On the mend

Slowly recovering the ability to breathe through my nose, but still in bed to write this. More snow today, but mid-week it is supposed to warm up into the 40s. This is good news because Friday we drive to the Cleveland area to pick up the new puppy! There will be pictures posted, not only of the puppy, but of 5 very ticked-off cats. This should, at least, have the upside of distracting them from the aquarium, where new fish are darting and air is bubbling, and the fish won't swim near the front of the aquarium for fear of attack.

The hub and son made a run to the store yesterday for orange juice, and came home with candy, cookies and cake as well, bless them. My appetite has been nil with the cold, for everything except sweets. Being diabetic, I am careful of amounts I eat, but I can't eat nothing either.

In addition to general web surfing, I have been ebaying quite a bit. I was on ebay back when I had to explain to people what it was. Too bad I didn't invest in it too. Anyway. I've had good fun with it, getting everything from clothes to Christmas trees. Currently I'm interested in old cameras. We have several that were bought new back in the 50s to the 70s, and recently we sorted through them all in the process of re-arranging furniture. Somehow, I can't get into the whole digital scene, the comparable pixel-to-film comparison is generally thought to be 12 Mpix = 35mm at 100 ASA, and do you know what a 12 Mpix camera costs? Some sources say it is actually more like 24 Mpix, if you want to make a significant enlargement. Plus, I like photos I can hold in my hand, or frame, or fill an album, and the cost of printing digital photos is absurd. And too, I think of archival properties. How can a digital photo be preserved in a format that will be usable in, say, 50 years? CDs don't last more than 20 or so, I've been told, even if the hardware and software to read them is still around. The same goes for flash cards, hard drives, etc. Remember 5 1/4" floppies? I have family photos as cabinet cards dating back to post civil war times, taken in the Matthew Brady studio in D.C. But yet the film part of photography is taking it on the chin. It is exceedingly hard to find film in 110, 16 mm, 120 mm or most polaroid formats, let alone someone willing to process them. I'm sorry we did away with our home darkroom, at the time I had a really great one available at work (for doing electron microscopy), but now some of that technology has been subverted to the digital format too, although believe me, the film used in EMs, at an ASA of around 8 and magnifications of 100,000 x, make the digital cameras on the scopes cost in the hundreds of thousands, often equal to the cost of the scope itself. And the digital files are, of course, gigantic. Anyway, no darkroom here anymore, although I think the Vo Tech still offers classes in B&W photog. I took photo classes in San Fran where the emphasis was photography as art; here at the university I took photojournalism classes, which is an entirely different kind of slant on photos. The funny thing about any kind of photograph is, if you show someone a really good bunch of pictures, the almost universal reaction is to say, wow, you must have a good camera. And not that you yourself had any influence on the subject, composition, exposure, depth of field, etc. Just that you had 'a good camera'. The best camera in the world, with every shot technically correct, won't equal having a 'good eye'. Neither will Photoshop.

Well, just writing this has tired me out, so I'll give up for now. Hope everyone is keeping warm!