Category Archives: Around home

On the road to Vegas with two lenses

Around home, Art, Camping, Photography

 

Ed Dieden and I took three days to drive to Las Vegas last week, camping as we went. The basic plan was to drive south along the coast until we got to about the southieness of Vegas and then we would turn left and drive east. For me, one of the main attractions was a chance to spend some time making photographs. I was getting my camera back from Canon and we would be spending three days in the kind of country I love, big spaces.

I did get the camera back, but it still didn’t work. After a lot of screwing around, including going back to the camera store,  I began to realize that the camera did work with my wide angle and tele zooms but not with my primary lens. My favorite lens! The lens that I use all the time. Shit!

I am re-reading  The Zen of Creativity by John Daido Loori and – I think – it helped keep me centered on the problem. What I wanted to do was spending some time photographing and being outside and not having my primary lens – my crutch – didn’t change that. In some ways, it could enhance it. It could help me see from a different point of view.

As planned, we drove south on Highway 101 and then turned east on State Highway 58. As we went inland, the country which was already pretty dry, got drier, the spaces got bigger, and the light got softer.

It also got windier and our camp site hunt became a lets find a place with as little wind as possible hunt. Strangely, that was a place pretty much in the open.

The wind stopped, the air got cooler, we put a some sausages and veggies on the grill and I had a couple of glasses of red wine. It was a very nice place in which to sit and feel the day end. (Double click to enlarge and notice the lonely power poles going across the valley.)

I don’t particularly like camping, I camp because I do particularly like being out in spaces like this at eventide. Feeling – more than seeing – the day slowly, slowly, drift into night; seeing the first star come out in the dusk – this spring it has been Jupiter, the king of the gods and the god of sky and thunder according to Wikipedia – feeling the darkness and stillness sop up the light. It is the witnessing of an ancient ritual in a huge cathedral. For me, it is being with The Sacred.

 

Spring is springing

Around home, Uncategorized

After rain, cold rain, warm rain,late rain, and then a hot week, our garden is alive. When I go for a walk in the woods – that seems a little pretentious and wildness seems way too pretentious, but both are more or less true – behind our lot, everything is growing but not much is blooming. But, in the garden, everything seems to be blooming. I am not sure why there is a disparity between the two although most of the stuff in the garden has been picked because it blooms.

When Michele’s dad died, twelve years ago, she bought a dogwood that was blooming so that – each year – it would be a a memorial and this year, our Fremontia – Fremontodendron californicum, a California native – joined it in a big way.

Along with some native irises ( Iris douglasiana) .

And lots of rhoddies whose tags have been lost and their names forgotten.

Spring is my favorite time of year and nothing says death and rebirth as much as a garden.

 

San Francisco Flower and Garden Show

Around home, San Mateo County

 

When I was a kid – say about 10 – the San Mateo County Products & Floral Fiesta was a big deal, only we – we being everybody I knew in about 1950 – called it The Fiesta. Our parents would leave us alone in a temporary mini-midway, five dollars worth of coupons in hand, to go on the sleazy rides and eat all the bad food we could while they went next door to the Bay Meadows Race Track to watch, and bet on – I guess – the horses. At the end of the day, rejoined by our parents, we might even wander into the buildings where the local farmers showed their flowers, or bushels of fruits and vegetables, or prized animals.

As an aside – On one wander into a county products building, I even saw a mother pig give birth to a bunch of piglets – on a, now unknown but vaguely remembered, bedding covered concrete floor – in a pool of amniotic fluid, as I stood, fascinated, next to my equally fascinated but horrified mother. End aside.

Now the Race Track is gone and the Fiesta grounds are called the San Mateo Event Center. Then San Mateo County seemed more rural than suburban with a population of  235,659  (205,748 Native White, 24,453 Foreign- born White, and 1,110 Chinese according to the Census – now the population is 718,451 with 383,535 White and 178,118 Asian). It is obviously a much more interesting place to live.

For some reason, the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show is now held thirty five miles south of San Francisco at the Event Center, so, for the first time in over 50 years, I went back. There was no midway and there are no pigs and we never got to the flower section, but there were lots of temporary gardens. The picture above is one of the winning gardens and is a little – a lot? – idealized: when we walked in, my first imprssion was of a dark barn with dim tungsten lighting. Sort of like this:

(the camera compensated for the exposure and I went back and corrected the white balance in the first picture.)

We went with Eileen and Aston Pereira who are definitely garden aficionados and had actually got there early to get in more face time with all the displays (such as the Dahlia bulb emporium and the hanging succulent garden seller).

They had saved the gardens to tour last when we got there. The theme was something around small spaces which worked perfectly for the venue. Aston didn’t think the gardens were as good as last year, but I thought a couple were at least very good, one was bizarre but interesting, the rest were above average, and some of the plants were spectacular.

All in all, it was a great way to tour gardens on a crummy, rainy, day.