Taking Pictures at Thanksgiving

It's not too early to be thinking just a bit how you'll take pictures at Thanksgiving. It was once simpler with a point and shoot throw-away film camera that you took to the drugstore and got pictures and negatives back. Now, however, we not only use cameras: we also use iPads, other pads, iPhones, other cell phones, and a pin-hole camera or two.

In spite of that, I'm going to pass on a bit of wisdom from the catacombs of photogrpahy. 

First. Think about priorities. Do you want the turkey to be the main feature or your shoot, dwarfing Great Grandma Johnson deep in the background? Do you really want to photograph another damn turkey, no matter how gorgeous, to dwarf Great Grandma Johnson? This picture comes from a well-known photography school, but clearly the photographer's priorities were on that bird: It's a fine bird, but where's Great Grandma Johnson? Oh, she's sitting over there behind that glass. 

Well, if you don't like Great Grandma Johnson, if you want to pretend she's already gone to meet her Maker, that she's an expired Great Grandma Johnson, then go ahead and shoot the bird.

But it might just be better to take a decent picture of Great Grandma Johnson before she dies. So...some suggestions:

1) position yourself at eye-level with Great Grandma Johnson. Eye level, I said. And come in close. New photographers hate coming in close on the subject. No no no no. Let Great Grandma Johnson know that you're going to take her picture and then get up close enough that her face and maybe her upper body fill the frame. Otherwise, you'll get a whole lot of distractions in the picture and not enough of Great Grandma Johnson.

2) Take pictures from an angle that favors your Great Grandma Johnson. If Great Grandma Johnson has multiple chins, for heaven's sake don't take the picture from below so that the rolls of chins that she despises--you can be sure she despise them--are accentuated. Take the photo from slightly--just slightly--above her eye level. The chins disappear or at least play a minor role in the shot. Spare this woman. And she's not even old:

3) Similarly, if you're taking pictures of a child, get to the child's level. Sit on the floor. get way down and close up. You want that child's face in your frame. Don't you? Don't just stand there and point your camera down. No no no no. And if that child has a dirty face, so much the better.

3) Long shots of people in the distance, looking like a bunch of elves, are always throw aways. Here's the guys out playing a little soccer after dinner. Can you see Johnny? Right over there. See? The kid wearing the red shirt. Yeah. That's Johnny. You can almost see his face. Save yourself the trouble. Get up close in the game, in the middle of the game, even at the risk of being knocked on your derriere, or sit on your derriere, and get some really fun shots of the guys playing. What's the harm if you have to buy a new dress or pair of pants? You got the shots that mattered.

So my one suggestion: get up close. Even if it makes you a little uncomfortable at first. Practice a few times before the big day. Take some really close pictures of your spouse or a friend or a baby or your dog and see the difference.

Of course you can get too close.

I feel a limerick coming on. Wait. It's coming:

There once was a guy from St. Paul, 
Whose visuals were not good at all.
He shot photos from a distance
Because of his passive resistance,
And his photos were nothing but gall.

Thoughts of Going Out of My Mind and Other Strange Places

If you have been found to be out of your mind, I hope you will post a comment. I don't like being alone in such matters. But I think discussion is in order, since it came up in the family again tonight.

I was in eighth grade, taking a required science class from Miss Wilcox. In those days, Ms. was an unheard of designation, and I'm quite sure her name was Miss Wilcox. My seat was near the back of the room at one of those desks with the ink well in the top. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry. I'm older than you.

On this particular day, a woman from the Salt Lake Board of Education was visiting the class, and she took a vacant seat right next to mine, across the aisle. Miss Wilcox was lecturing on something, and as usual, I was off in my mind. I guess. She must have been talking about stars, and in order to make a contribution, I raised my hand. "I've heard that if you're in a well, you can look up and see the stars, just like at night," I said.

Whereupon Miss Wilcox pointed to a diagram she had just made on the board of a well with arrows pointing out of it toward the stars. I gagged out an apology, while Miss Wilcox smiled a benign smile, and the woman from the Board of Education broke into a big laugh.

It was the first time I knew that I spent a good bit of time in my head, absorbing thoughts from outside places and then assuming those thoughts were my own. I'm sure I knew about being in a well and seeing stars--yes, Louise, I hear you laughing--but ... what am I trying to say?

Some of us live a good bit of our lives away from the so-called real world. We want to appear to be engaged, but more often than not, we're absent. Today, for example, I spent a good bit of time in church lost on Hogback Lake (see earlier blog), listening to the loons at sunset and enjoying the autumn leaves. It was a good place to be.

My question is this: in such moments am I in or out of my mind? Anyone care to join me? Meanwhile I'll just take the jeers from Louise and my sons. 

Fun at the Rijksmuseum

This is just too much fun to keep secret. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has undertaken a project to photograph its entire collection with high resolution photography equipment. And here's the good news: it's all online.  You can find it at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

This is only a little bit of the story. The museum wants people who access the museum collection to copy, paste, create their own collages. So, for example, I can download this image:

 

And so what?  Well, since the picture was taken with high resolution (in other words, with a fine photographic lens), I can chop this picture into little bitty pieces and put parts of it, say the hands or eyes or hat or whatever into another picture and it still looks great.

The possibilities are unlimited. You can make decals to put on your car, create a family Christmas card in the style of a 16th century Dutch family, or put a nose from some painting on your own face. So in just a couple of minutes, I took a picture of Louise that I had on my computer and pasted her face onto this woman's face. It comes out like this:

 

Isn't that a hoot? I have a whole new girl friend. Now don't go ratting on me and leave a comment on her blog that her face is on my blog in a 16th century costume. Actually, it won't matter much, because it's not going to damage our almost 50 years of marriage. I've done all the damage I could possibly do already. 

But go to this site, even if you don't think you have a creative bone in your body, and play around. It's fun, and costs nothing. You have to register, but that's free too. This is just about the best deal I've found anywhere online.  And just for fun, send me your creation (tom@tomplummer.com) and I'll post it on this blog. We'll have a little community of artists--or wannabe artists.

The Agony of Art

My purpose today is to show you a newly completed painting and to describe the anguishing process of naming it. This is no easy task when one has friends who know more than I know.

So I begin. The woman is not sitting on the mushroom, because I wanted to suggest some magical quality, such as levitation, which has drawn my attention for many years. My mother spoke frequently of levitation in her home town of Monroe, Utah:

"One of us kids would lie on a table out in the yard and four others would get on both sides of her. They would each put two fingers under her and say a chant. As they chanted she would rise off the table."

That was levitation. My mother's mother made the kids quit levitating, because, she said, "it is of the devil." My mother's  reaction years later was, "Laws, we didn't have television in those days. We had to do something to amuse ourselves." To this day we have been unable to come up with the chant. Otherwise we might spend part of every day levitating.

The other obvious element in the picture is the mushroom. I like the red and white design of this highly poisonous fungus, and I thought it made a nice addition to the piece. So the woman is levitating over a poisonous mushroom. I did my online research and came up with the name,
Amanita Muscaria. Title: "Levitating over Amanita Muscaria." Now some might argue that this whole matter is silly, that a woman levitating over a poisonous mushroom makes no sense at all, I would reply that all life is silly and my life is no more silly than anyone else's. I just happen to enjoy silliness.

But then my friend Al, a man with a keen scientific mind and a passion for fungi in the woods, wrote me an email: "I like the photo montage. The title needs work. It should be: "Sexy lady wondering why she is levitating over a fly agaric." You see, if you just say Amanita one might not know if you are referring to Phalloides ( death cap) or Muscaria (fly agaric). Other than that the sexy lady is clearly perplexed and probably would be so regardless of the mushroom identification. The source of the perplexment would be reason for much speculation and old chin stroking."

To this I replied, "Well the title is by no means certain, so maybe I should have you consult. It has to be shorter than you suggest, however appealing. Your astute observation about varieties of Muscaria has temporarily confused me. I just looked up Phalloides, and the images online show none of the red and white of the Muscaria, to which I am clearly drawn--for the color. Imagine a dull brownish-gray mushroom for a beautiful woman to sit on--or levitate over. On the other hand, I would not want to be embarrassed about such a title in front of the Utah Mushroom Society. Imagine Ardeen Watts just laughing himself silly. The name fly agaric does appeal, simply because of the word "fly" in the name--however irrelevant. Maybe I should put a fly on her nose?" I think not.

Al then felt a poetic moment coming on and wrote some doggerel, which I cannot locate on my gmail. I replied with this limerick in behalf of the painting:

There once was a damsel from Cape Fear
Whose eyes were exceedlingly dear.
She sat on muscaria
And screamed in hysteria,
Oh Lord, I've poisoned my rear.

My original limerick said the woman was from Bass, but Louise said I couldn't use that limerick on a blog. However, pressure has grown, and I now include the first one as well. Revision is the basis for all good writing: 

There once was a damsel from Bass,
A very comely young lass.
She sat on muscaria
And cried out in hysteria,
Oh Lord I've poisoned my ass. 

The "bottom" line: the title, thanks to Al, is "Levitating over Fly Agaric."  

Can you believe what a pain that was?

What problems have you had with naming something?

My New York Felony

For several days now, I have cajoled you, dear readers, to rush write your brains onto the page, to tell the stories hiding behind your masks, to get it all out. It is now time for me to confess my own humiliation, until now unpublished.

In 2006 Louise and I moved to New York City, swearing that we would never return to our home in Zion. This was to be our new life, our life of sophistication, of art, of theater, of Tosca, La Traviata, of Turandot. No longer would we subject ourselves to life with the Lumpenproletariat. We would rise to new heights of sophistication. While I've always been arrogant, I could feel a new surge of arrogant snot welling up in me.

Louise and I flew to New York, chose a two-bedroom apartment in Inwood, a Dominican neighborhood, just one building off Broadway and down the hill from The Cloisters, the medieval museum attached to the Metropolitan Museum. Now we were just a walk down the hill from a museum. We flew home and packed a 26-foot Ryder truck with everything we owned except for the stuff we crammed into a large storage unit. I arranged for movers in New York to be at the apartment at 9 AM sharp. Louise flew on ahead while our son, Charles, grandson Harrison, and dog Alice drove across this great country of ours. The timing was perfect.We arrived at our new home five minutes before the scheduled crew of movers, and in an hour's time we were in our very own apartment. Charles and Harrison took a cab to the airport, and Louise and I climbed into the Ryder truck to return it to its distributorship in south Manhattan.

I had never driven a 26-foot moving van from north to south Manhattan down Broadway. The traffic was far heavier than I had expected. Somewhere in mid-Manhattan I clipped a side-view mirror off a truck. Louise, who was as crazy hyper as I was, started yelling, "Keep going. Just keep going. The rules are different here." It occurred to me that she had morphed into a new dimension. We continued our mad romp down Broadway, and turned a tight corner just one block from the drop-off place. I think you hit something, Louise said. "Don't stop. Just keep going." At the very next corner, two policemen, two of New York's finest, stepped  in front of the truck, hands out. I could see the Ryder place just kitty-corner from where the police stopped our mania. Ryder trucks, vans, pickups. But not our truck.

"Follow our car," one policeman said. He led us around the block, where he stopped. And we sat and sat in the truck. No one said anything. We just sat there. Cops were talking on the street, pointing to something I couldn't see. My skin began to crawl. I envisioned my future in the cold, damp halls of Rikers, from which, on a good day, I could see daylight through the bars of my cell. After a half hour, a policeman stepped up to the truck.

"Do you know what you hit?" His voice was filled with rage, the kind that could slam me on the pavement face down, handcuffed if I even winced.

"No sir," I said.

"You hit a police car," he said. I don't remember his exact words after that, but they began with "s" and "f" and "stupid s" and "dumb f."

Then in a few minutes a policeman stepped up with a much kinder demeanor. I saw that I was about to play the "good cop, bad cop" game. "These things happen," he said. "It's a busy city." He was setting me up. I could feel it.

Eventually a policeman decorated with gold braid on his hat and sleeves, a hot shot cop, stepped up. "You just put $5,000 of damage on my car." More fs ss, ds, df.

I just kept repeating my apologies, my great sorrow at the trouble I'd caused. I knew enough not to fight back. I knew fighting back would get me arrested, cuffed, beaten up, kicked around. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know." The words of a wise dean at the University of Minnesota came to mind, "Never get in a pissing fight with a skunk."

During the two hours we sat in the truck, no one said, "Step out and see what you've done." I could feel the doom of New York City settling on my recently giddy brain. Eventually, a policeman issued me a ticket and said we'd get a letter for a court appearance. We returned the truck to Ryder, where it  showed not a scratch, not a bit of souvenir paint from the cop car.

We took the A-train back to Inwood, but now I no longer liked New York. My snottery was gone. Three hours after I had  arrived, I was on the verge of arrest and life imprisonment. A hit and run felony. So it seemed.

Two or three months later, a letter came, scheduling my court appearance. I dressed in my Sunday best and arrived in court about two hours early. Standing around in the waiting room were groups of attorneys. Suddenly it hit me that I could get help. I asked one if she could help me with a traffic violation. I told her my story. She said she could probably help. I wrote her a check for $250. "Have a seat," she said. I sat and waited. In 20 minutes she came back. "Not guilty," she said. 

It still gives me the creeps.

Some Topics for Writing

Rush writing is, for me, a great way to get going. I think it's a habit to cultivate daily or at least regularly. It's a good thing to do when you're suffering from writer's block. And, judging from many comments on this blog, some of you don't have much more than five minutes a day to write. And that's great. Today, I'm going to give you a list of topics you might consider for rush writing, if you're hurting for ideas. I've borrowed or adapted several of them from the book, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

1. Sit quietly in a room and write about the light, the quality of light, the mood of the light coming through the window. 
2. Write about your relationship with light. Some people suffer during the darker winter months because of the loss of light. Others are "moles," who are just fine living in darker spaces.
3. Write lists of small memories. Some writers carry a notebook with them for just such memories. They pop into your head for a moment and are gone. 
4. One way I generate small memories is to "put" myself back into a situation--eating dinner with the family, who is sitting where at the table, who. Who says what? Who eats how? What are the family dynamics at the table? Friendly? Talkative? Quiet? Sitting in your room--or a space you shared with others.
5. Draw a map of a place where you have lived. Put in all the details that come to mind. Where the furniture was, which places "belonged" to which people? What were the "traffic" patterns in that place? How did you get from one room to another? When you think of this, do other memories come to mind? 
6. Begin by writing the words "I remember," and just write all the small memories that come to mind. Memories of long ago, memories of 30 seconds ago, childhood, adult memories. Just keep going for a few minutes until you've exhausted the list. Keep the list handy for future writing. 
7. Go for a walk. When you come back, write a list of everything you saw. Do this from memory. This is good regular practice, because you start training yourself to look around. I have to get out of the fog of my mind or I just don't see things. 
8. Choose a color, say red. The go for a walk and notice all the things you see that are red. Write this list when you get home. Any color works, of course. Pink, blue, yellow. 
9. Write in different places. If you live in a house with a laundry room, try writing in there--possibly with the washing machine or drying going. Write about the rhythms of the washing machine. Try to put that rhythm to paper. What comes to mind as you write? Or other places--a local cafe, a different room in the house, a park. Places change our ways of seeing and what we see. Write those places into your notebook.
10. Write about yourself as a "morning" person. Are you bright and cheerful in the morning, or dull and distant. We've had two granddaughters live with us in the recent past. One woke up cheerful, we called her Pooh bear. The other was just grumpy and impossible to talk to for a while. We called her Eeyore. 
11. Write about your day. Or about an hour in your day. Slow it down as you write. Try to capture the details of your time. 
12. Visualize a place you love. It could be your room, a field, a beach, an old tree. Write about your feelings of being in that place, the smells, the sounds, if you're outdoors, even the bugs. Try to write the details of this place so that someone else reading your piece can feel or visualize the place you have described. 
13. Write about "leaving" in any sense that comes to mind--leaving for school, leaving for the office, or leaving home for good. 
14. Write about a breakup in your life. 
15. Write about the first time you saw someone die. What did you see in that moment, what did you feel, what new things did you realize. 
16. Write about walking along a particular street where you live. Look for the details along the way--a broken fence, a barking dog, unkempt lawns, a beautiful flower or blossom. Try to be aware of your thoughts as you see these things, your reactions, the memories that they evoke.
17. Write a list of people you have loved.
18. Write about a grandparent.
19. Write about 

• swimming
• the stars 
• the most frightened you've ever been
• the happiest you've ever been
• green places
• peaceful places
• noisy places
• how you learned about sex
• the first time you had sex
• the closest you ever felt to God
• reading and books that have changed your life

   20. Write about a favorite teacher
   21. Grab a poetry book. write down a line and then begin your writing from there.
   22. If you were an animal, what do you imagine you'd be?

These are just random ideas, of course. The best ideas will be the ones you pull from your own experience. As you write, keep a file or notebook of things that come to mind, topics for another day when you're back to brain freeze.

Telling your hardest stories

The hardest memoir pieces to write are those that make you feel vulnerable, "out there," naked. They are also the best, the most interesting. Just think about the stories you've heard that get your attention, that hold you right there until the story is finished. Many of them, I want to say most of them, take a risk, take a chance on telling something that has never been told before, because it so personal that we've kept them under wraps for years, maybe most of our lives. If we're married, we may not even have told a spouse. If we have close friends, we may never have taken the risk of telling that story.

Bette Bao Lord, a Chinese woman who married an American, returned to China with him when he became United States Ambassador to China. She has written several books on the Chinese, Chinese culture, Chinese ways from an insider's point of view. In her book, Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic, she writes a short chapter on the masks that the Chinese wear. Now she is writing this at a time when the Communist regime wielded a much heavier hand and when it was simply not safe to let anyone know anything personal. Consequently, she wrote, the Chinese wore masks--not real masks, metaphorical masks. They'd put on a "happy face" or a "serious face" or a "sober face" depending on what the occasion required. Never did they disclose themselves. She writes that the Chinese developed so many masks that if you were to peel them off, like peeling an onion, you would find nothing at the core. The masks had replaced the Self.

We wear masks too. Dozens of them. We have church masks, when we put on our best clothes, smile, shake hands, say, "Oh how are you?" (Don't tell me, I don't want to know) or "Do you need any help?" (I'm too busy to help you, and I wouldn't if I could) or "I just love you soooo much." (You dork). Often, of course, we are sincere. But if you are in a foul mood, you may just put on those masks to hide yourself from the people around you. Put on a mask. The same goes for work, for play, for parties with friends. We have literally dozens of masks. We have make-up masks--put on those eyelashes, that lipstick, that after shave. We have funeral masks, "Oh, I'm so sorry." (I'm not really). I'm not suggesting we are always a lying bunch of insincere people, but we all know when our mask is "masking" what's really underneath.

And it doesn't feel safe to tell other people how we're really feeling. Trust comes slowly. When can you trust someone? Who can you tell the real truth about yourself? Who will listen sincerely?

Today, try writing about one of your masks, one of your secrets that almost no one--maybe no one at all--knows about. A little secret life that you've covered for years and years, maybe most of your life. A moment so humiliating, possibly, that you can barely allow yourself to think about it.

You might want to try this as a rush write, just to get the ugly truth (we all have ugly truths, don't we) out on the table. Square off with it--in writing--you can put it away in a locked drawer after that. But you'll be surprised how cathartic it feels to face that monster.

Just take a piece of paper, sit down, take a deep breath, and write. Remember, you don't have to show it to anyone. But you can at least hit it head on yourself.