Sunday 02/19/2023
This morning I decided to go for a photo walk around the California Ave. street market. I haven’t done a photo walk in a long time, and it’s been even longer since I took the Nikon out for a shoot. And damn that D5500 is a good camera! It’s old now, we got it in like 2015. But it still runs rings around an iPhone. Much bigger image, more pixels, better shadow detail, and the lens is better by far.
So I walked around the market shooting “candids” as we used to say, for an hour, then had a cup and a cake at the hidden coffee shop in the alley, and came home. There I spent another couple of hours going through the pics, selecting the best. I never used to mess with the raw image files, just used the JPGs as the came from the camera. But this time, since I have a photo editor that handles raw files, I opened the “digital negatives” as Nikon calls them and tweaked them for exposure and shadow detail. Then I edited the resulting JPGs, cropping and fixing little things.
Here is a gallery with the results. Click the little “play” ▶️ icon for a full-screen slide show.
Then it was time to put on my red shirt and go the museum and lead a tour. I started with about 20 and still had a dozen at the end, all young, under 30 I think, but I managed to keep their attention. One of my better tour performances, actually. It felt good and a couple of the young squirts thanked me and said it was “fantastic”. I’ll take that.
Got home in plenty of time for the 4:30 event of my neighbor Connie Crawford reading some of her poetry. Connie is one of my very favorite people here, just a graceful, classy woman with seriously good writing ability. So about 3:45 I got a call from the auditorium where David G, who was to run the event, was having a problem.
For some reason the Zoom Room machine was not seeing the image from the ceiling camera. Just a black screen. Which if we didn’t fix it, would mean that the Zoom attendees would hear, but not see, Connie read. We both fumbled around and I ended up “fixing” the problem. Big technical achievement: I unplugged the cable from the camera and plugged it in again. Picture! I’m a fucking genius.
Anyway her reading came off flawlessly.
Codgerville 