Light

My greatest photography problem seems to be light - too much outdoors, not enough inside. With my digital cameras, when the light’s wrong, the focus doesn’t always work correctly.

My travel camera allows you to alter the light exposure, so the problem of too much light can be mitigated. Of course, you have to get the settings right. As my pictures taken on my trip west of Albuquerque show, a certain amount of experience is required to develop an instinct for those settings.

However, experience is one of those things one can get. It just requires patience and time.

The problem with not enough light requires non-human resources, especially since my close-up camera has no light control. As I looked at my failed pictures of sample rocks taken in the house, I recalled those images of fashion photographers at work with banks of lights in a room and what look like umbrellas in front of the lights to diffuse their effects.

I decided my problem with photographing rocks is that I lacked enough diffused light at table level. I went to the hardware store with some vague idea of a 25-watt lightbulb on a cord somehow set on a low stand, maybe one of those clips they sell for mounting work lights.

As I walking though the lighting department I noticed those gooseneck lamps magazines are always marketing to people of a certain age whose eyes now tire. They claim their array of low-wattage lamps produce something like daylight and imply a panacea for aging.

The store happened to have a desk top model with a light that sits about 11" above the surface. For $15, it was worth a test.

It’s not quite voila yet, but the problem has been changed from helplessness in the face of changing conditions, to learning how to use a tool. Depending on the rock, I have to move it nearer or father from the light. Sometimes, I’ve tried draping a white plastic bag over the top to adjust it a little.

To illustrate my problem I took a stone I picked up in a neighbor’s yard that was the right size to throw at a threatening dog. I quickly realized it was a keeper.

I first got a decent picture of it with my travel camera (picture 3). I then turned off the lamp, but left the altered light settings (picture 2). I next let the settings revert to the default problem (picture 1).

I then took out the indoor closeup camera. The lamp was too bright to show the detail of the rock, and so I used different sheets of colored typing paper as shields (pictures 4 and 5). As you can see, the biggest problem after focus is color reproduction. This is a grey and clear rock, with only a hint of a golden hue to the naked eye.

I Am Not a Camera

The sun’s rising later. It’s dark when I wake at six. Instead of getting up, I check the heated mattress pad is still connected and snuggle back in. It’s the best time for unstructured thinking.

Some people have everything organized. Before they go on a trip, they’ve read the guidebooks, have an itinerary, know what to expect. Perhaps they’re anxious they’ll never get another chance, that this is their one opportunity and they can’t afford to blow it.

I haven’t classed them yet as a separate species, but it’s a possibility.

Or maybe I should be thankful my mother was too intimidated by Spock and Freud to do anything serious about toilet training.

I learned long ago there’s no place in this country I can’t return to. That doesn’t mean things won’t change. Some evenings clouds are so special I wish could remember them. But there’s always the possibility for something wonderful some other night, some other summer.

The freedom of retirement is that time constraints are gone. If I didn’t get quite the picture I wanted Saturday I can drive back today. Or will be able to soon. Please let that woman who interviewed for the job yesterday come to terms with my boss.

A camera matters if you’re not blessed with a painter’s imagination and skills. I may not be able to recall those clouds, but it should remind me.

And so, this morning as I lay in bed I returned to the problem of photographing rocks that apparently send no signals digital equipment can recognize. I thought maybe I should simply take a picture of the same section of that rock with each light setting on the new camera to see the differences.

Maybe tonight.

This morning there was more light coming through the kitchen window and camera settings made do difference. The rock was determined to be brown and out of focus.

I took out the other camera, the close up one, which is turning out to be much more difficult to learn than I expected. It rarely gives me what I want when I first try, but always teases me with possibilities. It makes clear, it’s always my fault it doesn’t do what’s expected.

It folds in half, so it can be set it on its base in a V or triangle to take pictures. However, the lens is at an angle to the flat rock and gets blinded by reflecting light. I tried standing it on its end in a great U so the lens was perpendicular to the rock and things got better.

Then I decided to take a wet paper towel and wash the rock in a few places. As a child I learned it was worth while washing quartz, but useless if not dangerous with sandstone. The idea of washing a sedimentary rock is quite alien.

However, I discovered the wet rock photographed better than the dry one. Perhaps the water plays with the lens so the light reflects differently. It was finally possible to see the bits of mica and the flakes of quartz, though the focus was still fuzzy, the glints bright blurs, and the light glaring.

I have no choice but to master these cameras - a new one won’t be better, just different. But I curse them a lot, because throwing them across the room would, contrary to most rules of punishment, actually hurt them more than me.

Please, I beg them, if you can’t see what I see, can’t you please show me something better?

Tell me, is that pebbly surface of dark carbon and white silica something the land looked like before it hardened into rock? Can you show me the past?

How Hard Can It Be

How hard can it be to photograph a rock?

It’s not a child or an animal. It doesn’t move.

It’s not a plant. It doesn’t defensively reflect light.

How hard can it be?

The answer turns out to be, how hard can it be to photograph something no engineer cares about?

I had picked up a piece of that gray fallen rock on the road to Picuris to take to the Rock Queen to see if she knows if it’s shale or not. It is sedimentary, contains some quartz and mica, and crumbles a bit.

My old trusty camera took reasonable pictures, but not with any great detail. The quartz, or what I assume is quartz, appears as white blurs.

My first attempts with the new camera used default settings which let in too much light. I hadn’t washed the rock, and it picked up the browns. It looks more like sandstone than anything.

After I tried again with different light settings, the color was better but much too dark. In some cases it was possible to get some sense of surface detail, but not much. It looks more like an old piece of bark than a rock.

I tried another camera someone had advertised as good for closeups including rocks. I hadn’t noticed the dead leaf until the camera caught it. Unfortunately, lighting is still a problem. The reflective quartz washes out the surrounding color.

I’m serious. How hard can it be to take a picture of a rock?

You get to an age when it no longer matters if a challenge makes sense, so long as you can meet it.

So, how long will it take me to turn a mute, mutant, mutinous piece of digital equipment into something useful?

The Journey Begins

I finally talked back to my boss one too many times.

Or, he finally made me mad one too many times.

Take your choice.

Two weeks ago he came in angry about something, maybe the extra zero on an invoice. When he paused, I reminded him it really was time for him to find my replacement.

Besides, I added, now that I get social security, I didn’t want to pay taxes on it.

There’s nothing like a tax scam to motivate the man.

Within days the ad was in the paper, he was looking for the best qualified person he thought he could bully, and I was counting the days to freedom.

Of course, retirement is the great bluff caller.

All those things you’ve been saying you’d do, if only you had time.

Well, now you have time and no excuses.

My boss’s mother came in to see what I was going to do.

I told her that since I'd had to buy a new car in March, I wanted to drive around the state and look at places I hadn’t truly seen.

I reminded her that the Las Conchas fire this summer had gotten me started, those days when the smoke was so bad I climbed into the car and drove towards Taos just to get my lungs into air conditioning.

The first time I headed out I had no map, no plan. I only knew I couldn’t go south or west because of the smoke. I didn’t want to go east because the road to Chimayó is too treacherous. That left Taos.

I can’t say I had no map. When I pulled it out I discovered it was issued when Garrey Carruthers was governor. That was between 1987 and 1991. I moved to New Mexico in the fall of 1991. While I’ve seen little evidence of road construction in the past 20 years, I thought I really could do with something better.

A friend whom I’ll simply call the Rock Queen and I went scavenging in Borders, but it was early days and there were no bargains. However, they did have DeLorme’s atlas for the state, and it’s been worth every penny I overpaid.

The next time the smoke got bad, I took the Dixon cut off. Just as I passed the crest of the Sangre de Cristo and headed towards the Carson National Forest, the car’s warning system came up to tell me I had a tire going soft. Route 75 may be a state road, but it’s about as isolated as you want to get in this state.

The next day one of the tires was flat. The tow truck operator, the car dealer, the tire dealer - none could see any reason why. The only possible explanation is that the manufacturer used soft tires to get better car mileage, and such tires aren’t really good enough for driving on two lane roads in New Mexico where shoulders are rarer than the need to get out of the way of some hell hound riding your bumper.

So the next purchase was a new set of tires.

My next expeditions were still day trips into parts of Rio Arriba county. It soon became apparent that gas stations don’t exist once you leave Española. All many towns have left are convenience stores with slow turn over.

I was grateful that car does get good mileage.

I also learned to always throw ice and bottled water in the cooler and a bag of potato chips, just in case. I wasn’t going to do any better in those out of the way convenience stores, and the local ones were probably cheaper.

Last week, after my boss had narrowed his choice, I ordered a new camera, one so cheap I could replace it if it bounced off the car seat. I picked the Sony that advertised wide-angled landscape capabilities. That was the one thing my current camera didn’t do well, though I will admit expecting it to do close ups of a fire some 20 miles away is a bit much.

Again, I learned inexpensive is another way to provide quality by eliminating necessities. In this case, you have to remove the battery to recharge it. It’s possible to buy some kind of device to connect the charger to the car’s electric system, but it’s really cheaper just to buy more batteries and a surge suppressor for those times I expect to spend in some motel in some remote part of this state.

Photograph: The Las Conchas fire taken from my back porch on the first day just before 8pm when the flames were becoming visible in the smoke. I pushed the close-up focus beyond the capacity of the camera to handle both the foreground and the Los Alamos area some 20 miles away