Smell the Roses

One very warm weekend a bit ago heralded the blooming of the roses in our garden. Just wanted to share one of them.

Even when life is crazy, and it feels like we're doing nothing but trying to keep up, somehow there's always time to stop and admire the incredible beauty that is right by us.

The trick is remembering to look.

Lost in the Details

It's easy to get lost in the details, especially when there's a whole lot of details and just one of you.

It's easy to follow that calendar from meeting to meeting, hack away at that inbox from urgent email to urgent email. Every day feels like it ought to be Friday already, except for Friday, when it feels like it's only Tuesday and where did the week go? Somehow, the wisps of leaves that I photographed in March are now grown into full loincloth-sized fig leaves -- where did the month go?

In the middle of it all, we look at someone else and, from our vantage point, see them mired in their own forest of details. It makes us wonder, how in the world can someone get that lost in details? And, at the same time, our vision is working furiously to not point out the fact that we, too, are buried in details, and our memory is doing overtime making sure we don't remember that we were lost in very similar details to those we now see someone else swamped in.

So here's a reminder to myself to get up and breathe, and to look at the present in the context of everything that I've done and everything that I aspire to accomplish.

Here's a reminder to myself to look beyond what's yelling for my attention and notice the important stuff that's perhaps quieter.

Tesla: High Speed Four-wheeled Batteries

I love commuting by bike, it's hard to beat that for saving on fuel and getting exercise at the same time (other benefits may include reduced seasonal allergies, great parking spots, and a stylin' farmer's tan).

I'm also not a big fan of driving fast. (Actually, I'm more of a stickler for rules. I had no problems going fast when driving in a German autobahn when conditions allowed.)

However, as far as combining fuel efficiency with incredible speed and beautiful design, Tesla Motors really seems to have delivered. (And it's convertible, so you may also get that farmer's tan to boot.) With so many car companies decrying the impossibility of improving gas fuel efficiency by even a few percent, it's great to see a few companies coming up with uncompromising designs that ditch the aged internal combustion engine for something new. (Of course, with an electric car what really matters is the energy source, and with a lot of the US energy coming from coal-powered plants, even with electric cars we still have a lot of work ahead of us if we're hoping to avoid having to start colonies in Mars.)

I got to check out a Tesla roadster live this past weekend at Yuri's Night at Moffett Field. Sadly, no test-driving allowed, but we did get to check out the view from the driver's seat. It certainly looks and feels like a sleek and very, very fast car. If it keeps to its promise of 0-60mph in 3.9 seconds, it will certainly be leaving a whole lot of sporty-looking cars in the proverbial dust (now pollution free).

Beginners' Luck

Whenever I go out with my camera, I tend to come back with a story. It's not that something happens in the "you'll never guess what happened to me" way (I seldom seem to have my camera around for those times), but rather that I've noticed that the camera tends to record more than just what's in front of it.

Each photo has a story to it -- the place, the time, the weather, what I was thinking at the time, who was around, what happened to catch my eye, how much time I put into creating the shot. Together, a series of photos tells a story in a way that no journaling (or perhaps even video, though I seldom have someone follow me around with a video camera) has been able to capture.

This weekend I went with a friend on a photo hike to the beautiful Filoli Gardens. (A "photo hike" is usually much more about the "photo" than the "hike", and can only really be done with others who, like me, when in possession of a camera tend to walk in no particular direction, stop randomly and spend minutes getting into yoga-like positions to catch a particular angle on a scene.) I hadn't been there in a long time, though years ago I used to go there nearly every week to study and relax.


This week's photo happens to be the very first photo I took out of about a hundred that afternoon. Call it "beginners' luck", but out of the whole set my eye keeps getting drawn back to this one. There are some other shots that I'm very happy with in terms of detail and color and composition. They often also took a lot more consicous effort to produce. This one was pretty much the first shot that caught my eye as I walked into the garden and pulled my camera out of its bag.

It's possible that "beginners' luck" is less "luck" (we just tend to give that term to any positive, not fully explained event) and more "intuition-driving-before-my-slower-more-analytical-self-kicked-in". It always amazes me what people can accomplish when they aren't trying to do something consciously.

It's a bit like walking into a garden and, next thing I know, I have a photo on my camera, almost like it took itself. It also tells me a thing or two about what my eye is instictively drawn to.

What are your photos that just "happened"? What is your eye drawn to?

The Art of Making Time

We've been devising ways to measure time, that most ephemeral of humanly perceivable dimensions, pretty much since our time began. We've used cycles of the sun, the moon, the ebb and flow of a river, the seasons (yes, even California has seasons), mechanical clocks, digital clocks and, of course, the cellphone (for which "clock" is now listed at least 20-30 features higher than "makes phone calls").

What I am curious about, however, is how long ago humans first realized that, beyond merely measuring, we also have the ability to make time.

It might have gone something like this:

Human A: Grunt. ["Hi! Mind if I share this nice, protected spot with you for a bit."]
Human B: Grunt. Grunt? ["Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Can't you see I'm busy?"]
Human A: Grunt... ["Pity, because I just hunted more food than I can eat before it goes bad..."]
Human B: Grunt! Grunt! ["Oh, I didn't even recognize you! I can always make time to see you, take a seat!"]

As technology and human knowledge march onward (if not always forward), we seem devise more ways to fill in every last moment of our conscious lives. Everything only takes a fraction of a second, so we jam multiple things into every second, aiming towards that ever-elusive instant gratification. So it's only to be expected that we are more and more often busy, and too often too busy to do something that, really, we'd love to do.

This can be a problem (we can get so caught up on being busy that we forget to do things that we like) as well as a crutch (being busy, while technically often true, is often used in place of "I'd already planned on doing other things during that time, and what I've planned is more interesting to me than whatever is being proposed").

The catch is, all the things that are keeping us busy are, for the most part, things we have chosen to do. That means we could also chose not to do those things, which implies that we can make time to do other things. Sadly, that's easily forgotten.

Whenever I realize that I'm telling someone that I'm busy, I'll try re-phrasing it (usually in my own head) as "I'm not willing to make the time to [whatever it is that the person is proposing]". If the gut reaction is that this just sounds wrong, then it's likely that I'm busy with the wrong things.

I make time for my family; for my friends; for photography; for drinking tea. And thinking about it, I want to make more time for getting in touch with friends I don't hear from as often; for meditating; for social dancing.

So, what do you make time for? And what would you like to make more time for?

Of Tulips and Droplets

I've talked before about how I love macro shots for their ability to reveal something that even I didn't notice while taking that very photo. (From a recent conversation sparked by Futurama -- it's like having better resolution that the real world.)

This weekend I went outside to take some photos of the beautiful tulips that are opening up in our backyard (apparently, it's the season for tulip photos). This particular photo caught a water bubble, which itself reflects the whole flower bed, upside down (close crop below).

I wonder whether someday we'll be able to take photos where a "close crop" of a water droplet could contain enough resolution for us to find another droplet on a nearby stem and see what image it reflects.

Now picture having enough resolution to find an image of the world that is a good dozen droplet-levels deep. Compare that to the "real world", and it might begin to give us an idea of the difference between any concept of "actual reality" and what any given individual actually perceives.

The fun question is, just what is the shape and substance of the droplets through which you perceive the world?

Attack of the Visible Dust

When I first got a digital SLR camera, it somehow prompted stern words of caution about the horrors of dust from a number of acquaintances. One friend took me aside, pointed at the button that releases the lens from the camera, and solemnly proclaimed, "once you press that button, it's all over, you have to worry about dust".

Quick aside for those who haven't spent much time listening to photographers go poetic about their gear... A digital SLR (dSLR) uses a fixed sensor to record images, and the design allows the user to change the lens among a wide range of wallet-busting choices. However, since the lens can be removed, that also means the inside of the camera (and, thus, the sensor) can be exposed to air and whatever else may be floating in your air of choice (dust, oil, hairspray, imprecations, water vapor, etc.). Back in the ancient, ancient world of 10 years ago when people used film (yea, people used film), it really didn't matter too much if dust got into the camera. At most, there would be a little bit of dust on one frame, but then the camera would move on to the next piece of the photographic film and (assuming you weren't procuring your film supplies from some shady person in a trenchcoat on the corner) that new frame wouldn't bring any dust with it. With digital, that changed -- the sensor is the same physical bit of electronic circuitry for every single photo the camera will ever take, so any bit of dust that lands there will stay there until something else disposes of it.

Ok, that wasn't as quick an aside as I thought. But, moving on.

After clocking over 17,500 photos on my camera without any visible dust appearing on any of my photos, one will hopefully forgive me for starting to wonder what the whole dust paranoia was all about (actually, I still do, but that's besides the point). After all, that's more photos in 15 months than I'd taken in the rest of my life put together. I even remarked as much in a recent conversation.

Of course, as soon as I got home after that conversation and went out to take some photos of the new figs our tree is working on, I noticed that there was a slight dark blob on the photos that didn't exist outside my camera.

A quick, highly scientific test (also known as the point-your-camera-at-a-patch-of-sky-and-take-photo test) confirmed that, indeed, I had some of that fearful dust on my sensor. (Red circle added later, for emphasis. Though it would be kinda cool if there just happened to be a big floating red circle on the sky right where that bit of dust appears. I wonder whether this is how some UFO photos come about?)

I opened up my camera and peeked at the sensor. Sure enough, there was a bit of fuzz in the equivalent spot on the sensor, of about that shape. There's a zillion products out there (I found out) to let one clean/swipe/swab/wash/brush the sensor. There's also, unsurprisingly, a zillion bad ideas on how to clean your sensor (my favorite for actually-sounding-like-it-might-work-until-you-think-better-about-it is the scotch tape method; just like cleaning lint off your jacket, except it's your digital camera sensor that you're de-linting; having worked with semiconductor manufacturing before, take my word for it: Bad. Idea.).

Going for simple-is-better, I got myself an air blower. Going for why-not-get-the-funny-one, I got one called Rocket Air Blower. (It actually has really good reviews.) That took care of it in about 10 seconds. Repeating my test from earlier confirmed a clean sensor (for the photo-geeks out there: yes, I was using a small aperture for the tests). With a bit of luck, it will stay that way for another 17,000 photos. (Or, I'll need to clean it again after writing this post. But at least now I already have something to clean it with, and it will make for a funny story to boot.)

Blue Skies, smiling at me...