Mom
I finally finished off my huge photo archival project which involved taking 40 years of childhood photos from our house in Chula Vista and getting the best ones digitally scanned and then uploaded. They are all on my photo site now but boy was it a lot of work. While I was going through the photos I noticed that there were quite a few photos of my mom. She was the obvious center of our family – giving birth to 12 kids (almost one every single year I was living in that house) – but I think it showed me that my dad who was the camera-man always had a genuine love for her. I guess it showed it how often he photographed her.
Well, my mom, besides being the greatest mother ever is a real beauty. I always remember everywhere we went they thought that she was one of the sisters. Everyone would always ask – where is your mom and we would point to her and they would say, “no!”. It was quite funny having a mom that always looked as young as one of us. Through the years my mom has defied time and actually gotten younger and younger looking. And I think I know her secret. It is because she is acting younger and younger each year. She is one of the most active and involved people I know. She is more involved today than she was 10 years ago and she is getting younger and younger because of it. I think she has discovered the secret of eternal youth. It is something I have definitely learned from her.
Bridget’s Window
Bridget has a very nice window in her front room. There is a nice antique couch with a side table and some nice flowers on it. Sun pours through the windows which are covered with white sheer and some cream colored drapes. The setting is quite nice and has a very warm charm to it. I got a chance to take a picture of Bridget in front of her nice window today. We were finishing off a big photography project for her and it turned out quite nice.
Girl in Vietnam
I keep going back to my pictures from Vietnam because I often find them to be the most interesting pictures that I took in the last year. I have learned that to take good pictures you need to put yourself in the right setting where you are sometimes a stranger. I like my pictures from Vietnam not only because they bring back good memories of visiting this country but also because the pictures were very different than the life that I live here. In this picture, I was walking in a small village in the hills and this girl and her mother came down from their hillside home to get some candy that we were passing out. What was sad is that she didn’t have much but just wanted a small piece of candy. It makes you wish you could do more for them when you see somebody so innocent that can be helped with so little.
Writing Songs With Kevin
I had a pretty amazing day with my enormously talented nephew – Kevin Nash. Kevin is one of the most amazing and talented musicians that I have met in my life and to think the bonus is that he is my nephew. Kevin’s core talent is his ability to play just about any musical genre at the drop of a hat. I think that his ability to improvise is second to none. I can begin playing a funky jam and he will come up with the most amazing lick to play along with it. It is amazing to watch.
Kevin is at a bit of a cross roads in his life; having just graduated from College, quitting his job and breaking up with his girlfriend of many years he is more free than he has ever been in his life. But with that freedom comes some apprehension and fear. Kevin wants to begin starting his music career and if there is anyone that can do it, it his him. I hope he can because the music that he composes is some of the most beautiful that I have ever heard and I want to hear as many songs from his as I can in my life.
A brief on Pelican’s
If you head down the San Diego coast and take a walk along the beach you will probably watch dozens and dozens of Pelican’s soaring up and down the beach in their V-Shaped squadrons. The Pelican population in San Diego is swelling and you can see evidence of it on any given day. Many years ago you be lucky to see one or two squadrons a day; the pelican squadrons are near constant thing throughout the day as they soar back and forth. I cannot think of any real explanation for it other than the fact that there must be more food for them out along our coast and that is why they are doing so well.
I took this picture of a pelican flying along the coast yesterday afternoon. They can be quite lovely to watch fly because they fly in long gliding motions. They are so beautiful flying up in the air. When they are on land however they flop around and can make quite a funny sight.
It’s Springing up Spring Everywhere
It’s March here in San Diego and springtime is springing up everywhere that you look. Now I must admit we don’t have the terrible winters that you might get back east so Spring does not mean the first flowers poking up through the melting snow or anything like that. Well for us SpringTime is just that beautiful time of year when the weather is perfect and flowers are springing up in all directions. I visited the Carlsbad Flower Gardens today and it was in full bloom. Beautiful spring day in San Diego.
4 Geno’s are better than 1
What is better than 1 Geno? The answer is simple – 4 Geno’s. For good boys eating all their food groups at the same time. Camille helped me set up this fun shot and we had a great time taking it. As usual Geno was a fantastic model and subject.
When we were young
When you come from a large family you tend to have lots of photographs of your childhood. My dad always had cameras and film equipment to capture holidays and memorable moments. While he was persistent he wasn’t necessarily a great photographer. He was truly a point and shoot guy that would probably do very well in the digital age but the age of film that point and shoot mentality just meant a lot of unusable photographs.
Last month I started a very ambitious project to archive the best family photos by having them scanned in digitally so that we could share them and use them for whatever they needed. The first step involved going through tens and thousands of photographs sitting in my mom’s closet to determine what was even usable. That process took at least 20 hours and I ended up throwing about 10,000 photos directly into the trash either because they were duplicates or because there was nothing in the photograph that was remotely part of the family. You see my dad was the kind of guy that would take pictures of anything – the mailman, the grocer, the fuller brush man passing through the neighborhood. I mean there were so many pictures of people that really had nothing to do with us and had no real need to be in our archive. After trashing about 10,000 photos I was left with probably around 10,000 photos that were remotely useable. The next step was deciding what was important enough to scan and pay the 20 cents to have it digitally archived. That process was really arduous and took about 3 full days to complete. I ended up with about 2,000 photos that I felt were archive worthy.
So the scanning company took my 2,000 photos and sent them off to India to be scanned in my cheap labor no doubt. It took about 4 weeks but they finally scanned all of the images in and then sent me a proof sheet to approve them. I just ended up approving them all since I really didn’t want to make those $1 an hour employees feel bad about the work they had done. I am sure that there is some sort of mechanism there in India where they only get paid on what gets approved by the buyer. I wanted nothing to do with scrimping someone of their payday so I just approved them all.
This week the CD arrived and I had a huge number of digital photos of my family that are actually pretty good. I would say at least 1,500 of them are pretty good. Over the next 3 weeks I will be compiling galleries for each person in the family so that they can have all their baby pictures and see themselves when they were young. That was the whole point of this project – to help my brothers, sisters, mom and dad remember the times when they were young.
