Day 2 Day radishes

September 28/ New camera

These are from my new Single Lense Reflex camera.  A Canon. Remember the one my mother gave me or my birthday.   I have a lot to learn, but here is a start.  It came as news to me that you could focus by twisting a ring.  The last five pictures were taken at a public fishing place on the Stilliguamish. 

March 13/ The Abraham Lincoln

Mr. Radish goes to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

November 21/Photos and giving thanks

It is Thanksgiving time, and it is time to be thankful for things great and small. This photo is a picture of me around four with my Mother in her delightful hat and my great grandmother holding my brother.  I show you this picture because it has been in the bowels of my computer for maybe three years.  I will correct that, and say that it was in the bowels of my previous computer, and then somehow I managed to get it over to this computer.  In fact that was hard, but not as hard as organizing them and finding them and placing them in somewhat of an organized way. 
My photos were so messed up, and it was enough to make a grown woman weep.  About three days a week I would sit down, and try to work some.  I could not create folders in the right place.  Somehow I could not drag and drop to the correct place.  It was awful.  God, it was awful. 

Then Sunday afternoon in the middle of a storm, midway through the second football game, and before the third game started, I decided to open up a new program.  I chose Picasa by Google as it was free, and my sister liked it.  And it turns out, I can work it. Yes! Yes! In about five hours, about two thousand photos were preliminarily organized. 

This whole process reminds me of my college days.  When I went to college, I had no clue as how to manage a check book. I still don't, and after about 20 years of marriage and huge trauma ever month at statement time, my husband does the whole thing, and does not even complain. But in college I did not have a husband, and so when I  could no longer deal with my checking account, I would close up shop and find a new bank.  Then I would know where I was, usually at zero.

I know that Thanksgiving is not for the little things.  It is about health, security, freedom, our families, peace,  but on Thursday I am going to give a thanksgiving for my photos. 

November 18/ Camera

This is Gordon with me at Best Buy.  After many trips to Best Buy discussing cameras with Gordon, yesterday I finally bought my new Sony Steady Shot DSC-H5. It is what is called an advanced digital.  It is short of a SLR, the truly fancy and more expensive very trendy cameras.  But currently this is all the camera I can handle, literally and figuratively. This is medium size with a 12x lense and provides many shooting options: ie. shutter speed and aperture. 

Addicted to crazes, I am participating in the current craze of photography, partly because, I like to unravel the puzzle of how things work, and partly because I have an artistic nature. Without a doubt, digital photography is the tidiest creative project I have participated in to date.  And I love the process just as well as the product.

Doing something with the photos is something else.  You have to take a college class to learn how to run Photoshop.  Adjusting and cleaning up photos  can bring  me to tears, and I am talking merely getting the colors to print the way they look on my computer screen. Every magazine picture, every ad you see in a magazine, has been severely corrected.  A woman is standing by a brick wall and her pink coat does not mix well with the color of the brick, change the the color of the coat to green.  That is a minor change.  A photographer does not like the sky in a picture, he can import and then mix two other skies.  You see a picture in Bon Appetite of a perfect roasted turkey?  That turkey maybe had some car grease mixed on it.   No wonder we are a neurotic nation. Who can keep up with all this mass media perfection?