The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.William Gibson, Neuromancer
It's been a long while since I've read anything by William Gibson after discovering his work in the early 1990s via the Burning Chrome anthology1. The last Gibson adventure I read was Idoru, the second novel in the Bridge trilogy. I never completed the trilogy.
The self-imposed need to produce a daily blog post with photography is wearing thin. Frankly, outside the weekly dinners at Brick Farm Tavern or the occasional beer garden, I remain at home, physically isolated from my community of friends and photography fanatics and tech geeks and mac nerds. No photo walks. No tech meetups. No user group meetings. It’s also been hot out, so I’ve been self-isolating even more than I had been. To paraphrase Gibson:
Life under a global pandemic is the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Most of the images I have recently posted to this blog are, in my opinion, utter garbage, devoid of any personality. It’s not art. It’s picture-taking. I want to do better.
I had hoped that the beverage photography workshop would occupy my time, but I've been frustrated by a lack of equipment, imagination, and patience. I underestimated the time and effort needed to produce good images. I will continue my efforts, plodding along, learning, and improving. I don't expect to produce finished images daily.
I want to step back from the daily posting. I think it’s too much to create a daily iPhone 11 Pro image, a daily Isolation Project image, and a weekly smartphone image. I want to create a weekly smartphone image, but I want to be cognizant of my limitations. What shall I do?
In an attempt at simplicity, I have deleted all but two film simulation recipes from my X-T2.
I have retained a tweaked version of Luís Costa’s X-trans III colour recipe and Jamie Chance’s ACROS Red film simulation recipe. Neither of these recipes attempts to replicate the look of any specific film stock. They are what they are; general-purpose colour and B&W for Fuji digital cameras.
I will continue shooting RAW + JPEG, using the JPEG for "instant photography" and tweaking RAW files when I want to go beyond the limitations of film simulations.
While the electricity was out on Tuesday, I used the last bit of power left in my iPad’s battery to start reading Semiosis, a science fiction novel by 2019 Campbell Memorial Award Finalist Sue Burke. It is her debut novel and the first book of her Semiosis Duology series. It’s very different from the past cyberpunk and space empire stories I’ve enjoyed in the past, but I’m enjoying the novel. I'm enjoying it so much that I bought All Tomorrow's Parties, the conclusion to Williams Gibson's Bridge Trilogy.
I haven't read books for a long time.
Submitted as part of the 100DaysToOffload project.- The intro to the anthology led me to Bruce Sterling and a (now lapsed) subscription to Wired Magazine. Sterling's 1988 novel, Islands in the Net, was the inspiration for this blog. ↩
I’d like to see more of your memories and photos mixed, like that Niagara Falls memory. More human stories rather than technology. More of the tangible rather than intangible moments of life.
I’d like to write more of these but I don’t see travel in the near future until a vaccine is found for COVID-19.
No memories from the past that you haven’t written about yet?
I'm sure I have many. But first I have to remember them.
I've lived in the USA since 1986. I have lived without the support of the British Caribbean community for a very long time. Without a British Caribbean immigrant population in this part of New Jersey, I have forgotten most of our customs and food. The culture is becoming a distant memory only sparked once now and again by some random thing.
Maybe there is something in the Lightroom Catalogue. I'll keep looking.
Daydreaming is allowed in writing, Khürt.