Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Ye olde house

There's a landing midway up the staircase inside my house.  During the day, I find myself looking upward through the blinds to stare at the clouds as they pass overhead.  I angled the shades specifically so I had this view; in an otherwise artificially lighted corridor, it's a welcome relief to have this perspective.

I love my house.  It means so much more to me than I ever anticipated.  It was a slow ascension, too.  When I moved in as a single father back in 2019, it was all I could afford.  Pickings were so few and far between for my budget.  But I do remember a sensation of familiarity when I walked in the first time.  Rooms and windows were laid about just *so*, as to provide that intimate awareness.  Sure, the paint color was obnoxious, the stucco was (and still is) pock-marked by errant golf balls, and the carpet was abundant with various stains of unknown origin.  But it was mine.

Some days, I feel we might never leave this house.  But life's only surety is the uncertainty of all things. For my part, I can imagine staring upward at the kaleidoscopic sky for the rest of my life; or at least for as long as my legs will propel me up the stairs.


Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Days of travel, past

About a year ago, it seemed I was traveling to California every other weekend to see my wife (née fiancé), whether by car or plane.  But my gosh, was air travel ever preferable.  I am reminded that in California, public restrooms have been considered a massive luxury since the pandemic started, so it made the electric driving miles tantamount to medieval torture as I stopped for 20-30 minutes every 200 miles.  

Thursday, January 20, 2022

Friday, January 14, 2022

Blue Heron

[Originally published March 30, 2012]

He seemed amicable enough. I would take two steps, he would shuffle a few to the left. His gaze never left mine, and when he flew, he never gained more than a few yards' advantage.

It almost seemed a game; the heron daring me to try again before taking flight. People stopped and stared at my vain attempts at closer shots. Ultimately, I chose to halt what could have been a real annoyance to this poor bird.

Doesn't make him any less beautiful. And my pops thinks he was just a baby, too. He seemed big enough to me.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Stop the car

I spend a lot of time in my car, if I'm honest.  I drive to work, children's schools, church, work errands, and personal stuff.  I love road trips, preferring them to flighty excursions across the country.  And while the majority of miles on my car are from my 54 mile round trip to work five days a week, I count numerous journeys to California, Utah, and local AZ hotspots amongst the nearly 67,000 miles on my 2019 car.  

Outside of El Paso, TX...a monsoon squall crashes into the desert
But more to the point of this entry, I tend to see things.  "Golden Hour" is, more often than not, the exact time I find myself going to and from work each day.  The sun casts its shimmery flaxen light over fields of alfalfa near the reservation on Queen Creek.  It bounces off the rain soaked roofs across rows of suburban tract housing in Chandler. It passes through the leaves of an assortment of trees, both evergreen and deciduous.  The Superstition Mountains, with its numerous crags and peaks, gets an especially astonishing treatment in the evening hours, especially when clouds create stationary silhouettes across the red rock of the hills.

So, I see beauty.  I experience a visual embellishment in the world each day, but I am usually going 55+ MPH.  Rarely do I stop.  I feel a constant tug to keep moving toward the next appointment, class, destination, etc.  But each time I pass something by, I feel remiss.  And I do understand the notion of living in the moment, thereby granting mindfulness and gratitude for the immediacy of life.  But I nevertheless have a longstanding and conflicting love of photography that simply demands that moments of beauty be preserved.

Preserved, and if I am honest, shared for others to see.  I think I have a little bit to contribute to this crazy world.  To that end, I've made a promise to myself to stop my car just a little more often.  It's a matter of slowing down a tiny bit.  I took a look in the mirror today and saw an abundance of gray staring back at me.  It seem that, in a momentary blink, two decades have rushed past me, leaving little imprint to immediate recollection.

It is said that one way to slow time is to constantly learn.  It feels immensely rewarding to be learning and creating again.

Tuesday, January 04, 2022

The magical world of non-destructive edits

iPhone 6 Plus ~ 4.15mm ~ ƒ/2.2
Lately, it's been tricky finding time to shoot.  Generally speaking, inspiration hasn't been the dilemma; in fact, I am quite grateful that the urge to take a picture materializes more often than not.  It's a feeling I've missed, part and parcel with the writings that used to be common fare on this site.  Time and energy it is that stops me nowadays.

So I decided to take a quick journey on my iPhone today, utilizing the [Search] function built into the Photos app.  (Side note: Try it.  Seriously.  Search for anything; flowers, mountains, a person, a color, etc.  My library is over 27,000 pictures strong.  What I find with search is staggering)

Anyway, back to what I was doing.  A quick search popped up this glorious shot of a jutted rock in Newport, CA.  But sadly, it didn't look like this first image with rocky details and creamy morning sand. 


Shot w/Hipstamatic ~ badly
Instead, it looked like this.  It was a hastily snapped picture, taken with my favorite app, Hipstamatic. And thanks to the magic of non-destructive edits, I was able to turn back the hands of time by six years and uncover the virgin, unedited picture with a few taps of my finger.  

Hipstamatic doesn't always do what I wish it would.  But that's part of the appeal, in a way.  Harkening back to the days of disposable point and shoots, when one would never know what result would come until the day of development, Hipstamatic brings a little bit of risk back into digital photography. 

But I digress; such is no longer the case.  I remember reading years ago when the developers added non-destructive edits, but I believe I only scoffed when I saw that news.  I probably figured it would tarnish what I believed to be a perfect app.

But I've grown up a bit, and today's photo brings me a bit of excitement.  Because buried within the 27,000+ photos in my library is the possibility of a few more gems worth re-editing.  And that will tide me over quite well until I can get back out on the road and capture a few new shots.

Saturday, January 01, 2022

A rose by any other name...

 

What a ride.  This season was absolutely bonkers from start to finish.  Losing to BYU was the worst blow, maybe even worse than tonight's narrow loss to Ohio State.  

You have to hand it to OSU for their ability to make adjustments after halftime.  I was never quite comfortable with our lead, even when we seemed firmly in control.  But in retrospect...were we ever in control?  It seemed like the nerves kept us in check.  Even when our specialties shown through, we weren't able to get off our heels.  

It sure would have been nice to ring in the new year with a Rose Bowl victory to cap this otherwise outstanding season.  

Next season, boys.  Next season.

Friday, December 24, 2021

Just a few meandering thoughts on this Christmas Eve

I love this part of 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'.  Throughout the episode, there's this crazy energy.  No one sits down, no one breathes.  But outside, in the crystal clear air, Charlie Brown finds a moment to connect with his own heart, and, hearing Linus' words inside himself, is at peace.

Take a moment to breath it all in; they're only this young once.  I'm not saying the magic won't be there in the coming years, but time has a confounding way of transforming it so as to make it nearly unrecognizable.  

I hope that this Christmas season brought you what you desperately needed.  If your heart is broken, may it find comfort.  If you are feeling desperately disconnected from humanity, start with you.  Figure out how to get your head to talk to your heart again, and from there, you may find that the tools you need are already with you.

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Water tower on a Sunday afternoon

What is this, 2002?

It's been a while.  A fairly long decade, in fact.

Which brings to me to what makes starting again so difficult...there's simply no conceivable way to summarize what's happened over the past 3,650 days.  What's more, I haven't much of a penchant for reliving the past whether in deed or, in this project's objective, word.  

So we'll start fresh, right here, right now.  Keeping it simple with the same domain I've had since the year 2000.  Dumped all of the old blog posts (all 415 of them) into the archive, and maybe...just maybe...some of them will resurface in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Suffice it to say that I am grateful for new starts, creative energies, and noise cancelling headphones.  And not necessarily in that order.

Friday, November 15, 2019

Light, shape, debris

There's a bit more depth to this shot as you spend a bit of time looking at it. The opposite side peeks through the middle cylinder, and the weeks worth of dust muddies the outside.