Reading

I've been trying to read more. Really. There was a reading challenge I joined at the beginning of the year, and made a good start. The cheat sheet for it is probably somewhere in the clutter on my desk. My thinking was that with the lockdown I'd have lots of time to read. Not. I dropped out somewhere along the way, what with other things seeming to take up my energy and time. (The person who organized it is really nice and dropped off a surprise gift for having participated, such as it was.)

You'd think reading would be easy. It used to be, at least for me. Now I seem to find it really hard to dive into a book and finish it. Often it's what I call a paint by numbers book. Do you remember those? There would be a drawing with little numbers in the spaces, and a key to tell you which number was what colour. I hated them. 

Too many books are following a formula. The Hero's Journey, or elements of it, is common. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. The meet-cute. Conversational conventions. Stupid decisions. False conflict. Teenage sulks. Unrealistic stakes. Impossible deadlines. Whatever. Boring.

Movies are even worse. The comic book superhero movies are all that and more. Or less, depending on how you look at it. Even the trailers are all the same. I don't watch many trailers any more. If the poster has a gun in it, I don't watch. If the blurb has the words revenge, justice, payback, mission, taut, and a bunch more, I don't watch.

However, I do like browsing IMDB to see what actors or writers I like have been up to lately. Or a long time ago. One of the recent books from the library was about Stanley Kubrick. It turned out to be way too much detail about other people's recollections of his work. TLDR. But on the same trip I saw Dr Strangelove in the dvd bin, and brought it home. I had not known it was the first movie role for Jame Earl Jones. It was released 1964. It was an odd look at a world that lots of people now still remember, and it seems so strange, yet we got here from there.

Which by an indirect route I won't detail here, got me watching the trailer for Plunkett and Macleane. We'd seen it when it first came out, and I remember it being fun. Holy doodle! It had that "ONE MAN" trailer voice, and it was so weird hearing that again. That came out in 1999, which wasn't all that long ago.

Which got me to a young Liv Tyler, and then to Lord of the Rings, which came out 2001. Even people that had never read Lord of the Rings wanted to see the movies, and the wait between releases was brutal. As for the wait between that and The Hobbit, they should have kept waiting. 

I still remember reading the books the first time. I was in high school, and finished The Two Towers. Boom, the iron gate closing. I was right there in the dark with Sam. It was late. Really late. I seriously thought of starting The Return of the King to see what happened, and decided I'd better not. I knew I wouldn't be able to put it down, and it was likely going to be dawn when I finished. I've read it any number of times since, but oddly enough I haven't read the books since the movies came out. I won't say they spoiled the books for me. The movies did a good job of translating the books to screen, and what works in one medium doesn't work in another. I'm told there are more movies coming out, based on the Silmarillion. My hopes are not high.

You might remember me mentioning Neil's book of Porchraits. I got a similar book, A New York - Paris Visual Diary The Human Face of Covid-19, by Peter Turnley. It turns out taking a photo of a highly reflective black cover is difficult. There's a bit of dust on it, and there's a bit of a selfie there.

This is a grittier book that Neil's, and tougher reading, but the photos in both books are fascinating. It took a couple goes to finish it, and I'll be revisiting it as well. 

The book I'm chewing on now, bogged down and struggling, is set in the Algonquin Hotel, in modern day, featuring Dorothy Parker as a ghost. That's a good start. Now it's dragging in a revenge plot by a writer and his ex-wife, and it ties to the book that is key to Dorothy showing up and cracking wise. It's  beginning to read like an in-joke for the New York publishing industry. I might not finish.

Then there was this one.

One of my English teachers in high school had drunk the Can Lit kool-aid big time. She was always talking about how it was the new thing, upsetting the old order by adding new stars to the pantheon. Or something. Much of what we were forced to read was dreck, or so I thought at the time. 

To tell you true, it was the portraits that interested me at first. I'm getting more interested in photographs of people. In most ways the book is a disappointment. I have to tell myself that most of these portraits are done by an amateur photographer with film and in natural light. I think in some cases it was publish a particular portrait, or have nothing. Much of the text of the book is about the connections in that Can Lit world. Who knows who, how they got introduced, who got what published. Kind of dull, unless you're into that sort of thing. Most of the people are poets, and the only one I'd heard of was Leonard Cohen. The only writer I'd heard of was Margaret Atwood. Call me a Philistine if you must.

Next? A photo series by an indigenous photographer, and something that looks like a remake of The Expanse.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Paperweight

This is one of the reasons why paperweight photos are difficult. Every faint scratch in the glass surface can catch the light.

The rocks of Feb 24

New Zealand beaches are good for many things. Walking along them will soothe your soul. Just that there's a beach and an ocean means the scenery is good, and sometimes it's spectacular. I fell in love with the driftwood, as you've seen over the last while.

But there are often rocks as well, and some of them are fascinating. These are all from Brighton Beach, near one of the largest and most interesting chunks of driftwood I've ever seen.

I was captured by the textures. At first I thought they might be fossilized wood, but I don't think so. Some of them reminded me a bit of Blue Rocks in Nova Scotia.

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11. I had hoped to make these into a panorama, but they didn't go. Maybe I should try again now that I've got more memory in the computer.

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12/13 And in fact I went back and tried the merge again, though it's not as successful as I had hoped. 

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16. I suppose this one and the next one are Driftwood of the Day. It's hard to get a sense of how big this chunk is. I'm a long way back from it

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Another before and after, more subtle this time

Look at me go! Not only the tablet, but Photoshop too! The after.

And the before.

And just for fun, the really before, straight out of the camera.

It maybe isn't noticeable in the small version, but in the big version I see in Lightroom there were several streaks. I'm not sure what they are. I could crop out some of them and make a stronger photo, but one was too close to the blossom, and was the brightest of the bunch. I really liked this shot and didn't want to show it with such an obvious flaw. With the right tools it's easy to fix.

Before this I could count on the thumbs of one hand the number of photos I've altered in Photoshop. It's such an intimidating application, and the trackpad was a difficult tool to work with. It's still intimidating and I don't expect to start using it as the every photo every day photo editing tool. Neither do I expect to be going crazy using it, like adding in a a giant flaming asteroid to create drama.  

As a for instance, I tweaked the settings in Lightroom to improve the photo. The original is somewhat darker than what my eyes saw, and the final edit is somewhat brighter. But if you looked at the final edit, and then looked at the actual flower on a late afternoon overcast winter day you'd recognize it as the same scene. 

You probably all have an image in your mind of a landscape painter, sitting or standing at their easel, palette in one hand, brush in the other, peering out at the scene and dabbing at the canvas. Some do that, of course, but what they're really doing is painting a scene that is in their mind. Having a painter express their artistic vision by adding or subtracting or altering elements of the 'real' scene is a well established and respected tradition.

These traditions are not quite so firm in photography, and especially not digital photography. Cameras, for better or worse, capture everything. Power lines, stuff intruding on your composition, funny colours or textures, artistic streaks of light, blurs, you name it. Some of those things should be dealt with while taking the photo, and some can be dealt with in editing. It's always fun to give a group of photographers some booze over a discussion of what should be done at the scene, and how much editing is the right amount. 

Which is something I've thought about in terms of my own work. How much editing to do? How far to push the settings? Most people think of a photograph as an accurate representation of a scene, something taken by a journalist and published in a newspaper or magazine. Except all of those are edited as well, to support the story at hand. 

Really, photographs now are digital art. Light captured on an electronic sensor, manipulated in the camera to create a digital file, sometimes sent to other computers where there will be further manipulation, perhaps actual human editing, further manipulation to display it on a device, and then we get into the human sensory apparatus. A colour blind person will see a different image than the one I produced and edited.

I'm thinking of a particular photo of mine, taken of a sunrise landscape on a winter day. Cold and bleak. I really tweaked the colour, pushed them far more than I usually would, past what you'd see even in a spectacular sunrise. I asked a friend what she thought, and she loved it enough to buy a print. It all comes down to the artistic vision of the person doing the camera work and image editing. No two people will produce the same image, even starting with the same raw file.

So going forward you might not see obvious changes in my photos. What I'm going to work for are subtle tweaks like removing small distractions, and finer adjustments to specific areas. I've had a number of comments suggesting how other people would do things, and I love thinking about that. I hope you all follow along, and don't be afraid to comment on what you see.

And yes, I've begun to think about Image of the Year.

Of the Day

Driftwood

And a Macro Monday paperweight. This looks really similar to, and yet is not the same as one previously presented. There's a subtle difference in the texture of the glass.

A first, and some before after

 Here's a first. The very first photo edited with a tablet and pen system. I'd always struggled with the adjustment brush in Lightroom. It usually made things worse. Much worse. Some of it was an imperfect understanding of how the application tool worked, but part of it was the physical tool, a track pad. On or off. Click, boom.

Here's the after.

And the before.

Before the tablet I wouldn't even have attempted to adjust those little sunbeams. The result would look terrible. As it is, I'm pretty pleased with it as a first attempt.

There's lots of ways to configure it, and I spent a happy few hours playing and thinking about how I do things, and how I could do things. I'm not convinced I've got it perfect, but it's easy to tweak. It made me think about the controls in Lightroom that are also keyboard commands, which I tend not to use. This is all part of my experiment to try to take my photography up a level, so I'll be playing with this for a while, perhaps going back and redoing old images.

The tablet is really designed to work with Photoshop, and I'll be starting to play with that a little more as well. That should keep me busy and out of mischief for the rest of my life.

How did I come by it? My friend Lynda (not my wife Linda) wasn't using it and gave it to me to try out. She doesn't want it back. So far so good, as the saying goes. I'll have to find something nice to do for her. We met up yesterday in a socially distant way and went for a walk in Fish Creek, catching up socially and professionally. We are in much the same profession, and met on a contract. We have lots to talk about during photo walks.

Here's another before and after.

As it turns out, appliances are manufactured on a much faster time frame than they used to be. Planned obsolescence and all. Our old oven was 16 years old and the door latch/lock mechanism failed, locking the oven shut. There were various remedies proposed by Mrs Google, but none worked. A call to the manufacturer rep didn't generate any new ideas, but did disclose the replacement part was likely no longer available. 

As a digression, the part, or a functionally identical part almost certainly exists. Somewhere. Finding it is the challenge. There were a certain number of them made for the production run of the appliance, and somewhere there is an algorithm that tells the manufacturer how many more to make to honour their warranty commitments. They live in a warehouse somewhere, or some number of somewheres. Eventually the last one is sold, and maybe for a while there is a bit of trade between warehouses, but then that oven starts getting old. The remaining parts start gathering dust. They get moved. They don't get counted in an inventory and drop out of the computer databases. For all intents and purposes they cease to exist. It may be possible to tinker with the lock to disable it and yet have the oven continue to be functional. Maybe. I'm not going to experiment with an appliance that is designed to optimally mix natural gas with air for combustion. These things are always more complicated than it might seem on the surface. Someone not in the trade never knows what interlocks or safety features are part of the design, and it's generally a bad idea to disable or circumvent safety devices. 

We were willing to call a service tech and pay for the call, and the part, but we weren't willing to call the tech, be told the part was not in stock, that there wasn't even a similar part that would work, and still be on the hook for the service call that didn't fix anything.

So Linda went oven shopping. I was buried in work meetings. This one includes an air fryer rack we are eager to try out, and a griddle that sits in the middle of the cook top. One of the burners puts out about a third more heat than the biggest one on the old oven, so the morning coffee routine goes about a third more quickly, and that's a good thing, as long as I don't get distracted by the cat, or the sunrise, or, or... There's already been one adventure with hot chocolate.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Paperweight

2020 almost done, but is 2021 sipping a beer?

One of the things I like about being retired is that generally there is no particular rush to be doing most things. With a bit of planning things happen in an orderly way.

Except 2020 has been anything but orderly. Things keep changing. But such is life. I know some people are pissing and moaning and complaining about the state of the world just now, as if the pandemic was put here to personally inconvenience them. That wearing a mask and restricting their activities is an unacceptable assault on their freedom. Some have made lemonade, setting their sails to the new direction of the wind as best they can. Others are taking advantage to get closer to their families, or getting various projects around the house done than they've been meaning to do for years decades. 

As I've said, our lives haven't changed much. Linda passed her 3 year retirement anniversary this week and is loving every minute of it. She likes it so much she says she should have done it decades ago, except, pension calculations. The weeks/months since we got back from New Zealand in March have zoomed by, no pun intended.

Technically, I suppose, I'm not actually retired. There are people paying me to do things for them, and most would call it pretty dull work. I don't, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. However, this has been a long week of meetings. Really long. All of my work team mates are on vacation now till Jan 4 at least, and were desperate to finish off things before departing. Lots and lots of meetings, which displaced some of my actual deliverables. Video meetings are tougher than they sound. I had to put an extra cushion on the office chair.

Then there's all the stuff in between meetings, regular life stuff like going for a walk, important stuff like getting to the library before it closed for a month, and crucial stuff like making coffee. I had to hustle to get these things done, sometimes scrambling to be ready for the next meeting.

Now that almost everyone is away I have no meetings at all on my calendar for the next two weeks, unlike the 17 hours of meetings for work last week, plus another couple hours with our financial advisor. (SG, MK says hi!) By Friday afternoon I was a complete ball of frazzled. That might well have been a record for number of hours spent in meetings in a week, ever.

I've got lots to do over the next several weeks, even if the relevant documents haven't been formally approved. They won't change that much. I hope. It's the kind of work I like, puttering with queries and databases, fixing data, planning for migrations, making sure that there are no nasty surprises and that the documentation lines up with what the data actually says, and what we actually do/did what the documents say. It's kind of fun exploring a new database, as long as you don't have someone looking over your shoulder, asking questions, with an impatient clock ticking.

The plan is to dive in, after waking up, paying attention to Celina, and making/drinking coffee. Take a break after a while, have breakfast, clean up, work a bit more. Go for a walk near mid day when it's nicest out. Work a bit more in the afternoon. Work on blog and novel writing as the mood strikes. Domesticate a new tablet and figure out how it affects my photo work flow. Get out for more photos. Only 18,000 so far this year. It should be a lovely low key ending to the year. I hope.

You know that meme, someone saying, "hold my beer", then doing something stupid? I fear that 2021 is sitting there quietly, sipping a beer, waiting for their moment. The people that study such things were not surprised by the COVID pandemic. For years they've been saying something like this was coming. I'm wondering what nobody is seeing coming.

Lately the mornings have been clear. I enjoy watching the subtle shading of colour from the western dark sky to the gradual brightening of the eastern sky. Although that one morning back in October was pretty spectacular.

This is pretty much what we're looking at these days, though this is also from October.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Celina

Though for many people this expresses what they think of 2020

The file number serendipity shot from 2016.

Paperweight