Through a Glass Darkly

I was having a conversation about photography over email with a friend recently, and I got pumped up telling him how much I enjoy taking photographs.  Then I thought, You know, this is silly.  I should just take a photography class already.  I had always loved photography; even as a child, I took photos I loved and thought maybe were actually good, though I rarely shared them with anyone. I had always wanted to get better at photography.  But it took meeting my husband, taking some photos with his nicer cameras, and having him go, “Wow, you really have an eye for this! I wouldn’t have seen that shot!” for me to believe maybe I could and should pursue it more.  And it took the conversation with my friend for me to nudge myself into taking greater action.  I’m done applying for grad school, and my work schedule is at a less hectic time of year, so I really had no excuse not to move forward.

Sometimes, it feels a bit embarrassing to focus on something that really interests you when you aren’t sure how good at it you’ll be.  But that embarrassment is rooted in the vulnerability of passion, and letting that embarrassment be a reason not to do/learn/try something is a waste of life’s offerings.  Nervous as it made me, I signed up for the basic Digital SLR 1 class, and as anxious as I was going in, I took the first one last week.  I had actually been really anxious about not having my photography manual (it’s long gone . . . somewhere) for the class, and when I realized I had misunderstood the requested memory drive and not brought the right thing, as we drove over to the class, I felt positively panicky.  My husband and brother both teased me (rather gently, actually) about how they were just absolutely sure the teacher was going to kick me out of the class for not having the manual and the right drive.  Cerebrally, I knew they were right that it wasn’t going to be a big deal, but I had to force myself to go into the class and just see how it went.  Of course, it turned out we needed neither for the first class.  (And I’ve already got the right drive—loaded with my photos—in my backpack, waiting for the next class on Thursday night.)

Now I have to share my photos in a public forum.  Granted, it’s a public forum of twelve students (well, and one excellent photographer who’s our teacher), but still, it makes me nervous all over again.  “But you share photos on Flickr and on your blogs,” Dan said—and it’s true. But I’m not sitting there while people look at those photos and judge them. (And, honestly, truthful blogging can be hard along the same lines sometimes.)  Why does it matter what judgment people place on them? And how can I get any better unless people offer some critiques? I know, I know.  But still—granting people the right to judge something I’m producing, and right in front of me, brings out the perfectionist side of me that I work so hard to release these days.

Anyway, our first homework was quite simple:  to take two sets of four photos that use different settings of white balance to begin developing an understanding of how best to utilize them.  The teacher requested that we do this activity using photos with a single type of light source.   White balance is, as the name implies, getting the photo color correct so that white = true white.  The human eye has the amazing capability of adjusting to different lighting so that when we walk from a yellow-toned lit room to the blue-toned outside we adjust to the color variances created by the lighting conditions very easily.  However, cameras are not able to do this nearly as well as human beings can; thus, many photos we take have distracting or inauthentic tinges of color to them that we may not have noted with our eyes when we took the photos.  There is an ‘auto’ white balance setting on DSLR cameras, but the auto setting may not provide as correct or desired an adjustment as a photographer can.  By adjusting the white balance on a digital SLR camera, a photographer can adjust the camera for the lighting conditions in fairly specific ways.  White balance settings and the adjustments they provide are based on temperature ranges for color. Warmer colors, such as the light from tungsten lightbulbs, can get cooled off by the use of a setting that adds bluer tinges to photos.  Photos taken outdoors get a golden tinge added to them.  Etc.  These settings allow the camera to provide true white (or another shade, per the photographer’s desire).

Below are what I consider the two most ‘balanced’ photos from each of my sets.

The first set of photos of these flowers was taken adjacent to Piedmont Park on a cloudy morning. (See larger versions of photos at the Flickr links.)  Obviously, for this set, the light source was the sun—which, when refracted through the atmosphere during the daytime, provides a cool blue tone to photographs.  I actually think the camera’s automatic white balance setting worked the best for this set, though I might have liked the ‘cloudy’ setting if it hadn’t been slightly out of focus.  As blue as it turned the photo, my favorite of these is the one taken on the ‘tungsten’ setting.  Working in an office with no windows, I think I am somewhat starved for the cool tones of outdoor light.

The second set of photos of the cookies & milk I took indoors using an external flash and on-camera flash as my lighting.  With this set, I preferred the slightly warmed look of the flash white balance setting.  In this set of photos, on the Flickr page, you can see how extremely wrong the tungsten setting can be in certain lighting.  It was fun to set up the flash, a white board, and a reflector to take some slightly-more-professional-style food shots for this set.

Once I had taken my sets (I took others but decided to use these), Dan and I played around a bit in Photoshop to sharpen the images and bring up the contrast a bit on some of them.   Dan was so excited to be showing me things in Photoshop that he started to overwhelm me and had to back off a bit.  He could geek out about photography for hours at a time (if not days), so he’s pretty thrilled I’m showing an interest in the more technical side of photography now.  I can’t say the pure technical side is what drives me, but learning to utilize it is important.  Learning at all—pushing myself to move forward bit by bit—is important in general.

Straight hair!

Does it freak you out a bit?

I look like Becky.

We now return you to my regularly scheduled life (sans makeup, even).

Watermelon

You know
what summer
tastes like—the pink flesh
of a generous earth,
this rounded life
fully ripe, fully flavored.
How could you be ashamed
at the tug of desire?
The world has opened itself to
you, season after season.
What is summer’s sweetness
but an invitation to respond?
There is only one way
to eat a watermelon.
Bury your face
in the wetness
of that rosy slab
and bite.

—Lynn Ungar

The Thing Is

The thing is
To love life
To love it even when you have no
Stomach for it, when everything you’ve held
Dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands
And your throat is filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you so heavily
It is like heat, tropical, moist
Thickening the air so it’s heavy like water
More fit for gills than lungs.
When grief weights you like your own flesh
Only more of it, an obesity of grief.
How long can a body withstand this, you think.
And yet you hold life like a face between your
palms,
A plain face, with no charming smile
Or twinkle in her eye,
And you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again

—Ellen Bass

This is Dan, raising an eyebrow in his best cowboy show-down impression, (not to mention utterly jet-lagged and exhausted after a 3-day US to Sweden to Italy hop that included late nights and little sleep) dressed up to perform a Wild West-themed skit to introduce his paper at the conference he attended in Italy. I have this photo on my bulletin board at work, and every time I look at it, it makes me grin.

One of the women at the conference saw him and later told him she hadn’t realized it was a fake mustache. Instead, she had thought, “What is it with these mobile HCI guys and their weird facial hair?? And why does Sally let him have that?!”

Of course, if he wanted to have facial hair like that, I couldn’t really stop him.  I just wouldn’t kiss him until he got rid of it.

I decided a while back that, in my third year of working for Habitat, I should probably go out to a build site and actually spend a whole day there.  (Imagine that!) Though I’ve become much more familiar with construction terminology in my time here, my work is not construction-related, and I already average more than 40 hours per week devoted to this cause; thus, I’d never actually gone out for an 8-5 build day and helped physically construct a house.  Being clueless with construction equipment (building sets in high school having been my only such experience), I was a bit nervous about going out to help with the build.  Fortunately, my builder friend Greg was gung-ho about going out with me to talk me through some stuff and offer his assistance to the build, as well.

I’m still exhausted today, I have bruises on my arms and knees, and, despite using sunscreen, I have sunburned splotches on my body from the places I missed.  I have not been so happy to take a shower in a long time as I was when I arrived home that afternoon (just to bathe and go out to a different, dressy Habitat event until 9 at night). But going out to the build site and being part of the first day of construction for this worthwhile homeowner’s house was a really awesome experience. (Interestingly, this homeowner’s family is actually from me and Greg’s hometown, and we had relatives of hers in our high school class, though she herself did not grow up there.)  Working the build regrounded me in why I do what I do here—and it was good to go out and have some intense physical exertion for a while, too.   Also, the church group we were working with were completely kind to me despite my ineptitude. While I was a total newbie who hammered, held things in place when needed, and took photos, Greg was able to take a leadership role on various elements that were going on that day and inject some knowledge into the process.  The day was really great for both of us.

Here Greg and I are adding a board to what will line the roof.  For the rest of the photos of the day—to see the house come together and check out bits of two other current builds in different stages–check out my Flickr Habitat Build Day set.  There are comments with some photos to describe elements of them.

After delayed flights, missed connections, and lost baggage, he’s finally about 10 minutes away from our apartment, on the train.

And I feel a bit like a 5-year-old waiting for her birthday party to begin.

And a bit like a naughty 15-year-old waiting for 7 minutes in heaven.

The one in Florence, that is.

14 more hours!

I got my graduate school acceptance letter yesterday.  I am pleased and relieved. It’s wonderful to have a piece of the future figured out when so much (as always) isn’t.

I’m experiencing a bit of my “waiting for the other shoe to drop” syndrome. I get good news, so I brace myself for something bad to follow. I have to be worried about something; I struggle with simply being happy. I’m glad I realized that’s what I’m doing, though.

Not that I’m counting or anything. . . .

In high school, sometimes separately and sometimes together, we’d just drive off and get lost.  Or at least, it felt like getting lost:  he knew where nearly all the back roads twisted together, and he had a knack for finding special places buried in the heart of the woods.  I just knew that whatever road I took, unless I got stuck in the mud or hit a deer, eventually I would reach a highway that would take me back into town.  (Or, if the logging road ended, I could just turn around.)  Driving was an adventure and, it often seemed, one of the only adventures in our small town.  If I finished whatever extracurricular activity I had after school around sunset, I would take off on the highway that traveled due west at the exit from town—past the horse farm, out of town a few miles into the fields, along the railroad track.  Of course, a few miles later, my adventure would be over. I’d be due home any minute.  I’d turn around at the pecan orchard and head back into town, to my family’s house.  I daydreamed about driving into that beautiful evening sky and following the sun into the new, distant, and better life that adulthood would provide.  I wasn’t surprised when one of my girlfriends chose a college due west all the way to California.  We needed out.

But we also need a sense of home.  So last night, after I finished working late, I spontaneously put aside my life’s busyness for a while.  He put the top down, and we took out his convertible for a drive into the dusky night.  I tipped my head back, pressed my flying hair down, and enjoyed watching the clouds over the city grow brighter than the sky from the reflected light.   It got a bit chilly eventually, but he turned on the seat warmers, and we left the top down.   We talked a bit about pieces of the past, what’s going on with our families and friends, what we’re working toward in our lives.  We listened to the same type of eclectic combination of classical, rap, country, and alternative music that we always did, though the songs themselves have changed some.  And we teased each other about the issues where we don’t, and won’t, agree.  I’m verbose where he tends to say few words.  He’s mostly more conservative, and I’m mostly more progressive. He’s religious in a very different way than I am.  He thinks he’s apolitical, but he’s not: he just takes his views for granted as being right instead of being one viewpoint.  Our lives have diverged significantly from when we were kids.  But we have junctures remaining, too, we have a level of trust that takes a long time to develop, and we are part of a system that contains each other’s memories.  He doesn’t remember one of the apartments I lived in, but he remembers the apparently hideous orange CPR mouth guard I used to use as a keychain, something that I had entirely forgotten.  He know some of the scabbed-over parts of me that will never entirely heal.  I know what verbal tic he does that means he’s nervous, and why he doesn’t show up for parties half the time he says he will.  We both believe the other can succeed.

My family as I used to know it has evaporated, and none of them even live in my hometown anymore.  My husband is my primary definition of home now, but there’s more than one kind of home, and it’s my old friends like this one who provide my primary connections between the lives we led then and the ones we lead now.  I told him last night that now that I commute, driving isn’t fun for me anymore, at least not most of the time.  But I still like being a passenger, going nowhere in particular, just getting lost around the edges of the city, seeing the hidden places he’s discovered, and feeling, for once, again, like I’ve stepped out of time for a few minutes.  Then I relinquish that experience to re-enter my life, my good life, as it exists now.  I’m better at accepting the paradoxes these days.