Books, not politics

It's the day after the election, and that's all I'll say about that. (As written, but I delayed hitting publish button for a day.)

You get books today. Some think paper books are quaint and outmoded. They'd rather read on a device. Which mostly is fine when it comes to text. Screens are better now, and there's lots of handy things a device can do that a paper book cannot. Like give you the definition of a word by clicking on it, as opposed to putting the book down, picking up another book or device and looking that word up, which is a likely path to being distracted along the way, which might perhaps lead to a happy coincidence.

I was getting distracted there. But images. A hand held device sucks when it comes to images, especially really nice images. The screen is just so small, and images on a device, even a good desktop computer monitor, look different than they do in print, and typically not better. 

After all, a book image looks the way the photographer wants it to look. An image on the screen could have had any number of alterations. How the screen is set up for brightness and colour balance are the main issues, but even the very dimensions of the image could be altered. Don't get me started on the damage done by "optimizing" for the web. 

You can hold a book in your hands and see the image as the photographer intended, within the limits of printing and publishing technologies. When you're looking at a book, you're almost certainly paying attention to it, unlike the fraction of a second as you scroll past a photo on IG. 

New Zealand by Helmut Hirler. I'm not sure how I didn't blog about this before. Closest I got is here. I chatted with him a bit about his approach. He does research, then rides his motorbike to the place and camps out. The most important step is to wait for the light to be right for what he wants. The images are amazing! Doubly so if you like wide, panoramic images in black and white or infra red. 

Borrowed Time by George Webber. The same George that led the recent darkroom class I took. He's been at the game a long time. It's fun looking through the book and finding places I'd been. Some of them aren't there any more. The photos bring a huge sense of time and place, and take you on a journey.

Both Sides Now by Ari Jaksi. I recently found Ari on Youtube, here, talking mainly about film photography. Most of what's on Youtube is crap, (Totally validating Sturgeon's Law, at the very least.) but I keep coming back to Ari. He talks about gear sometimes, but it's not the modern, 'you need this camera to be a good photographer', or trying to push the newest camera. It's more about how a particular lens, or the combination of camera, film, developer, and paper to get the results or look he likes. He uses mostly old film cameras, and he even made a functional camera out of household materials. I'd sum up his approach by saying, 'less is more'. This is a book to savour, enjoying the images. The text snippets are not about the images, rather are extracts from a work journal that somehow go with the photos. I chuckled at some of them, coming from much the same industry, albeit in a much less exalted position.

Canadian Photographs by Geoffrey James. My big question about this is why the photos are laid out as they are. It made no sense to me at all. I wasn't impressed with the photos, as near as I could tell they could have been taken by any tourist on a trip.

From here down is a draft that I found. I'm not sure when it dates from, but it could be several months back. 

The Changing Face of Portrait Photography by Shannon Thomas Perich

Not a comprehensive list of portrait photographers and their work, but a selection from the earliest days to now. A interesting read, seeing how photographers struggled with their limitations, and a sampling of their work.

Mastering Portrait Photography by Paul Wilkinson and Sarah Plater. Good for beginners. Kind of a cookie cutter approach, talking about techniques, but not getting into the artistry or emotion of it.

Georgia O'Keeffe edited by Tanya Barson

This has gone back to the library, and I don't remember the details now. It was pretty darn scholarly.

Almost doubled the yearly output in 1 day

Sunday was a big photo day. I ended up selling 1603 photos of the nearly 2000 I took in 4 hours. (8 photos a minute, to save you the math.) My year to date on Saturday was just over 1000 photos. It isn't how many that's important, it's how good they are. What I've heard about them so far is good.

Taking the photos is the easy part. I was given a shot list by the event director, and that's what I did. Even if one person handing out medals was trying her best to get her hands or hat into every photo. A few people commented that I looked a bit overdressed, except this wasn't my first rodeo. They're moving and I'm standing there waiting. It's easy to get chilled and the light drizzle didn't help. The racers didn't seem to mind, but nobody hung around very long after the race.

The hard part was babysitting an old computer into digesting that many photos at once. It takes time to churn through, and then upload to a place where people can see them. Actually the upload to Google Photos was fast, but Google Drive was really slow and fussy. No idea why.

My eyes are tired today. It's a lot of work watching for racers and trying to capture them when they arrive in a clump.

The polls are just closing in Atlantic Canada as I write this, but I'm going to try to ignore politics for this blog post. Even though our elections are short compared to the American, it's been going on a long time and I'm sick of it.

One of the downsides of our electronic life is periodically dealing with the stuff nobody likes to think about. All that data that gets accumulated, and what for? I was looking at some of the folders I'd created, and I figured if I had to actually look at the photos to understand what it was, it was safe to delete it. I was going through and trimming down my Google storage box. It's gradually crept up, larger and larger, and it's starting to bug me about buying more storage. For many people this is a default choice. It's easier to pay that small monthly fee than to dive in and do the work to trim the bloat. Then again, they make it harder to trim the bloat than it needs to be. 

A bit of colour from the garden the other day. 

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

A fuzzy butt for one particular reader.

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

The Pink Floyd wine trip

Again, not quite like you may have thought, especially if you're my age and were into some of the recommendations about listening to Pink Floyd. This was a drive to Red Deer to get wine, with a soundtrack of Dark Side of the Moon, A Delicate Sound of Thunder, and Echos. This wine.

For those that don't live here, it's about an hour and a half drive from our house to the store in Red Deer. Why there for wine? The price. We saved $338 across those 6 kits.  The four on the left were the pre-orders. I knew I had saved more than enough from them to buy one other kit and part of the other. So why not?

Plus the drive is nice, if you pick the right day. Almost all of it is freeway, making for a mostly relaxed drive on cruise control. You just have to keep an eye in the rear view mirror for the drivers on overdrive control. I was passed several times by drivers going well over the speed limit, probably in the range of 150 kph or maybe more. Zoom. Such is life when your idiot government bans photo radar on provincial highways because, "they're a cash cow." Whatever happened to making criminals pay?

Only saw one crash, which is par for the course. Some driver, somehow, tangled with the fencing in the median and just about tore their car apart. A cop and a guy with a big tow truck were trying to sort it all out. In almost 45 years of driving on Highway 2, I've just about seen it all.

I was in a funny mood during the drive. Something that really resonated with me was from Time. 

"You are young and life is long

And there is time to kill today

And then one day you find

Ten years have got behind you"

As a digression, I sometimes see the so-called 'reaction videos' of people supposedly hearing various music for the first time. I am dumbfounded that anyone can claim with a straight face that they've never heard Bohemian Rhapsody, or any Pink Floyd, or be unaware that Disturb's amazing version of The Sounds of Silence is a cover. So in the unlikely event that any of my readers haven't heard Dark Side of the Moon, find 43 minutes and a pair of headphones. Listen to it all in one go. Thank me later.

Then at the store I was chatting with the young lady in charge. I think she's the grand daughter of the former owner, who has since passed away. I started buying wine there 2002 or so, mainly because I like drinking wine and had just started at Skystone. Lots of the people there made wine, and they were happy to introduce me to the process. It wasn't uncommon to come into the office and find wine kits near the door. People going past Red Deer would pick up kits along the way and save someone the drive. 

I asked, but the young lady didn't know the Skystone name, or any of the people's names I mentioned. Perhaps I'm the last person from those days still buying wine kits. Given the inventory that will be on hand when those 6 kits are done, there might well be enough wine to last the rest of our lives. That's an odd thought that has started to occur to me, that something I've bought won't need to be bought again.

 For me 2002 doesn't seem like very long ago. I thought of myself as young and keen, and eager to contribute. Sean was already working there when I started, and Susi started the same week I did. For a while her office was across the hall from mine. She had a window office, and I had an inside office. She was an engineer, I was a software geek. I never had a window office there, but for a while mine was one of the biggest, matching that of the 3 owners, since I often had training sessions and other client meetings in it.

Sean is much the same age as me and has retired from oil and gas. Susi is much younger (and way better looking and almost certainly smarter) and last I heard is still working for the man while dreaming of retirement. I know at least 3 of the people I worked with there have died, none of them particularly old in the great scheme of things. Perhaps more have died, but I don't know; I've lost touch with all the other people I worked with there and then. Skystone itself doesn't exist anymore, having been bought out and absorbed into another company.

It's easy on any random day in retirement to kick back and enjoy a quiet day. It actually needs to happen periodically and is good for you. But then if you aren't careful, it might not be 10 years, but the time is gone. And when you know there isn't that much time left, you need to start thinking about what you might want to get done today. 

And yeah, that's a hint. I've had an amazingly healthy life so far. No broken bones, although one got  cracked during a memorable fall off my bike. I nearly lost some teeth out of that but they're still hanging in there. My dentist's office is amazed by the whole thing.  Hospitalized only once as a child to get my tonsils out. Did Ironman at 52. My doctor telling me last year that I'm boring, and keep on doing what you're doing. 

Except that clock keeps on ticking. About a month ago I woke up and while I made it to the toilet to pee, I haven't felt the room spin like that since I was a drinking teenager. At first I thought it was low blood sugar, or I got up too quick. As I was puttering in the kitchen making coffee, every time I turned my head the room was spinning and tilting. Before I started dealing with boiling water, I decided to sit down before I fell down. It took a few minutes to pass, and I was very careful with the coffee. I didn't feel particularly better after breakfast, and started thinking there might be a problem.

After visits to my eye doctor and GP, things are better than I feared. I periodically need to do a specific head motion that gets the little crystals in my inner ears back on the job where they belong. It's mostly good now, with a few episodes that typically don't last long. I think of it as a harbinger. There are a limited number of days left.

Today's flower.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

I struggle with vertical in photos. Sometimes it's really hard to get right, especially with wide lenses. I'm just guessing that the corners and windows of the building are actually the real true verticals, but that damn pole is what catches my eye.

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

The red light district

Gotcha! What were YOU thinking?

That was the scene the other day as I worked on getting some nicer prints out of the last roll of film, and using filters to change the contrast, just to see how it looked. I'm pretty pleased.

I'll be heading off to Red Deer soon to pick up some more wine kits, which will put the darkroom on pause. The desk that's used for wine carboys is also what gets used for developer trays, and there isn't room for both. I can still develop film, so I'll try to get some film ready to print when the wine is bottled. The original plan was to take the scenic route with Sean to see if we could find some photos. We've done this a couple times before, but our schedules and his travel plans (have fun!) didn't line up this time. Spring time in Alberta can be a tough gig for photo rambles.

Here we are, late April, and the grass is greening up. All sorts of flowers are growing enthusiastically. Linda dislikes cleaning away winter debris till spring is actually here. Lots of little creatures are hanging out in the debris, awaiting real spring. Anybody's guess when that actually happens. As I came back to review and proof read, Linda is cleaning out the winter decorations and getting the worse of the crud off the lawn.

Mis and disinformation is growing like a toxic weed. Nobody can keep up with it when AI, bots, and troll farms flood the zone with all manner of shit. I was back on Facebook a bit, and holy doodle. It's bad. There's a real estate and politics blog I like to read, but the comment section is a sewer. I feel like I need to shower after reading that.

When did people get so rude? When did it become normal to insult and denigrate someone with a different opinion? Is it because we can hide behind an internet wall, flinging rancid opinions out into the world? Why so much fear of the other, the different, the unusual?

More and more I think we need a course on how our government actually works, and how to understand the various budget numbers. Suggested course topics include, in no particular order: How our three levels of government have clear areas of responsibility on paper, but in practice it's a bit of a muddle. There is a difference between fiscal and monetary policy. Government finances are not remotely like a household budget. The definitions of fascism, socialism, communism, and capitalism, complete with the differences between them, along with the major variations of them. An introduction to statistics and logical thinking.

More than 7 million people have voted already, which is great. Hopefully they either ignored or sorted through the mound of crap being spouted. If you haven't voted already, you've missed the advanced polls. Go early on election day, or prepare to be in line. I'm hoping turnout cracks 80%. 

My prediction? A Liberal majority government. Maybe not by much. If so, it will be nice to have a  grownup running the country again. It's been a long time since the 1993 to 2006 era of Chretien and Martin running budget surpluses. 

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

Still struggling with sharing photos of prints.

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

A first for us

We didn't watch much network TV back in the day. We'd get videos and DVD's (remember them?) from the library or rental store (remember them too?) to watch movies and some TV shows. Generally we were years behind. We'd sometimes rent season one of something, like it, then realize there were some number of seasons, and it had been cancelled. We've bought into that several times just because the show was that good. For example, Firefly and The Sarah Conner Chronicles, RIP, gone too soon due to network stupidity.

That's in contrast to Grey's Anatomy. We watched that during the early days of COVID. We outright laughed at some of the story lines as it bumped downhill, but eventually they went too far and we bailed out. At least they didn't do a time travel episode, or at least not while we watched. I think it's still going on.

Another favourite, Elementary, we bought in while it was still ongoing, and we'd await the next season coming out on disc. That was one that reached a natural end, as I think of it. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Elementary did that. I would love to see a spin off about how a particular organization goes forward in the wake of events on the show. Pity that one character was killed, I loved watching him. (You might remember John Noble from Lord of the Rings or Fringe, which I liked at first and then gradually lost interest.)

As an aside, about the same time as Elementary we were also watching Sherlock, a British take on Sherlock Holmes. Cumberbatch is a brilliant actor, and the first season was really good, and then it went all pear shaped somehow. I'd rewatch any random episode of Elementary before Sherlock.

We recently got Acorn to chew through Brokenwood Mysteries, since we weren't sure we had watched them in order, which matters a little bit but not a requirement, since I'm quite fond of the character chemistry. There's another season of that coming out. We tried The Amazing Johnsons since the premise was interesting, and it features one of the actors from Brokenwood, but we were disappointed and stopped at the end of the first season.

We did Midsomer Murders, all bazillion seasons of it. The more recent seasons aren't as good as the earlier ones, and there's more coming. Somehow we got onto My Life is Murder, but that was really disappointing. Our nickname for the show was Inadmissible Evidence. That led us to A Remarkable Place to Die, which we quite liked, especially since we'd been to Queenstown and knew some of the area.

You might remember this photo. That's the Remarkables off to the left, which I admit doesn't really do them justice. 

And last night was the first. Most recently we discovered The Chelsea Detective quite by accident. The quality of the acting is really good, the camera work is excellent, and the procedural aspects of it are more believable than most. Yes, of course there's some story mechanics formula, and some might say it's a bit slow paced, and the actual deaths are pretty pedestrian compared to Midsomer, but I like how the story unfolds, and the length of the episodes gives the time to drag some red herrings across the set. 

We had just finished season 3, episode 3, and were looking for the episode 4 we knew existed. It does, but doesn't air till Monday. So here we are, right up to the minute on a show. Amazing. I think they've started filming a season 4, and we're looking forward to that.

Back in the day, when I was working out of town I liked to catch Mythbusters on TV. I saw some number of episodes, and of course have seen any number of snippets on Youtube. But in between things, if Linda feels like reading, and I'm not in the darkroom or doing something else, I've been going through Mythbuster episodes, with my finger liberally on the fast forward button. It's like they think people will forget what was happening before the commercial break. Then again, given the stupidity of most commercials, maybe that's not a bad assumption. I'm enjoying it, though some of it is dated now. (How on earth is Kari Byron 50 years old??)

 I'm not entirely sold on the whole streaming idea, though I have to admit the sheer convenience can't be beat. The resume show button is a great idea, but the functioning is somewhat erratic. The search feature isn't much fun, and I can't stand the popup trailers and image resizing that happens as I scroll across the screen looking at the endless possibilities, most of which do not interest me. There's been a few times we can't find the show that was there just a minute ago. Part of the problem might be me fat thumbing the remote. Part of it seems to be a touch pad and very touchy. But then again, I like browsing for DVDs in the library, and I liked going to the rental store. 

All of this is making me wonder if I've turned the corner from being curmudgeonly to outright cranky geezer. E-mail, for example. It used to be a great thing. Now, not so much. Some of the traffic is useful, like getting told the amount and due date for a bill (although I prefer paper), or that a book on hold at the library is available for pickup. Lots of it lately is essentially business related to the affairs of my community association, and some of that is enough like work that it's bringing back memories. Very little of it is actually from a person that I know, on a purely personal topic. All together too much of it is spam. I don't even know how many rules exist in my email program to route things to a trash folder, and even then new things constantly come up, requiring a new rule. 

I am reminded of the time that the IT staff at the small company I worked at asked us to be mindful of the amount of mail we had accumulated, and to archive as much as we could, since that got treated differently for back up purposes. They published a shame list showing mail storage sorted by size. The guy at the top, who had more than twice as much as the next biggest account promptly solved the problem by deleting all his email folders, and sending out a note that he had lost all his mail due to an IT failure, and if anyone was expecting a note from him to resend the original. Amazingly enough he didn't get fired, and the IT staff promptly restored the deleted items. 

We are waiting for Telus to put in the super duper ultra high speed fibre network in our neighbourhood, and then I'll seriously consider turning off the nucleus email, and create a couple of Telus addresses and start over. I have email going back years, and I wonder why. At work it was to cover my ass and save rework. There's lots of times when people asked me where a particular file was, and I'd resend them the original reply, complete with headers. Yes, that was intended to be aggressive.

I can hear the kids out there looking puzzled, asking who does email anymore. Don't people text? (Or whatever apps the cool kids are doing now that I've never heard of.) Except I mostly think that texts are a degradation of language. Words and letters were invented because symbols weren't precise, and now people are going back to emoticons and emojis and god knows what else I'm unaware of, being a grumpy old geezer. Sigh. 

I'm told that in a text that starting a sentence with a capital letter, and ending with a period and a space, is aggressive and insulting. I have, but some haven't graduated from using 2 spaces at the end of a sentence because that's the way it was done in the typewriter era. (Typewriters are an obsolete way of putting letters onto paper.) 

Where was I? I'm coming to appreciate more the writings of previous grumpy old farts complaining about the younger generations. At least so far I haven't shouted out the front door, "Hey you kids get off my lawn!" Maybe next week.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

The last polar bear flip book

The bears are fascinating to watch. As this one wandered along, sort of towards the snoozing bear, our naturalist was in raptures, thinking we might get to see a bear squabble. Except not. I could just imagine the conversation between them, wondering when the water would freeze over, and if anything interesting had happened lately. Or maybe the one came over to wake up the other and remind them of a planned social event. 

Again, since there are so many photos here, and I fear getting a TLDR, I've passed on the usual Of the Day photos, but it will return.