These Days
Tuesday. Another day of overcast and rain from the look of it, back now from a good breakfast and an hour or so reading the papers. I'm not sure reading the papers is good for your soul, let alone your health, but so many things you consume (I consume) in our society turn out to be near fatal anymore. White albacore tuna, for instance, stuff I've eaten to excess in the past, is so supposedly full of mercury you shouldn't follow the federal guidelines on tuna fish if you're eating it (keep your consumption to no more than one can a week), but basically don't eat it at all. OK, maybe that's too much, maybe white albacore once a month is OK, but still, how many cans have I eaten in a single month in this life? None recently, but how many? Nature's perfect food?
Where'd that come from?
A podcast from a Morning Joe segment. I don't watch Morning Joe, I watch very little of anything on commercial TV, but I followed a link that led to a link and suddenly tuna fish appeared. Depressing.
Don't eat it anymore.
As I said, “depressing”.
Later. A walk down the way to Noah's Bagels for a small coffee and, what the hell, a blueberry muffin of some sort, sitting at the table, finally, wrapping the camera strap around my wrist and turning on the camera. Low battery. This has happened before, same battery, runs out of juice much too quickly, needs to be replaced. Which means I walked back to the apartment without a functional camera. Hmm.
Nothing popped up in front of me, of course, nothing I felt I missed in the way of a picture unless you count the giant Lepidoptera that came screaming down at me out the sky just as I was approaching the lake. You know, the forty foot thought to have been extinct now for twenty million years, a picture of which would have made the papers? But I paid it no mind. They've swooped down in the past when I've had a live camera in my hand and every time I've checked the image afterward, film or digital, there's been nothing to see, so I'm chalking it up to age and the elderly brain. They can get in the way, forty foot wing spans and all, swooping down just as you're in the middle of a pleasant conversation. Distracting at the least. Confusing. Makes a bad impression, when you're discussing art and life with Ms. Right, and you suddenly jump under the couch.
This makes two of them now, two batteries failing over the last four years. The camera says it's OK, there's a place in the menu where you can check battery life - how much charge remaining? does it need recalibration? how much overall life does it have left? - all of which seemed OK in this particular case. Except it failed. And I didn't bring a backup, something I always do when I'm out at a parade or shooting something like a party or a wedding. So we learn, life goes on and Nikon and B & H make another sale. Oh, and I need to take another walk with a fresh battery installed this time.
Later still. No walk. I got into copying old images from CD's I'd made years ago to a hard disk with the idea of consolidating them and making two copies of each this time on DVD's, starting with the 2001 San Francisco Carnaval Parade. And I copied them, and I looked at them, and I realized that many of the images I'd made from them were too small compared to the later images on artandlife. The black and white images, shot on film and then scanned, were (in many cases) awful. So I started opening them in PhotoShop and making corrections, looking at the steps I'd taken when I'd first made them and wondering what in the hell I'd been thinking about. And this is not one of those lightening, get in done in a day projects, but I found I was enjoying myself, wondering at the idiot who'd made them those years ago in PhotoShop, realizing this was what it was all about. My, my. The afternoon has gone well.
Quite a few more to do, but we'll get there. One of these days.
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