Driving the Flies

Not really. I just wanted to say that.

In the photography universe, I am strictly a grain of sand. While it’s true I have been, and am still,  involved with some projects that are now somewhat well-regarded, I am virtually unknown as a photographer in the town where I live, and where I’m primarily assumed to be more or less a professional flake.

And maybe some kind of writer.

Or something.

But, as a blogger, and sometimes a photo blogger, and as a, well, chief lackey prominent member of a pretty vocal group of gearheads, I have gotten to know a few people in the biz, as it were, and largely because of this I’ve gotten my hands on a pre-production sample of the new Pentax K-7 DSLR, and it has been pretty much glued to my hands for the last couple weeks, which made the drive to Arkansas and back a little adventurous. Matter of fact, the last photo I posted came from that camera, as did the shot of The Boy in the book shop, and you may have noticed that no amount of clicking or cursing would open either of those photos as larger versions. That’s due to a rule I agreed to abide by, that nothing I posted would exceed VGA dimensions, or 640×480.

The other rule, nothing over 1600 ISO, hasn’t really come into play yet for me. Why the rules, you ask? Simple: as a pre-production model, it doesn’t have the final version of the firmware installed. While we all know that nobody on the intertubes, and especially not on the pixel-peeping discussion groups, would ever, ever jump to any dire conclusions regarding image quality, rendering, or potentially the end of civilization itself after having seen a fistful of images from a preproduction camera, why take the chance?

I’ll not cough out the specs of the camera for you, rumored or otherwise, because it’s been done. Google Pentax K-7 for a good time. Indeed, there was such a glorious flurry of wild-assed guessing, smug insider allusions, and flat-out misinformation streaming from the fevered fingers of the world wide techno-weenie world that it became something of a sporting competition to see who could come up with the most outlandish feature and to swear upon the graves of cameras past that someone somewhere had confirmed it through the clever method of outright denial.

Kind of an old-school shooter, I still see cameras as tools, like hammers and computers, and I can only think of one of my many cameras that I ever formed anything close to an attachment to, and that was the Pentax LX, which is a dinosaur by today’s zippy measurement, but which is, as far as I’m concerned, the pinnacle of 35mm SLR design. Mine still sits within easy arm’s reach on my desk, and just so you know I have lost quite a chunk of allotted time for this particular entry to a thorough dusting, to which I sacrificed a citizen of my toothbrush stash, and a number of photographs of it, not to mention a thrilling interlude during which I cranked up the motor drive and detonated a satisfactory number of shutter cycles, wondering if I still have the eyesight for manual focus.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Cameras as tools, and I don’t get involved with them. This may change.

Free time and car keys were ours.

Our stomachs full of our favorite barbeque, The Boy and I piled up for a tour of the old stomping grounds. There were hours to kill.

Curiously, as we drove and I pointed out the sites, I found myself in censor mode. I was in college then, and there are things he does not yet need to know, like this is where I was so stinking drunk I climbed up the front of the building like some demented Spider-Man, or this is the street where I tied a rope to the back of Hoyt’s Vega and skiied behind it through the snow. The closest I came to anything exciting was an admission of grabbing serious air on my motorcycle off the railroad tracks. Even that was tinged with dad-ness, as I reminded him that my friends and I were experienced riders, though I made no claim to controlled circumstances.

So the tour was noticeably, to me, curtailed, and we both got tired of me leading off sentences with, “there used to be…” and the thirty years have done their damage to the places of my memories.

“Let’s go in here,” I said as I pulled along the curb. He followed me through the door and stopped, blinking, his head swivelling, and I couldn’t help but grin.

The books were everywhere, floor to ceiling, little hand-lettered cards and directions stuck here and there, and from wall to wall, and between were tiny corridors that asked for a cool suspension of your personal space if you came across another person.

Behind glass, I caught site of an early edition of In Cold Blood, and my eye consumed the view of hard-loved bindings, gold leaf lettering, the very properness of this book shop, and it’s important that this stay a shop, not a store even though it says store on the window, because a store means corporate offerings and generic blandness, the touch of the accountants, but a shop still means love, an obsession with the book as a token of hope and dreams, reverence for the written word.

The Boy is a reader, God bless him, a gene I’m proud to have passed on, and his eyes took it in as his fingers gently touched the many spines almost unconsciously. We paused in a doorway, up two steps and I reached to place my fingers on his shoulder to get his attention for a moment. “When you hear me speak of heaven,” I told him, with a small gesture of inclusion, “this is what I mean.”

He planted himself in science fiction while I roamed and peered, a stiff eighty bucks for a Winogrand I’ve coveted that went back on the shelf, and I got stuck between Walker Evans and David Douglas Duncan, finally choosing neither and the little voice in my head that sounds a lot like my wife told me we were short on funds, the trip itself eating the bulk of our current budget. I looped through this grand labyrinth, thinking I’d live there if they’d let me, and I remembered one night, when were watching a movie, and one of the scenes began with an establishing shot of the interior of a home, and there were piles of books and overflowing shelves and no flat surface not occupied by books, and The Wife said to me that is what our house would look like if she left it up to me, the truth of it echoing through my heart.

I could not deny The Boy, though, when he asked to buy two books to read on the drive home while I had to content myself with some photographs and a silly memory of our time here together.

I lost all of Monday to catching up after having been away for four days. Apparently there are parts of the internet that only I control, or at least I take the blame for, and my being away from the computer causes them to foul up.

Yesterday I lost to my main computer, which resisted all efforts to bring it back to life after it suffered a hard-drive meltdown, even failing to accept a new, better transplant.

Today it rained, and I had Baby Girl home with me for the afternoon. She’s a delight, but not exactly a boon when it comes to getting any work done beyond her identifying everything in the house as either “mine” or “not mine.”

I tell ya, this unemployment is tiring. And tomorrow morning we’re off west for a family wedding and maybe a photo op or two.

So keep the faith, people. I might get to to a little road-blogging, some drive-by posting if the gods are willing and I get a few minutes.