All posts by Steve Stern

Complainin’ AND braggin’

Photography

IMG_2413

My camera – the very same camera that I have been so nice to and raised from a pup -tried to commit hari kari yesterday. The – formerly – trusty camera is a Canon 5D is SLR which means that it has a little mirror inside that directs the image from the lens up to the viewfinder, when I take a picture, that little mirror flips up out of the way so that the image travels directly from the lens to the sensor. The mirror weighs, probably, less than a 1/10th of an ounce and is a beautiful piece of engineering, or was until it fell off the flipper. Now I don’t have a viewfinder. Or a lightmeter, because the lightmeter is somehow dependent on the mirror.

When I was in Basic Training at Fort Ord, a typical retort to a complaint like They made us run all the way to the rifle range, was Are you braggin’ or complainin’? Of course it was a little of both and – of course – that is what I am doing about my broken mirror. Not having a viewfinder or a lightmeter is a huge pain in the ass, but there are work-arounds. Sort of.

I first started using a camera before they had built in lightmeters so, to look official, we would carry a separate lightmeter (usually tethered to us by a cord hanging around our necks). Using the lightmeter was cumbersome and we would take a meter reading for the scene, put the setting in the camera, and then shoot the whole series at the same setting. An even easier way was to use the Sunny Sixteen Rule. The Sunny Sixteen Rule was to set the lens aperture at f16 and the shutter speed to match the film speed on a typical Sunny day. It actually works pretty good as the pic below shows.

IMG_2380 Fortunately, the LCD monitor on the back of the camera still works and the 5D has all sorts of additional exposure feedback, so I can point the camera in the approximate direction, take a picture, and then adjust which is what I did in the shot at the top and the shot of the dinosaurs below.

IMG_2403

So far, so good. Of course the only other choice that I have is to start screaming at the camera, but I am afraid that, if I start screaming, I might throw the stupid %&$#@ across the room and then I would be even more frustrated.

A thought from the road, Everyplace is different

Americana

IMG_2072

In the deep American Outback, Labor is cheap and Stuff –  material – is expensive. A custom cooked meal comes on plates and we drink our homemade ice tea out of glass glasses. In civilization – using the term very loosely – Labor is expensive. In Civilization – again, using the term very loosely – the further down the economic scale we go, the more Material replaces Labor. In our Holiday Inn Express, everything is prepackaged, one serving size;  we drink out of wrapped plastic or paper cups and eat our complimentary breakfast off of paper plates.

IMG_2375

It is only when we get to the elegant Bistro PETIT OISEAU, in Portland that we get back to reusable – stuff valuable enough for somebody to wash – glasses and best of all custom cooked food. Very delicious custom cooked food.

IMG_2367

We are going to Portland for our nephew Jason’s wedding

Around home, Travel

Eastern Oregon -But first we are going to the Smoke Creek to see Mike Moore. The we will wander around the Eastern Oregon desert – drylands? – for a couple of days (we really don’t have much of an idea of what the area is like except that it is in the rain shadow of the Oregon Cascades). We will be back a week from Tuesday.

 

Things that go bump in the night…poor dear

Americana, Around home

Dove-1770

A loud bump at the other end of the house woke us about dawn yesterday morning. Both Michele and Precious Mae sat up and looked around, but that’s all it was, one loud bump. And then silence. We all went back to sleep.

When we did get up, at first, there was no sign of what could have made the noise. I would say, Here is a book that fell over, and Michele would say, No, I put it there. The whole loud bump thing was soon forgotten, that is until Michele found a Band-tailed Pigeon – Columba fasciata – dead, under a chair out on the deck. As an aside, the name columbarium – a place to store cremains, the cremated remains of humans – comes from the Latin for dove, columba, and originally referred to the compartmentalized nests for doves and pigeons. End aside. This poor dear had apparently flown into a window and killed her/his self.

We have a bird feeder out in the garden and I mistakenly bought Wild Bird Seed rather than Patio Mix and that has resulted in the birds at the feeder sorting through the seed and throwing the seed they don’t like on the ground (I guess, technically, they sort through and let the seed fall to the ground). Either way, this has brought more ground feeders into the area and that includes the Pigeons. Unlike their city cousins, feral pigeons – Columba livia domestica – the Band-tailed Pigeons are very shy. The slightest movement sends them flying and this poor animal flew the wrong way.

Band-tailed Pigeons-

All the Pigeons didn’t fly into the window, just this one, and that is vitally important.

Courtney Gonzales and I were talking about the desirability of embracing differences in people. In thinking about the Pigeon, it seems to me that embracing difference is not just desirable in itself but vital to any group prospering. Monocultures don’t do well in a changing world, they probably wouldn’t do well in a static world either, but – since the world is never static – we don’t know that for sure. As an aside, diversity is the most basic success story in the living world,  it is engine that drives evolution and, to get diversity, we have sex. At the most basic level, if we reproduced by splitting into clones of ourselves, there would be no diversity and there would be no evolution (and we would all still be proto-amoebas). End aside. Societies that are monocultural, that are pure, are not as strong as societies that are diverse.

Our diversity is what makes the United States is so powerful and it is why the most diverse parts of the United States are the most prosperous. Silicon Valley is so successful because it is so racially diverse (and I suspect it would be even more successful if it were more behavior and gender diverse). People who want to have everybody the same as themselves are really trying to make an environment that is a setup for stagnation and failure.

It is nice to remember that.