Random Thoughts on a Very Rainy Day

If one must stay in bed, it is a lot easier to do it on a day when it is raining stair rods and there flood warnings all over the county. I love the view from the living room into the oak trees, especially when The twisted branches are dark with rain and the leaves are just coming out.

 Once again, I thank all of you for your support and your sympathy. As OilMan said, "Jennie, this is not the time for herbs!" .  The doctor told me to stay out of crowded places because my immune system was clearly "compromised" but I think RaspberryJefe had the right idea in his comment, "kind of hard to stay away from yourself"….

I have been halfheartedly been looking at Emma Davies' A Year With Your Camera, and feeling rather stupid, but when I got to today's lesson on composition, I realized that I have actually learned a lot about myself. if not my camera. I am not now and never have been very interested in what OilMan would call his basic mode of thought…numbers. When we rearrange a room, he makes a scale model on  special graph paper marked with a grid and little scale model pieces of furniture. This does not prevent me from insisting on moving the furniture around…sometimes several times! He may think in numbers, but OilMan is patient. To me, apertures, shutter speeds and ISO are just numbers….

When it comes to composition I get excited. I'm on firmer ground here. . The art, for me, comes from how I decide to turn a view into a photograph. I am constantly amazed at how adept our minds are at editing a scene and how much the power lines show up in the photograph.I'm happy to have a working knowledge of the technicalities of the camera, but I probably won't go to manual anytime soon. I'd rather let the camera do it. 

 I think Nana K raises some interesting thoughts here about photography and what it means, particularly as it relates to photographing people. The answers to these questions seem easy enough at first, but the more one thinks about it…

I would ask if there should be a different code of ethics for professional photographers than there is for someone who is taking photos for more or less personal use….or perhaps it's a question of motivation. 

Which leads me to one more question…what about camera phones? They seem to have led inexorably from black and white photos of a very special family vacation  to pictures of someone's breakfast, or their naked lover or, worse yet  somebody else's naked lover, to 'selfi'sticks'  and hundreds of pictures of the same people in the same positions with the same smiles with a glimpse of Paris or the Grand Canyon or Whistler's Mother behind them. The age of computers and digital cameras has brought about a whole new attitude toward photography, privacy and respect. We're drowning in photographs! Perhaps that's why so many of us love the Blipfoto model.