I continue to pull down a photography book or two from the shelf now and then, some new, some I've had forever, and study the portraits by photographers both famous and not. This seems to be more than a pleasant interlude and, over time, I've decided it's good to look at pictures, study them and not so much think about them in any kind of right brain logical sense, but let them percolate down and take whatever time it wants to arrive at, again, not a logical description, but a kind of intuitive understanding. Is this a way to learn to shoot pictures like Avedon's, for example? No. Not in any literal sense. Avedon had his own demons, his own eye, his own reality (out there in the bright lights on the big stage) and I have mine, but I think it leads to better photography. Of course at my pace it will take centuries to show. Which is OK. “Speed kills”, as Fat Freddy used to say.

You're rationalizing buying all those photography books last week, right?

Who knows? Hardly an original observation, they teach it in all the photography classes, but it's interesting to see something going on deep down inside or to think you're seeing something going on deep down inside. It would have been nice to have had this realization earlier, had this insight when I was fourteen and shooting everything under the sun with no idea why. Maybe I'd have continued. But you never know these things until you know them (said the old man).

It did turn out to be NBC buying my old NBBC.COM domain last month. Strange. North Bay Business Computers is now The National Broadband Company. I was never told by the person who negotiated the purchase who the purchaser was - she said rather vaguely it was a venture she'd decided to put together based on an idea she'd had in talking with her children - when I found a reference buried way down on Google to The National Broadband Company (NBBC) being formed by NBC a day before the deal was to close. Had that not been the case I would have been pissed today when I went to the site and realized who was buying and what I'd sold it for. Still, all's well that ends (reasonably) well. Here in Oakland.

Ah, now we know where the new photography books came from.