I saw a photo on the Internet. The picture was just a part of a woman’s face. I bit of her nose, lips, and the crease of her smile against her cheek. It was suggestive, and I wanted to see the rest of her face. My mind started to run wild with speculation. Finally, I found the source of the photo after nearly an hour of furious searching. The web page informed me that it was indeed a fragment of a larger photo. There was a link pointing to flickr. I clicked on it. The page loaded. “This user is no longer a member”.

All I am left with, all the whole world is left with, is this fragment of a smile. A fragment of a face we will never know. Forever wondering what brought on the smile.

Is Digital Really So Different From Film?

Apparently not. This morning I got up early to watch the sunrise on one of the longest days of the year. I brought along my digital camera to see if I could capture some of it.

As I walked and the sun approached the horizon, I saw purple mountain-ed majesty, although there were no fruited plains; just plains with lots of buildings on them. Actually, the mountains were pink, not purple, and there was still some of this year’s magnificent snow pack visible on them. Against an aqua blue sky, it was pretty stunning. It appeared that if I could zoom in as far as the optics on my digital camera would allow, I’d be able to capture it.

I fired up the camera. It booted. A whirring sound was made as the protective iris over the lens opened, and the lens telescoped out of the body of the camera like a mechanical erection. An image appeared on the screen. I zoomed in all the way, and tinkered with the camera’s parameters until a nice image was displayed. I pressed the “take” button. A message appeared: “No Memory Card Present. Image Cannot Be Saved.”

My mind instantly took me back many decades to a moment where I had been out in the field, having carried with me a heavy bag full of Pentax cameras, a tripod, lenses, filters, and various tools for making 35mm film images. I had carefully set up the camera, composed a shot, and discovered that I had forgotten to bring film, and that none was loaded in the camera (I’d cleaned out my camera bag and “organized” everything the day before).

If you had told me about digital photography when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have believed you. Even though I was an electronics hobbyist. I took to photography at a very young age. My first cameras were of the Kodak Brownie type, taking 127 roll film, usually black and white. The cost of having it developed at the pharmacy was high, so I very quickly learned to develop the film myself. With that came the joy of the smell of chemicals, and discovering all the things that could be done with the image in the dark room by manipulating the chemical processes of developing the film, and the image printed to photographic paper. I acquired all sorts of equipment over the years, from bulk film loaders allowing me to buy film hundreds of feet at a time, to all the accouterments necessary for processing the film. Cameras, enlargers for making prints. I love to shop as much as anyone else, and I shopped hard for all that gear. I worked in various film formats, mostly black and white, from 120 roll film to 35mm to 5″ x 7″ sheet film. I used flash bulbs to illuminate subjects, and discovered the world of lighting for photography. In college I learned about acting and even makeup for film and television. I went on and shot 16mm and even some 35mm motion picture film, side stepping the low quality of 8mm. I learned how to budget film productions, and employ film crews and union workers to move around all the equipment (and take expensive breaks to ingest large amounts of catered food and drink).

All the while, electronic photography was following in my wake. Video at first. Soon, it was cheaper than film to shoot. I worked in Broadcast Television for a while, and Video was a must. The images weren’t as good as film, but the money was better (that seems to have been the story of television). Electronics progressed, and digital photography inched into practicality. In my digital vault is the evidence. Very low resolution images and video taken with devices ranging from the sublime to the ridiculously cheap.

I branched off creatively into music and writing. But technology did not wait. It gobbled up the market for images and image making to such an extent that now precious little is left of the film industry, and what little is left is in support of the rapidly diminishing market for cinema and movie prints.

So I am here now. Remembering, as Baba Ram Dass always exhorted, back in the days of Bob Fass and Steve Post at WBAI. Not that much has changed. Memory cards can be forgotten as easily as rolls of film, and images can be lost even more easily than the negatives: at the touch of a button.

[as a matter of self-aggrandizement, I’d put a link in to my own activites at WBAI, but I used another name then, just as Ram Dass was once Richard Alpert]

Is Digital Really So Different From Film?

“Just visited MySpace. Half the lights are out, bears are living in my comments section, and a homeless guy’s been pooping in my blog.”

@pattonoswalt

So much for diversity.

I’m fully armed. I could be dangerous, but not in this blog. Netbook, cellular modem (in case the wi-fi isn’t), bag, sunglasses. It’s really all I need to write. Girlfiend took over the bathroom – it’s her office now, and the wi-fi works great in there.

Today I’m at the supermarket. Not to shop. There’s a nice workspace here. Moderately quiet. A handy coffee dispensary right next to it. More than enough food and drink right there if I need it. So I don’t. Helps me keep my girlish figure, what there is of that which is not solely in my long-term memory or imagination.

It’s a gray day outside. There’s an exit door right there in case of an emergency need to get out. Not needed today. Today the glass door is the portal by which I can see the gray. It’s helping to get the work done. The sun promised has not arrived, and that was expected to be followed by a three-day rain-a-thon. No wonder alcoholism is a workplace hazard for meteorologists.

There’s a fake fireplace. It does not radiate heat. I’m chilled. It limits the time I can spend in that timeless, limitless place called cyberspace that I’m sharing with you now. I’m reminded of when I was dead. I was dead for way more than 6 minutes once. Fortunately I was tended by medics who knew how to keep my brain alive. That was cold too, but I’ve learned to limit what I write about that, because the experience conflicts with the deeply held beliefs of many others. Fortunately, now, getting warm is a much easier task than it was when I was dead. Sadly I was not capable of it then, but now I am able to simply remember the hug I got this morning. I’m very glad about that hug, and I wish that everyone on earth had gotten a hug like that this morning. But I know that many didn’t, and wishing for a thing does not make it so.

I want to go back to my office now. That was, after all, the purpose of coming here. To make me want to go there. But something is holding me back, and making me write this instead. It’s the gray. A holding place. A Zen state. Punctuated by passing small children, their shopping parents, and supermarket employees on break. And now a last cup of coffee, after which I’ll get back into the gas-powered vehicular system that will transport me back to what I now appreciate as a much better environment, filled with compute power, pleasant environment, and warmth. There I will work for a while. Until I want to write more. And then, I will write.