Category: Photography

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I Had Every Intention

…this evening of going out and doing some night photography. I even got the camera and tripod out. Then I looked at the temperature and the wind chill and said, "Ain't nobody got time for that!"

Oh well. Maybe this summer.

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Dreams of Home

Last night I dreamt my sister and I were back in the house where we lived during my high school and college years. I don't remember the circumstances, only the overwhelming feeling of "home" and "safety" that it elicited. I remember standing in my bedroom, running a finger down the blinds, watching the afternoon sun stream in. It was a little slice of heaven.

Dig those bell bottoms!

That poor bedroom received more coats of paint that I can count over the years. Sadly, I don't have photos from all its iterations. I think the blue phase was my favorite, even though it never was the exact blue I'd envisioned. I also forever regretted my choice of carpet when we first moved in because it never went with anything; a brown, white, and black shag that my father reluctantly agreed to on the condition there would be no more "girly" colors (lemon yellow, lime green—hey, it was the late 60s and early 70s!) like I'd had in my bedroom in our previous home.

My mom, being an interior decorator, indulged my nervous color twitching and I think on some level encouraged it.

My "peach" phase, and the color of the room that most often appears in my dreams

I've dreamt of that house more often than usual over the past few years, and I'm starting to think that while my last apartment in Phoenix may be my current conscious mental "happy place" where I go to de-stress and cocoon, that house on Solano Drive North may in fact be my real, subconscious place of refuge.

The chocolate experiment
What I wouldn't give to still have that original Hildebrant STAR WARS poster that I picked up for $3 at Spencer's Gifts shortly after the movie came out…not to mention the Donna Summer!
Yes, that's a collage of mens…
Always the stereo geek. Funny how I don't keep house plants any more; I used to surround myself with them.
The chocolate walls lasted about 6 months before they closed in and I was convinced I was seeing things moving in the shadows. It was time for them to go.
Disco, baby. Disco.
A little bit of that afternoon glow streaming in that so often appears in my dreams of this house.
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Scenes from San Francisco, 1993

I still find it amazing that for all the years I lived in San Francisco—inarguably one the most photogenic cities in the United States—I have so few photos of The City itself. Again and again I used to say, "I really need to grab my camera and just start walking the neighborhoods," but like going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium—something else that kept getting put off "because it'll always be there"—one day I woke up and realized I no longer had the opportunity.

But every so often I did get out…

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The AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1988

Going through more photos…

Even though I'd been in San Francisco a couple years when the quilt was unveiled at Moscone Center in December of 1988, I was still semi-insulated from the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, having lost only two friends to the disease: Kent "Red" Kelly (who'd moved from Phoenix to San Francisco in 1979 and remarked shortly before his death in 1987 that, "Six years in San Francisco are better than sixty in Arizona," and Ben Walzer, a dear friend and "neighbor with benefits" from my time in Tucson who passed only a few days after Kent.

But like happened with so many others, the arrival of the horrible 90s changed all that.

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Beauty in Darkness

Stars Bursting In The Night Sky

Australian photographer Lincoln Harris' collection Star Trails, surreal swirls in the sky created from a multitude of long-exposure shots and the effect of the Earth's rotation.

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Bullshit

Like millions of others, I upgraded to iOS7 last week. I generally like it, but it's taken me only a few days to discover a HUGE fail on the part of Apple and the bloom is definitely off the rose because of it.

The built in photo app now allows you to apply filters to your photos, either when you take them or after the fact. Pretty cool, right?

The problem is that when you transfer them off the phone using Apple's own Image Transfer application on the Mac (or through iPhoto), all the filter information is stripped and you're left with only the original photo.

WTF?

And moving the pictures back onto the phone does not restore that lost data.

So all of the original beautifully filtered photos that I took on our trip to Santa Fe are gone (except for the ones I uploaded to Instagram), and the only way I was able to get them back is to re-import them to the phone, reapply the filters, and then email the filtered photos back to me. Yes folks, email.

I would expect this kind of crap from Microsoft, but not Apple.

And did I mention that when you do this you don't get the full resolution photos, even though they're being selected to be sent as full size? Nope, they're only 62% of the original resolution.

This is bullshit.

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And Apple Wins Again

Just amazing.

I tried catching this scene earlier today using my old "prosumer" (not my digital SLR) Sony digital camera. It failed miserably—by not only refusing to stop the moth's wings in flight, but also in failing to capture the deep purple color of the flowers. As I was about to give up and walk off, I returned with my iPhone.

MIND. BLOWN.