Notes to Self

In the art world we learn that not everything in life is Top 10, or 5-Star. When we do our critiques at mid-term or finals, we would be laughed out of the studio if we said something was great – and we’d probably be flunked out of school if we told everyone their work was great. The purpose of a critique is to give constructive criticism, and everything in art, as well as in life, leaves some room for improvement.

I’ve carried this concept with me through life. Especially through my life as an artist and my work as a Quality Assurance Engineer.

With the coming online of twitter and facebook, with online rankings and reviews, there is more opportunity to spread the glory of being great around. The only thing is, that the word great now seems to have the same definition as the word mediocre. The word has landed in the same pile of useless words where adjectives like interesting have landed. In the art world, to tell someone their work is interesting is to tell them their work is meaningless.

So many times someone has sent me a great link and I click on it and read, something that may or may not be useful, but it certainly isn’t great.

If someone asks me what I think of something, I’m going to give them an honest answer. I feel it’s my job as a human being to be honest with my thoughts about something.

This morning while in REM sleep I revisited a tiny village in Mexico. As far as I know it doesn’t exist in the waking world. I think this is true because it is yet another place in my dreams that I can not always find.

In the past I have gone to this place by bus and by car, crossing over the border through southern Arizona, although the first time I went to this place I walked. Down a broad and wide southern California beach, over the border and down the road.

The village is not easy to find, and can’t be found unless it wants to be. A number of times I have made my way down there, only to get to a neighboring village but no further. This place is only three or so blocks long and is tucked into a steep, rocky canyon. The middle block of this town is its widest point and has what would be called a town square, but it’s really just a very wide part of the street.

Every time that I have been to this town there has been a band of musicians playing music on what might be the church steps, under a very large and ancient tree. It’s always the same tune, and they always play only one song. Sometimes it’s a flute band, other times a mariachi band. After they are finished, the crowd disperses and goes on about their business.

I love this little village. This morning I wasn’t out looking for it. I was with a friend and we were walking up a canyon road. Before we turned a bend, I had a sudden realization of where we were headed and what lay beyond. I could faintly hear the music being played in the square.

On this trip the village had changed a bit since my last visit. It had grown. There were now cafes on the square. There were a lot of tourists in the village, hanging out at the candle lit tables of the cafes, wandering through the shops, and there was a new block of buildings on a new street with a hotel or two.

I was a little sad that the village had grown by a block and that it seemed to have been “discovered”, but my friend and I had a wonderful time wandering around and exploring.

Probably like the rest of you, I don’t really like spending my down time reading technical manuals of any sort. Well, maybe cookbooks if I’m looking for something new to make, but otherwise? Nope. So I’m not sure why I said yes when I got an email asking me if I’d like to review the new release of The Basic Book Of Digital Photography. Other than the fact that I might learn something new and that would be cool.

When I got the book in the mail I thought, crap this thing is huge. It’s about the size of Lonely Planet Mexico. I thought it would be a book that I might want to pack in my bag with me on a trip, but no. This is a manual to study and use at home or in the studio.

So I have to admit that I haven’t read this book cover to cover. But I do pick it up and refer to it quite often. And you know what? It always has the answer to my question.

This book thoroughly guides both newbie, as well as advanced film photographer who is moving into digital, through the basics of both digital “point & shoot” and single lens reflex (dSLR) cameras. It’s not a bible. It’s a guidebook to get you started. In that respect it’s a pretty good one. Besides talking about differences in cameras, the authors, Tom and Michele Grimm, give hands-on advice about basic equipment like tripods, lenses, and other accessories as well as exposure settings, white balance, sensors, memory cards, basic composition and printing techniques. They illustrate their information with photo examples, screenshots, and diagrams. In the back of the book is a nice glossary of photography terms to get you up to speed and a few pages of urls for finding more information on the web.

I’m finding it to be a handy resource.

The Basic Book of Digital Photography: How to Shoot, Enhance, and Share Your Digital Pictures

Tom and Michele Grimm are a husband and wife photography team.

There is a campground that exists only in my dreams. It’s somewhere close to home, because it doesn’t take long for me to get there. It sits on the map north of where I am, and towards the ocean. Sonoma County? In my dream that’s where I go, onto the back roads of Sonoma County, through the forests and into the hills.

The campground is always full of people. Setting up camp, preparing food, taking care of camp like business. The air is pristine and forest is green. The water in the creek is pure and clear. The land underneath the forest is dry and dusty. It smells of evergreen. Whenever I arrive at the camp, I drop my gear off at my spot. My friends are there working already and they’ll take care of everything, at least enough so that I don’t have to worry. I head up the hill out of the camp and onto the road.

Once on the road I hike a few miles to the next left turn. I take this road until it turns into a trail. This is the crossing point. The place where things get interesting. From this point on anything can happen.

It’s not a path of adventure. So far nothing out of the ordinary has happened to me on this trail. One time the trail took me to a cave and I went spelunking. It was cavernous and a peaceful place and somewhere where a clan may have lived in ancient times. Through an opening at the back of the cave the trail continues up a steep climb.

Sometimes the cave isn’t in the dream and the trail goes from the trailhead up the steep hill through the forest. On the way up the hill, sitting in a small flat area is a village. The first time I visited this village it was market day. The town was lively with the market in the square, the open cafes, a little pipe band playing on one corner of the square. It had a feeling of being in Mexico, but it could have been anywhere in Latin America. The people of this village wear a lot of red.

I have been through here a few times. Only once so far has the village been there with people in it. The last few times the village itself wasn’t even there. Last night I found the village again, but it was empty. The shops were closed and the market empty. I felt disappointed. The village told me that Fridays were market days and that I should come back.

At the top of the hill is a beautiful green meadow. The trail continues through it. If I walk far enough I come to a place where the land narrows and there is ocean far below on both sides of the mountain crest that I’m walking on. There is not one cloud in the crystal clear sky and the ocean is an incredible shade of turquoise. I continue on, taking in the view, weighing my options: should I continue walking to the place called Argentina or should I hike down to the village on the shore and take boat?

Argentina is not much further down the trail, but in past dreams I haven’t gotten that far. Once I found myself in a village at the tip of Tierra del Fuego, but I didn’t walk all the way there and the colors were different. In this dream, the one I am writing about, I have done one of two things at this point. I’ve turned around and gone back to my camp or I’ve hiked down to the village at the shore.

In that village everyone is happy. The homes and small building are built of stone, and everyone seems to love a traveler passing through. In the village there is a cozy B&B where I’ve stayed for a few days at a time before returning home. I’ve spent the days riding the B&B bicycle through the curvy streets of the town. My sketchbook is always with me and I stop to make drawings, and to talk to whoever I might meet along the way. The B&B also has a nice patio and people stop by to talk. I never seem to get on the boat, or care about getting on the boat, and I never make it to Argentina.

The other day as I was being interviewed (on camera!) I was asked the question about my first trip when I was a kid. When did I first remember getting into the car and going off to travel?

I can remember the days before car seats and seat belts, of bouncing around in the back seat of the car and standing to look out the window at the landscape going by. My memories of traveling came early – mostly from trips to the grocery store for a pack of cigarettes or over the river and through the woods to my Grandmother’s house.

My family isn’t big on traveling, other than the emigration thing. I guess my Dad wanted to travel a lot more than he got to. Most members of my family seem to be terrified of flying. One member of my family is agoraphobic. I’ve got one cousin who travels more than I do, but that is mostly because she’s a member of a dance company that performs all over the world. For the most part, my family sticks close to home.

My love of travel came from one or two places. My grandfather telling me stories about Prague, and my Grandmother’s (the one who lived over the river and through the woods) National Geographic magazine collection.

My first big, multi-day roadtrip – the one that I remember – was with my parents, my Mom’s mom, and my little sister. We got in the car and drove to Florida from our home just north of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. I was five years old and was in kindergarten. I remember driving south, sitting in the back seat with my Grams. I remember the back of my Dad’s head as he drove the car the entire way. I remember getting car sick, a lot. Cigarette smoke and motion sickness just don’t mix. I remember asking “Are we there yet?” just a hundred too many times for my Dad to answer.

I also remember my first American cultural lesson of the trip.

Where I grew up, at the time I grew up, my town was an all white community. Or the circle that my family was in was all white. I’m not sure which statement is more true. As we traveled south I started noticing that people in the towns that we were traveling through didn’t look like my family. They were really tan! Actually they were really black. They were as blackety-black as I was whitey-white.

So of course I had to know if the people I was seeing had tan lines, if they were white underneath their clothes, which gave my Dad an opportunity to teach me about the superficial differences in people and why people look the way they do. And of course I had to know how he knew all of this, because really, when did he peek? He was very good about it and it also gave him an opportunity to say something more than, “No we are not there yet.”

There were other things that were fairly fascinating on that trip. The weather changing as we went further south was pretty neat. The architecture and magnolia trees in Savannah. The alligators in the river as we crossed over into Florida. The cobblestone streets of St. Augustine. Being on the beach in Daytona. Driving down to the Keys. I remember little details of the trip. How I was able to walk from the hotel, under the street, through the tunnel, and to the beach by myself. Collecting sea shells. Seeing tropical plants for the first time. I remember the neighbor lady to the hotel in Daytona, picking bay leaves from the tree out her kitchen window for her spaghetti sauce. A dead shark on the beach. And too much sun.