It came to me in a dream. I should shoot more photographs with the Leica CL. And I should be more adventurous in my lens choices. Or something like that.
Speaking of dreams, I've been experimenting on myself again and with interesting results. I've decided to go to bed one hour earlier than I have been over the last few years. Trying to give myself a fighting chance at getting a good 7.5 or 8.0 hours of sleep in before swim practice. So far the results are good and I'm not finding any real unintended consequences that I can peg back to the new regimen. But I am finding that I remember dreams much more than I have in the past. And sometimes the dreams wake me up.
I woke up two mornings ago because I was having a dream about swimming the butterfly stroke and I was working, in my dream, on my dolphin kick. But as my brain was dreaming about the kick my legs were actually doing the kick in real life. I woke up because I was getting frustrated (in my dream) since I felt like I was working hard but not making any forward progress. Today I woke up from a dream about my freestyle arm recovery.
As a blogger who writes about photography it would have been a lot better for all of us if I'd been dreaming about some new and innovative way to make great photographs. Something I could share that would make you rush to your camera, hoist the strap over your shoulder and then run out the door to try out some almost unimaginably cool technique. But sadly... no. I'll see if I can "change the station" in my dreams going forward.
In the previous blog I talked about using the Sigma Contemporary 90mm lens with the Sigma fp. A few people liked the way the combination rendered color and the way the images looked, technically. Even while mentioning the mediocre content...
I wondered if all that glorious technical performance was due to the Sigma fp camera or just how much putting the correct lens on a camera shifts the results. Today I put the Sigma 45mm lens on the CL and decided to see how much different this combo might be. But I more or less give up now. All recent cameras are fine. Most recent lenses are admirable. Put any of them together and the shooter becomes the weak link. How else to explain it?
Last night it ended up raining here for hours and hours. A wonderful continuous, soaking rain but with none of the wild gyrations, impetuous downpours or random flooding. The episode did wonders to clear the air across the city and my experience walking through downtown was downright pleasant.
I am bored already with Summer. I'm tired of the hot days and the humid nights. I tried to book a trip to a far off city to visit a friend but when I went on line to book a hotel every single one of the hotels I wanted to stay in were totally sold out for the week in mid-July in which I wanted to travel. And then there is the uncertainty of air travel. I guess my next recourse to getting out of town is to head to San Antonio or back over to San Angelo. Someplace I can drive to in less than 4 hours. Someplace where there is always a vacant hotel room.
Looking back over the last four or five years (factoring out Covid lockdowns) I find that June and July have traditionally been my slowest months for business. And that's sad because even though I have a big chunk of time in which I can get away I can't imagine a worse time to go to the kinds of places I'd like to go. Filled with tourists, Record heat waves all over the globe and every measure of uncertainty one could toss at the world. I know from experience that major cities like Rome, Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, etc. are much, much more pleasant in the Fall months, after the tourist clear out and the kids are back in school.
We're aiming for that. In the meantime I'm happy to swim more. In fact swimming is becoming my major activity for the Summer. I just need to cut out the dream kicking before someone gets hurt...
If you are out traveling right now you are braver than me. Or just heedless and not very risk averse. But more power to you. Life is short and, if not now then when?
Me? I think I'll just maximize being a tourist in my own town. At least I know some of the good places to hit for dinner...
