A Scenic World

Yesterday, I made my third trip to Orlando in the past 8 days. It’s roughly 240 miles round-trip.

I brought my camera on the first two trips. On the second, I took the following photos as the sun rose near Ocala (I was a passenger on the first two, the driver on the third):

On the third trip, I didn’t take my camera. I can’t tell you why - it was the only time I was going by myself, and there was a good chance there’d be some down-time when I could occupy myself with either the Nintendo DS or the book I was reading, both of which were already in my camera bag (with my camera, obviously). But as I set out that morning, I looked at the bag once and set out without it (sorry, fellow Pact members - this makes only the second time I’ve not taken it with me in a long, long time).

As I approached Gainesville (10 miles from my exit, in fact), a semi lost control in front of me. One moment it was in its lane - the next it was perpendicular to the lane - then it was airborne - then it was on its side, sliding away from me. I managed to stop just a few feet away from its spinning front tires.

To be honest, I was paralyzed with fear. Other cars coming up from behind me quickly filled in to my left; a few attempted to go into the ditch around the front of the truck to get by on my right.

Had I had my camera, I would have been in the perfect position to take the front page photo for the local newspaper. But I don’t think I would have. At that moment, I didn’t know if the driver was dead or not. I didn’t know if anyone else was injured (for the record, no one died).

I’ve been in other situations where I had my camera with me and an opportunity presented itself, but I felt like I would be robbing someone of his or her dignity if I took it. Just a few days ago, a homeless man was napping on the bench I’d wanted to use for a shot. He was bathed in a single shaft of light, and his bicycle was propped perfectly next to the bench. But I discarded the thought almost immediately. Even when I travel, I can’t bring myself to take photos of strangers just to highlight their poverty or their difference.

But I don’t know if I would have taken this photo or not, and that bothers me. Would having my camera in the seat next to me have changed my priorities? I use the camera to detach from the world; I can honestly see myself using it that day to manage my fear. But if I’d been thinking about the possibilities of having the photo published, wouldn’t that make me an awfully selfish, cold person? Or just a sensible one?

In the end, I’m glad I broke the Pact that day. I don’t necessarily want to know what kind of person I am.

At work, I make a point to do everything that the guys do. I lift heavy boxes, I chase shoplifters, I build displays. Outside of work, I get by without a guy’s help - I can fix small things on my car, I get things off high places, I change lightbulbs, I can program my own VCR.

Tonight, while driving home, I passed a Mercedes pulled over on the side of the road. Nothing too uncommon there, but as I drove past, I saw that the passenger’s side door was open, and a person was kind of leaning in the seat. Another person was kneeling next to them on the ground.

Immediately, I slowed down. What if something was wrong? What if they needed help but didn’t have a phone? It was a dark road with little traffic, and the chances of someone else driving by any time soon was low.

But as soon as I slowed, I sped back up. My shortcut from my apartment to work goes exactly one block away from the “bad side” of town. This car was parked on the road that borders that side. This “bad side” really is - it’s a neighborhood no pizza delivery place will touch because so many of their drivers have been killed there. Not carjacked or mugged or robbed (they’ll still deliver to those neighborhoods - I should know. I got to take my roommate, who was delivering pizzas at the time, to the emergency room after the guys who stole his money and his phone decided that they might as well bash his face in as well), but killed.

This car was parked on the street that borders that neighborhood. If they’d been one block south or east of there, I would have stopped. But because I’m a girl, and I’m alone, and I’m unarmed, I felt like I couldn’t.  All I could think was that maybe it was a drug deal gone bad, or a fight between a couple, or just a child fallen asleep in the car while his mother was visiting a friend at the house down the street. Either way, I didn’t need to be involved.

But I still wish I could have stopped, just to make sure.

I (amazingly) had the day off today. I spent the entire day downloading indie Christmas songs to use at my impending Christmas party. I found some really great, beautiful stuff which I’ll feature here later. I listen to new music nearly every day, but it’s incredibly rare that I find so many beautiful/haunting/infectious songs in one day.

I decided early in the day to capitalize on the sunlight to take a photo lit by something other than a lamp. I started screwing around with one of the scarves I bought in Morocco and came up with this:

I liked it well enough, especially after I fiddled with it in Photoshop, but later, much later, I decided to see if I could get a photo of me with my headphones. Music had been the theme of the day, after all. I took this shot, which I really, really liked:

I uploaded the first photo as an alternate and then uploaded the second as my official choice. By the time the second had uploaded, however, the first had already gotten two “favorites” and one comment - far more attention than any of my recent posts had gotten. Perhaps I was making a mistake by choosing the second as my official choice?

I’d read somewhere that by the nature of flickr’s interface (small thumbnails, white background, etc), photos with bold bright colors and/or strong geometric patterns have the best chance of making the enigmatic Explore (the 500 most interesting photos for a given day). I don’t take my photos with the idea of making Explore, and I gave up trying to guess which ones would make it and which ones wouldn’t.

I really like the second photo best - the processing is better, it’s more pleasing to me compositionally, and it was MUCH more difficult to set up and take. Plus is reflects my day better.

Okay. I’m choosing the second. The masses will have to be catered to by someone else.

#160: I’ve Been Framed!

This photo has quite a backstory, one I can’t really go into right now. Suffice it to say that I work in retail, and sometimes things happen when there’s money involved, and the repercussions aren’t good for anyone involved.

While reading Harry Crews’ excellent A Childhood: A Biography of a Place, I ran across this extraordinary passage:

The night after the day my daddy was buried, somebody went in the smokehouse and stole all the meat that had been cured and hung there before he died. There were nine middlings of meat hanging, and sausage in boxes, and headcheese in muslin cloth, and somebody took it all, everything but one little piece about as big as a man’s hand hanging in the back of the smokehouse.

Mama knows who got the meat, not because she has any hard proof, but because in her heart she knows, and I know, too, but the one who got it is himself lying in the same graveyard daddy’s in and I see no reason to name him.

He was one of my daddy’s friends. I do not say he was supposedly or apparently a friend. He was a friend, and a close one, but he stole the meat anyway. Not many people may be able to understand that or sympathize with it, but I think I do. It was a hard time in that land, and a lot of men did things for which they were ashamed and suffered for the rest of their lives. But they did them because of hunger and sickness and because they could not bear the sorry spectacle of their children dying from lack of a doctor and their wives growing old before they were thirty.

This photo is #4 in a series related to my favorite books. “Ender’s Game,” if you’re not familiar with it, is about a child, a boy named Ender, who is phenomenally good at strategy - so much so that he’s recruited to train against an alien attacker known as the buggers. He practices both with hands-on “battles” and with computer simulations (a.k.a. video games). I won’t give away the ending, but Ender ends up a different boy. In a word, his world was crushed.

So my plan was to have a video game controller in the foreground and myself, fully decked out in astronaut gear (they trained in space) in the background, looking sad. In fact, this is what you see here. But while I was setting up this shot, I noticed something on my floor. I’d just swept the day before, but God knows I’m no good at cleaning, and this looked like a pretty big something to miss.

It was a huge bug. I’d seen one a few nights prior crawling around next to my porch light, but this one looked like it was almost dead. It crawled around slowly but didn’t attempt to take flight or hop or do whatever bugs of its sort do to evade predators.

I abhor killing bugs. I practice catch-and-release. But I was fairly certain this guy was already nearly dead. RJ, a friend of mine from work and an entymologist in the making, had just mentioned to me the previous day that the most humane way to kill a bug was with fingernail polish remover. Unfortunately he hadn’t gone into detail, but I placed a plastic container over the bug and put a paper towel soaked with the polish remover inside. He twitched a few times and was still.

Now, the moral dilemma. A bug, especially of this size and sort, would make a perfect prop for my “Ender’s Game” photo. I have never managed to get an insect macro shot, and suddenly one had presented itself on my living room floor. I moved the controller and placed the bug where it had been. I set up a maglite as illumination. And I snapped the shutter.

Then I saw him twitch again. Worried that he was still struggling, I put him back in the container with the nail polish remover-soaked towel. Again, he stopped moving.

My shots with the bug were okay, but it was bloody difficult to get him really big in the photo with me in the background - even with an aperture of f/32, I was just a blur. So I re-did the shot again. I’d nearly gotten it when he twitched AGAIN.

I was very worried that I was just torturing him with the nail polish remover vapors. So I did what seemed like the only humanitarian thing to do - I doused him with it. This time, he was instantly still. When I moved the container a bit, he fell over.

Thirty minutes later, as I gazed at his carcass, struggling with my photographic demons as to whether to post a photo with a dying animal or not, I saw him move one last time. Convinced that this bugger would prove to be just as difficult to kill as the buggers in Ender’s Game, I gave him one last chance at life.

He was summarily thrown into the front yard, and I posted the photo with the controller.