Hey Stuart,
Catch any good light lately? I am liking moving out of winter and into spring with the promise of new growth and perhaps life returning to normal. I have been out of it for the past few days. I got my second vaccine shot on Saturday and the side effects hit me on Sunday. Nothing major, just tiredness, sore arm and head achy. Basically I have been a slug. Just returning to the studio today.
Today is my mother’s birthday. In the final years of her life I used to always visit on her birthday. My annual spring break to Ohio. Today when I walked in the studio I glanced at a photo of my folks and me at a banquet in Cape Cod. It was my father’s naval reunion, September 2002. I had forgotten the exact date, but knew I had some digital photos of that trip and the were buried somewhere on my computer. The file info would give me the date, if only I could find the folder where the photos lived. Fortunately I named the folder Cape Cod and a quick search found them. I was using an early point and shoot Nikon, I forget the model, but the lens swiveled. Not a bad little camera, but like all digital cameras of that era, they this awful delayed shutter thing. You push the button, pause, the shutter snaps the image. So much for capturing the decisive moment. But for landscapes and such, it was fine. I started nosing through the photos I made one afternoon and found this image.
It got my attention because the light was so striking and the clouds so dramatic. I can see why you like it there. Too bad my crappy little camera couldn’t do it justice. None the less, it serve nicely as a snap shot, a little emotional book mark as it were.
Technology sure has come a long way since then. It is kind of odd how it took so long for digital photography, on the camera side of things, to take hold. I mean personal computers and desk top publishing came about in the 1980s, Photoshop in 1990. But the first truly professional digital camera didn’t hit the market until 2002, actually not long after I took this photo. It was the Canon 1DS. I waited for Nikon to make a professional level camera and when they didn’t, I jumped to Canon when the 1DS mark II came out in 2004. Another odd factoid is that Kodak invented the first digital camera back in the 1970s, but shelved the research for fear it would interfere with film sales. Lucky for me. It gave me the time to do most of my best work on celluloid. But that seems like another lifetime ago.
What’s new in your world?
m
