“Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world.”
        ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Technology can be baffling.

This is a peculiar written statement for one who (tries to) make a living by it, but truly, there are days when it plays Murphy's Law Dominoes and the entire workflow falls to pieces in the blink of an eye. One thing collapes into the next and there you are, down for the count.

It began when my beloved 22" TFT/S-PVA monitor died just as the sun crested the end of the canal one dawn. It had been warning me for a few weeks with intermittent power issues and flickering lines. I praised it daily and reminded it that we still had miles ahead of us together, but that early morning, off it went in another direction. I immediately connected my old 19" Samsung, knowing it would never do after all these years with all that wide expanse real estate. It did buy me time, though, for the thing I dread most: researching new technology.

I spent a few days reading forums and educating myself about the new pathways TFT technology has forged over the years while I've been blissfully using a monitor that plugged in and matched prints perfectly from the first footstep. Prices, contrast ratios, bit depth, IPS vs S-PVA...it all leaves me so...so...so...uninspired. Others feed hungrily at this stage. I despise it.

Several new architectural assignments are stacked up, waiting for a landing like planes over O'Hare, so there just wasn't time to whine, cajole, or buy someone to make a decision for me. Gotta just plunge ahead, read fast, scribble some pro/con notes, say a prayer and call it done.

Soon enough, a new 24" Samsung arrived. It cost enough that I shouldn't have had to immediately calibrate it right out of the box, but I'd read warnings in forums about that, and a new colorimeter accompanied it. This, of course, also led to a new graphics card. That domino thing...it just hurts.

And all was well for a few hours after calibration. Gorgeous, vivid color. And then I printed. And then I converted to sRGB and saved for the web. All output had horribly skewed colors. I made the even-more-dreaded calls to Samsung who insisted on sending me to Adobe who wanted to send me to the X-rite people, and by that time, I wanted someone to send me on a long vacation that didn't involve technology of any sort.

In the end, to the best of my investigation and understanding, it seems that these lovely "wide gamut monitors" are a bit ahead of their time. Browsers can't keep up, and no one except a few authors and some left-brain-only forum lurkers really understand all this color profile linguini completely anyway. Someone suggested I run dual monitors - one that is pretty and one that is "real world"; a solution I decided to call "elegant idiocy". Samsung said they'd send me a new one, except that they were out of them.

What's a little more money thrown at a situation anyway, eh? I'm sitting here now, straddling technolgies as Queen of my own Geekdom, running dual monitors that sit on a desk built in the 1880's, which has outlasted everything that sits on it or AT it by just about *forever*.  Colors are oh-so-pretty on the behemoth "wide-load" Samsung, but then I have to drag them over to the view on the cheapo 22"  real world screen from Best Buy and re-edit. Nobody said this was going to be easy, I guess. Elegantly idiotic, indeed.

I gotta admit, though, this duel dual thing is enormously fun and just geeky enough to intrigue me. Browser over there (monitor left), Photoshop and Dreamweaver over there (monitor right) and me 'n the mouse somewhere in the middle. Click here, slide the mouse over and click there - nearly as fun as rolling the office chair around on the new tile after ripping out all the carpet. Call me crazy, but when technology threatens, it's sometimes just better to give in to your inner kid.

The world's gone mad; of this I'm pretty sure. Technology has made sure of that. And just a bit of humble advice: If you see any skewed colors on this web site any time soon, don't ask! Smoke leaking out my ears just ain't a pretty thing.

"I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.”
          ~ Jaques-Henri Lartigue

It is my complete and utter joy to quietly drift my kayak along the skirts of mangroves and occasionally find a roseate spoonbill or two in perfect light. I never tire of their strangely awkward beauty.  It is days like this, when the water is still and reflections shine, when the shadows darken in the low-slung angles of the last bit of light squeezed from the sun...it is days like this I can't imagine being anywhere else, doing anything else, experiencing any other thing.

Spot metering, my old friend in this kind of light, lets me capture what I see both before me and in my creative mind.

Art, floating in light and magic.

Nikon D2x, Nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/400 sec, f/7.1, Spot Metering, ISO 100

"The places I photograph are like friends. I like to revisit them over and over to deepen the friendship."
       ~ Michael Kenna

I just finished what will likely be my last photography sale venue in Florida until late fall. Last night, both exhausted and satisfied, I sat still for a time and let little movies of the past six or so shows and sales run through my head. Lessons, unexpected connections, new friends, missteps, losses (one has NO idea how much bureaucratic red tape is involved in getting a permit for a silly sign along the road - or how many of your illegal-but-expensive signs will get confiscated when you ignore said permits!), compliments and praise, setbacks (balloons tied to illegal signs in the hot Florida noon sun tend to pop rather quickly and loudly) and great momentum - all these things played out in clipped vignettes of the last many months.

No one ever said making a living as a photographer was ever going to be easy...or a fast road to a lucrative destination.

And yet, sitting still, watching clip after clip of these memories in my head, I felt rich in a way I couldn't have imagined. Forward progress really HAS happend! Life is funny like that. You head down one road, approach a big corner, and you try and try and try and *finally* get up the nerve to round that scary corner, and then boom...the road and terrain all changes and off you go again.

I read a lot of stuff about succeeding at business these days, and often still feel inept while navigating these types of ropes. There are so many "shoulds" and "should nots" and rules to follow.  I've learned a lot, but probably the biggest lesson is that you can do everything "right"- textbook, even - and still fall down flat on your face. There's a certain mystery in all of this; something blowing in the winds of fortune that even the best of 'em can't predict.

I don't have many answers except to be grateful for the successes and even more grateful for the fall-down lessons. And to keep rounding those corners with a "heck yeah, I can!" on my lips.

The winds of change are always our friends.

Nikon D2x, Nikkor 12-24mm @ 12mm, 30 sec, f/16, ISO 100

"The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever."
       ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau

I had to be in the kayak at the Barefoot Beach canoe launch in the late afternoon yesterday for a photo shoot. It was not a typical photo shoot for me; in fact, it was quite atypical. This time, I had to be the subject while someone else manned the camera. An author writing a book about artists wanted a shot of me in my natural "studio" for inclusion in the book, and surely, the kayak is my primary studio. Anyone who knows me well knows why I'm on the shootin' side of the camera, so this was a real exercise in being outside a certain comfort zone, but soon enough, it was over and I paddled off, eager to distract myself with a sunset at the Pass.

The high tide was falling quickly and a stout east breeze blew the kayak around in open water. I chased a few plovers on some oyster bars, and followed a few roseate spoonbills along the skirts of mangroves until low tide pushed me back into deeper water. It felt good to just float and shoot.

At the Pass, two young guys were practicing their cast netting skills with varying results. I steadied myself in the wind and current and watched them, admiring their perserverance. One cast brought back a bunch of shiny, wild baitfish and after that, these guys were hooked.

They made me smile and reminded me that our individual comfort zones are just a few practice casts away.

Nikon D2x, Nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/320 sec, f/11, ISO 100

"You can't tell me there is no mystery
It's everywhere I turn...
Moon over junk yard where the snow lies bright
Can set my heart to burn"
       ~ Bruce Cockburn, "Mystery" from  Life Short, Call Now

One of the side-treats of holding art shows in your own neighborhood is really gettting to know your neighbors and they, you. This year, I've discovered new friends all around me, including a big passel of home-schooled kids. As a person who has lived a long time in far-away, remote locations, I'm used to that and appreciate all the hard work and effort these parents put into their kids.

And so, one thing led to another, as things often do, and I found myself answering a lot of questions about Alaska at one of my shows. Before the blink of an eye, I'd invited the whole herd to my home for a presentation about Alaska. I can't say who had a better time walking down memory lane the other day - the kids and their moms or me. Probably me. The kids, ranging from most likely about six to twelve, were very attentive and curious - and two of them even arrived decked out in full Brownie scout regalia.

So we took a tour through artifacts of life in the Alaskan Bush some thirty-five years ago: my ancient treadle sewing machine that sewed its way through all my clothing, winter gear and dog harnesses; the little ivory carved Inuit kayaker; birch bark baskets and picture frames and a big ol' wad of photographs that have stood the test of cheap Alaskan printing and some pretty rough storage environments.

This photograph, nearly 35 years old, was taken with a camera I simply cannot recall, but surely one tough piece of equipment if you consider that I was driving the sled as I tripped the shutter in pretty frigid temperatures. I doubt there was a battery in it as the only batteries we fiddled with back then were 12-volt car batteries that ran various lamps and the eight-track cassette player in the cabin. As I scanned this old photo into Photoshop and tried to breathe it back into some semblence of its former beauty only my memory knew, I chuckled, noting that I still drive and snap the shutter today.

The kids were hooked - rapt - as I talked and showed them photos and maps on the widescreen TV in the living room. I may as well have been from Mars, this was so foreign to them. Most of these kids have never even seen snow, much less a bunch of dogs pulling a sled in the white stuff on top of frozen rivers. One adorable girl, Maggie, decided to become a photographer when it was over. We'll be giving this new dream of hers a whirl together come summer.

"How big is Alaska, kids?"  BIGGGGG!!!

Denali, the tall one right ahead of us in this photograph, is a magnificant destination for a magnificant adventure on an even more magnificant day, all those years ago.

Everywhere I turn...everywhere I turn.

"I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could."
       ~ John James Audubon

In the last moments of my day, when all else is dark except for the wee pool of light surrounding me, I have been rereading some of Galen Rowell's essays in his "Inner Game of Outdoor Photography". I read this book - or big chunks of it - years ago. One of the magical things about really great books is that a reread can yield completely new perspectives. Grains of understanding, like beach sand, is forever shifting.

Back then, I struggled with "seeing" creatively in the way Galen often wrote about. Today, I struggle in a much more literal sense. Recently, I discovered that "seeing" - literally clear and focused eyesight - is not necessarily what completely drives me behind the camera.

These two tern photographs were shot at a busy intersection at New Pass last Sunday at the height of a gorgeous spring day of power vessel frenzy. The yellow kestrel kayak and I were beached in the flats, facing an enormous (and enormously noisy) flock of terns, gulls, willets, black skimmers, pelicans and the odd merganzer and reddish egret. Directly behind me and across a narrow channel was the local dog beach, even more frenetic with dozens of canines chasing toys in the water and making the occasion attempt to swim the channel to get these crazy birds. It seemed a bit of a standoff - wave runners, boats, dogs, and sun-drenched people on one side - and howling birds on the other.

Me, I had good music strapped to my ears and easy bird pickin's in front of the camera, so I was able to easily block out the Sunday chaos. I still can't focus well with my shooting (right) eye. Rather than let frustration take hold, I decided to simply relax into the music, willing birds and the sun on my skin, and just shoot what I could. Soon, I found that despite my eye letting me down, my brain completely remembered how to take a photograph. I know, it must sound odd for a photographer to say, but I was shooting tiny blob-like shapes and doing just fine.

Galen says, "The key...is asking yourself before you click the shutter, 'What am I responding to here?' What are the essential values I need to include to communicate this concept or feeling in the visual foreign language of film?"

For me, I am discovering that my photography is primarily a sensory experience followed by a bit of technical execution. That's just how MY creative brain works.

Even if my eyes can't really see them all that well, my brain can surely feel a sandbar full of pretty birds having fun on a gorgeous Sunday. That's what I "saw" and that's what came home with me.

Nikon D100, Nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/320 sec, f/8, ISO 100