Head shot

It's not just about the pictures.

Certainly cameras and photography are often simply tools and processes to get needed or desired pictures.

Camera shop eavesdropping suggests that for some, the pictures are just excuse and proof-of-function for the wonderful gadgets.

But sometimes photography can be about the process, the pictures mostly just proof-of-function and diagnostic tool for that process.

Particularly if one has a moderate to severe case of Dysfunctional Brain Syndrome*, as I do.

My psychiatrist is fond of saying, "Don't pathologize everything." Not every difference is a flaw. ("Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.") But that doesn't mean it can't be beneficial to examine some nonpathological behaviors and attitudes.

A fondness for taking pictures of rocks or dried grass need not represent a pathological interest in dead things. But perhaps examining that fondness might help extract the most benefit from rocks or from dried grass or from photography. It might suggest other beneficial activities.

Applying my DBS head to the my potential DBS benefits from photography, I come up with the following:

• Assisted seeing - A camera helps one focus what is seen. The resultant picture a record nut just of what was seen, but also of the process of seeing. In times of sensory overload, using a camera can help narrow ones visual input to be more manageable.
  
• Active versus passive - Many of us tend towards more passive. Even walking and enjoying what is to be seen, our brains are not fully engaged. Photography can engage the brain in an interactive process.
• Deceleration - Too often I get someplace, look around, perhaps walk briefly or perhaps not, then hurry away. Looking for photo opportunities and photographing slows things down, allows me to get more value from having gone there.
  
• Purpose - An additional activity, with small scale focus, can vastly increase the number of destinations closer to home, especially when physical mobility is restricted (I have variably reduced walking range, variably reduced driving range). Having a purpose can also make it easier to be someone where there are other people, and often deflect unwanted social interaction.
  
• Control - Our lives and surroundings are beyond our control, which can distress and frustrate. Expanding certain types of choices may compensate. By occupying myself with taking a picture of a rock or clump of dried grass, I may be less frustrated with my inability to hike further. By having a camera with a variety of automatic and manual modes, I may choose each of the camera settings, or choose to let the camera control all or some of them while I make other choices. An option rarely taken can still have significant hidden value in reassuring that the more common option was chosen, not forced.
• Communication - Some parts of my head may not be communicating well with other parts of my head, perhaps unusual only in degree. Communication with others is even more problematic. The photographs I make may provide useful insight into some of the more obscure and abstruse parts of my brain.
  

Potential DBS problem areas in photography include:

• Keeping track - We have variable ability to keep track of multiple things, whether "hardware" or "software." When we pass our limit, we lose hats, keys, lenses. We fumble procedural steps. Hence a noninterchangeable-lens camera, with automation options. Feedback is important - if a setting is changed, that must be clearly indicated so that it gets changed back.
  
• Transitions - Change requires a period of adjustment. Changing a camera from one automatic or semi-automatic mode to another makes the camera harder to use for a while. This can be reduced by a mental model that reduces the scale of change, e.g. a perception that my brain and the camera's brain share well defined tasks, and trade off on who does what. An automated task that does not fit that model, perhaps because it is inadequately explained, can be more difficult than doing the same thing by manual choices. Good feedback of both automated and manual choices is vital.
  
• Overdoing things - Whether called Obsessive-Compulsive or Autistic Perseveration, we often persist in something beyond our physical or mental stamina. We may then no longer readily transition to another activity, and almost certainly will have problems keeping track of the stuff we have with us, and of "finish up" tasks. Finishing and picking up must be straightforward.
  

Subject to the latter concerns, photography clearly has significant potential for therapeutic value, and more subtly, for "feedback" or "diagnostic" purposes.

However fun it is, worthwhile in itself, however useful or enjoyable the resulting pictures might be, for me the ranking of cameras, the significance of various features, and the justification for purchasing a camera, should be primarily based on mental health factors, and only secondarily on picture potential or "geek factors."

And as with so many things, including my block play, potholders, and probably eBay, I should remember that my photography is more about the process than the product.

*DBS is not my actual diagnosis, but is used here in lieu of a dog's breakfast of various neurological and psychiatric diagnoses.

[I am not finished, please consider this a work-in-progress.]

Dryside Daytrip

My first trip to the areas East and South of Vantage, Washington, was with my Boy Scout troop about 1964. I have been back many times since, with various daytrip companions.

Chris & I have been wanting to make another daytrip, for a while, and today turned out to be the day. I managed to get up & get going early enough to beat rush hour, so after meeting Chris & Schmoo in North Bend, we still had quite a bit of day in front of us. We ended up using all of it.

Headed over Snoqualmie Pass to escape the rain and found sun as we approached Cle Elum. After breakfast in Ellensburg, we were soon leaving I-90 across the river from Vantage, and had our first nature stop at the side of the Columbia just after we left SR 26 on the road to Beverly.

Back in Chris's car, we wee soon heading East from Beverly on Lower Crab Creek Road. I love that country, with the dry channels dating from the ice age floods I have recently been reading about, and the Saddle Mountains towering above to the south.

One of the things I wanted to do is actually take some pictures. Do some photography. See if I would actually be likely to get out and use a new camera, or just sit on the couch and read about photography. Providing my old D450 would cooperate.

I took pictures.

The first effort was abortive, with camera problems. But I changed the battery and reformatted the memory card, and the second try got the rock with orange lichen that opens the slideshow above, found in a small nature preserve along Lower Crab Creek Road.

We continued to Othello, turned south to Mesa, a place a high school friend was from that I had never visited before today. Then north to Lind, where the long-gone Milwaukee line crossed over the Northern Pacific on a long bridge. West through Warden to O'Sullivan Dam, where we made our longest stop, took our longest walk, and I took the rest of my outing pictures.

The sildeshow includes every image I took, without modification, just as they were downloaded. Obviously there are some things that need some work, such as holding the camera level, but what struck me most is how they harken back to pictures I took with my first 35mm SLR about forty years ago.

Continuing west, we turned onto Frenchman Hill Road, enjoying the bird sightings along there to the days birding high point just west of Dodson Road. That location is considered one of the best birding locations in the state, but I first stumbled on it by accident on a daytrip with Jo way back when. We returned there a couple of times with the girls when they were young. Just about every visit has been good, with my favorites there usually being Avocets and Stilts.

No Avocets today, but twenty or so Stilts, and numerous other birds that I will let Chris list in her own blog.

Back to I-90, back across the Columbia, and soon, back across the Pass in driving snow and marginal conditions. We thought that was pretty weird, until after parting with Chris in North Bend, I returned home to find North Seattle in driving snow - enlivened by flashing lightning and pounding thunder. The last few slideshow pictures document that, ending with Violas in the snow.

Long day, but a very very good day.

Subduing shadows

An old bromide speaks of peacetime armies and navies preparing to fight the last war instead of the next one.

As I consider what I want from a new camera, I need to remind myself that I will be using the camera in the future, not to rectify missed photo opportunities of the past.

Not an easy task.

Since I posted about the new Olympus SP-570UZ Digital Camera couple of days ago, I've been reading & thinking and getting myself confused and maybe sometimes a little unconfused.

As usual, "mental disablity" isn't meaning "can't" -- it is meaning "harder" and "can't do for very long without a break" and "easily confused or upset."

Things are complicated by PTSD "calendar triggers" that are surely compounding some photography-related triggers, but at the same time may also be providing a distraction that is letting me do this. Asperger's syndrome is also a complicating factor, adding both difficulty and motivation.

Things are complicated by the fact that until I got my first digital camera in 1998, I mostly shot slides, and when I shot print film, I mostly had basic processing. That meant that you used the viewfinder for cropping, it wasn't something you could adjust after you got home.

Even with my digital cameras, the resolution has been so low that one wanted to use as much of the frame as you could. Most of my digital cropping has been to change form factor and trim a bit off the edges, especially in my Blockplay blog.

But with an image sensor with a high enough resolution, more options present themselves. The "digital zoom" that camera makers love to tout is one example. Whether done in camera or later in the computer, it is simply reaching beyond the limits of the optical zoom of the lens to pick out just the center of the image. Turning a 110mm-equivalent lensed 640x480 camera into a 440mm 160x120 is of limited pleasure, but a chunk out of a 3648 x 2736 image from a 520mm equivalent zoom could be very satisfying. Bring home some fun bird pictures.

At the wide angle end of the zoom, you can get more perspective control. In Blockplay, many times I've had to accept images where vertical lines on a building converge towards the top or bottom of a structure -- sometimes both. The solution to that is to keep the image plane (sensor or film) vertical. Which usually means chopping off part of the structure, if not omitting the structure from the image entirely.

To maintain resolution, one must shift the lens, which requires either a view camera or a very expensive lens for an interchangeable lens camera. But for blog use, I will be happy to take the low-to-medium resolution image I need out of when edge of a much larger image.

If you don't think the Blockplay examples have been terribly egregious, that is because I have had the luxury of being able to back up and use moderate telephoto, which makes the effect less noticable. In most cases the depth perspective effects of doing so, including nudging me towards using solid-colored backdrops, have done more good than harm. In the real world, those options are typically either not available or more troublesome.

Enough ramblings, especially with no pictures.

More anon.

Catching light

Olympus SP-570UZ 10MP Digital Camera with 20x Optical Dual Image Stabilized Zoom

I have been using cameras since about 1960, with various degrees of seriousness about my photography, and with cameras of a wide range of sophistication and features. It seems like over the years I tended to go back & forth between simple snapshot cameras with convenience features and more advanced cameras with more options and accessories.

Often I had more than one camera at once, trying to fit my various needs.

In retrospect, I now better understand how my then undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder was manifesting itself in my contradictory needs, but also in my abilities.

My earliest "serious" camera was an old folding Zeiss of my dad's. Taking a picture was an interesting process:

• Open the hatch on the front of the camera
• Extend the lens on its leather bellows
• Set the aperature (f-stop) on the lens
• Set the shutter speed (fraction of a second) on the lens
• Set the focus on the lens
• Cock the lens
  
• Frame the shot
• Release the shutter
• Open a little shutter covering a pair of small red windows on the back of the camera
• Turn a knob on the top of the camera to either move the frame number to the next window or move the next frame number to the first window
• Close the back shutter to reduce the risk of light leak fogging the film
• Recock for next picture, having made necessary adjustments to any settings
• Or, collapse bellows and close hatch and put camera back in pocket

Over the years that followed, the succession of cameras generally sought to automate at least some of those tasks while not compromising too much on image quality or size of camera.

Sometimes I was happy to just have a compact convenient camera. Other times I wanted to be able to reach out with telephoto or spread my grasp for wide angle.

For a while in the late 1960s, I had an Instamatic with crude autoexposure and a spring-wound film-advance drive. Other times I had SLRs with various lens -- my favorite was an Olympus OM-2 with motor drive and a compact zoom (the camera body in one jacket pocket & lens in another) -- it broke my heart when that camera was stolen, and I haven't owned a feature-rich camera since.

For several years, my camera has been a 1.3 Megapixel Olympus D-450 with 3x zoom. It did what I wanted, it still does most of what I need, and I have enjoyed it.

As camera technology has moved on, I have occasionally admired and coveted newer cameras. But the truth is, these have been rough years, and I have probably been better off with something familiar and more tilted toward convenience than flexibility or features.

The cameras I've looked at might have done much more of what I wanted to do (or have wanted to do at various times), but it was still true that no one camera did it all - there was still a requirement to choose between feature trade-offs.

But lately the 450 has been hinting that it is getting tired. And then the other day I ran across a blurb for the new Olympus SP-570UZ.

At first glance, it seemed to have all the features I had been looking for, all wrapped up in one.

At second glance it still did:

• Long zoom range with true & significant wide angle, through substantial telephoto
• Image stabilization, to maximize usefulness of telephoto and for low-light conditions
• Reasonably high resolution
• Good macro (closeup/small object) capability
  
• Extended ISO range for low light photography
• Reasonably fast lens apertures
  
• Good range of shutter speeds
• Useful video capture modes, with sound
• Both built-in flash & hotshoe for accessory flash
• More modern sensor & image capture technology

[There are more features and functions than these, but that is not necessarily an advantage for me. :)]

Which is not to say that their weren't trade-offs or compromises. The image quality, even it 10 Megapixels, isn't comparable to a good digital SLR with comparable Megapixel count. The viewfinder won't compare to an optical viewfinder, and there may be some performance issues.

But the sample images I've seen, even in extended telephoto, as well as lowlight and macro, look quite satisfactory to me (yes, those web pages are in German, but scroll down to "Download der Bilder in Originalgröße" and there are a group of links to download batches of original-size image files.

So I have downloaded the instruction manual from the Olympus web site, and will be studying it to see how manageable the actual operation seems.

If all looks good, and goes well, I hope to be able to get one soon.

In the meantime, I will probably come back to this blog and look at specific features and what they mean to my photography -- for example, how wide angle plus extended resolution stand in for a shifting lens. Writing helps me think & organize my thoughts.

Friendship Pansies

Better known as Johnny-Jump-Ups or Violas.

When I was a kid, both my grandmothers had these in their gardens.

They were all over -- and for me, iconic -- at Beach Grandma's (Effie Whetstone) place on Vashon Island (actually Maury Island, but they are connected by an isthmus). She was the one that called them Friendship Pansies.

My Town Grandma's (Olga Winston) place at 70th and Palatine, had fewer, with just a scattering along the edges of some of the flower beds, but they were there and I welcomed them. When I called them Friendship Pansies, at least once she tried to correct me, but I wasn't buying.

A few years ago there was a nice batch in the parking strip of a place on Loyal Way that I often pass on walks, but last year they were a no-show -- weed elimination?

This year I will plant my own, in our own yard.

[It amuses me that the LillyMiller packet (bottom right) uses the same picture as the Ed Hume (top left). Lily Miller is a brand of Ferry-Morse (top right), while Ed Hume is a local (Puyallup) operation. I would prefer to think the seed packet photos are from their own plants, but I guess they just buy stock photos off the internet.]

Harvest

The creamer is an old family piece. We had quite a bit of this pattern in the 1950s, of which I also have a few butter-pats and a cereal bowl. I think we may have a sandwich plate around somewhere too, Maybe under a plant.

Jo found the sugar bowl, sans lid, at Goodwill a couple of weeks ago.

Fun!

That got me interested enough to track down that it is Louisville Stoneware, Harvest Pattern (sometimes known as Pear Pattern), and find a bunch of it on Ebay.

Yesterday I won a pair of mugs on ebay -- these still seem like the "proper" thing to drink cocoa from.

Most of what I see on Ebay doesn't grab me much, but it is fun to look at.

And it is something fun to look for in thrift stores. The bottoms of larger pieces have a "John B Taylor" signature in blue, while the smaller pieces just have a script "JBT."

Not something I want a lot of, but but great fun in small quantities.

Sometimes I say I was all but born in a pear orchard. Apple is closer to the truth, but hey, there were pears nearby.

There was also a pear tree on my grandmother's property on Vashon (actually she was on Maury Island & they are connected).

Pears are good things. (Pairs are too [waves at Jo].)

Woof!

Moving right along

I had a fine & quiet Christmas, with snow in the afternoon and an after-dark walk on the beach, including the recurring solstice labyrinth. Great presents too: coin books for tracking my collecting, old weights and scales, and sugar-free chocolate. :)

My mother moved into assisted living between Christmas & New Years. Jo's Aunt Kathy died during the same days - she had been such an important part of Jo's life, and all of ours. Now everyone is madly trying to clear out two houses under deadline.

I have been enjoying playing with Southeast Asian herb weights ("Opium Weights") with their intriguing animal shapes - not only are they great for the typical Aspie stimming of sorting and lining up, but the heaviness and graduated weight progression boosts the sensory impact - some of the more conventional weight sets have been joining in. It will probably be a new Cope List entry soon.

It's been interesting confirming the correlation between types and levels of coin & weight activity and stress (complication of life?) level. Graduated steps there too.