3.28.2026 – rapidly changing …

rapidly changing …
no way to anticipate
these occurrences

Weather, however spectacular to the eye, may present difficult conditions and compositions, especially when working with large cameras.

Setting up the camera takes several minutes during which the first promising aspects of light and cloud may disappear.

I would sometimes wait hopefully for the scene that I could visualize as an exciting image.

It was occasionally realized, but I have always been mindful of Edward Weston’s remark, “If I wait for something here I may lose something better over there.”

I have found that keeping on the move is generally more rewarding. However, it is important to say that I photographed from this particular viewpoint in Yosemite many times over many years, with widely varying results.

Clearing Winter Storm came about on an early December day.

The storm was first of heavy rain, which turned to snow and began to clear about noon.

I drove to the place known as New Inspiration Point, which commands a marvelous vista of Yosemite Valley.

I set up my 8×10 camera with my i2’/4-inch Cooke Series XV lens and made the essential side and bottom compositional decisions.

I first related the trees to the background mountains as well as to the possible camera positions allowed, and I waited for the clouds to form within the top areas of the image.

Rapidly changing situations such as this one can create decision problems for the photographer.

A moment of beauty is revealed and photographed; clouds, snow, or rain then obscure the scene, only to clear in a different way with another inviting prospect.

There is no way to anticipate these occurrences.

From Examples: The making of 40 photographs by Ansel Adams (Boston: Little, Brown Collection, 1983).

I used to be really into photography and cameras and film and a darkroom that my Dad bankrolled for reasons I cannot understand today but maybe that I spent hours down in the basement away from everyone else had something to do with it.

Today I use my iPhone.

I use my iPhone and I think about the work of Ansel Adams.

Maybe it is a bit much for me to think about my camera work and Ansel Adams in the same sentence but I am the guy that edits Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg in 17 syllables so there you are.

It is evident and important to remember that from his writings and commentary, Ansel Adams saw not just a scene, but the photograph he could make of that scene in his mind before he ever got out a camera.

He was such the master of the tools of his day that he knew just what camera, what lense, what filter, what settings, what film, what developer and what photographic paper he would use to make the final print before he ever snapped the shutter.

His work was getting all of this to produce what he saw in his mind.

I think he would have loved an iPhone.

I think he would have embraced Adobe Photoshop and digital imagery as he worked to interpret what he had on his iPhone to match what he had in his mind when he envisioned a photo.

I think he would have spat on artificially generated images while at the same time, the final prints of this photos may have had a lot more to see that what his camera picked up.

This morning I biked over to Horse Creek Landing Pier on Hilton Head Island.

My guess is that most folks could have been coming to Hilton Head for 40 years and never heard of the place.

I walked out on a narrow fishing/crabbing pier and looked into the heart of the island.

The tide was going out.

A storm front with gale force wind warnings attached to it was coming in.

The sun shone through the clouds.

Rapidly changing situations such as this one can create decision problems for the photographer.

A moment of beauty was revealed and photographed; clouds, sun, or rain then obscure the scene, only to clear in a different way with another inviting prospect.

There is no way to anticipate these occurrences.

3.27.2026 – forget that, when are

forget that, when are
they going to do statue?
one surreal moment …

Adapted from the article, “Flatterers out in force to fill Trump’s head with Venezuelan statue dreams” by David Smith where Mr. Smith writes:

Burgum added that, during his recent trip, the media had been allowed to visit Venezuela’s equivalent of the White House, the Miraflores Palace, for the first time in 20 years. He said there were encouraging signs for US businesses returning and for oil production. But Trump’s mind was still elsewhere.

“Forget that,” the president interjected. “When are they going to do the statue?” The room erupted in laughter.

Trump has long had a special interest in statues. He has railed against protesters who toppled Confederate statues, proposed a National Garden of American Heroes and this week installed a Christopher Columbus statue on the White House grounds. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna has proposed carving Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

The exchange was just one surreal moment in another weird and wild cabinet meeting, the first since the war in Iran broke out. Trump claimed that Iran has been “beat to shit” and accused British prime minister Keir Starmer of a “shocking” lack of support. He went on a long riff about the merits of Sharpies over what he claimed were the $1,000 pens that presidents typically use to sign bills.

Just one surreal moment in another weird and wild cabinet meeting.

Just one surreal moment.

Another surreal moment was listening to people argue that ‘we’ are safer today now that those folks in Iran no longer have the ability to nuke us.

That those folks in Iran who have been after us since the Carter administration are no longer a threat.

That people in the US feel safer today because of this.

I said to my wife I never felt a threat from Iran.

She agreed and put forward the thought that we had lived most of our lives under the threat of immediate annihilation from the dread Soviet Evil Empire and with that in our background, Iran didn’t seem like much to worry about.

I been thinking about that.

I think she is right.

But a good part of the population today don’t remember the Soviet Union.

But a good part of the population today don’t remember those Olympic Teams of the CCCP.

Just one surreal moment in another weird and wild world that exists due the efforts on one man.

I guess he desrves a statue.

BTW – this is a real statue in Oslo, Norway. The creator, Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland, spent the last two years of his life making the statues in a particular park in Oslo contains 212 bronze and granite sculptures and covers around 80 acres of land. including this mad baby. Here we have a statue of a giant, angry infant throwing a naked tantrum on top of a cube stacked atop a larger cube.

3.26.2026 – yes, you’re going to

yes, you’re going to
die, but, you know, we all die
eventually

Based the opening paragraph in the article, Do we really need eight hours sleep a night – and what happens if we don’t get it? by a Mr. Joel Snape where Mr. Snape writes:

‘Once, after I did a presentation, someone came up to me and said, ‘I don’t get eight hours of sleep a night. Am I going to die?’” says Prof Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford. “And I said, ‘Well, yes, you’re going to die. But, you know, we all die eventually.’”

Which brought to mind Big Bill and the speech of Hamlet which I paraphrase here:

To die, to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to.

To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life but that the dread of something after death, makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all ...

I must be getting old though a recent location chnage has dropped me on an island where the median age is 62 I am middle aged again.

On that theme of getting older, let me talk about the best part of my day of late.

My after-supper nap.

I ask, why don’t I feel as refreshed as I do after my after-supper nap as when I wake up in the morning?

I read all these articles about sleeping.

We all have to sleep.

We all are going to die.

All I want is to feel refreshed, like I do when I nap, when I sleep all night.

Mr. Snape writes:

… the best advice is to prioritise sleep: recognise that it’s important, make sure you’re setting enough time aside to get as much as you need to feel well rested, and make the most adjustments you can to your current sleep environment.

“If I only did one thing, it would be invest in proper blackout curtains,” says Leschziner.

“And if you live in a noisy environment, then consider comfortable earplugs that are designed for sleeping in.”

So I ask, what do I do about the neighbors?

3.25.2026 – I like fallacies …

I like fallacies …
the mistakes that men make … why …
was I against it

Adapted from the passage in the book, The Etiquette of Freedom and The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison (Counterpoint: Brooklyn, NY, 2016) where Mr. Snyder writes:

I like fallacies, the mistakes that men make.

For seventeen years, I had an open firepit in the center of my house.

The smoke was supposed to go out an opening in the gables, but a lot of the time it didn’t.

I was trying to live like I was in a Japanese farmhouse.

I even had a hook for the pot over the firepit.

But, you know, it takes a long time to realize certain things, and I realized, yeah, the stovepipe was a good invention.

So finally I boarded it over and started living with chairs and a table, like Americans do.

It’s like a friend of mine who did without electricity for fifteen years, and when he finally connected up to an electric line, he said to me, “You know, I can’t even remember why I was against it.”

3.24.2026 – small wonder that men

small wonder that men
hold boats in the secret place
cradle to the grave

Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove.

Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope.

It is small wonder that men hold boats in the secret place of their mind, almost from the cradle to the grave.

From the essay The Sea and the Wind that Blows by E. B. White and published in The Ford Times, June 1963 and re-published in The Essays of EB White by EB White (Harper and Row, New York, 1977).