Greetings,

Well, it is December already and this is Museletter #150!! I’m a little blown away by both. Time is constant and goes at the same rate but sometimes you look back and could swear time has to be accelerating.

This month’s beauty is Ziva Faye. She is an amazing walking bit of art. And I love that she lets me capture her in pixels.

Last Sunday and Monday I had yet another two day class with a wonderful couple from California. Things went well and we all had fun and they learned a lot I think. It is interesting that, for the last couple of classes, I approached them more like I intended from the beginning. I’ve grown, and the classes are so regular, that I don’t have any written notes or solid plan going into the class. They are generally customized to the student and I pilot through it based on their questions. That gives me the direction they want to go in and that works perfectly.

But the base concept of the classes are now going deeper into mind set and developing a style. I’ve always said the art of photography isn’t paint by numbers. No one who is successful has done a paint by numbers process to get there. There isn’t a step one, step two, etc. It is a mind set that taps into likes, dislikes, and sometimes the weather. Everything in our lives affects who we are. Pains, friends, loves, losses, loves lost, the season, and even the sniffles can change who we are in the moment and adjusts the path our thoughts take us. We can, to some extent, control how happy or sad we are about one thing or another, but they affect us in any case.

I like to use a story about the movie “Hospital” with George C Scott as an example of how we can view things differently based on what we are going through in life at that moment.

So I’m home sick one day. Laying on the couch while coughing and trying to use up the global supply of tissues single handedly. And channel surfing. I stopped on this movie about a hospital and so many patients are dying that they are having trouble finding places to hid them so it doesn’t look bad on them. I’m not into horror movies but I left it there was watched as I was hacking and coughing. So much death.

Fast forward a month or so, and this movie popped up again and I watched a little of it. I think I was building some Ikea furniture and just wanted some noise. What the hell!! It’s a comedy!! Of course, this time I felt fine. I wasn’t sick on the couch. My mood and my whole being saw this movie in diametrically opposed ends of the entertainment spectrum because of how I felt when I watched it each time.

That has now become a new way of thinking when I’m deciding if I like something or not. Am I just in a mood that is slanting my views? I feel it actually opens my mind up to seeing whatever it is differently. Because I KNOW this fact about perception based on mind set.

So, the last few classes have shifted the focus a little more towards our thinking in situations like lighting, editing, and overall creativity. I think it brings us to a better outcome when we understand the deeper currents that draw us in different directions. We can feel it happening and therefore control it, or at least understand the results in a new light.

Now, that was deep and I hope it made sense. The line between a philosopher, and an old guy mumbling, is not a fine line.

On the geek side there hasn’t been much going on. Radio wise the neighbor put up some really nice fancy holiday lights and MAN do they interfere with my radio on some frequencies. I guess it’s payback from the 40’s-70’s when hams messed up people’s TV. Now just about every one of our hundreds of things from washers, to TVs, to computers, to the simple LED light all make noise to make HF radio communications almost impossible. This is why I use my station at Bonita Creek, in the forest, remotely because it isn’t surrounded by man made electrical noise up there.

On another note, Colby and I did our first sessions of “Wide Open” and I’m doing the struggling of syncing up videos from 4 cameras and the sound. I’m learning fast and I hope, in a week or so, we’ll have the first one out there for viewing. I think you’ll like it. It actually touches a lot on that thought process I was talking about. What we were thinking about this or that, and the process we went though to get where we are. We could have also called it “The first 10 years” because it goes over a lot of growing pains we remember and that we think new people may find comforting because they are going through the same thing. Sometimes it’s nice to know you aren’t the first one to trip and fall over things.

Until next week, enjoy!!! And stay safe.

Dave

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