 20D, being keenly aware that what I most needed was to improve my skills rather than get a better camera. The 20D is a great camera and it wasn't exactly letting me down—more the other way around. Actually, what I found myself longing for was a 5D, and for quite a while I watched eagerly for news of the update for the 5D which would give way to the wait for the reviews to come in. I have utmost respect for my limitations as a judge of anything mechanical and wait for the far more experienced to find the bugs. I lack both the expertise and the nerves to serve on the front lines.

In the meantime, I went to Samy's one day knowing full well that these casual pilgrimages to the giant candy store for photographers will be a thing of the past if, indeed, we ever get to move. I made the mistake of "just looking" at a 40D. The huge (to me) screen and the perfectly beautiful viewfinder were a revelation. It was love at first sight. The story is a familiar one to most photographers. One thing led to another and I am once again coping with the learning curve that results because, of course, they always move all the buttons.

So far, I am happy with the decision. With decades old eyes, just the larger screen and better viewfinder were enough to convince me. But, there's more. I suppose I will blather on about the new additions to the gear in the next few weeks—yes, that's a plural. I didn't stop with the camera. But, right now I have to explore my shiny new toys and accustom myself to the considerably larger files.

Blurb Blues

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Between the nasty complications that have arisen in my life, this project I have taken on, and the time it is taking to recover from SoFoBoMo, I am not getting out and shooting much and not finding much to say that seems worth sharing. I'm still keeping up with my favorite bloggers and catching up on some additional reading.

I am looking forward to beginning a project that is more about shooting and less about this business of preparing files for Blurb. Gordon McGregor left a comment on Paul Butzi's site that spooked me a bit. He mentioned having "over-corrected" some photos for his book. Now, I am second-guessing myself on my understanding of what it takes to prepare a file with that profile.

Synchronicity

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(I don't know what happened to this post and how it got lost, but I have re-published it. I may have the date wrong, but it went up sometime in early May.)

Today, I awoke in a reflective mood and began to draft some notes in an attempt to state some thoughts and feelings about the place of art projects in my everyday life. After getting close to what I was trying to say, I detoured to read the posts on some of my favorite blogs. I normally do that first with my breakfast, but decided to get really rebellious this morning and shake things up a bit. What a surprise. I found others talking about similar issues, and far more effectively than what I had scribbled and set aside for a moment (those notes still languinsh unfinished). It appears the synchronicity of experiences produced by the SoFoBoMo project may not yet have run its course.

SoFoBoMo Final Stretch

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As I make my way through the final stages on my book, I am shaking my head over some of the discoveries.

1. This isn’t the book I intended to make. When I signed up for SoFoBoMo, I was looking forward to trying my hand at producing an elegant book with a small number of images (close to the required limit) that would somewhat accurately represent the best work I am capable of at this point in my life and still stay within the time limits. I thought I was making a book to learn about producing a photo book and get past the fears of tackling such a mammoth project, so I would be encouraged to later produce such a book without the time constraints. I intended to be shrewd and disciplined by including little text—to make it a photo book in the purest sense of the term. That decision would allow me to focus exclusively on the images and the layout thus saving valuable time. Instead, I ended up making something that met almost none of my initial objectives.

2. The book has turned out to be bulky (plenty of text, after all), and a much bigger mess than I thought I could tolerate, but each time I have tried to make it fit into anything vaguely resembling that elegant image in my mind, the whole thing fell apart and became so utterly meaningless that I couldn’t bear to finish it.

3. Choosing a very personal focus for my book ended up being a double-edged sword. The hunger to capture images that would later serve as a bittersweet reminder of the home I have loved for twenty years provided the emotional heat that powered me through the long hours, but perhaps melted my brain. The book is a mass of contradictions and examples of a project gone berserk. For example, there are far too many images in the book for the project I wanted to produce and only about half enough to satisfy the hunger that drove the work. Furthermore, while I envisioned something simple and elegant, the final product is sprawling, decidedly untidy, and as much in need of pruning as the locations that I photographed.

4. Ultimately, this is a reminder that all creative endeavors are a messy business and filled with unpredictability—indeed, for many of us that is part of its joy. I am pretty much spent and have left for myself this one day for proofing text and finding assorted gremlins.

5. The journey has been frustrating, exhausting, inspiring, and I have crammed more new information into my head in the two months of preparation and execution than I dreamed possible. Still, I am grateful that I lost my head and signed up to be part of this madness.

Inching Along

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Bear Valley business all day yesterday—no layout, no pictures, no editing—just the four hours of driving chews up a big chunk of the day. (Thank goodness we enjoy the drive and the opportunity to celebrate yet again the beauty of the landscape.) The day before, I got a minimum done on SoFoBoMo. That means today is a major catch-up day. Overall, I am inching my way along—putting photos in the layout and doing it, I’m afraid, in the most haphazard, unconventional manner—just winging it at this point, working with Pagemaker and taking advantage of the layout space around my pages and planning to shuffle things about as I go. I can't tell you how radical that is for me. With a project such as this one, my first language is planning. This is a big part of this exercise for me—letting go of old work habits and experimenting with new possibilities.

So far, I am hanging on to my determination to let go and just do it. I have officially given up regaining confidence in what I have to work with so far. The best part is that I can look at pictures I don’t much like anymore and accept them as where I was at the time, and each day I am moving forward. So far, I would have to say that the SoFoBoMo project has been one of my most favorite ever exercises. My purpose was to deal with exactly these issues.
Periodically, I have come perilously close to falling for the temptation to put the idea away and wait until I am better prepared, have better photos, get the layout just right, and on and on. I signed up to see if I could break some barriers and I am shattering them with glee.

In the meantime, the prodigies, Gordon M and Paul L have posted their beautiful books and they are truly inspiring. I will return to their sites for a boost of energy several times over the next few days, as I huff and puff toward the end—I suppose a little like those marathoners who shuffle across the finish line at the end looking bedraggled with feet dragging and glazed eyes.

Messy Business

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Yesterday, I set up a Google Alert to notify me about postings on SoFoBoMo. Those e-mails have offered a welcome relief from what has been a hellish day so far—brought to us by the nut job of a guy who was negotiating to buy The Husband’s business. (Fortunately, there is another deal in the works with what appears to be a sane person.) So, this first guy backed out of the deal, whining about how he didn’t like the terms of the deal he had agreed to, and now he is tossing around warnings about imminent phone calls from his lawyer and screaming about how we tried to “railroad” him and we are "ungrateful". Honest to goodness, it’s black helicopter time for this guy. Still, his phone calls, e-mails, and irrational demands have put a major kink in our day by creating a great deal of work that hadn't been scheduled into the plan.

Other than that, the day has centered around the personal confusion brought on by working on my photo book. Of course, as soon as I started dropping photos and text into my layout, I began to see the flaws in the design. Suddenly, the layout I had been so content with looked far too staid for my content. Furthermore, I had to face the fact that if I stuck with the design I had, either I would have to omit a number of photos that I really want in this very personal book, or I would have to spend a fortune printing the book. Decision time.

After going back and forth on the layout until I was dizzy, I found a fresh approach. The new layout is more complex than the original one—that means more layout work, more processing, and many more decisions per page, not to mention more photographs to suit it. How could that be?! Still it seems to the right direction. At least, for now.

As if that weren’t enough, all the photos have, overnight, turned to dreck. I can’t remember why I ever wanted to put any of them in a book. Okay, that’s too crazy even for me. I must have seen something that appealed to me.

For over two weeks, I was having way too much fun to give the deadline a thought. As of today, I am officially starting to get nervous. How did it get to be the 21st?

Neither Here Nor There

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The Husband and I are in waiting mode. Certainly, it isn’t as if I have hours on my hands to spend sitting around waiting or fretting. I have errands to run and all those pesky household chores—nowadays “company”, meaning prospects to buy our house, might pop up at any time (I can’t remember ever doing this much housework). There are meetings, Open Houses, boxes being delivered to Bear Valley, and endless forms to complete. I am having a wonderful time experimenting with camera and lenses as well as working out software issues I will need to produce the “evidence” that I complete a photo book within the time allowed. I am seeking a balance between packing things I will need at the last minute and leaving too much to pack until the last minute. We have even found time recently for some socializing.

Still, the overall mode is waiting. Waiting to see if any of the offers on our house will result in a final sale, waiting to see if more offers are made, waiting to move, waiting to fully engage in the SoFoBoMo project, waiting to move and begin this big life-adventure as a yikes—a retiree, shudder—some days that seems a dreadful mistake, others an enormous relief. When I meet strangers now, I am not so comfortable when the conversation turns, inevitably, to “What do you do?” After all, for decades, I had an answer and it didn’t fluctuate. Suddenly, the old answer doesn’t apply. To complicate matters, even “where do you live” triggers a bit of disorientation. We are headed there, but most of our things are still here. We still are not able to say that we are even in the process of moving. The answer to both questions could be, “Can I get back to you on that?”

Waiting isn’t a painful state or a negative one in any way. It’s just an unfamiliar one for me. I have been so busy going and doing for years that waiting is requiring some adjustments. It’s a good time for reflection and evaluation—a time for gathering thoughts and storing ideas for future projects.

Macro Misses

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Up until a few days ago, the Canon100mm macro I got at the first of the year has been sitting in the bag. This past week I have finally had some time for photography again, now that we have our house on the market and I am making the most of this breather. Not surprisingly, I am running smack up against the demands of macro photography. I am developing a closer relationship with my tripod and thinking about buying some knee pads. I certainly am getting more familiar with deleting images, but I am having a great time experimenting.

Software Puzzles

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This past week, I celebrated having survived our first Open House and spent some time exploring the possibilities of laying out the photo book in my creaky old Pagemaker. I have an early version of InDesign, but just never could get anywhere with it—not that I had ever become a power user of Pagemaker. To complicate matters, I have seldom opened that program during the last three or four years. Furthermore, I decided that I had better learn to compress a PDF for posting on the web—another new skill. Not surprisingly, I stumbled about quite a bit.

For some reason, I couldn’t remember how to number the blasted pages in Pagemaker and floundered around in Help before finally solving the mystery. I had only ever used Adobe Acrobat for the purpose of creating simple PDF's limited to two or three pages. Up until now, compression hadn’t been an issue. I still don’t know exactly what date I will begin my SoFoBoMo project, but these are the sort of things that I wanted to work out before April 1. I certainly won’t want to devote two out of my thirty allotted days to stumbling about in the Pagemaker and Acrobat Help sections. So far, so good. Pagemaker will never be my favorite program, but horses for courses, as the saying goes.

Sofobomo – The Next Chapter

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Tuesday I was so relieved to have settled on a theme for my SoFoBoMo project that I couldn’t get to my camera fast enough. For most of that day, I shot as though my hair was on fire. Yesterday, I was exhausted from the adrenalin high and only experimented a bit with a different lens. I have spent much of today agonizing over a book cover. Of course all this activity, is the result of my struggle to refine both my theme and my plan for execution.

I have these recurring visions of someone viewing my book and asking, “Why did you make this book? What is it about.” “Because a bunch of other people signed up for a a challenge and I thought I would give it a go” isn’t an acceptable answer. That’s what has had me stewing. Okay, I’m making a photo book. What is it about? Will I produce a collection of thirty-five mediocre images that collectively scream—these photographs were taken for no other reason than to get to the magic number of thirty-five. For at least a week, I felt the title of my book should be “Sharp Images of Fuzzy Concepts”, because I was haunted by the famous Ansel Adams quote. Can I clearly define what this book is about—why it should be made? Am I clear enough about what I want to say? And, just as importantly, can I say it well?

While Paul Butzi has laid claim to “the stupidest idea ever beheld”, I may have to challenge him on that when all is said and done. After much agonizing, I have committed to a theme that has some emotional heat for me; now, I wonder whether I can come close to making pictures that will convey some of the very feelings that have produced the heat. My subject is saying goodbye to a place that has been my home for twenty years. I will make my thirty-five pictures within a radius of about five miles of our home here in the San Fernando Valley in California. This is the very small world where I spend most of my time—our house, the yard, the barn area where the horses are stabled a couple of miles away, and an area along the Little Tujunga Wash, between the stable and our house. So, I finally know what I want to photograph and why. Now, comes the issue of successful execution. Can I bring a viewer into my simple little universe—the places where I spend, by far, most of my time—and put across some of the feelings of melancholy I am already experiencing at the prospect of leaving it behind? Or, will the passion be strong, yet the craft weak?

I confess that I had not wanted to immerse myself in these feelings about another ending. But, here I am plunging into the abyss. There is no easy way out of this. The feelings will supply the energy and inform the work. To deny the feelings is to turn off the energy supply. Best to not snuff out the flame. Predictably, I will waste some time trying to worm my way out of the pain that goes with the experience and rely on the “understanding” of purpose to get the job done. Nope. It doesn’t work that way. Red Smith’s observation on the ease of writing included in William Bronaugh’s book, “Just Open a Vein” says it all. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” If we set out to create—regardless of the medium—there is no getting around the struggle. What SoFoBoMo amounts to is that a whole gang of us have elected to—if I may paraphrase Red Smith—pick up a camera and open a vein. I suppose the only sensible course is to take comfort in the observation made by more than one participant that it won't last forever. They are right, of course. A month will fly by. No, wait. That last part isn't comforting, at all.