Category: Photography

The Middle Way

photog Current Events, Photo Study, photog's Corner, Photography ,

Lately my days have been filled with frustrating road blocks.  Things that should resolve themselves easily instead get bogged down in endless complication and delay.  Because of this I’ve been pretty stressed out.  So today while I was contemplating this it occurred to me that I shouldn’t allow days at a time to go by without any fun.  So, I’ve decided to try and add at least one fun thing into each of my days.

Sounds easy.  But what it means is that I have to first free my mind from the annoying things I’m trying to overcome and instead think up some small diversion that I can do in a short amount of time.  For instance, today I dragged out my camera, the Minolta 200mm f/4 macro lens and a bellows mount and started taking some macro shots of a dead preying mantis that I’ve had sitting on a house plant for a few months.

Now was this a terribly valuable use of my time?  No, not at all.  But it was fun and it got me thinking about what kind of a macro rig I’d like to set up.  The bellows device I was using had a bunch of problems associated with it.  It didn’t attach to my tripod very well and it was not rigid enough to avoid a lot of vibration.  But working around these issues was stimulating and fun.  And it made me think about something other than my problems.  It was a distraction and it lightened my mood brilliantly.

So, for the foreseeable future (meaning, until I get past my problems), I will be trying to add something fun to my days in order to stave off depression.  But in general, maybe I’ve hit on something worth pursuing.  I’ve never been someone who lived a balanced life.  My instincts have always been a sort of all or nothing strategy to most things in life.  Probably this was a matter of necessity caused by an almost pathological laziness that left me always forced into an eleventh hour, hail Mary effort to stave off disaster.

So maybe late in life I’ve discovered a miraculous unheard-of strategy; balance.

Tomorrow is a big family party.  But I think I’ll get up early and try to set up a focus bracket with the 90mm macro lens and some interesting macro subject.  I think I saw a dead spider down in the exercise area.  I think he might make an interesting target.  If not, I’ll find some still life thing; a feather or a coin or something.  And I’ll have some fun.

And that will leave Sunday to do some work.  I need to figure a few things out that have been stalled for a couple of weeks.  And then Monday and Tuesday are unavoidable hell.  I thought Tuesday would actually turn into a horrifying fiasco but blind luck stepped in and turned a horrifying nightmare into a merely tedious exercise in futility.  But just two days later and it will be Thanksgiving and that should be a wonderful way to recover.

Balance.  What did Siddhartha preach?  The Middle Way?

Too Soon for Cabin Fever

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Photography , , , ,

Too many irons in the fire.  More and more “stuff” dumped in front of me to trip over.  Boredom, frustration, ennui, blah, blah, blah.  Okay, whatever.

So, I’m trying to concentrate on the important stuff.  I got my cover artist signed up.  He needs some information from me and I’m working to answer the questions.  I’m still waiting for some answers from the experts on small stuff and big stuff that has to be decided (when, how and how much).

And I’m looking to sell off a bunch of lenses I don’t use much and exchange them for that new 100mm f/2.8 macro lens from Sony.  It’ll be good to move out a bunch of stuff that’s just sitting around and concentrate on what I like to play around with.  I’ll probably also buy a macro rail and maybe some doo-dads that will let me experiment with tilt shift and other technical adjustments.  I was watching a video from a guy in England who does a lot of product work.  You know, pictures of corn flakes boxes and shampoo bottles.  He was demonstrating his technical camera.  It’s a digital “back” attached to a bellows with a lens on the other side attached to a support that allowed for all kinds of motion for the lens; tilt and shift and any kind of motion relative to the digital back.  In addition, the digital back can tilt and shift also.  This allows the image formed by the lens to strike the sensor either straight on or at any angle desired.  Now I think this is really great.  I’d love to have this capability.  But the numbers being thrown around for a medium format digital back and the other components runs into the tens of thousands of dollars (well, pounds for that Brit).

But it occurred to me that with a little ingenuity and a slight downgrade in kit (e.g., a full frame camera like my Sony A7IV instead of a medium format back) I might be able to get almost the same effects for very short money.  And since the winter is beginning to bite into my soul (we had the first noticeable snow cover this morning) this would be a marvelous time to distract myself from the realities of Dunwich in the winter.

Tuesday and Wednesday will be boring work days.  Saturday is another family party (great!).  A week from Tuesday will be a day of tedium not to be imagined and then Thursday is Thanksgiving.  I guess you must take the good with the bad.  But I’m not very patient.  Camera Girl is much better at that sort of thing.  She was raised to be hard-working and dependable.  I, on the other hand, am lazy, easily bored and unreliable.  I like to think this is because I am like my idol; Wiley Coyote, a super genius.  I like the way that sounds, WILEY COYOTE, SUPER GENIUS!!!!!!

I’d better cut this short.  It’s becoming too much like me talking to myself and that’s not healthy for anyone.  It’s too close to the scene where Wendy Torrance starts reading the manuscript that Jack has been working on and finds that it’s hundreds of pages of text that consists of variations on the sentence, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  It’s just too early in the winter to start getting cabin fever.