So, after Point Reyes and my birthday on Tuesday, I basically did laundry and started packing again, this time for two weeks away in Italy. A for-real vacation for the first time in a while. Two years? Maybe three? 2020 we went to Colorado in the fall, but that was a working trip, where we were just isolated somewhere else and doing our jobs remotely. I don’t recall a vacation in 2021. NYC in 2019 might be the last one? Anyway. New camera came wednesday of that week, and I have some thoughts, which I’m gonna share at a later date. It came on the trip.
We went to the airport mid-afternoon, for a 7something departure, SFO to Frankfurt, and then Frankfurt to Florence, where we were stopping overnight. I’m sure Frankfurt is a lovely town, but Florence is a short train ride from Rome, and for some reason the tickets were cheaper (and our hotel, too). It made a sort of sense when we were planning, anyway.
I really do love the international terminal’s departures hall. Just a big airy space. People going somewhere, people coming from somewhere. Also, I never knew that SFO has an out-of-doors patio at the far end of the G terminal, but it was right by our gate, so we took the opportunity to get a couple last breaths of fresh air and sunlight.
Anyway, we boarded and were delayed, but finally took off. I sat there, reading for quite a while, and then I looked out the window and noticed some odd lights: it took me a moment to realize, in my sleep-deprived state, that it was the Aurora. I’d never seen it in person before. Of course, I only had the tiny camera, and didn’t yet know how to lock it to infinity, so the resulting pictures are even blurrier than they would be normally. Still, it’s something.
Arrived in Frankfurt, got our passports stamped for entry into the EU, and ran for our flight to Florence, only to see that it too was delayed, and then it was delayed again. Finally, we boarded, flew another hour, and landed at sunset in Florence (beautiful, but through a dirty window; the pictures look like they were taken with vaseline on the lens). Wandered out to find the Taxi stand and the queue, waited another 30 minutes, and got to our hotel just in time to get dinner.
Then the next day, we had breakfast and set off for a day in Rome. Next time!
Posted on 2022-10-25T08:29:53Z GMT
This was summer 2021, after everyone got vaccinated but before Delta came and took away our hopes and dreams. Drink and Draw is a little get together for creative folks to be creative in an easygoing space. I haven’t been in a while, but the format is probably the same now; they’re announced on insta @drinkndraw.elis.
Anyway, at the start, everybody throws out a prompt, and someone makes a list of all of them. Then you just sit there and chat and draw the prompts and have drinks and food and sometimes there’s a dog. I’m a terrible draw-er but it’s still fun to see what people come up with, to figure out interesting ways to interpret the prompts, and just have fun being creative with folks.
Pausing on the recent for a little bit while I live with the next photos off the queue from my month-ish of travel. It’s nice to get a little distance from the photos. At least, that’s what I tell myself to justify a year+ of backlog that I haven’t posted. Also, I feel like the next post is going to be somewhat camera-reviewy, which makes me cringe reading it back to myself. but I spent a long time agonizing over this new camera, and really ended up liking it, and I think there are things about it not covered in the endless algorithm optimized reviews that are already out there. So, a review.
Oh, look at the time, seems I’m all out of words. Go read Tony’s blog, he’s better at words anyway.
Posted on 2022-10-11T07:34:45Z GMT
So we set out from James and Janelle’s, heading due west on back roads. Pretty quickly we were in the middle of nowhere, practically. North of Petaluma and west of 101 is ranch and wine country. Lots of big hills that don’t quite make mountains. We got to the 1 at Tomales, and followed it south.
There are a half dozen little towns you pass through on the way down the eastern side of Tomales Bay; little places that may have once subsisted on fishing industry, but now seem to exist mostly for people to visit. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a gem of a little bay, and the rolling hills make for an excellent drive, even on the sunday of a big holiday weekend. The traffic wasn’t bad, but there were a lot of tourists hitting the open restaurants.
For no particular reason (OK, a very peculiar one unrelated to anything here), I’ve been thinking about dowsing the last couple of days. You know, the thing where someone gets a forked stick, or sometimes two bent wires, and they walk around and find where to dig for a well. You might be thinking, “Surely that must be fake, and there’s no way hard-headed Matt believes in such nonsense,” but you’d be wrong. You see, I have the knack for dowsing myself.
I don’t remember how it started. I think we’d seen some show on the history channel about it, and the person in the show had used bent wires, L shaped, one in each hand, with the long part of the L being maybe 18” and sticking out in front. My dad said, yeah, some folk have the knack and some don’t. Your Great Uncle Shorty, (or some other relative, I don’t recall) he could dowse.” Well, one of us realized we had a surplus of wire coat hangers and pliers.
Next thing we knew, all three of us were out in the back yard pacing around. The first time the wires crossed in my hand ( and every time after, too) it felt as though some force was pushing on them, and there was no way for me to stop them. We had well water, despite living in a house in the middle of a suburb of 35,000; the house predated the development of the area by a few years. The wires would always cross when I walked over where the pipes fed from the wellhouse to the house proper. Eyes closed, eyes open. Weird, inexplicable, not terribly useful skill, in the days of ground penetrating radar and sonar and whatnot.
I tell that story because it feels a little bit like the process of making pictures for me. Like there’s this inexplicable force between me and the image. Sometimes I go out with my camera (bend coat hanger rods) and look for the pictures (the water) and can’t find it, other times it’s there and I can’t stop it. There are a lot of easy explanations that flatten an essentially inexplicable experience; if you try to examine it too closely it disappears.
I’ve talked recently about good days shooting, and this is kind of like that. I think what I was talking about in that post was a kind of mastery, of getting the thing right. A dowser day, a day like this sunday afternoon, is more like something rolling down the hill. It’s a thing that happens as a side effect of pointing the camera at stuff and pushing the button. “In the moment of aiming, the [camera] turns like a dowser’s wand” (to steal a paraphrase from Tom Waits) and even though it feels like you haven’t done anything, the pictures happen.
OK, enough blather. I probably should have tried for a tighter edit; maybe one less boat? I had so many of that long beach that I cut, and other images of pretty much everything you see here. This edit started out at like 40 pictures. Anyway. Next: Matt goes to Europe and reviews a camera (maybe).
Posted on 2022-10-05T06:01:12Z GMT
Most of september, I lived out of my suitcase. Labor day weekend, I was flying back from Denver. I had been there at a conference, technically in Aurora. The night before had been a late one; there was an open bar that had Laphoriag, and it only takes a couple (three?) these days to give me a wicked hangover. But that’s not what this is about, nor is it about the 3am Mcd’s I may have had. I managed to get up in the morning and get myself together, get to the airport. By the time I got through security, I’d drank a liter of water and one of gatorade, and I was feeling somewhat human.
Of course, that meant that as soon as we got to cruising altitude, I was asleep. Turns out that was a good thing, lots of clouds over the Rockies, not a ton to see. I woke up as we were passing over the eastern sierra, snapped a pic of the fires over Yosemite, and tried to wake up to march through the airport.
Somehow, I either took a wrong turn or something, but my plane went to terminal 1, and I ended up walking all the way to the exit in Terminal 2. Maybe I was still a bit hungover. At least I only had carry-on luggage; I walked out the door and Sophie pulled up about two minutes later, and we were off. I had kinda thought I’d go home, maybe take a shower and grab some clean clothes, but things were already in motion, and there wasn’t time.
Sophie drove straight from the airport north, across the bridge and onto the 101. I don’t remember the town name, but we were headed somewhere in Marin, where our friends James and Janelle have a place with a pool. Cason and Ryan were already there, having a good time and texting us, telling us to hurry.
I feel like I got there, cracked a beer, and hopped in the pool, but there was probably more to it than that. They definitely showed us around the place. It was dark, when we got there, but it was also still like 80º. This was one of the last really hot weekends, so the water was fine. I was able to run laundry, shower, and fall asleep in a nice warm bed.
Sunday, we went to the grocery store and got some essentials, burgers and chips and that sort of thing. Just sort of had a lazy day most of the morning, besides the grocery run. James grilled the burgers for a late lunch, just a perfect Labor Day weekend. Then, I’d decided ahead of time that I wanted to go shoot pictures around sunset in Point Reyes, because it was my birthday weekend. So we took the car and headed west, in that direction. But those photos will be in the next post.
Posted on 2022-10-02T07:22:18Z GMT
I just felt like posting something, and scrolled through the stuff in my backlog (which I keep in Lightroom’s ‘Quick Collection’). This was the first set that really kind of hung together.
This was last year, about this time (roughly August). I had just gotten fired from my job, and decided I should take some time off, and as it happened Christa was visiting, so it kinda worked out. We met and took the ferry to Oakland, probably got dinner, or I drove her to Allie’s? I don’t remember, she might’ve stayed with us for part of it too. Next day, we went to the Bay Model (not pictured, talk about drab lighting inside but fascinating to look at). Then an afternoon walking around the de Young with Allie, dinner in the Sunset, Uke on the couch, and a hike on the last day.
Some or all of that may be out of order, it was a long time ago. I’m pretty sure Christa has visited twice since then? or maybe I was in NYC twice and she was here once? Anyway, there are a lot more photos on the backlog. A whole years worth, almost. Remember when I did short posts, just one or two photos? Yeah, me neither.
Posted on 2022-08-26T08:22:52Z GMT
