If you’re in the car at the right time, you can see something dramatic. You could see something dramatic at anytime, really. It depends on your definitions. A good stable molecular structure is all around us and that’s nothing short of miraculous, if you ask me. Maybe it depends on where you’re willing to look. Going outside helps. I should do that more. But, still the quantum nature of stuff in the house, or in the office or in the studio can be equally impressive …
But those early evening clouds, they sure are swell, aren’t they?
You know how modern phone commercials advertise everything but the actual phone? I’d like to see a few commercials that show the next practical advancements of phone cameras. You want to wow me? Make me buy a new phone? Show me a model that captures an impressive moon photo, or makes a rainbow’s photo look as glorious as the optical illusion of a spectrum caused by the reflection and refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets in the sky.
If I’d had a proper camera with me today, maybe that would be better. But it’s still dramatic in its own way. A rainbow! Shift to the left, hand in the pocket, pull out the phone, open that wondrous little app and snap a series of tries. It’s a picture of chance, a photo of opportunity. The car never slowed down. There’s no thought to composition, only that old story about the pot of gold that’s at the other end, and a wry smile about how that end of the rainbow is always moving.
Just a bit of a bike ride. I rode really hard to get this clip.
Really hard. I was well behind and I had to work at shutting that down. It was a four-mile chase, I think. At least I was able to look cool when I went by. You don’t see it in the video, but I did. The whole pursuit and catch was pro, on my part.
With so many other things going on around here we haven’t checked in on the cats in a while. Let’s check in on the cats.
Poseidon, as you can see, is stuck in his tunnel in some awkward way.
He does it to himself, clearly. Oh he’ll whine about it, but this is his doing.
Being a cat, however, he is perfectly willing to exercise his “What? That’s exactly what I meant to do, and I don’t know what you’re talking about, anyway.”
Phoebe stares at him in disbelief a lot. We all do.
As ever, she’s content to sit around and pose nicely.
Truthfully, I only take these pictures because you occasionally get these moments where they are wide-eyed in the sunlight. Sometimes they really show off the iris.
Tomorrow we’re going to show off some other things. The cats know what it is, and they are very interested. So do come back and check that out.
Friday / photo / running — Comments Off on More phone photos to round out the week 2 Jul 21
A few raindrops on a maple leaf. I always joke — it’s more of a complaint than anything, you’ll see — that maples are nature’s first quitters. But the end of June is pushing it, even for leaves that just can’t go on anymore.
Probably it was the wind or the cicadas, which are all but gone now, but even still, that’s a disheartening sight to see before the neighborhood kids have narrowly avoided explosive amputation of their fingers on the Fourth.
I went for a run this evening and it was bad. Just my foot, calves, back And shoulder troubled me over two-and-a-half miles. Why do you ask?
When my back tightened up I decided to just lay down in the grass for a minute. It was a good idea, and it helped! The only problem was, where I was, in an empty little lot across from a park, there was no reason for passing motorists to see a guy laying in the grass.
So when a car came by I stuck my phone up in the air and took pictures. A signal, everything is fine and this is only slightly weird.
I had to take more than one picture like that before I could my back to cooperate, is my point. But, hey, that happens. The next outing will be better, because that happens too!
Here’s a little video clip I took the other day. We’d just come back from our trip, a long, long redeye flight, taken a nap and then went for a bike ride. And if you ever have the opportunity to fly, overnight, two-thirds of the way across the nation and then go for a bike ride, don’t.
The nap helped, don’t get me wrong. But it didn’t help that much.
Anyway, this was the plan. Torture ourselves on a plane and then chase each other on a hard ride.
This was one of those rides where I knew the route beforehand, and I knew where I wanted to shoot this little video, because of this curve and this sign.
Do you know how hard it is to chase someone down and how difficult it is to get into, and stay in, the right spot for a precise moment? I found this to be very difficult that day.
Anyway, I’m just cleaning some stuff off of my phone here. Last weekend, my Chick-fil-A cup was making faces at me.
The path nearest our house isn’t quite as nice as running just off the Pacific coast, but at least it had rained just before I went out for this little jog.
It was my first run in new sneakers. The blue Kinvaras have been promoted to walking-around shoes, while the old black walking-around Kinvaras have been demoted to shoes which are … just in the way. (The left heel on the black sneakers had just sort of … collapsed.) Meanwhile, I was approaching the end of the running lifespan of the blue ones, so it was time all the way around.
And these new shoes are fancy looking.
Saucony redesigns their shoes all of the time, which befuddles real runners and mystifies me, too. Not all change is good. Somewhere around Saucony 5 they just turned these things into really shoes, rather than something people wanted to run in. But now, the Kinvara 12s feel like the running shoes of old.
I wish I felt like the runner of old. Mostly I just feel … like I have new shoes.
This is the last of the mini-vacation posts. We’ve been back from a four-day trip for a week. I’ve managed to coax a week and-a-half of posts, and 41 photos and a dozen videos out of it. And all of it is interesting and of vital importance to the Internet.
So we’ll relax today and unwind with a bit of time at the beach.
This is out on a morning run. I know there are other places like this, but one of my favorite features of the Pacific Northwest is how the hills and mountains just fall right into the ocean.
Where I’m from you’d have to drive more than three hours from the coast to see any hill of note. So looks like that always intrigue me.
Here’s a bit more of that path that runs along the coast. The ocean is just off to the left there, just a few yards away. And yet, there are little hills here, and it’s made of a sand and soil stable enough to put down asphalt.
And while those pines and firs are familiar, this scrubby, tall grass is something of a new treat.
You know, another thing you don’t see anywhere but on a coast is sculpture like this. Two hundred miles inland it’d make no sense to see boat bumpers hanging on a light post. That far away, you’d roll your eyes at industrial fish netting on the wall of anything other than a Long John Silver’s. And this would be right out.
Here we are, down on the beach one day. That’s not me fishing, of course.
And while any of my photography professors would say I blew the rule of thirds in that picture, I nailed the golden ratio. That guy’s face lands in the Fibonacci circle, even though I was far from considering that while I was on the beach. Also, you’ll note his fishing pole is point up at the sun, and his eyes are looking that same way, which directs your eyes up to the sun, which just appears in the corner. Only some of those things were on my mind while trying to keep the sand out of my shoes. It’s a pretty happy series of accidents that came together to create a fairly dynamic and decent composition. And sand got in my shoes anyway, as it should be on the beach.
Here’s a video of that beach, from almost that same spot.
Again, that hill just falls right into the sea. There’s something wonderful about that.
And here’s a bit more, just in case it has been too long since you’ve seen the ocean.
It’s been a week for me, maybe it’s already too long.
