It was a big day in Southern Oregon. I had my yearly checkup and I was pronounced healthy. Also, the plumbers replaced the pipesfrom our house to the city’s main line. The house was built in the 50’s, when Orangeburg pipe was commonly used. It has a life span of about 50 years — ours lasted 70. The replacement pipe is PVC, which will last up to 150 years. Long enough, I say.
To complete page 3, I enhanced the colors, added a walrus, and painted the circus tents in the distance.
The ringmaster is now a penguin instead of a man
I think I’m finally finished with this page. The big change, for today, is that I replaced the man with an animal. Introducing a human being into the book would be a bad decision.
At the moment I’m waiting eagerly for my Leica IIF to make its way from Belgrade, Serbia, to Southern Oregon. This camera was created sometime between 1951 and 1956. I’ve bought vintage cameras before and I’ve had good luck, most of the time. The only dud was a Polaroid camera converted to use Fuji Instax film. The camera itself was fine, but Fuji stopped making the film.
I’m looking forward to having a Leica again. I sold my Leica M3 out of necessity in 1988. It didn’t occur to me that thirty-years later I would regret selling it. Going 30 years before regretting a decision is okay by me — I regret most of my bad decisions immediately.
So many choices, so many ways to be disappointed, so many risks.
I couldn’t focus on anything but cameras today. Cameras and film scanners. Then I started lurking around Ebay. I’m a camera addict, and Ebay is my dealer.
Despite my trepidation about buying a used camera on Ebay, I’ve bought three working cameras in the last 7 years — a big Polaroid camera for which film is no longer made, a Nikon F3, and an 80-year old Rolleiflex, which works like a charm. Now I want a little Rollei 35 to carry with me while I’m out and about. I have other cameras, but they’re alarmingly huge and conspicuous and I want to be discrete as a mouse, just going here and there without being given away by a foot-long lens sticking out from my jacket.
May 30, Memorial Day, 2022
I started the day by making our lunch. I made a savory sauce, roasted sweet potato cubes, smokey collard greens, and barbecued tempeh. All plants. Not a single animal product. Nobody died for my lunch.
In the afternoon my beloved partner and I walked Nacho in the hills above our house. She brought her Polaroid SX-70 camera and took a few pix using 5-year old film. Surprisingly, some of the pictures demonstrate the dreamy Polaroid glow. When you shoot Polaroid, you are sometimes blessed with happy accidents. That’s life with a 50-year old camera.
In one of the pictures, I’m wearing a new pair of glasses that I bought online, from Zenni. I’m using a temporary prescription for the next few months until my cataract surgeries heal up.
I’m going to get back into photography, in a small way this time. I’ll be putting some photos here from time to time.
Brand names I mentioned in this post just because I like the products. Relax — there’s no kickback coming my way.
Today was a cooking day. From 9:30 to 4 pm I was baking vegan loaves and cornmeal encrusted tempeh buffalo wings. Oh, I almost forgot the gallon of tomato sauce I cooked.
On another front, I feel my old first love beckoning me again…film photography. I was totally into film photography from 1967 to 2001. I was a camera addict with my share of Nikons, Leicas, Hassleblads, Pentaxes, and a shit ton of no-name cameras I found in pawn shops. I had my own darkroom, enlarger, the finest lenses, and 100-foot rolls of 35mm black and white film. My true loves were Kodak Tri-X film and D-76 developer.
Then, I went insane and stupid and sold all of my gear. Why was I so dumb? Simple. I was going to go digital! From that day in 2003, when I bought a shitty digital camera and tried to make it work, my interest in photography eroded year by year until all I had to take pictures was my telephone.
But now, the sleeping giant has awakened. My partner has been talking madly, passionately about film photography, and I feel excited about shooting someblack and white film. Tri-X, of course.
I’m not sure how deeply I’ll dive in. I still have picture books to illustrate and stories to tell. Will their attraction be enough to keep me faithful, or will my first love consume me…again?
Two days ago I created the storyboard for the final pages of my third book. I can post the pictures now that I’ve finally figured out how to use the Mac Screenshot tool. My frustration level is now so low that I’ve stopped quivering and whining about macOS.
My job as a part-time, temporary substitute project manager will be ending on May 31. It won’t start up again for three months. During the hiatus I’ll be free to finish the book I started writing and drawing 18 months ago. Hardly a day has passed that I haven’t given it some time, my daily inch of progress. In those 18 months I’ve created a monumental number of sketches, experiments, and failures. I’m hoping those failures have been my Art School of Hard Knocks. I’m optimistically believing that I’ve learned something that will help me work more efficiently on my next Jimmy Jay book — Jimmy Jay and the Dolphin Who Took on the Robots. That’s going to be the working title that will inspire me for the next year.
Testing Clip Studio Paint on my Mac.
I want to do more work on my iPad and iMac. Although I’m happy when working with Windows, just moving an image from the iPad to the Windows machine is a pain. Understand, I have a 2017 iMac with an awesome 27-inch screen to work with. It may be slightly slower than my PC, but I can airdrop images to it, which saves me the time that I would spend uploading an image to iCloud, then downloading it to my PC. In other words, the simpler workflow saves me time and lowers the aggravation level, which makes me a happier, though struggline, novice writer.
Today I had cataract surgery. The ophthalmologist removed the cloudy lens in my right lens and replaced it with an acrylic lens. I had been dreading this surgery for years. The thought of someone cutting my eye with a razor-sharp diamond scalpel was more than I could deal with.
Afraid as I was of surgery, I was also afraid of not being able to drive at night. Night driving had become a frightening ordeal .When you have a full blown cataract, the glare of oncoming headlines turns the darkness into a wall of white light, which is not fun when you’re driving on a two-lane highway.. I scoured youtube for cataract surgery videos. As my ignorance of cataracts diminished, I was able to schedule surgery for my eye.
Today I felt like cooking. I made some taco soy curls, no-cheese sauce, marinated mushrooms, and broccoli. The boys like to hang around in case I have something for them, which I always do. I keep it healthy by giving them broccoli.
Just one of those long days at work. Now that my workload has tripled, I’m beat by the time I sit down to work on my book.
My inch of the day was trying to paint a background image, but I kept falling asleep with the stylus in my hand. At this moment I’m typing with my eyes shut. I’m yawning continuously.
There’s no point in typing another word.
