6:52 – When I grew up there was only 5-pin bowling in town. Later on a 10-pin alley was built, but it was too late, I sucked so badly at 5-pin that I had no interest in bowling at all.

When we moved to North Vancouver there was a 10-pin alley at Park Royal. Kirk dragged me over and I discovered that I enjoyed it much more than 5-pin….mainly because I was more likely to actually hit a target with a heavier ball and more targets to shoot at.

Sadly, the Park Royal Lanes were bulldozed to make way for the new Village Shopping Centre and we are back to only 5-pin in close proximity. So it was a pleasant change to go play again.

But I still suck.

10/365 (January 10, 2011) – I turned on my computer this morning and the first email I read told me that a friend had passed out of this world.

The second email I read was the topic for today’s Daily Shoot – Rhythm.

I went to the beach to consider both emails.

Time and tides both follow uninterruptible rhythms. When we are children, the rhythm of time is an exhaustingly tedious one. Everything takes too long, we want to rush forward and experience everything. Them, as we grow older, we realize how precious time is and we wish we could stop it to savour it all.

Three years ago I joined Flickr when I saw my best friend posting photos of her dogs. I thought, how neat, perhaps I’ll post photos of my cats to share. I uploaded some photos of trips, and a few weeks later, a complete stranger added me as a contact. I didn’t know this person, he was on the other side of the world. I thought it strange, but then I was new to Flickr and didn’t really understand it yet. I was a private person. I wouldn’t dream of chatting with a stranger online.

And yet, a year later this same person had convinced me to join several groups, had become a source of daily banter and a battle-of-words. We became sparring partners and when my wedding rolled around, he and others forwarded messages via my best friend and bridesmaid. Four months after that, Kirk and I spent four weeks aboard a sailboat in the Mediterranean and then stopped in England four four days, with the sole purpose of meeting some of these interesting people from these Flickr groups, face to face.

We raced across the bottom of the country to meet up with one group at the Eden Project, then back to meet another group in Poole, and finally a short visit with two more people in the New Forest.

During that visit to Poole, Danny George picked us up and shepherded us on a fast paced tour around the area he loved. He showed us the sights, sent us up to Corfu Castle, took us to see the steam train, the “Puffer” as he called it. And finally hauled us into town to meet the rest of the group who had come to visit and have a photo-wander through town and around Poole Harbour on a ferry.

Only a year and a half later that bigger than life man, so full of laughter and wit, has flashed from this world. Exactly one month after his birthday.

The tides will continue to ebb and flow. Time will march on, frustratingly slowly sometimes, and maddeningly fast at others.

I am grateful that time and tides gave me the opportunity to meet Danny in person. And I am equally sad to know that I will never again have that opportunity.

My best friend introduced me to Flickr, but Danny, you showed me where I could go with it.

Rest in Peace Danny.

291/365 (October 18, 2010) – Where exactly did this year go to?

I thought a 365 was going to be difficult, and it hasn’t always been easy, but it wasn’t nearly as onerous a task as I thought it might be. The one negative thing I’ve found is that I have wanted to focus on some film photography and I feel like I haven’t really been able to do that since I am so fixated on getting a daily digital shot to post.

Will I do it again next year? Maybe not. Maybe. I don’t know yet, but I do know that I want to do more film work.

flickery lets you upload photos into your Flickr photostream, but it does so much more! From within flickery on my desktop, I can:

- view my contacts photos
- view photos taken near me geographically
- view my favourites
- rearrange photos in my photosets
- see what’s new on Explore
- browse the newest uploads to Flickr
- share something I find from within it
- get info on any individual photo
- view photos fullscreen on my monitor

And a whole lot more. Like search for a photo among all of Flickr!

It’s drag and drop, but I have way more control over tags and other upload options from within the program.

And, as with most Mac Applications. it’s inexpensive. $15. Not a bad deal if you are a heavy Flickr user.

I’m not sure why, but I only like to eat eggs on the weekends, poached, on an english muffin. Love eggs benny! But any other day is generally NOT an egg day. And free range eggs, none of those pale things that have no flavour.

I like real eggs, with a nice deep orange yolk…that has flavour. Those pasty things are only good for baking with, but I don’t even buy them for that anymore. I think I fell in love with the flavour of a deep orange yolk when we went to my aunt’s place and she sent us home with a carton of duck eggs. WOW were those ever good! And they changed our egg eating habits forever.

My little Minox didn’t work out and I returned it yesterday because there was something wrong with the shutter display, very sad about that, but looking at an Olympus XA from 1979 now.

So I am back to my crappy little plastic Holga which I hope to take an interesting picture with someday…I’m only on roll three of using it, so I still need to work at it a bit. I love this stupid thing though. It is cheap plastic and if you aren’t careful, the back falls off and all your film is ruined because it isn’t like 35mm which is safe inside the spool (the unexposed part anyway). There isn’t really even any point in looking through the viewfinder since it doesn’t really represent what you are seeing accurately. There are more or less no exposure controls, no control of shutter speed, just a switch that has a sun on one side and some clouds (I think that’s what they are) on the other. And you can set it for close, not so close, a little farther away, and way out there, sort of…but who knows what you end up with?

Whenever I pull this thing out it just makes me smile and laugh because I can just imagine what people are thinking…..

I’m reasonably good at having a camera with me most of the time. The built in camera in a cell phone helps for those times I don’t want to lug my DSLR around. And the iPhone has some fun (and goofy) camera apps that make playing with it entertaining. I used to hate the camera in cell phones. Sure, it’s nice to be able to get a shot when you don’t have a real camera, but the quality is always total garbage. But in the last year or so I’ve actually come to appreciate the crappy shots a bit more than the perfect images that come out of todays digital cameras.

We spent a whack of time recently going through thousands of my Fathers photos and old slides and oddly, the ones I liked the best were the ones that had that 70′s feel to them (probably because that’s when they were actually taken…duh). But I was trying to put my finger on what I liked about them… certainly I wasn’t nostalgic for flares and big collars on shirts. It was something else. The colours were slightly off from reality and there was a softness to them… a grain. Digital cameras have become so good at capturing exactly what we see in such a precise manner that it sort of takes some of the fun and the surprise out of the final image.

I guess that’s why I’m making a bit of a foray back into film. I have a Nikon F-80 film camera that will take all (most) of the same lenses that the D300 and the D70 use, that’s why I bought the body a few years back, but it doesn’t ever really get out much. It’s almost as bulky as the DSLR so the digital camera always gets grabbed. I tried a small digital camera, but the lens is so puny that it is a pain and it takes too long to decide on exposure meaning you miss the moment most of the time. So that’s why I am out looking for the perfect little film camera now.

Yes, I bought my $40 Holga, and it’s taking some getting used to. I have a roll of colour film in it now, but it’s not something you toss into your purse and go since the back would probably fall off and all the film would be exposed (120 film isn’t inside a protective case like 35mm). I was pretty excited about finding the Minox ML, but unfortunately it hasn’t stood the test of time since the 80′s as I thought it has. The shutter speed indicator isn’t functional so I have no idea what the film is going to expose at for any given aperture unless I do some math…and I hate math. So it goes back today after I knock off the film inside it.

So I have my eye on a little Olympus XA on eBay now. While the Minox was a German cult camera, the Olympus was mass produced so there are more of them out there, but they have a stellar reputation for optics and reliability….and they were built in 1979. So I am now in the market for a 30 year old camera…. all that is old becomes new again.

Anyway, my first week of the 365 challenge is done and here are the results as pulled from my Flickr photostream.

So what happened?

I joined Flickr. And then my friend invited me into a Challenge group….and then there were a few emails as I was trying to learn the ropes, and then a few people cracked jokes (OK, it helps that the vast majority of them are English and I’m a sucker for the language (British English is so different and yet so similar to Canadian English) and the humour).

So here I am a few months later actually contemplating rearranging some of our travel plans for our trip to Greece next year just so we can take a day or two and head down to the Cornwall area to meet some of these people that I am on the verge of considering as friends….and I’m really chintzy in the friend department.

So maybe the Pen Pal has a place in the 21st Century after all….and it’s kinda cool….

Enter Flickr!

What a wonderful invention!

]]> http://the-philosophical-fish.ca/archives/61/feed 0