Some years ago, I went to the opening of a one-woman show for an artist and friend from whom I’d bought numerous large paintings vaguely reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s work and characterized by cartoon-like figures in brilliant colors. Although the subjects were mostly about life’s struggles – poor health, anger, suspicion, ageing, addiction – I found the paintings oddly beautiful and humorously compelling. I’ve hung them freely throughout my environment where they remind me that no matter how heavy life is, it can always be leavened with a sense of humor, a quality I think God gave us to prevent us from going crazy in this complicated environment He created. I was eager to see her new work.
But what a disappointment! She’d moved on (or degenerated, depending on your point of view) into what I call the “safety-pin-in-the-baby-doll school,” dark, heavy, angry and depressing work – open mouths with lots of jagged teeth, screams in the night, women with multiple breasts all spouting vitriol – without a scintilla of humor. I knew she’d expect me to comment, even congratulate her on her work, but I didn’t know what to say. I waited until she was engaged with another viewer and tried to sneak by her on my way out of the gallery but she turned just as I was passing and snagged my arm. I was hooked. When the other patron left, she smiled and said, “Well? What do you think?”
I wanted to be truthful but also graceful. I said, “They’re very interesting. But I prefer your work from the period of the paintings I already have.”
Dismissively, she said, “You always did like pretty!”
And she’s right; I do like pretty: pretty paintings, pretty rooms, pretty people and especially pretty scenes to capture with my camera.
My love of photography goes back to grade school, when Mom gave me her old box camera. With those sticky-fingered, pasted-down corner holders, I mounted its black and white prints in albums of black pages carefully captioned with white ink. In now quaint testimony to an abbreviated, stuttering family history, the captions might read, “The Liberty Bell,” “The Washington Monument,” “Mount Vernon,” or less dramatically, “Tree in Bloom,” “Susie and her cat,” or “At Mom’s birthday.” As a going-away gift for a student tour of Europe in 1955, I received my first 35mm camera and graduated to color slides, which now include photographs of years of travel, all carefully preserved and catalogued in 30 or 40 carousel boxes on shelves in my basement. These slides have (I’m sure) bored countless weary-eyed viewers, mostly family and friends, but also the occasional Rotary or Lions club meeting. Before a trip to Egypt in 1984, I bought my first SLR camera, a Minolta, with (eventually) four interchangeable lenses, and I used that quite happily, and very successfully through five one-man shows until, in an effort to keep current, I acquired my first digital camera just a few years ago. Now I travel with my Nikon D90 with both a wide angle lens and a long one, carefully nestled with other appropriate equipment in a not-so-light kit slung over one shoulder, slightly elevated to keep my precious burden in place and resulting, I’m sure, in a posture that explains why all my horizon lines go slightly downhill. Before my recent cruise, I added a small Nikon Coolpix, which I carry in a pouch hung from my belt. It allows me to take candid photographs of people at night without having to schlep to dinner the large camera in its heavy, cumbersome case. You get the picture.
Someone once said that to take good photographs, you just have to take a lot of them. Subscribing to that school, I returned from my month-long gig as a gentleman host with over 1800 digital images, 1500 from the big camera and 300 from the little one. To process and preserve my photographs, I first upload the images from my memory cards through a card reader to the “My Photographs” file in my computer. The images also go into Picasa, a Google product that’s my editing software (I’m not smart enough to master Photoshop), used to straighten those downhill horizons and tease the best from all those tiny pixels. I can also move the photographs around, integrating shots from both cameras into an order that makes a good story. (This was once important to my presentations of Traveling with Phil at the nursing home but since Mom died and I no longer go there, it’s now important only to my admittedly inordinate sense of order.) Picasa also allows me to duplicate selected photographs and move them into other files. In this way, I can create a file of “Friends” or “Family” or my more commercial “Sunrises and Sunsets” or “Reflections on Water.” Once I’m sure the editing and duplicating process is complete, and have made additional minor adjustments by watching a slide show of the pictures on my computer, I make a CD that becomes my permanent record. As you might expect, these are all filed carefully away in plastic shoe boxes in my basement under appropriate headings for the year and subject matter. I’m nothing if not organized. I can’t help it; it’s my anal personality. And finally, I once made coffee table books of all my trips, produced with software from a local company now frustratingly out of business and whose owner refuses to return my phone calls. But that’s another story.
After uploading all the photographs from my recent cruise, I noticed that an updated version of Picasa was available from Google and downloaded it from the Picasa website into my computer. It included some great new features, like a simplified tool for correcting red eye and a lasso and cloning tool for removing flaws. I was thrilled, and happily spent many days playing with my new photographs, bringing out the best in them and moving individual shots to the most appropriate slots. But when I was finished and progressed to the next logical step, the new software would not allow me to make CD’s. As usual, the prompts appeared but the software wouldn’t progress to “Write,” necessary to producing the CD. I was sure I’d done something wrong. So I tried again, but with the same result. Unfortunately, Picasa doesn’t have person-to-person customer service but their “Help” command instead sends you to a Picasa forum where common problems are discussed by users and brought to the attention of the company. Navigating slowly down the usual irritating rabbit warren of digital information toward an eventual site that discussed my problem, I eventually found other users who also couldn’t make CD’s with this new version of the software. Eureka! I was saved. Now for the solution. Several users suggested several options but Picasa provided a step-by-step method to solve the problem. I tried it timidly, terrified that I’d do lose all my photographs. When I was finished with the correction, I was relieved to find the photographs still there. But the program still wouldn’t write a CD. I must have done something wrong. I backed up and tried again. But I got the same result. Back to the forum. I tried another suggested solution but it didn’t work either. I decided to try uninstalling the new version of Picasa and reinstalling it. That didn’t work. I tried the recommended solution again with the new download but that, too, was unsuccessful. Now I was getting angry. But anger never got me anywhere. I emailed some of my friends whom I knew used Picasa but they hadn’t downloaded the new software – and now wouldn’t – but they had no intelligent suggestions. I decided to leave the project for another day, when I might be calmer.
When I retired 12 years ago, I decided I must learn to use a computer. I took an elementary course in an adult education program that taught me how to use a mouse but not much more. So I bought a computer and just began. I made a lot of mistakes and was frustrated many times. But my motto has always been, “Learn by Doing,” and as my experience increased so did my knowledge. Now my whole life is on my computer and I’d be lost without it, using it so much that my handwriting skills have all but atrophied. Nevertheless, despite my increasing confidence, I’m always cautious when entering a new area and given all the warnings about viruses, I’m especially leery of downloading from the Internet. A recent argument with my computer service company over a $150.00 bill for five minutes of work ended that relationship. And I don’t have a grandson (or great grandson) with the inherent genes that would enable him to fix my mistakes. I was stymied.
Several days later, in the shower, where I do my best thinking – physiologists/psychologists say that accessing one’s higher powers is easier when we’re engaged in some routine activity that requires no conscious thought – it occurred to me that I might uninstall my new version of Picassa and go back to the earlier one I had used so successfully. But how to find an earlier version? Here, Google came to my rescue by sending me to a site where the old version was available. I downloaded it with great glee at my new computer savvy and the eager anticipation (sweet smell) of success.
Murphy’s Law says that anything that can go wrong, will. And, in my experience, machines like cars and computers have their own perverse personalities. I have no reasonable explanation for this but when I downloaded the old version, carefully ”preserving data” as the instructions suggested, the captions I had entered for all my photographs remained but the edits disappeared. I would have to edit them, all 1800 of them, all over again. I just couldn’t face that right away. I had to take a few days off.
When I’d cooled down, I went back to work, again correcting all those downhill horizon lines and teasing the best from Pixeltown. It took almost a week. All the time I was working on the project, I tried to ignore the obvious question scratching at the back of my mind. When I’d finished the editing, would this old version make CD’s? I wouldn’t know until I tried the “write” command and I couldn’t do that until the edits were completed. I labored on.
With the major editing finished and further minor adjustments made after viewing the photographs as a slide show, I was ready to make my CD’s. The software told me it would take seven of them to capture all the images. I inserted the first CD and waited, breathlessly, for the prompts to turn from “Insert Blank CD or DVD” to “Write.” And to my surprise, and immense relief, it worked. I had one additional moment of panic when the backs of the CD’s didn’t have the usual look of having been recorded, but I inserted one into my computer and the show began. What a relief!
In this saga of my long photographic process, only one step remained: a trip to the nearest Ritz camera store where I could make actual prints from the edited CD’s. Once these were made, and entered into an album, I would have both a physical copy and a digital one of all the images. I could then delete the photographs from my computer and from the Picasa software, thereby conserving computer memory. But I was in for another surprise. And another example of my computer’s, and Picasa’s, perverse personality. When I put the first CD into the equipment at Ritz, the photographs appeared as usual, but in complete random order. Pictures from Rio were all mixed in with those from St. Helena. Shots from Barbados were intermixed with shots from Cape Town. Before exploding, I took a moment to wonder why the pictures on the CD were in edited order when I played the CD on my computer, but were in mixed order on Ritz’s equipment. But I couldn’t figure that out. There was no logical explanation. I just made the prints I wanted, sorted them into proper order when I got home and stuck them into my album. Needless to say, this took more than a few days.
My hajj to photographic Mecca has taken most of my free time since I returned from my cruise. Everything’s edited, and recorded, if not in perfect order. Do I now delete the images from my computer and format the memory cards, thereby erasing all the original data? I hesitate to do that. But India beckons and the memory cards are needed to record new images.
I’ve sometimes wondered if my zealous concentration on pursuit of the perfect photographic record of my travel doesn’t detract from the travel itself. I know I miss some of the on-site guide’s information because I’m often off in the distance focused on the perfect angle for some shot. Might I get more out of travel if I gave up the photographs? When I once posed this question to my mom, she said she didn’t think I missed anything. If I hadn’t been inspired by the travel, I wouldn’t have taken the photographs. And the record enabled me to enjoy the trip over and over again. I hope she was right. I do so like making pretty pictures.
A guide in Turkey once referred to me by saying, “I guess we have to stop the bus here for a minute so Pappa Razzi can get his photographs.” I can live with that. Taj Mahal, here we come! Stay tuned.
