Our Beautiful K
photography
Morning Coffee
Morning Light
New Camera
The decision to leave my school and take a chance with at a new school teaching a new subject was in some ways difficult and in other ways easy. Seventeen years in a place can do that to you.
Changing camera systems is sort of the same. The first real camera I bought was in Poland: a Zenit I bought at the jarmark. After that, I bought a Nikon. When I returned to the States, I bought my first and last Canon, and a couple of years after that, I bought my first digital camera, a Sony. Finally, when we bought a DSLR, we went back to Nikon. First, a D70s. Then a D300. And seven years ago, almost to the day (6 March 2018), we bought a D500.
It was about time for an upgrade.
But to what? DSLRs are on the way out — it’s all mirrorless these days. And besides, we wanted something small: the D500 with the 2.8 lens weighs over 1600 grams, and it’s huge. Not as big as a D6, but not as professionally expensive, either.
We’d been using our Fuji X100 almost exclusively over the last year or so, and we’d gotten spoiled with its size and simplicity. But it was nearing its end: released in 2011, our lovely little Fuji was 14 years old — ancient by digital camera standards. So, again, it was time for an upgrade.
We wanted something small, but in the end, we wanted a bit more functionality than the X100 series would offer. While we love the camera, it does have its limitations. We thought briefly about the Fuji X-Pro 3, which is similar to the X100 series but with interchangeable lenses. But that price…
In the end, we decided to change camera systems entirely and go with the Sony a6700.
When the battery was charged up, E and I took the dog and the camera for a walk to see its low-light capabilities. The same walk, in fact, that we took with the D500…
Monday Soccer
Winter in LW
Polska 2011 Revisited
Decorating 2024
And so we enter the Christmas season, which this year promises to be unlike any Christmas we’ve shared. This is the last Christmas that L will still be living at home. It certainly won’t be the last Christmas we spend together, but it will most likely (excluding any unforeseen contingencies) be the last Christmas that she spends with us where the weeks leading up and the weeks trailing off see her still in her lovely room. “I guess I’ll head back now,” will be the phrase we’re dreading next year.
Last year, apparently, was a last for us — at least for a while. I am no longer in charge of the tree: this year, the Boy insisted on taking care of the tree. He unloaded it yesterday afternoon, suspended it under the deck to allow the branches to relax a bit, and carried into the house by himself — irritated that I wanted a picture as he did it.
“You’re like the paparazzi!” he declared.
This reticence to having his picture taken has been building, and it’s positively a thing now. L has gradually disappeared from the majority of the entries because of similar reasons. It’s understandable: teens are so very self-conscious of everything they do, of how everyone might look at them. I remember those anxieties myself. I would have felt even more aware of myself during this time of year: nothing stands out like not celebrating Christmas. At least when you’re the one not celebrating it. Like so many “distinctives” in our little sect, that one is more wide spread than I would have suspected as a seventh grader.
He did allow me to snap a shot of him putting the first ornament on the tree.
And as we were putting lights on the house, there was not much he could do to protest.
I don’t have nearly the number of photos from my own childhood as my children have of theirs. The reason, of course, is simple: digital is cheaper. We currently have 135,184 pictures in our Lightroom library, and that’s including scanned pictures back through the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties — well before the masses went digital. There was certainly something about the old film days that’s lacking now: that wait. You take a shot and you think you have a really great shot, but you’re not sure. So you send the pictures off for development (or do it yourself — I’m fortunate to have had a little darkroom for a few years), and there’s that excitement going through the pictures (or watching the developer bring the image out of nothing).
I still get that a little with digital, though. Snap a picture and a series of possible edits in Lightroom start running through my head. I’m no longer wondering if I got the shot, though. And that delayed gratification — it’s gone for good.
Finally, we get everything up and L asks, “Why is are the lights on the tree blue at the top and white at the bottom?” Because, to return to the opening thoughts, this Christmas will not be like others. Nana and Papa have been gone for years now: this will be our sixth Christmas without Nana and our fourth without Papa, true, but it still feels wrong.
It will also be our first Christmas without a long-anticipated Christmas party. Almost everyone we usually spend Christmas with decided to go back to Poland for this Christmas. (That’s why we all got together on Thanksgiving: the only difference was the food and the lack of carols, though everyone made up for it singing everything else they could think of.) I can’t blame them: Christmas in Poland is magical in a lot of ways. But it means things will be different around here.
Quieter, for one.
That’s almost always a good thing.
Krakow, Early Morning
Horse and Snow
St. Augustine 2024 Day 1
Morning
The shells on the beach just at the edge of the surf were visible for only a few moments before the white bubbles and turbulence hid them again.
In the brief time I could clearly see them in the shallow water, it was obvious most of the shells were only fragments, often smaller than the smallest coins, slivers well on their way to becoming grains of sand. Every now and then, a shard would catch my eye, and I would think, “I might try to grab that one” just before incoming wave hid them once again.
By then it was too late: once the water cleared up, the tide would have tkane the shard so far away from its original position that finding it was all but impossible. Another might catch my eye, but then the process would simply repeat itself.
To get a shell required calm and patience followed by a paradoxical ability to move quickly when needed. Hesitation meant the loss of the moment. In some ways, that’s a metaphor for live in general for many people. Everything is about getting the right moment, and when that fails, increased stress is the outcome.
Yet the older I get, the more I realize the error in living like that and the unnecessary stress it causes. Yes, I might not get that exact shell that I wanted, but there were plenty of other shells that were just as lovely, often more so.
Evening
In the evening, after we’d spent a few hours back at the Airbnb, after we’d spent some time downtown and had dinner, we headed back to the beach.
I took a few pictures:
and the Boy took a few pictures:
A short walk to end a lovely day.
And we got home, and I saw the fantastic news from the Tour de France: Mark Cavendish got his record-breaking 35th stage win, assuring him the historic title “The Greatest Sprinter of All Time!”
Almost as enjoyable as watching the win itself was seeing the other riders’ reaction to the amazing win.
Previous First Day
Transformation
Tournament Day 2
wasn’t as success as day one. They lost their first game out in three sets. Since it’s bracket play, that put them immediately in the consolation bracket…
And the only picture from today: a 20+ year old picture from Slovakia on New Year’s Day.
Twist
Walk
First Day 2024
Hilton Head Day 2
We’ve had that model plane for — I don’t even know how long. Over a year. Maybe more.
“At some point, we’ll put it together,” I assured E, and myself.
And so as we were packing for this end-of-the-year trip, we had the idea that we could take the model and put it together here, in Hilton Head. Most of it, though, the Boy did himself. I wanted to be involved, but I also wanted him to have the experience of assembling it alone. I helped when he requested it.
This morning, he finished it.
In the afternoon, a stop at Piggly Wiggly — they still exist!
And in the evening, a walk on the beach,
some time in the hot tub,
and games in the condo.
Roadside Chapels, Chyzne, 2004
Evening Walk
While the Boy was at soccer practice, I took my normal walk…
Blue Ridge Parkway
