The Snap

Something snapped when I was tuning my friend Ellen's piano (see previous posts for other mentions of Ellen).

She was glued to her computer while I was tuning, and when I took a break, I went over to see what she was doing. And I saw images--gorgeous images. I was sucked in.

She had just discovered photography and was off the deep end with it.

I drove home in a daze. And all I had was my Nokia (previous post).

The rest of the story:

I went further into hock (What's another $1K when you've already HAD to run up the CC for car transmission replacement, gas tank replacement, vet bills, dead laptop, etc. etc. all within an 8-month period.) All for necessity and not one penny for the soul. It was then, in late September of 2007 that I said "screw it". And bought my Pentax K100D. Joined BetterPhoto. Got Adobe CS2--remember that crappy first photo of my cat?

When I was about to throw the image away, something about his eyes stopped me. Here he is transformed. The image also now has a title--Essence of Cat--and sells well as a matted print in my local gallery, STAART.

next installments utterly condensed!

You will note the great hiatus in dates here. I simply had too much work to do to and too much to learn to maintain the grandiose historical outline I had started out with.

history continued and much abbreviated . . .

2nd Warning: Don't read this unless you read the first (Background) one and are a glutton for mistreatment.

In the ensuing decades I worked for a publisher of college textbooks in Boston math and science as a production editor. Marched against the Vietnam War, worked on Shirley Chisholm's presidental campaign, was precinct captain in my area of Cambridge, MA for George McGovern. AND, had a few very valuable lessons in photography. This was the time of my first camera -- A Mamiya Sekor which I used for years, until I bought a used Pentax K1000. I was strictly a black and white shooter, and today, I still think like that for the most part.

Additionally and extremely important to my entire professional growth, I began collecting, studying, and using type -- lead type. And all the equipment necessary to do letterpress printing and established Fairfax Press.

To make a long story short -- I eventually ended up moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan and entering the Graduate Graphic Design Program at Western Michigan University. Studied with Jon Henderson who later became the head of the Hallmark Research Library. When he left, he was replaced by a person of, to be kind, about 1/3 his mental stature. I left t the department, spent a year in printmaking and then switched back to English, receiving an Honors M.A. and going on to Ph.D. work at the University of Western Ontario.

After leaving -- with the infamous A.B.D., I returned to Kalamazoo and set up my own graphic design studio, producing work for Selmer Music Company, U.S. Robotics, French Paper Company, and Western Michigan University.

In 1988 I had to return to Vermont to take care of my aging parents. This was the end of my visual life as these were the days before the ubiquitous computer and I could not take my clients with me. I had to work for others. All work for the next 10 years was for leading edge technology startups and therefore my normal work week was about 70 hours. No time for anything else except rest and recuperation to prepare for the next day.

From my third job in this era I got laid off (along with otheres) without severance and being owed back pay. It was then I tried to start a web design business. And that was a laugh. It was 1995 and everyone EVERYONE I talked to told me they thought the Internet was a "load of hype" and was never going to amount to anything. I knew they were wrong, but I didn't get any business except for a wonderful guy in California, Jed Donnelly, whose Computer and Communications pages, begun in 1993, are still active today. And, whose pages are still using my very dated banners! Reading Jed's bio is like reading a history of the Internet.

The other client turned out to be a fairly large one. He owned and ran a teleconferencing site called "Summons Teleconferencing" I redesigned his site and wrote a ton of perl programs for getting at visitor stats--in those days you had to roll your own. Within a couple of years he sold out to Genesys for a mil or so--nice for him, but my tenuous attempt at a web business was gone.

That was the end of my web design career. So for nearly 10 years I tuned and repaired pianos. (Don't ask.) And then, something snapped.

Fun with Better Photo

I mucked about some more with my cell phone and BetterPhoto, and managed to get one more interesting image while waiting at my vet's house. I sliced this out of the image and again PSed it until I saw something I liked. And, it is still one of my favorite images, though of course it is quite small.

Ellen and I began talking on the phone several times a week, looking at each other's images that we sent up to BetterPhoto. As I looked at our images, I felt an incredible longing for a "real" camera. Basically I was doing 0-60 in a two-week period here. But the crushing debt on the CC kept me tamped down. But only for another couple of months. I fell in love with one of Ellen's images--you can see it here and began to drool excessively. I dug out my old b/w contact sheets from the years when I first got into photography--all film, all b/w.

Then something happened; don't remember exactly what it was, but got dealt another financial blow which hit the card again and I said "screw it". After a great deal of research, (but not quite enough), I bought a Pentax K100D. And, of course it came on a dark and stormy night (UPS comes very late where I live.) Without having the foggiest about the myriad buttons, I snapped one of my cats in low-light (really non-existent light). Crappy image for sure, but dear to my heart.

Damn Kodak, Hello Nokia

All I had was a cheap Kodak DX3215 that I bought a few years ago to quickly get images of pianos up on the web. BUT, for some reason the software to do this no longer worked and when I tried to update it, I got a humungus program called "Easy Share" which did everything except connect my camera to my computer. (I'm very computer savy and surfed for hours trying to fix my issue, only to discover that it was Kodak's issue.)

I blew it off and looked at my Nokia cell phone, which heretofore I had considered to be "only a phone" and started taking pictures with it. Too poor to even afford a visit to a local campground, we set up our ancient camper in the backyard and spent a wonderful 24 ours enjoying Vermont! As the sun was setting, I saw this image of our old railroad lantern and its shadow, snapped it, and mucked about with it in Photoshop to get the second one. I had joined BetterPhoto and uploaded it. And, among all the Nikons, Canons, Pentaxes, and Canon Powershots, it received an Editor's Choice.