The Details

I am not much driven to seek details with my camera, as I prefer the documentary look of the Big Picture so from time to time I force myself to look close. This was a piece of graffito on a cement barrier:

These cold front days bring night time lows between 60 and 65 degrees which with a north wind feels cold. The benefit is clear blue skies by day and in the sunshine out of the wind it is quite warm which wakes up the comatose  frosted brain. Sunbathing seemed quite sensible out of the wind to one as cold averse as myself.

Walking The Meadows near the police station on my lunch break i looked up and saw the sky properly which act of conscious seeing reminded me how much I enjoy the cloudless blue.

Photography is supposed to be drama and storytelling and clouds are considered helpful, if not a requirement. But some days the negative space of an empty blue sky is lovely and worth recording.

 Especially when you have roof lines and gables like those in Key West.

I love watching bees at work but photographing them, even at a distance and with no special photographic tools professionals use, is almost impossible. This little guy allowed me a couple of pictures that expressed some sort of bee effort. Here he is out and about in February in the land of eternal summer: 

Mangrove Colors

I caught him looking back at slow old me plodding along behind the active young dog. Young? I asked myself what that meant exactly and I came to some rather worrying conclusions. 

We got him on February 20th 2016 after my wife heard from a fellow teacher about the Homestead organization known as This Is The Dog which had a dog that was coming up for it's third outing to seek a permanent home. I drove to Homestead to the Petco where he was on display yet again looking for someone to love him. After I decided (within 2 seconds) he had to come home with me, scrawny little thing that he was,  he got a chip...

 

...and a permanent home. So if he really was four years old back then, does that make him eight now? I wonder how long he was kept locked away and ignored in a back yard before he was thrown out to fend for himself in the Redlands of Homestead? I guess we'll never know for certain but he seems awfully spry for eight years old. Maybe he's only six? I suppose you could say the same about myself at 62  with a  fake pelvis. Perhaps we are a match.

I have been debating another important issue in my First World Life. How little do I love my back up camera? I decided six months ago that I could make good use of a small pocket camera to supplement my big boxy Panasonic with the giant telephoto lense built in. I am a fan of modern all-in-one cameras, known as bridge or zoom cameras, rather than the clunky bulky inter changeable lens cameras (ILC) preferred by serious photographers.  I am not a professional and I like to travel and having to worry about just a camera, a microfiber cloth and a spare battery keeps my photography life simple. I have found that modern electronics and modern lenses, even in their least expensive versions are entirely adequate for my pixellated picture storage needs. My cameras cost between $350 and $400 each and they are complete with no accessories needed. To spend thousands on a camera body and several lenses to replace my bridge camera makes no sense for the kind of photographs I post here and on Instagram. When they no longer meet my needs I shall spend more money for more technology because time does pass and things do change.

My main camera is fun and easy to use but it is large and I thought especially for when I go on the road that a small unobtrusive compact camera with a small telephoto built-in lense would be a good thing to have. Also if I break my FZ1000 far from home and my eBay access I will still have a camera that does more for me than a phone. So I bought another Panasonic to join my FZ1000 which I love using every day.  It weighs a pound and a half and looks like an interchangeable lense camera but it only has  a one inch sensor combined with 400 mm of optical zoom it is a capable package especially in good light. For my night pictures I fall back on intelligent auto and let the camera with its built in stabilization do the thinking.

Digital photography takes a lot of study to get it right. The benefit of electronics is also the Achilles heel inasmuch as you have so many options and choices and possibilities the whole business can get very confusing. Little wonder smart phones are wiping the floor with dedicated cameras in the world of photographic sales. But me, I am perverse. I don't enjoy using my phone as a camera and I find the limitations rather confining as pictures are hard for me to compose on the phone's  screen. Perhaps the iPhone 12 will convince me to believe that electronic telephoto is of age but so far I find my iPhone 8 rather inadequate for anything more than a snapshot.

So I bought a pocket LX100 which is slipping into obscurity as the Mark 2 version came out last year with features I don't need, thus making the first iteration cheaper than ever. Great camera the pros said, fun to use and decent image quality. Jolly good I thought to myself and with the same complex menu system as my FZ1000 I figured it would be easy to learn to use. Boy was I wrong. The camera is as small as a phone covered with dials and no room to rest my big fat fingers. I was toying with the idea of putting it back up on eBay but my wife said keep practicing. She, as usual was right. I started learning from scratch using the manual controls for the slippery little LX100 and I have to admit I have been having fun with it at last.

I gave up plodding after my dog who dived head first into some bushes and started enjoying for myself the setting sun and the shadows and the leaves and while I did I played around with the custom settings as well as the manual controls. Next month we are taking a ten day trip to the British Isles which title technically comprises England Scotland Wales and Ireland.  As this is my first visit to Ireland  I look forward to seeing where my grandfather grew up as I never in 60 years knew I was Irish and not English. From being the oppressor I became the oppressed.   My Scottish sister, filled with despair at Brexit, investigated our family roots and found she and I are both eligible for Irish (and thus EU) passports. She has filed her application and I am pondering the merits of doing the same. I expect we will have long talks in the car as we drive around in what I fully expect to be a cold rainy foggy vacation in County Wicklow. On the other hand there will be hills and all that lovely fog with woods and architecture and stuff which I don't get much of here so I shall practice being a photographer in a  temperate climate. Then I'll know more about my cameras and their shortcomings.

As always, playing around with the camera and its custom screens while standing around in bare legs and short sleeves in February is a timely reminder that it could be much worse than living in the flat and featureless Florida Keys! I figured out how to isolate one color in the custom settings and I greatly enjoyed playing around with it.  It is a bit embarrassing I admit as I think it is a rather outmoded trick past its prime but...it was fun messing with reality for a short half hour far from the 911 phones at work. I used the feature in several pictures on this walk and as silly as it is it made me smile.

I had seen clouds on the drive in and I had hoped for a sun drenched sunset but it wasn't going to be, so I closed the aperture down to make it look darker than it was, and more dramatic, as we ambled through the mangroves back to the car. Gloomy and threatening seemed to satisfy. 

For contrast here is a shot I took on Spanish Main in mid suburbia with the camera phone on my way with Rusty before the walk. Proper sunny colors and nothing out of place (I was stopped and not therefore about to nail the mailbox). Boring but useful snapshot photography. Much better to have a camera with miles of menus and settings and a wide angled to telescopic lense. 

Elizabeth Bishop Rediscovered

I received a surprising notice in my electronic doohickery that Elizabeth Bishop  was being celebrated while I work this weekend. The news I just learned is that at last her home where she lived in Key West before she went to Brazil to conclude an adventurous life has been purchased for restoration by the Literary Seminar.  What she left behind in Key West was a home barely acknowledged as her own. In similar fashion where Tennessee Williams lived is equally unmarked and unknown were you to look for it. Well that state of affairs is changing at least for Elizabeth Bishop. I don't suppose her home will become the talk of the planet the way Hemingway's home in Key West has become such a center of attention. She was after all a woman and decidedly not a swashbuckling drinker and big game hunter and war chaser, rather a poet of sensibility who yet managed to live life very much on her own terms. I rather prefer her style in writing and in life but the good news is an enduring institution which is the Seminar has announced a concerted effort and quite some commitment to making her home the landmark it deserves to be. Great news.

This essay I wrote in 2014, so the decrepitude of the landmark is no new thing, and given land prices in this absurd town, nothing could have made the purchase of an historic home on White Street at all easy. Yet it is done. Excellent. 

624 White Street

The state with the prettiest name,

the state that floats in brackish water,

held together by mangrove roots

that bear while living oysters in clusters,

and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,

dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks

like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.

The opening of Elizabeth Bishop's poem called Florida.

She lived here from 1938 to 1946, on White Street in Key West and published her poems as she gathered up her stuff and took off on a world tour. That tour stopped abruptly when she fell in love and settled in Brazil for 16 years. Those sixteen years were happier, they say, than the difficult years in Key West, a town she liked but that did not bring happiness, oddly enough. I don't think happiness in love was easy to find for a lesbian in those distant and prejudiced days, albeit a wealthy one able to ignore convention and not starve as a writer.

Bishop was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, got a good education and an inheritance so she was spared the tedium of daily work. However she also lacked the discipline of earning a living, but by way of compensation she turned out poems that are gaining in popularity and earning more respect the more time passes since she died.

Not that the famous poet gets much respect in Key West.  Hemingway's home is famous and the image is sold artfully by the family that owns the business. Everyone else is on their own, their marks on the city of Key West as obscure as if they had lived on the dark side of the moon. That this home has a plaque from the friends of the library is a minor miracle, but ironically enough Bishop's former home is an embarrassing wreck.

Who knows and who cares really. Lots of people live in tumbledown homes in Key West, and lots of people who think they want to live here expect the high rents to return a decent living space. That's not very likely in Old Town. But a famous writer's home should be a landmark shouldn't it?

My last writer's home was the opposite, not recognized at all but not left to rot, far from it. Key West Diary: 709 Baker's Lane, Key West. It's not easy to be critical of people living in their homes, owned or rented but there is a sense of sadness when you see this lovely old eyebrow home not just degenerating but taking a memory we owe the world with it. Indeed the homes of writers around the world are revered, the sense of place that imparts the art to the artist. Here? Nah. What a shame.

Elizabeth Bishop's Misunderstood Life World Library Volume, “Brazil” : The New Yorker

Monochrome Rain

It goes pretty much without saying that I am quite capable of being a bloody fool. Yesterday was one such morning. 

I took Rusty into town for an early morning walk without once glancing at the National Weather service app! Silly me. I left the umbrella in the car without thinking about it and we took off. 

It was a lovely dark morning, not quite six o'clock and no one was around. I felt very lucky to be there on a still silent morning. Not for long.

And then the sprinkles started, just a few, more like humidity in the air, and I hardly noticed it as rain.

That didn't last long and suddenly the heavens opened and we ducked rapidly, as one body under an arcade in front of Island Dogs bar. Rusty took his place under a separate doorway and we watched, and waited.

After a while I started to wonder whether this downpour would quit or not. Rain forever? I took out my phone and finally got smart. The weather app looked awful, a giant green and yellow sausage of rain and storms stretched over Key West and far out into the Western Caribbean promising rain all morning. And right there stuck on Front Street it wasn't yet seven. 

 There was hardly anyone around, a few mad exercisers, a dog walker or two like me, but hardly any cars.

 In its own way it was peaceful enough sitting there under cover watching the water fall.

 When finally it started to ease up we made our way, him fluffy with wet fur and me squelching every step.

You know how they say a cold gray day is a day for a good book? I think any day is good to hang out and read. Yesterday was perfect. I took full advantage.

Window Shopping

I like Sloppy Joe's Bar when it's closed. The dutch barn doors are sealed, there's no one around and the clock on Old City Hall says I made the picture shortly before seven in the morning, a civilized hour to be downtown. Later of course the doors will open and the drinking and eating will begin. I will be long gone.

The CVS program on Duval Street is still going strong showcasing local artists, per their agreement with the landlord, the owner of Fast Buck Freddie's that used to own the space. The artists who is a friend of my wife's said all you have to do is apply and they will slot you in for the next available date. Lucy lucked out and got  a date apparently in the very middle of high tourist season for maximum exposure. Very cool.

Around the corner on Fleming I was taken by the display of local books at Island Books. Still going strong and visible.

I puzzled over this sign for a while. It seems as though the only qualification to get a peace sign on a safety pin is to buy something. 

And here is the window display of the other CVS store, one of many chain store pharmacies in the city. Enticing isn't it. No local artists here, Just boxes of stuff!

I loved these plastic hat holders and I'm someone who never wears hats. They would be brilliant in a storm.

A short walk with a  few ideas and some pictures of everyone's favorite -Key West. That's it. Go back to doing something useful. Your break is finished.

Tallahassee In The Keys

Last weekend we had plans, lunch with friends, a play after dark, half a day's overtime and time enough to exhaust Rusty before abandoning him to go to the Red Barn. That all fell apart when I woke up at 3:45 feeling like death and unwilling to get up to even walk Rusty. I called work and told them Keith's cold bug had got me, even though I had hoped on Friday that Keith's dire predictions were not going to come true. 

We were surprised and delighted when the Red Barn box office was able to give us seats this Saturday night so I plan to not get sick again like everyone around me. I say nothing but privately I am relieved I got the 'flu vaccine early in the season and disappointed the young bucks who fear needles or autism or whatever fashionable rant most moves them failed to do likewise. Massive sick outs put stress on survivors in a  town where adequate hiring is impossible to maintain. 

The newspaper is reporting the results of the annual junket to Tallahassee to get lawmakers to support issues of concern to these few people who live in these peculiar islands. Florida is run by the governor and cabinet members who are elected separately while the two houses of the legislature only work part time, three months a year and members only get paid something like twenty thousand dollars for the three months work guaranteeing only people with money can run to be representatives and senators.  It's a pretty creaky system in a state as large and complex as Florida and gives massive power to the Governor and Cabinet. To make it all even less representative gerrymandering has given a majority Democrat state a Republican dominated legislature and the Agriculture Secretary is the sole statewide elected Democrat. 

So the resistance Keys legislators offer to environmental proposals coming out of Tallahassee where old school thinking dominates means not very much. It's not easy to explain the need to control sunscreen sales to a Hendry county rancher who has never seen a coral reef in his entire agricultural life and has no plans to either. I found the same dichotomy in California when I was a youngster in Santa Cruz, a hotbed of university fueled activism surrounded by the hard headed conservative farm policies of inland ranching and orchard interests in Gilroy and Merced and Lodi, places that couldn't give a damn about the Monterey bay National marine Sanctuary that was so important to the Coastal Commission. 

I look back a hundred years and force myself to think hard about the drive of Henry Plant on the West Coast as well as our more familiar Henry Flagler on the East Coast, men of vision and boatloads of cash who wanted to open up the Sunshine State to tourism and industry. And they got on with it. A quotation attributed to Flagler, a partner in the early oil industry explosion of wealth goes something like this; "I'd be a rich man if it weren't for Florida." Indeed his East Coast Extension Railroad to Key West from Miami was always a losing proposition and following the 1935 hurricane, long after his death, was abandoned and handed over to the state to turn it into a road.

These days you'd never see that sort of vision in Tallahassee, creating a road out of a roadbed, opening up these islands, spending government money to create. And the billionaires of our age are a pretty poor shadow of the vision and drive of the robber barons of those days who built public facilities and infrastructure, somewhat at random I grant you, but in places where nothing was seen before. 

The best they can come up with in Tallahasse is offering to make canal cleaning a big concern but with no money to back up the nice words about water quality, and that old bugaboo of increasing evacuation time to allow more development. Not exactly stellar legislative achievements for 2020 but when you elect people of limited vision you don't get thoughtful legislation. I suppose doing not too much damage is the most we can hope for these days. 

I was listening to the radio on my way to work yesterday morning and San Francisco has closed its downtown artery Market Street to private vehicles. Apparently it took years to build consensus for that modest change and they are monitoring results. In Key West closing Duval Street, an obvious move, is a non starter and electric bicycles as replacements for internal combustion are driving people mad with anger. Change really isn't easy is it?