Pleasantly SurprisedTuesday. Another crisp sunny morning after a night of drifting in and out of sleep, breakfast at the usual place for a waffle, mixed fruit cup and coffee (trying to keep the bacon and eggs to once, maybe twice on the weekends) and now back at the apartment thinking it would be nice to go out somewhere new and find a picture or two. I've indulged myself mindlessly on the small strobes, each of them now outfitted with an external Nikon battery pack and the Swiss Army knife-like all purpose tripod heads that will connect them to pretty much anything (including tripods). I have no reason to have all this stuff, but I've lucked into some unexpected income recently and I'm treating myself in the standard American fashion. Boys and their toys. Now if I could but find a way to use them to produce actual images....
Are you serious or not about shooting?
It's something I need to sneak up on, I think. I want to broaden my horizon, I'm to the point of looking for a way there through a back door, through a window. Sneak in if you can't just walk up and enter through the main entrance. I need to make mistakes. You don't learn if you don't stretch and make mistakes. I said yesterday that I'd shot perfunctorily at the zoo and I did. Go to an animal enclosure, find the animal, shoot the animal's picture. Most of them were sitting with their backs to the visitors, I certainly don't blame them, wouldn't want to trade places with them in their somewhat obvious misery, so the predictable photographs I shot could have been done by a robot. Go to the exhibit, turn toward the animal enclosure, take a picture, hope for results.
Now that's at least a start. Something to recognize for its paucity. I was at the zoo. It was crowded. It was warm walking up and down along the pathways. My brain was numb, but I was aware of what I was (not) doing. Go a second time, a third time, take chances, shoot things I only vaguely recognize as having potential as images. Find new avenues, new ways of thinking and seeing! Eat that Broccoli! Eat those peas! (Hup! Hup! Hup!)
You do go on.
This is where I could use editing. I'm reading what I'm saying, I'm believing what I'm saying, but if there's no way around writing about it, why not go back and write it better? Camouflage the bitching and moaning? Better hide the fact that I'm lazy. You walk around the lake one morning for exercise, write that you hiked around a mountain in a spirit of adventure! Don't come across as a pendant swimming totally unaware in his surroundings. It's best to not make that obvious. Telling the truth has its limitations. (Hup! Hup! Hup!)
That's my cousin Jon's son up above doing whatever it is they do when they have time on their hands in L.A.
Later. A walk all the way downtown, the pace brisk, not because I wanted to push, but because that's the way the body evidently wanted to do it. I have to admit I continue to be pleasantly surprised. It's good to be pleasantly surprised.
The photograph was taken Sunday at the San Francisco How Weird Street Faire with a Nikon D3 mounted with a 70 - 200mm f 2.8 Nikkor VR lens at 1/125 second, f 2.8, ISO 200.
