Change of Plans

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At 5:30 in the morning the sky is grey. At 5:30 in the morning the coffee shops are closed. The humidity was high. Mosquitoes rouse hungry, attracted to any animal that exudes CO2 . Today it drizzled making the grey just another tone darker. The mosquitoes don’t care about the rain. But it was breezy. So what better place to be than to a nature center in Rockport, Maine? Well I can think of a few . . . .thousand. For those who reaaaaaaaalllllllllly have an interest, here’s more info; http://www.merryspring.org.

We all gathered to take pictures of the flowers. Whoopi! Too much rain though. The flowers drooped. I walked around trying to find some pictures to take. The rest of the class was very excited. With tripods and macro zoom lenses they took really close up pictures and they were beautiful. I was looking for dead animals, live animals, dead humans or whatever I could find that wasn’t beautiful. Nice attitude David. I'm really not that much of a Debbie Downer (apologies to Debbie). Some of the folks took pictures of dead flowers on the ground. Go dead flowers. They were easier to shoot because the wind didn’t blow them around. A lot of the students were frustrated. They used their tripods to get really close and shoot the details of the leaves or flowers. They held really still. Were real quiet. But the wind kept the flowers moving and they couldn’t focus right. Ahhhhhhhhhh. If aliens were landing now and observing. I kept walking around waiting for a photo to happen. Not necessarily the best approach.

So at 6:30 I gave it up. Headed to the Mariner restaurant for coffee and food. This is really not the class for me. It wastes my time, the teacher’s time and it’s clearly not a positive thing for the serious students that luuuuuuuvvvvvve the challenge of taking pictures without humans or animals as props. They don’t think that nature is most interesting when it’s being cruel. They think humans get in the way of beauty and are not its source. They have eyes for the intricate detail of physical life, of fauna, flora and geology. I think humans break natural patterns and that’s interesting. I think animals show us more about who we are from than we probably want to know. Nature is beautiful. You can’t argue with that. But even our teacher, Alison, takes the nature that she sees and manipulates it through photographic techniques to make it look like something one never sees. That’s too much work for me. And for what? Good question. Lots of people would have good answers but not me.

I bailed. Did a Sarah Palin. The going got tough and I looked for and found a road to escape. I went to the Director and said, “help.” She said she wanted me to have a good experience. I thought, well never mind. It was dirty. We looked at the course offerings this week. She thought about Fran’s class. No way. Are you kidding? Husband and wife in same class? Fran and me in same class? A dumber idea might have been thought of once but I can’t remember when. But there was another class, “Intermediate Digital Photography.” Sounds innocuous. The course description is as you might expect. I said, “I’ll take it.” And so my new adventure began.

Ray Van Dusen, a very nice man, teaches the class. He’s a digital imaging specialist. Get a mental picture? Little beard. Glasses. We are learning Lightroom 2; organizing our photos and fixing the bad ones, which, in my case, could become a full-time job. I missed the first day. Fortunately there are a couple of women in the class that were there the first day but seemed to miss the day anyway and the morning was spent reviewing what they missed when they were there. I feel good. I’m not the least talented in the class. I’m not going to be picked last for the kickball team. That’s a long story from fourth grade. One that I’m not likely to repeat any time soon.

So I sat in a lab today. I organized my photos. I learned a lot about a complicated piece of software. And I didn’t go out in the rain to shoot. That’s tomorrow morning’s exercise. Shoot at the harbor and then bring the photos in to the computer and fix the damn things, making them look professional when originally they sucked. If the sun's not out we'll make it out. If the colors are drab, we'll make them bright and cheery. That’s great software. Even those without a vision ought to be able to fool people from Mississippi or one of those other states.

Tonight Fran, Greg and I went to dinner at Ephemeral. Nice name. Long story. The owner became much more of a friend that we had ever expected, ever wanted, ever will want again. My friends Theo and Harvey always makes friends with the owners of restaurants when they can. Tonight, we saw the dark side of being friendly. This is a small town.

Night night,

David

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