My personal photo album--computer files and Flickr account, that is--is full of weeds, or anyway, pictures of them. Flowers, too, and dogs and cats and trees and bugs and sunsets and sunrises and formations of migrating geese and a person here and there, but always lots of weeds.

Sounds pretty dull, I know. Who-in-hell takes pictures of WEEDS?

I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective.

A 7^th-grade art class taught me one thing about “perspective,” or maybe one aspect of “perspective,” which, distilled, was basically that any particular thing you’re looking at gets steadily smaller as the distance between it and you increases. The art teacher had us make a pencil mark in the center of a sheet of drawing paper, then make marks equally apart on the left and right edges of the page, then make very light pencil lines from each of those marks down (or up, depending) from the marks on the edges, THEN draw something like a house or a box or anything with straight edges, like a supermodel for instance, within those faint gray pencil lines.

At the end of the exercise, we all could see how perspective “worked.”

Obviously an art teacher or an artist could explain this better than I can.

Three years later I took a photography “mini-course,” a 9-week class introducing me to photography, which gave me a whole different perspective on “perspective.”   In photography, “perspective” had more to do with the angle from which you chose to perceive a subject. So about every 9 weeks or so we would see a different crop of students climbing up on desks, lying prone on the floor, hanging from the transoms above the classroom doors with their cameras pointed down at the ordered or, more often, disordered rows of desks and student occupiers, etc., all looking for a “fresh” perspective on a “photographed 55 billion times” subject.

If it was eye-level to you, you needed to change the position of your eyes, of their height above the floor or ground--get closer to the floor, farther from it, didn’t matter; simply to alter your perspective was what mattered, that might make the image you capture “unique,” or at least different enough from the standard eye-level views to capture the attention of others.

A corollary to that was that you needed to try to seek out and “see from” the perspective of your subjects. If you’re taking a picture of a toddler, get down at eye-level with HIM, try to see the world through HIS eyes, rather than your own: A picture of the top of a toddler’s head is going to make most viewers yawn, at best; an eye-contact level view of a toddler toddling towards you is going to be at least a little more interesting.

What I somehow missed during this perspective lesson was the obvious.

Trying different perspectives can make the images you capture “better,” yes--but it can also change your own perspective, the way you view the world. This is not news, obviously.

I was thinking about all this today when I decided whimsically to go on a low-crawl along the fencerow at the south edge of my yard.

It was an hour or so before I had to go to work, the sun was shining, I was bored reading news and “sorta news” online, and I got to thinking about photography and angles and perspective and “quality of light” and on and on and on. I’ve only been doing photography on a more or less daily basis for maybe seven years now, although I’d toyed intermittently with film since high school (yea, “lo, these many years ago”), but somehow I’ve developed (groan) what a couple of friends call my “signature light.”

That’s not as artistically impressive a term as it may seem. Thing is, my work schedule as well as my personal preferences dictate that I take my camera out mostly in morning--and morning light IS magical.

Today I thought about it, and decided that, if it is true I have a “signature light,” maybe it’s time I tried something else.

Which led me to a low-crawl along the fencerow at approximately high noon (my least favorite light).

Lying on sun-drenched ground in mid February, in northwest Missouri, can be perspective-altering.

And when you actively seek something, generally you find it.

Today I found yet another weed. What made this one different was that it was only about 10 inches tall--this particular variety of weed usually tops out at about 4-5 feet, 5-6 times as tall as this little guy, a sort of “bonsai” among weeds of its ilk, and was inexplicably entranced by it.

I’ve only walked that fencerow with my camera maybe 100-150 times since onset of Autumn, and it’s not a long fencerow, the part that I walk being maybe 120 feet long. Yet until today, when I decided to do a low-crawl, I had never seen this particular brave little stunted weed.

Makes me wonder how much else I’ve missed, standing proudly up at eye level.

(And I still cannot figure out how to make the pic post "upright."  That is irritating.)

Mama please take my monochrome away.

Today was typically monochromatic for this time of year, the winter kind of day that we’ve been blessedly spared for most of this winter season. Coming off four days of semi-debilitating (that is, annoying more than anything else) back pain, despite the black-and-white and shades of gray coloring our world, it was nice to get outside, even nice to point the camera at something besides sunsets, sunrises, dogs, cats--the usual winter things you look for when the world seems otherwise without color.

I haven’t thought in black-and-white, really, in a lot of years, not since Tri-X Pan days, when I worked for a while as a sports photographer for a local newspaper, then as a photojournalist in the army. Once I left school and the army, I never did black-and-white again.

As a photographer I am more photojournalist (or photographic journal-writer) than artist, more interested in the “content” of an image than the image itself. That is not to say that photojournalists cannot produce art, or that photographic artists never produce excellent photojournalism. It really is a difference of approach, how you go about looking at potential “subjects” and even at that tool you carry in your hands and (when you’re lucky) begins to feel like a part of you, an extension not only of your eyes, but of your mind and heart, as well.

This means I take a LOT of pictures, some of them good, most of them ho-hum, some of them godawful. This also means that I have little time for “post processing” and other digital-darkroom manipulation of the images I “capture.” For the most part, that is not a bad thing, I think. My camera does a pretty good job at exposure and all that other stuff all on its own--while I COULD manipulate the image later, there is no real reason, most times, given that it is not the “image” I’m after, but rather more in the life captured IN the image, if any.

Which brings me back to monochromatic today, sort of.

Two of the dogs--Cecil and Nina--having charged off toward the back 40 or down to the river, the other one, Xena, lying comfortably in the snow, and the cats all inside, there wasn’t much at which to point the camera besides the black-and-white landscape, especially since, given the aforementioned back problem, I wasn’t able to get down and crawl around on the ground, etc.

And I began to see in black-and-white again.

It truly is a different way of looking at things. First, you look at shapes and patterns and lines, stuff defined not by color, but by, well, their shapes and patterns and lines. Then you look at contrast--you want black blacks, white whites, and as many of Ansel Adams’s “zones” in between as you can manage. The chisel-plowed field to the north, the chisel-plowed then anhydrous-drilled field to the east, along with trees in both directions, multi-shaded gray sky, all offered opportunity.

I looked and shot and shot and looked until my fingers were nearing frostbite (can’t manipulate a camera with gloves on, and it WAS cold), then came inside, plugged the SD card into the computer, inspected what I had.

“Muddy.” That’s a word we used to use to describe B&W photos that lacked those black blacks and white whites, but were instead only varying shades of gray. In “real” darkrooms back in the day, we could use “burning” and “dodging” and other tricks I’ve forgotten after my 30-something-year separation from trays of developer and rinse and fixer, smells of chemicals and thick black felt hung over doors, working under reddish light, watching images appear slowly, then leap into view on the sheet of paper you’re swishing slowly and methodically in each tray successively.

“Digital darkrooms” aren’t nearly as much fun, but they’re functional, and I admit I was even satisfied with most results. To be able to transform the image I saw on the computer monitor into something more closely resembling what I had seen through my own eyes . . . “Cool” only begins to describe it. And while the final product may be “boring,” I’m happy with it--especially because it reproduced what I remembered.

Trips down memory lane, back into a black-and-white world, can be fun, frozen fingers and all.

That said, I’m sticking with color and with my non-post-processing world. Call me lazy, call me a non-artist. It’s entertaining to visit sometimes, but the black-and-white world is no longer as comfortable for me as it was when I was 18 or 20 or 22. Figure that one out.

Come on, feel the noise.

I reintroduced music into the house the other day.

It had been pretty quiet around here for a couple of years, ever since I disconnected the one computer on which I used to download music videos because the computer had the misfortune of being located in the living room, which was then undergoing renovation, and started using this computer, the “play” computer in my office, for working with photos, everyday news-browsing, everyday EVERYthing.

I’d gotten used to the quiet, and in fact mostly enjoyed it. Once in a while I would miss being able to hear, as well as watch, news videos and so forth, but for the most part, it was as easy getting used to quiet as it was getting used to no television. I haven’t watched television in almost 10 years, not so much as a matter of choice, but because of my work schedule and the fact that I’ve lived in places where non-cable TV reception is almost nil. I still watch DVD movies at least a couple of times a week, but obviously have no clue what “Jersey Shore” might be, and wasn’t particularly heartbroken or even much affected by the demise of “All My Children” or “Seinfeld” or whatever. “Out of sight, out of mind.” Or, “Absence makes the heart go yonder.” Or something. And I’ve never gotten out of the habit of blasting music in my car on the way to the grocery store or to my parents’ house or even just on a sightseeing trip up on Pizz Ridge.

For no particular reason, this past weekend I decided that it was TOO quiet around here. It dawned on me that I should go ahead and re-hook up the computer on which I used to watch music videos, etc. THEN it dawned on me that, since the speakers on that computer were built into the monitor, all I really needed to do was swap out the monitors. Duh.

Yeah, I’m slow, but sometimes I get there.

The monitor swap worked, and now I have sound again--and when I pulled up Annie Lennox’s version of “Whiter Shade of Pale,” it hit me how much I’d missed it.

Since Saturday I have been a YouTube fool, seeking out long-”lost” (to me) videos, downloading and playing them. Free-associating took me from Annie Lennox to Bruce Springsteen to Madonna (and back again and again to Madonna) and to Starship and Neil Diamond and . . . The list goes on. Of course.

I didn’t stop with getting the sound back on the computer. THEN I went out and bought a portable radio/CD player. “Whole hog or none,” right?

Maybe I should have consulted my housemates before perpetrating these massive changes, however. The cats definitely are NOT fans of rock and roll, which is a bit surprising considering that at least two of them, as kittens, used to love it when I would plug in a movie with lots of gunfire, explosions and jet planes (think “Iron Eagle” and “Top Gun“), and absolutely despised anything “mushy” (think “chick flicks”).

Cecil the dog is put on instant, baffled alert by anything involving conversation (news clips, etc.), which again is surprising given that throughout his young life he has spent eight hours a day, five days a week in my office as I listen to dictated medical reports on speakers. On the other hand, he seems purely fascinated by anything involving Stevie Nicks (especially “Sara“ and “Gypsy“ and “Landslide“), and absolutely loves “Whiter Shade of Pale,” Madonna’s “Live to Tell,” and the “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” soundtrack.

Guess there’s no accounting for taste.

Virtuality

Sometimes I wish our corporate bosses knew as much about language as we do. Other times, I suspect that they know a whole lot more about language and its power than we will ever dream of knowing.

Years ago, maybe even now in places where people “go” to work--that is, someplace outside their home--a fashionable term to describe the people doing the jobs was “worker bees.” Think about that one. “Worker bees.” Not human, of no particular value, perfectly expendable, perfectly replaceable. Just so many tools. First time I heard the term in workplace context was in a (useless) meeting, spouted by some chick with an admittedly entertaining bust but not a whole lot else going on, at least “upstairs” (although I did come to admire the way she leaned over the conference table “just so.” On a clear day . . . ).

For the past 10 years I’ve been working at home, quite happily, an off-site “employee” of a medical transcription company. Today I’m in the same job, although the company I started with went through a couple of name changes, then a bankruptcy and acquisition by another, larger company, but still an “employee.”

Or anyway, I was.

Now, I’m a “virtual employee.”

Because I’m a fan of dictionaries and have spent many a glorious hour hopping from word to word in the “real” as well as the “virtual” variety, and even was once accused by an older cousin of reading the dictionary, I went in search of “virtual” in online dictionaries. Here is what I found in one:

Virtual:  adj.
1.  Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form or name:  the virtual extinction of the buffalo.
2.  Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.  Used in literary criticism of a text.
3.  Computer science:  Created, simulated, or carried on by means of a computer or computer network:  virtual conversations in a chatroom.

Obviously, “virtual” has grown in meaning, even taken on a whole different meaning. Words do that sometimes.

So now “virtual” has acquired definition #3, above--“carried on by means of a computer.” Seems innocent enough.

Trouble is, for most of us in the medical transcription business, and maybe anybody over about age 20, the word still carries its original definition and nuance. See definitions #1 and #2, above.

It is no accident that our corporate bosses, all the MBAs of the world, the “bean-counters” and Republicans and so forth, have taken to calling us “virtual” employees. By doing so, they make us “unreal.” They dehumanize us, reduce us to . . . Who the hell knows how their minds work. Upshot of it is, it makes us ever so more easily disposable.

That they now comfortably refer to us as “virtual” means that they’ve already made us disappear, “virtually.” Those of us they cannot replace with computer programs--and computer programs aren’t yet all that good with words, although they are getting better all the time--they will replace with even less fairly paid Indians and Indonesians and I forget who all else. (It is mind-boggling or ironic or something to realize that, before too long, if I want to ply my trade for an American company, I’ll have to move to Asia. Nothing against Asia, but I would rather go to Romania, or Sweden--I know some crazy little women there, and they are HOT.)

Just makes me all proud to be an American.

I‘m really not whining about this. I‘m more Darwinist, I suppose, than anything else, albeit with a strong humanistic streak, and I know that “life is unfair,” blah blah blah. I‘ve never even been ON a turnip truck, much less fallen off of one.

It does strike me, though, that we are about to “telephone-game“ our way into extinction.

Capitalism, free enterprise . . . That worked a century or two ago, when we had lots of space and not a whole lot of people. Capitalism, free enterprise, the “American Creed,” have been passed down from one generation to another over several generations, losing a little something with every passing of the proverbial baton, yet in some important ways never really changing. Its latest transmogrification will impoverish more Americans than it will ever enrich.

What scares me, I think, is the suspicion that America, and Americans, have lost their vision, have lost their dream.

“When you give up your dream, you die,” said a character in a movie, “Flashdance.”

I look at myself and realize that I have become nothing more than a “virtual employee,” and see that I am dead or dying, and by extension, America is dead or dying.

Learning

Your memory and the way your mind works, combined with a situation, can take you down some odd pathways sometimes. For instance, the other day I was out pointing my camera at frost-covered weeds along a fencerow when it occurred to me that my habit of pointing my camera, with macro lens, at frost-covered or dew-dripping weeds along a fencerow has probably made me better at my job as a medical transcriptionist or medical editor/transcriptionist or “medical language specialist” or whatever title they are conferring on us in lieu of actually fair pay--and conversely; that is, my job has made me better at seeking out subjects for macro photography. In both, attention to detail, looking at the “small” things, is (thinking of various clichés, here: “paramount,” “key,” “the ONLY thing,” etc.).

A little over a decade ago, I left a job in a busy pediatric clinic at a teaching hospital where I had worked for a little over a decade. In many ways I hated leaving--it was a decent enough job, but, more importantly, had transformed me in myriad, mostly unexpected ways. For example, it even made me a better driver. Spend a few years walking rapidly through a clinic with three waiting rooms and a couple dozen exam rooms boiling over with bored and/or hyperactive and/or just plain normal, active kids, and you sharpen your peripheral vision--nobody wants to slam into a 4-year-old who has barreled out of a waiting room into the hallway. That enhanced peripheral vision saved me from barreling into stop sign-ignoring cross traffic on the commute to and from work on at least three occasions that I specifically remember.

In that particular job I worked for 7-10 pediatricians, 4 nurse practitioners, and sort of for 2 social workers, plus had to deal with 50-something residents and every-two-month rotations of medical students, all with their own personalities, obviously. That probably doesn’t seem like much, but to introverted-me, it was a lot, or seemed to be whenever I thought about it (which wasn’t often). One of the nurse practitioners once told me that my job was like being married to a dozen women at a time, which made me laugh because she was so right.

That probably prepared me to handle up to 21 pets (16 cats, 5 dogs) at once--and handling/keeping happy 21 pets at a time probably prepared me for my current job, to some degree. It helped teach me how to pay attention.

Which in turn helped me when I relocated to Natchez, Mississippi--”Deep South”--a few years ago, then when I relocated back up here almost 3 years ago.

I am not a “perfect” photographer, macro or otherwise, was never a perfect office coordinator, will never be a perfect transcriptionist or editor or driver or pet-slave or even neighbor or anything else, but it can be fun to look at how all of those separate “parts” of me have meshed and fed off each other, learned from each other, over the years.

Point is, we all get our “real” education in circuitous and unexpected ways.

This is not news, I know--we all know that we can and do learn from every situation we experience and every person we meet. Sometimes we may need to remind ourselves of that, however.

"I got a Nikon camera, I love to take photographs . . ."

Was reading a while ago about Kodak’s bankruptcy filing and the demise in general of traditional, film-based photography. Almost more interesting than the story itself were the comments readers made, which ranged basically from “they just couldn’t keep up with progress, serves them right” to “film was SO much better than digital! It will come back, like vinyl records.”

As a hobbyist photographer whose original best friends in the field were Kodak Tri-X Pan black-and-white film (for high school, college, newspaper and army journalism assignments), Kodacolor and Kodachrome for more personal projects, but who went digital seven years ago and hasn’t looked back, I can see both sides. Sometimes I miss Kodachrome, especially (and still love Paul Simon’s “Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away.” Best opening line EVER: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder I can think at all”). Of the thousands of photos I’ve taken over the past 30-something years, some of my favorites still are prints made from Kodachrome slides.

But I became a better photographer (maybe not good yet, but working on it) with digital simply because it allowed me the luxury of endless repetition: Once you buy the camera and the computer, you’re done spending (unless you get prints made, which I’ve been known to do). I pressed the shutter button on my first digital camera, a Lumix FZ20, almost 90,000 times, pointed the camera and focused on a subject probably 300,000 times, before I retired it. Practice has not made me perfect yet, but still the practice has been invaluable. If nothing else, I’ve learned to see light itself in a whole new (to me) way.

And the digital format allows me to “share” photographs through on-line media like Flickr, which in turn has given me the opportunity to meet other hobbyists (and pros) from all over the world. Compared to showing photo albums or slide shows to whomever you can lure into your physical presence, this alone is amazing. One of the fringe benefits of that aspect is that, with your pictures on line, you don’t even have to be there to show them to other people--they can happen onto your photo stream, wander around, look at a few, enjoy them (you hope); then, later, you see what they’ve looked at and are able to revisit images you might have forgotten (like the one I’m going to attach to this post, if I remember).

In the article I read this evening about Kodak’s bankruptcy, the writer quoted a “commenter” on an “Atlantic Monthly” story about same. The commenter wondered if, in 100 years, any of today’s digital images would still be accessible. He had prints from 19^th century photos, he said; would any digital images survive? Good question. I’ve asked myself the same thing.

Technology changes so rapidly, will files we’ve backed up on external hard drives, etc., even be able to be read by computers of 10 years from now, or 20? Or two?

The hope, I suppose, is that Flickr and Photobucket and whatever other on-line photo storage companies are out there truly mean it, and, more importantly, believe it, when they tell us that what we store with them is “forever,” that the 37,000 pictures I’ve got on Flickr so far somehow will be available to me when I’m in my dotage (not that far down the road) and to anybody else who cares to look at them, long into the distant future.

My best guess, of course, is that none of it is “permanent,” that Flickr, et al, ultimately will die or fade away or otherwise disappear, and along with them the millions or maybe billions of images from all over our world, the daily photographic record of millions, maybe billions of people.

And that is probably as it is supposed to be.

Across the road from me is a very small, old cemetery. Nobody around here now knows anything at all about the people buried there, who died between 1870 and 1901, really not that long ago.

In the long run I suppose it doesn’t matter. Life goes on, the world goes on, one way or another.

But . . . Wouldn’t it be SOOOO very cool for, say, whoever lives in this house or on this property 300 years from now to be able to pull up my 21^st-century photo stream and see real life fin this particular spot rom that long ago? Wouldn’t it be SOOOO very cool to be able to “see” history, to see the world, as it unfolds or grows on a day-to-day basis?

Good night, Kodak, wherever you are . . . .

There's a bathroom on the right.

Doubt that John Fogarty and Creedence Clearwater Revival, or even the songwriters themselves (Eddie Miller, Dub Williams and Robert Yount--credit where credit is due) ever imagined a young Missouri farm boy listening to “Bad Moon on the Rise” and hearing inexplicably a line about a “bathroom on the right.” That’s what I heard, though, for years, probably well into my thirties, every time that song came on the radio and even when I put the actual vinyl record on the turntable. It never made any sense to me, but then, a lot of rock lyrics never made “sense,” per se. (Can we say “doo wa diddy diddy dum diddy do”?).

Probably everybody can remember their own personal “misheard lyrics.” My ex-wife’s, for instance, was “It’s so scary,” which was how she and her sister always heard til Tuesday’s “voices carry.”

And then there are mispronounced words--read as well as spoken. In sixth grade our reading teacher read “Great Expectations” to us, and about every third or fourth word seemed (to me, at least) something that sounded like “melon collie,” as if a fat Lassie had somehow inserted herself into the story. It wasn’t until I got hold of a copy of the book that I discovered that the “melon collie” was what I had been “hearing” in my head as “ma-LAN-cha-lee,” spelled “melancholy.”

I thought about “ma-LAN-cha-lee” tonight when I was transcribing a “history and physical” dictated by an ESL physician whose English is actually pretty good. When he got to the medication list, he mentioned something that sounded like “ma-LAT-a-neen.” I’d gotten pretty much everything he’d said up to that point without much trouble, despite his accent, but ran into a wall on that one. I went to the FDA site and plugged in about every 3-letter combination I could think of, still could come up with no likely possibility. I gave up, inserted a blank, then before sending the report, re-listened to it and went through some other mental gyrations that I won’t even try to describe, and finally it clicked: He was talking about “melatonin.”

Language can be slippery, as much for the speaker as for the listener.

Listening to dictated medical reports sometimes can be like looking at one of those “magic pictures” that at first glance (and second, third, fourth, etc.) seem like just a multicolored, psychedelic yet organized splatter, then morph into a 3-dimensional image.

Sometimes it is like one of those “tip-of-the-tongue” moments when you can almost grab the word you’re looking for, but not QUITE. It’s like you hear it for one infinitesimal fraction of a second, then it gets away, lost in a blur of sound, surfacing fleetingly and tantalizingly just out of your audio “reach,” like a dolphin’s fin appearing and disappearing and reappearing in successive flashes amid the ocean waves.

And sometimes it is like an audio kaleidoscope, one of those little tubes that you hold up to your eye, peer into and see bits of colored glass forming one symmetrical pattern at the other end, then you give the tube a quarter-twist and the bits of glass reform into a completely different, yet still symmetrical pattern.

It’s like hearing “there’s a bathroom on the right” perfectly clearly, then giving the tube a quarter-twist, and suddenly hearing “there’s a bad moon on the rise,” also with perfect clarity--only now you will never be able to listen to the same song, same artist, and hear “there’s a bathroom on the right,” ever again, just as you would never be able to “un-see” the 3D image hidden in that psychedelic magic picture puzzle once you actually saw it.

Don’t get me started on how “black” and “white” can be virtually indistinguishable to the ear.