My partner Andy called to me from the back yard yesterday evening and said there was something he wanted me to see. He had moved a cut-off tree stump that we have in the back yard for decoration, and moving it had revealed a little mama lizard and her two tiny eggs underneath. Andy saw the mama lizard scurry off, and when he first showed me these tiny eggs, I thought they were Tic Tacs until he told me what had just happened. I had to run and get my tripod and macro lens and take a photo of this quick before the twilight faded away. Right after I took this photo (long 5-second exposure), we replaced the stump where it had been before, and we hope the lizard will come back to incubate her eggs.
Blog
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Phoenix Library at Summer Solstice
At about 12:30 (solar noon on this particular day), people at the Burton Barr Central Library in downtown Phoenix watched as the sunshine flooded the west wall and lit up the tops of the columns like ice blue “flames” atop “candles.” It was not what I would consider a spectacular event, but a quiet one in which a people gathered in a building and witnessed their and the building’s place in the universe… or at least that’s what the architect, Will Bruder, brainwashed me into thinking. 😉
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Andy & Me in Ketchikan
This is one of the photos we had taken of us while on our Alaskan cruise. We sailed on the Norwegian Star to Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway, AK and Prince Rupert, BC, leaving from and returning to Seattle, WA. We had an absolutely wonderful time, and I would recommend it to anyone. To see more of our vacation photos, visit either my Flickr account or Andy’s.
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Problem: Raindrops on windows
I noticed a problem right away when I sat down in the boat: the only way to get a photo of anything outside was to focus manually; otherwise, the lens would automatically focus on the raindrops. I found myself worrying about all the money I’d spent on the cruise, camera, lenses, excursion– only to be unable to take any photos! (I didn’t even realize yet that there was an upper deck.) Apparently, the good people who run this excursion know about all that (money spent and hopes high), so they are kind enough to squeegee the windows so you can get those coveted photos.
My frustration, though, made me think about the point of vacation. Is it really about the money spent and the things seen? I mean, it is about seeing things, if you’re a sighted person, but it must be about more than that, no? If that’s all it is, it seems petty to me somehow. Yet there is a reality to all the money I spent and all the reading I did and all the practice I did to prepare myself to capture certain images with my camera. Is a vacation like a hunting expedition? Are the photos the “catch” one brings back to say, “See what a big man I am! I spent a lot of money on fancy equipment, travelled the world, and shot these photos?” Or, “Look what I can see with all my money?” It strikes me as ugly. Yet, if going on vacation is not about what you can see, what is it about? What you can smell, taste, touch, and hear? Is it all about exciting the senses? Do we work all year at our jobs, save up our money and vacation time, buy our flights and cruises and excursion tickets– just to thrill our senses? Is there anything spiritual about it? Or is it impossible to have a spiritual experience without exciting at least a few of your senses? I mean, aren’t the most wonderful experiences we’ve ever had about what we saw, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted? Or is there more to life than that? And if vacation is not about perceiving different things with out senses, what is it? Your viewing this photo is dependent on exciting your optical nerves, and reading this text is dependent on either your eyes, fingers (if you’re reading Braille), or ears (if you’re listening to this through a text-to-speech reader).
My vacation really made me question the value of experience and what might be a deeper way to experience a vacation, or for that matter, life. Yet we are sensate creatures, and it could be argued that we experience spirituality through physicality. As Sting sings in The Police, “We are spirits in the material world.”
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Worth waiting for: Sandra Bernhard
I’m not a big event-goer, and I don’t like sitting through a lot of awards and speeches, but someone with seats to spare invited me and Andy to the AHRF (now Equality Arizona) benefit dinner starring Sandra Bernhard. Well… there were awards and speeches (most of them brief, thank God!) and it was worth the wait for “La Bernhard” as she jokingly called herself.
She may have shocked some of the people in the audience (by being a potty mouth and dissing Arizona where she’s from but is glad she left), but I’ve enjoyed her satirical sense of humor ever since I saw her in “Without You, I’m Nothing” in 1990, and nothing she said or did last night came as much of shocker to me. I just enjoyed her, and Andy did too.
Daniel Greene 