My dad and my uncle Rich crossing the river at the top of Adams Canyon in Layton. June 2010.
Sep 082010
So, I can’t seem to muster the mental energy lately to write a fully-formed, well reasoned blog post. Of course, most people would probably argue that I’ve never written one of those before in my life…but that’s another topic. So, it’s time for another random thoughts edition of One Off.
***
Sad. Sad, Sad, Sad. Epic Sad. Summer is over. To Wit:
This makes me sad. Our summer was so short this year. And rumor has it that we’re in for another very wet winter. The lawn outside my apartment is already a mud bog, and it’s only been raining for a week or so. I, at least, hope that we get some snow this year around Christmas time.
***
Speaking of Christmas time, it’s been cold and rainy lately, and every time the weather changes like that, it makes me want to start decorating for Christmas. I know, I know. It’s only September. And I may not be able to control my impulses when it comes to money, but I will refrain from decorating for Christmas until November. I may not have a lot of self control, but I think I can manage that. I bought my ticket home last week, and got my time off approved, so I will be down in Utah this year again. I will be home for almost a full week this time, so I might actually have some time to meet up with friends while I’m there. Especially if you’re available during the day time during the weeks.
***
I seem to be running into a lot of people lately who are capable of hearing only what they want to hear, and not what I actually say. If I say, "Once we start the project, it will take a minimum of three weeks to complete," the person to whom I am talking will hear, "The project will be done in three weeks." If I say, "We don’t do physical distribution of audiobooks, we only do digital distribution," the person to whom I am speaking will hear, "We do both physical and digital distribution." Did I all of a sudden (or is it "all of THE sudden?") lose my ability to communicate clearly? Did I ever have that ability?
***
I’m completely sickened by the jackholes in Florida who are planning a book burning of the Koran (Quran?) this weekend. I’m so, so, so tired of ignorant people making offensive decisions without at least trying to understand what it is they are fighting against. Sure. We’ll burn the Koran because some terrorists are Islamic, but we’ve never actually read the book, so we don’t know for sure what it teaches. Of course, some terrorists are Catholic, but we won’t burn the Bible, because those Catholic terrorists don’t reflect the point of view of all Catholics. All of the hatred, ignorance, and anger that resonates amongst people has really started to affect me lately. I just wish we lived in a world where those who are religious wouldn’t use their religion as an excuse to stay ignorant of the world and the people in it. It’s possible to be religious and still be enlightened and aware of the greater picture.
***
I’ve been feeling a little bit of…what’s the word…homesickness, I guess, for my old classmates and life at BYU. I never felt like I fit in all that much with the MDT kids (despite my trying desperately), but they were a really fun group of people most of the time. In the last few weeks, I’ve been mentally reliving the "breakthroughs" that I had when I was in school. Landing a supporting lead in a mainstage play the first week of school as a freshman, the first time I got really good scores on my acting proficiencies, the time in my first acting class when I made the class laugh doing an exercise when we were only able to speak in gibberish, doing The Fantasticks with Korianne and learning, for the first time, what it meant to have a fully two-way relationship with your acting partner. Choreographing a dance piece based on MacBeth with Nicole that the teacher still remembers eight years later. Taking coaching with Dave. Ballet with Richie. As difficult as the MDT program was (and, as worthless as the degree is in the "real" world), there were a lot of good times. I miss that.
***
I also miss some of my old former friends. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life when it comes to my relationships with my friends. I’ve lately been wishing that I could undo what I did and go back to the way things were. We’ve all moved on in our lives, and a reconciliation isn’t really likely (and perhaps not even recommended) but I still miss having those friendships more readily available.
***
On a more upbeat note, my dog is apparently part squirrel. The acorns have started falling off the oak trees here at my apartment complex. He likes to pick up the whole acorns (he won’t touch the ones that are cracked open) and carry them back to the apartment. Then he deposits them in a pile under the dining room table. He doesn’t chew them, he just carries and collects them, like he’s preparing for winter. It’s really strange.
***
I have two new neighbors who moved in a month ago who happen to be brothers of one of the guys I went to school with in the MDT program. They’re really cool guys, but they’re both built like brick walls, and always find ways to go around without their shirts on. (Let’s be honest…if I had a body like that, I would too.) My neighbors exacerbate my body image issues.
***
And lastly, here’s another photo from my photowalk on Labor Day
This is the underside of an old, abandoned train trestle over the Sammamish river. The slats across the top are actually the railroad ties.
Sep 062010
Sometimes, I think the universe just understands when I need a little break. Like this weekend, for instance.
I’ve been, not busy per se, but erstwhile occupied. I’ve been doing a lot of things I have to do instead of things I want to do and, as a result, I’ve not had much in the way of "down" time. Work has been going along well enough, and I finally feel as though I’m starting to fit into my place in the company a little more than I have previously. I’ve got my first 1-on-1 with my boss tomorrow, though, so I guess I’ll find out if my assessment of the situation matches his…
My audiobook company, Open Book Audio, has begun to change shape a little bit. Originally envisioned as an audiobook production company, my business partner and I have started morphing the company away from a production model and toward a distribution model. So, toward that end, I have been spending almost all of my non-work time in front of the computer designing and programming the new Open Book Audio store. (I keep linking them here on my blog to help drive the search engines to the site, so forgive the repetition). I’m quite pleased with the way the store has turned out, and the platform upon which the entire site, including the store, is built is an extremely flexible and easy to use one. We’ve already started listing products from other publishers, and we’re hoping to increase that number significantly over the next couple of years. We’re also in talks with the major retailers (Audible, iTunes, eMusic, etc.) to get our titles listed in those services. (It’s like pulling teeth, but we’re well on our way.)
So, Friday night, all day Saturday, and almost all day Sunday, I sat in front of my computer immersed in CSS, PHP, HTML, and LMNOP. (That last one is fake, by the way.) Last Sunday night, I finally launched the work I’d been doing for the last month, and actually went to sleep not making a mental list of the things I needed to work on tomorrow. It is extremely fortuitous that Monday was a holiday, otherwise, I wouldn’t have had much of a weekend at all.
This morning, although the weather was, shall we say, less than idyllic, I decided that it was time to have some fun for a change. So I did. I took Luke for a walk, and ate breakfast. Then, after looking through a Facebook album of one of my friends where pretty much everyone in the group of people looked like Abercrombie and Fitch models (and wore about the same amount of clothing), I decided that I would go run on the treadmill for about 30 minutes. I came back, took a shower, got dressed, unfriended my Facebook friend with the posse of buff gym rats, and then grabbed my camera.
I haven’t gone shooting in months. Too many other distractions. Work, Open Book Audio, the new piano…they didn’t leave much time for shooting pictures. This time, I decided that, rather than drive all over the place trying to find some amazing vista to photograph, I’d stay within the city limit of Redmond. I’m glad I did, because I found a beautiful little spot that I had no idea even existed.
Right near the city’s campus (city hall, police station, senior center) there’s a river trail that runs alongside the Sammamish river. Summer’s just starting to come to a close, so there are still some flowering plants, and everything’s green. I can tell that it’s going to be spectacular when fall comes, though. It was so isolated and quiet. I actually climbed across the river on that old abandoned train track you can see in the photo, and walked back up the other side of the river where I found this guy just plodding along in the river:
If you will allow me to wax grateful for a moment: I am so grateful that I moved to the Seattle area. The first year and a half were very difficult for me up here, and there are moments (October through May) where I can’t help but ask myself what I’ve done to move to a place where the sun only shines 17 days out of a year. But I love, love, love Redmond. It’s so beautiful and peaceful. It feels like a small town (albeit a very sophisticated one) with easy access to big-city accommodations. It really is the best of both worlds. Where else can you walk out your door to see a bald eagle or a great blue heron, and then drive five minutes to thousands of restaurants, art galleries, movie theaters, and more shopping than you can shake a stick at? I just wish I could afford to buy a house here. At the very least, I hope I never lose my job, because I never want to leave the Pacific Northwest. I’ve lived all over the country, and no place compares with this gorgeous, wonderful place.
Once the very relaxing photo walk was over, I came home, took a nap, made homemade pizza, a loaf of bread, and a homemade razzleberry pie. (Raspberries, Blueberries, and fresh-picked blackberries from the vines just outside my apartment). Then I watched an episode of Bones (thanks Netflix!), practiced the Maple Leaf Rag on the piano, and now here I am. Oh yeah, and I played about an hour of Angry Birds on my iPad. Fun game.
I’m the kind of person who, even when relaxing, has to be doing something. The difference between relaxing and not relaxing is whether I’m doing something I WANT to be doing or something I HAVE to be doing. And, honestly, many times, it’s the exact same activity. I just have to be in the mood for it.
In fact, the only thing about today that wasn’t perfect was that I did the unthinkable: I let my cleaning lady go today. She’s been picking up after me for over a year, and she was awesome. Unfortunately, with the new piano and some of my other bills, I just can’t justify the $240 a month I spend to have her clean my house–particularly since I’m not a very messy person. This will, unfortunately, eat into my relaxation time, but overall, I think it will be a positive change.
I’ll be posting more photos as the week goes on. I took about 400 shots, so I think I’ll have some good ones in there to play around with. In the meantime, go to http://www.openbookaudio.com/store and buy an audiobook. It’ll do you good. And while you’re doing that, I’m going to go and scoop up a bit of vanilla bean ice cream and place it over a piece of still-warm razzleberry pie. Happy Labor Day!
I don't really know why, but I really like this photo. It doesn't have the best composition, but it's just so stinkin' cute. This is the foot and hand of my neighbor Brigette, getting Luke to Shake.
My first foray into semi-professional photography was through the art of the headshot…the 8X10 photo that actors hand out to auditioners when they audition for parts. It’s a very specific style of photography. While I was in college, I used to do headshots on occasion to make a little extra money, and I got pretty good at it. I wanted to get back into doing some headshots again, so I asked Monica, a co-worker of mine, if she wouldn’t be willing to model for me. She does community theater, and so I figured she’s get some headshots, and I’d get some practice. I was quite pleased with the way this session turned out. Monica (despite her protestations to the contrary) is quite photogenic, and the lighting couldn’t have been more perfect. I did almost nothing to these photos. I didn’t really even have to color correct. Now, go out there and land a lead role, will you?
So, like much of the western portion of the United States, the Seattle area got pounded with a freak snowstorm this week. At work we had about two hours of mightily impressive hail, and the mountains got quite a bit of fresh snow. I missed not having any snow at all this year, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to go and enjoy the snow up in the mountains. So this morning at 6:00 AM (!) Luke and I hopped into the car and drove 30 minutes up into Snoqualmie Pass and over to the Gold Creek Sno-Park area for a couple of hours. It was absolutely beautiful, and Luke had the time of his life. He saw quite a bit of snow his first winter when we were still in Utah, and he loved it, but there just isn’t much in the way of snow around here.
It was a fun trip that wore me out. The trip did teach me a few things, however.
- I really need to get a new car. A Honda Civic Coupe is not a good snow vehicle on unplowed roads. I almost didn’t make it out.
- I really, really need to spend more time outdoors. It’s so beautiful around here, and I just don’t ever seem to take advantage of it as much as I ought to.
- I am woefully out of shape. Back to healthy eating and the gym. *sob*
- This was such a fun trip, and it didn’t cost me anything but the gas to get there.
Next weekend, I think I’m going to go to the tulip festival again. This is my third year here, and it would be my third time going back to to the tulip festival. I think, though, that I’m going to try and go very early in the morning next weekend so I can get some great wide-angle pictures without tons of tourists in the middle of my shot.
The cherry tree outside my front door is in full bloom right now, which is actually unusual. Most of the cherry blossoms have fallen off of the trees, but there are still a few patches of late-blooming cherry trees here and here, and the one outside my apartment is one of those I suppose. It’s also unusual in that its flowers are so dark. Most of the cherry blossoms in the area are white or the palest pink, but these are a deep magenta color.
I wanted to play around with lighting on these photos, so I clipped a small branch, brought it inside, and clipped it to one of my music stands with an oversized alligator clip. Then I used a small desk lamp with a daylight flourescent bulb in it, wrapped the lamp in a cardboard cereal box I had cut open, and used that in a completely dark room to light up the branch. Putting the branch on the music stand was awesome because it allowed me to the flexibility to rotate and tilt the branch easily, and instead of moving my camera, I could just move the subject.
Shot on the Canon 7D, 24-70mm f/2.8, ISO250, Exposure time of 1.5-8 seconds. Developed in Lightroom (cropping, basic color correction.)
Mar 242010
This picture just makes me want to go watch Steel Magnolias again.
I snapped this a few minutes ago while I was waiting for the bread I’ve got in the oven to finish baking. That’s right. I’m baking bread at 12:33 AM and taking nighttime pictures of Magnolias. My masculinity fled a LONG time ago. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a loaf of artisan bread to take from the oven. Good day, sir.
Mar 212010
Thursday, I purchased the first piece of equipment that I’m going to need for my big Wyoming backpacking trip this summer…perhaps the most important piece of equipment: my boots. I did a lot of research, asked my father, and settled on getting a pair of Hi-Tec Altitude IV boots. (I almost didn’t buy them because part of me can’t abide a company that spells its name "Hi-Tec" but I figured that a 50-60 mile hike at 10,000 feet is not really a time to be sitting on my high horse about spelling and grammar.
I want to break them in a little bit, so this weekend, I did a fair bit of walking. Saturday, I drove about 2 hours, and also spent about an hour walking around taking pictures. (See yesterday’s post.) Today, I woke up and took the dog for a 3-mile walk. Then I got home, climbed back into bed, and was just about to drift off to sleep when I got a call from my friend Bill, reminding me that we had planned on going on a hike to Cougar mountain in Bellevue. So, I got up, strapped my boots back on, and we went for a, shall we say, invigorating six mile hike through the forest taking pictures. Afterward, we decided to head over to Bellevue Botanical Gardens and, you guessed it, take some pictures, so we walked around for another mile or so.
Suffice it to say, my feet are a little sore. It’s been a long time (i.e. never) since I’ve walked 10 miles in a single day. I’m exhausted.
But, I was able to snap a few pictures that I didn’t hate. About 3/4 of the way through our hike out in the middle of the woods, we came across the corpse of an old car. I have absolutely no idea how this car got there, because there is nothing resembling a road anywhere near here. Most of the time, the path was only a 2-3 feet across. The only way I could think that the car might have made it there was if it had been dropped by plane from the sky or something. In any case, it was a pretty cool little chunk of metal in the middle of a very ferny and mossy forest, so, of course, we took lots of pictures.
One of the things that my hiking companions mentioned was the color of the green in the forest. For those who aren’t familiar with Seattle’s greenery, it’s a different shade of green than almost anywhere else I’ve ever lived. It’s almost electric. And moss grows on EVERYTHING. (I didn’t adjust the color on the photo below at all…this is exactly how it looks.) Even in Michigan, I never saw green like this. I guess they call it the Emerald City for a reason.
When I go hiking, I have a tendency to notice very small things on the ground since I’m watching where I’m going in order to prevent eating it in a giant mud puddle. One of the more interesting finds (besides a boatload of snails and slugs) was this fungus. I’d tell you to taste the rainbow, but something about this tells me that the rainbow might just kill you.
This is the time of year in Seattle where EVERYTHING is in bloom. A couple of weeks ago it was just starting, but now it’s really starting to go haywire. The Camellia, Rhododendron, Tulips, Daffodils, Jonquils, Hyacinth, Cherry Trees, Magnolias, Dogwoods–they’re all in full splendor right now. If you can combine those flowers with a sunny day and a blue sky, the flowers just sparkle.
So, all in all, I liked the way these photos came out far more than the ones from yesterday. Just goes to show, I guess, that even when you have a bad day, you just keep on keeping on, and eventually you begin to find what you’re looking for. Or something like that. I don’t want to start crafting life-lessons from a simple hike through the woods. If I start doing that now, imagine what a tome I’ll have to write when I get home from my Wyoming Trip in August. And I don’t have time to write a tome.
Mar 202010
When I was about 16 years old, my father let me use (and eventually gave me) an old Minolta X500 SLR camera and a few lenses. It was completely manual…manual focus, manual aperture, shutter speed. I loved using that thing. I would trek it over to the Albion nature center or schlep it along on some drives through the back roads around Michigan. While my classmates were taking disposable cameras with them on school trips to Toronto or Band Festivals, I was lugging around this heavy SLR, a 28mm, a 50mm, and a 135mm lens. I was buying (and occasionally stealing…since I was a klepto back in those days) all KINDS of film, both color and black and white. I spent tons of money on getting my film developed. I just loved taking pictures.
Part of the problem, however, is that I just wasn’t very good at it. I read books, and practiced, but I never seemed to be able to get the hang of lighting and composition. As with many things that I have tried to do in my lifetime, I understand the technical aspect of what it is I was trying to do, but I never managed to grasp the artistry.
My love of photography has never really abated. I got my first modern SLR camera as a sophomore in college (Canon Rebel 2000). As a senior, I got my first digital camera (Minolta DIMAGE 7HI). My first Digital SLR came less than a year later when I got my Canon Digital Rebel. A year and a half ago, I got the Canon Rebel XTi. Then, just before Christmas, I traded up to what I hope will be the last digital camera I buy for a good long while: The Canon 7D. The 7D is a fantastic camera that does 18 Megapixel images, and 1080p Hi-Def video.
I also, over the last several years, have managed to cobble together a few fairly decent lenses…which supposedly are the main different in the quality of the photos. My favorite lenses are my 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 wide angle lens, my 50mm f/1.8 lens, and my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. (Sorry for the geek speak for those who don’t know or care what those numbers mean.) (And, as another parenthetical, when I type the word lens, my fingers want to type it in as "lense." Not sure why.)
All in all, I’ve managed to cobble together a pretty good little set of gear for an amateur. I did some actor’s headshots and a few portrait sessions when I was in college and afterwards, some of which I’m pretty proud of.
But I’ve never seemed to be able to move my photography past the point of "workmanlike" to "artistic," and I’ve been struggling to figure out why that is. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I believe I’ve developed some insight:
1. I think that, overall, my frustration stems from the fact that I seem to be unable to capture the scene in front of me as I’m seeing it through my own eyes. I see things around me all the time that look absolutely beautiful to me. However, the instant I start trying to see it through the lens of my camera, I lose that vision. I don’t know whether it’s the fact that I’ve not yet mastered the technical aspects of my photography, and so I can’t translate what I see in my mind onto what I’m looking at on film, or whether I simply haven’t learned that translation layer yet. The camera can’t see things the same way that I can, and I’ve not been able to see things in the way that the camera does.
2. I think that, overall, I just struggle when it comes to visual creativity. (In reality, I feel like I struggle with creativity in general.) I’m really good a copying people or stealing ideas, but sometimes I have a hard time coming up with material on my own. For instance, I was looking through the Flickr stream of my friend Jamelah, and came across this photo and this photo. Jamelah does this "365 days" project where she takes a self portrait every day, and posts it online. And a lot of them are really, really good. They’re just so creative. And so well executed. I saw her photos and instead of using that as a springboard, all I could thing of were ways that I could copy or tweak her idea. I just struggle coming up with original ideas.
3. I rarely go off the beaten trail…both literally and figuratively. My drive for photography, like so much of what I do in my day-to-day life seems to come from proving that I can make a pictures that is just as beautiful or just as ______________ as someone else’s. I want to take portraits like Rachel Thurston. I want to take nature photography like Scott Bourne. I want to take landscapes like Chris Gin. I haven’t figured out what kind of photographer I want to be or what kind of photographs I want to take. So, as a result, I skim across the surface of several types of photography, never really getting good at any of them. I also don’t leave my comfortable world that often. So, it’s hard for me to find those sweeping panoramas or glorious vistas or unusual animals because if it’s not within a 10-minute drive of my house, I haven’t been there. So, I drive along the well-worn highways, take pictures of the same waterfalls, the same rusty old tractors, the same ferry boat ride panoramas that everyone else has photographed. As a result, much of my photography feels like snapshots instead of photos.
4. The digital toolbox. I may know my way around F-stops and shutter speeds, but when it comes to what to do with the final product, everything I’ve ever learned has been experimental. Some things I’ve gotten pretty good at (like retouching headshots) while other things (color correction, for instance) are troublesome for me. Plus, I’ve tended to use Photoshop to hack my way through fixing mistakes that never should have been made in the first place.
5. Some of it just my old self-doubt. I’ve always been one of those people who feels like, if his creativity isn’t the best and greatest, there’s no value in it. Why continue to create mediocre "art" when there are those out there who can do it so much better than you can. As I’ve started taking more photos again, I haven’t just enjoyed the process. The whole point of the process for me is to get a quality final product. And I think it’s that focus on the final product that prevents me from really learning and experimenting and creating in a way that I haven’t done before.
Today, I woke up early, threw the dog in the car, and drove down highway 202, east out of Redmond. I’ve never been that way, so I just drove to see where I’d end up. I ended up in a little tiny town called Fall City (population: 5000) not to far from the Snoqualmie water fall. I walked around, took a ton of photographs, and spent about two hours just meandering around the area. When I got home, I popped my memory card into the computer, and I was just disappointed with the results. I want to take that one picture, that one shot that just screams "AMAZING!" The one that you would want to use for your computer desktop, or even print up and hang on the wall. But out of the thousands of pictures that I’ve taken over the last couple of years, I can’t think of a single picture that I would want to hang on my wall. In fact, with all the photos that I’ve taken, the only thing of mine hanging up right now is 5 4×6 photos of tulips in a frame…and none of those are particularly good pictures on their own. They just happen to match my shower curtain.
It’s become painfully obvious to me that I’m not going to be one of those people who picks up a camera and starts making beautiful, amazing, life-altering photographs right away. I mean, come on, I’ve been taking photos on and off for over 15 years now. If I haven’t turned into the next Ansel Adams by now, I’m not going to. So, I think the real challenge for me to learn how to enjoy the process of photography, not fixating on the end result. The fact of the matter is that, I’ll probably continue to take pictures for the rest of my life because it’s one of the only ways that I’ve found to be even remotely creative in a visual space. And I have enjoyed it in the past, even when my photos were never that good.
I also need to really work on finding my way off the well-worn paths. I need to get out of my car and walk through the mud a little more. I need to experience things from a vantage point of someone other than a tourist. I need to be a little braver in asking people if I can photograph them or their pets or their flowers.
And I just need to keep taking pictures. Because, while my photos aren’t great, taking pictures is sure a whole lot cheaper than buying more equipment to take pictures that still aren’t great.
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