Daniel Greene

Tag: photos

  • 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.”

  • 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.

  • Paul McCartney and The Police — do you have to be old to understand? ;-)

    Well, here I am in Starbucks at the age of 40, telling the 20-something cashier how excited I am that my partner and I are going to see The Police in concert next Monday night– when I find myself having to explain to the young lady who The Police were. ;-( Nevermind telling her that The Police was the band Sting was in before he went solo; that would be like telling her that Paul McCartney is the guy who used to be the lead singer of The Beatles! (Who’s Sting? Who were The Beatles? Oh dear!)

    Seriously, though, once I told her that The Police brought the world such indelible hits as Roxanne, Every Breath You Take, Message in a Bottle, and Wrapped Around Your Finger, she got it. And if you have the chance to discover — or rediscover — The Police, I highly recommend it! It may be the closest you’ll ever come to a reunion of The Beatles until you go to heaven, if there is such a place. And if there is, I count on attending live concerts of The Beatles and The Police on a regular basis. 😉

  • Andy in Versailles Room

    Andy in Versailles Room

    Andy in Versailles Room
    Originally uploaded by danielgreene.

    That’s Andy reading our final invoice for miscellaneous charges over breakfast in the Versailles dining room on the Norwegian Star. We are docked in Seattle and boarding a Seattle tour bus on the way to SEATAC for our flight home!

  • Cactus Blossom a Cornucopia for a Bee

    This cactus blossoms in the early morning before the direct sunlight hits them. This means the photographer must capture them either in the available light, which is subdued, or use a flash. I shot this with merely the soft morning light that was available. Two hours later, when the flowers were bathed in direct sunlight, they had already wilted.

    I’m experimenting with my new zoom telephoto lens to take macros. The results are grainier than what I can get with my fast macro lens, because the maximum aperture at 300mm is f/5.6, so I have to bump up the ISO to capture enough light, and the increased ISO results in some noise or “grain,” as film photographers say. Still, I’m happy with the results, at least on this image.