Still Hanging Out in California

This is from the second roll of film out of the FM2n. I have a hummingbird's attraction to red. I wanted to see how a close up with wide open aperture, in other words really short depth of focus, would look with these flowers. I took this one shot and then had to wait for the film to be processed to see if it worked. It works for me. :-)

Things have been quiet so I’ve had to look for material while grocery shopping. For some reason, the overhead and closer mixed lighting produces interesting results.

Still, one should treat expensive, organic carrots like jewelry, no?
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I’d like to think that eventually these two kissed and made up. Although I would question the judgement of anyone wearing a Yankees hat. (Mind the copyright mark)

This shot was a hit at my photo club meeting last night. This is noteworthy for several reasons. The members are very interested in the latest gear and the latest software. Some of them are having second careers in art photography. A lot of them travel extensively.
This picture goes against all that. It was taken in San Francisco which is less than 70 miles away. It was taken with what is now referred to as a bridge camera(?). But the punchline… it was taken in 2004.
The camera was a Canon G6. This was my first serious (it cost $700US!) digital camera. And it was the beginning of the end for my film cameras. The sensor was tiny, 1/1.8. It had a fixed, 4x zoom. It was a lot of fun. And even though the camera was introduced 18 years ago and has a similarly small sensor, it still beats my 2020 iPhone. (That was the point I was making for the amusement of the club members)

I was recently reminded that in August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency of the United States of America. Even though we were grateful for his departure, it was still shocking. (His vice president had beeen run out of office for serious crimes also) I mean, we would never see something this bad again, right? In the past few days we have learned from news reports that the man who left he White House in 2020, may have committed one of the worst breaches of security in the history of this country. We don’t know and may never know how far this extends. Who among this country’s allies have also been compromised by this? In the meantime, we’ve been getting ample proof that the Republican party considers partisan politics above the rule of law. They seem to think that if they threaten to tear the country apart, the rest of us are going to back down and let them get away with this shit. To paraphrase the Chinese curse, we live in interesting times.

And now for something completely different- Mono Lake in October of 2014 or 15, I've lost track.

July was a bit dull. There were no bike races on July 4th, this picture is from 2006, but we did have fireworks. No major fires in the state though there were some small ones worryingly near Yosemite. This is a good kind of dull. Right now there is something bigger on the Oregon border so maybe we’re in for the bad kind of interesting in August.

A week ago I started a long overdue edit of my digital photo archive. By overdue, I mean stuff from as far back as 2005. Why did I let it get this bad? Two main reasons, time was precious and hard drive storage cheap. After a long day at work, one of the last things one wants to do is tidy up one’s photo archive. (When I’m tired, my judgement can be too lax or too critical. I keep stuff I shouldn’t or I get fed up and want to toss everything. It’s not a pleasant experience.)
Why did I finally decide to launch this onerous project? Because the advance of technology is threatening to strand my stuff. My current hard drives have USB connectors and the digital world has moved on to USB-C.(and probably beyond) (I currently have a Lightning card reader for my phone and a USB-C card reader for my iPad. This is to facilitate my new, edit-as-I-go workflow, but that’s another story.)
I’ve thought of chucking photography altogether. After forty-three years, one could argue I’ve given it enough and maybe it’s no longer giving back sufficiently. But I’ve decided to try streamlining first. I sold off some of my film cameras and lenses. The three film cameras I’ve kept will be seeing less action in favor of the easier, cheaper workflow of my digital kit. If things move well in that direction, sell a couple more film cameras. Keep the Nikon F3 as an homage to the grace and beauty of the previous age.
All this rambling brings me to the subject of the two photos I’m posting today. It’s been quite awhile since I decided I would no longer post photos of children that show their faces. I wanted to protect their privacy. But how does that work when a photo is old enough that the children depicted are now adults? Do they still need that protection or has time granted them the privacy of distance?
See pics under cut.
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I'm currently going through a media changeover. Because of hardware changes, the time is coming where my older photo files will become inaccessible. I could adopt the attitude that all things are impermanent and let these things pass into extinction. Unfortunately there are a lot of family pictures in that mess that I don't want to let go. And by mess I mean a 500 gig hard drive that is mostly organized but barely edited.
I made a joke about this being a summer project. After ten hours of sorting, I'm beginning to see the joke is on me.
Here's something I found during yesterday's session. I'm not worried about the child's identity as this picture was taken in 2006. He's a grown man now and this vulnerable version of him doesn't exist anymore.

But I can’t help wondering what other people in the world think when the country with the largest economy and the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons is revealed to have been ruled by some seriously f*#ked up people who would like to regain power. Breath in one two three four, hold one two three four, breath out one two three four.
This picture was taken on a Saturday afternoon in mid-January 2013. We were strolling around the warehouse district of Los Angeles, admiring the street art.

It could be worse. I recently read an article where vets are calling for the end of the current breeding standards for British Bulldogs. Their head and body structure causes serious health and quality of life issues and in the vets' opinions constitute cruelty to the animals.