18 February, 2017

“….Worth a Thousand Words!”

 It’s 7:30AM on a Grey rainy Saturday morning here in Sin City!!  I’m looking out on the golf course, and the sand traps just a few feet away from my patio, have taken on a richer, deeper Sepia colored hue….the result of the night long, steadily continuous downpour that drenched our city while we slept, and is still doing as the sky is slowly transforming into just a slightly lighter shade of Grey as I write!! (smile)

Only a few feet beyond the sand traps, as I look toward the 18^th hole, are “beautifully Green toned mounds of grass”, recently cut and looking like exquisitely manicured parcels of land leading up to the slender White pole, and small bright (but now soaking wet) Yellow flag marking the location of a 4 ¼ inch diameter hole. (yes, I looked it up!! [smile])

That hole is the desired “final resting place” (if you will) of a small White pock marked sphere that has been hit (and also gently tapped) over many yards for a period of perhaps 3 hours (more or less) by golfers who on this particular morning, are nowhere to be seen….of course!! (ha,ha,ha)

Funny….those three paragraphs amount to a total of 203 words.  I could provide myself an interesting challenge at this point, and continue to describe the weather and the golf course, and see if I….

• Could create a more vividly accurate mental “picture” for you of the morning….and
• Accomplish that result in the 797 words I’d have left, exemplifying that the famous maxim “a picture is worth 1,000 words” has indeed its basis in fact!! (ha,ha,ha)

That exercise would certainly take me back to 1998 and ’99, when my buddy Scott and I were doing our volunteer work recording textbooks on tape with Reading for the Blind & Dyslexic.

I’ll tell you, the 2 years we did that work were really fun, challenging and extremely rewarding as we had to (on a regular basis) attempt to create visual images of information found in the pages of a book.  It was a real treat when our assigned book was a novel, something with an intriguing and entertaining theme or storyline.  However….a textbook can sometimes contain neither of those two wonderful attributes….then we had to make the best of the situation!! (ha,ha,ha)

Seriously though, I loved it, and when I first moved here in 2001, I tried to find that kind of activity once again!!  The closest I came to it was as a member of the Radio Reading Service….a volunteer program with NPR (National Public Radio).

I did a really cool 2 hour broadcast, where with an on-air partner (usually a very lovely female teammate, I might add), we would literally read the Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper, covering a wide variety of subjects (yes…including the comics, Letters to the Editor, Dear Abby, movie reviews etc!!) for listeners who were vision impaired.

I was so saddened, when NPR’s governmental funding for that program was cut, and the radio station ended that activity.  Now we were volunteers that’s true, but the NPR employees who functioned in that program took the brunt of that action, and all of us felt the loss!!  It was so sad, as we loved serving the community in that small way, not to mention the fun I had realizing one of my dreams of being a “radio guy”. (sigh)

So-o-o-o, what’s all this droning on about my history have to do with the photo featured here??  I thought simply that my experiences dealing with the relationship between pictures and words, would go nicely (if not perhaps whimsically) with the crystal camera I added to my collection a few years ago!!  Okay….so maybe that’s quite a stretch, but remember, these chronicles are the “stories behind the glass”….AND….that’s part of the reason this blogsite came into being!! (ha,ha,ha)  GOTCHA!!

This is absolutely “one of my most favorite pieces” of the more than 200 sculptures I own!! (smile)  It’s actually a 2/3 size replica of the “Canon EOS 7D with Zoom Lens”.  I am so intrigued with how the etched work on the piece seems to give the illusion that the camera has 3-dimensional detailing.  It looks so-o-o-o cool.

I found this item on Amazon believe it or not, while doing one of my casual perusing exercises looking for glass.  They also have a 2/3 size replica of the “Nikon D90 with Standard Lens”.  I liked that piece also, but opted to only purchase the Canon, because I liked its’ configuration better. (smile)

Jodie and I talked about her using this piece as the title photo if she decides to create a personal scrapbook or binder version of “The Crystal Chronicles”.  I like her proposed title of “Skipp Pixx” for the project!! (smile)  Perhaps someday she’ll turn that idea into reality….not sure.

I captioned the photos “Say Cheese” obviously because it’s the thing that we used to say when we wanted folks to smile before the shot.  I also thought about captioning them “Smile for the Camera”, but that somehow didn’t strike me as succinctly whimsical enough at the time.

                                                                                              19 February, 2017

 After I had my camera for some time, I showed it to my nephew Aaron’s girlfriend Alejandra.  She does both Fashion & Portrait photography as a hobby / sideline vocation and has developed a website of her work.  When she saw the crystal camera she really liked it, so I presented the Nikon version to her for her birthday, sort of as one photographer to another!! (ha,ha,ha) It now rests on a nice display shelf in their apartment. (smile)

Originally, I had talked with “Ali” about her doing the photography of all of my pieces, and then having her feature some of them on her website as examples of her work.  She’s become much too busy with her own career, and we never got around to coordinating the project activity.  She’s quite good, but I’m kinda glad now that I went ahead and decided to do my own photography of the pieces.

So….there you have it.  Interestingly enough, I just did a count of the number of words that this installment contains.  It turns out that the photo of the camera did initiate a story comprising 1,000 words….1,056 to be exact!! (smile)