Trying on some new habits

Today I'm inspired and challenged by two fellow bloggers that I feel I know even though we've never met face-to-face. Leslie has just finished a full month of blogging (almost) every day and feels she gained a lot by the discipline and the effort of finding topics of interest every day. Claro! When we stop to examine and share our lives (and I'm not talking about belly-button-gazing) they take on so much color and beauty it makes us glad to get up in the morning. I've been posting, average, only a couple of times a week, but for August I'll try to post every day, with at least one photo to go with it.


Tancho also got my attention with his remarks on shopping for groceries at Mexican-style markets in the US. So when I hit the street market in Guaymas this morning at 6:30am with my friend Alejandra, I decided to photograph my haul and see how veggie prices here compare with other parts of Mexico and Tancho's store in the states. Of course, I didn't buy meat, tortillas or strawberries, which he did.

So here it is: two zucchini, three mangos, five bananas, a pineapple, broccoli, a papaya, two avocados, two beets, three red peppers, for 100 pesos, $7.96USD at today's exchange rate. I didn't get prices for individual items. My purchases came right off a truck parked every weekday on the street at 5am, next to several other trucks which only sell to restaurants. The vendor was helpful and courteous, pointing out what he had to offer (in ingles!) without getting pushy, always ready with a bag when I needed it. I don't expect to shop this way every time, but there were  advantages: parking was easy right next to the truck, it's refreshingly cool that time of the morning. Nothing had that tired "I've been sitting in this store all week" look.  And afterward Ale and I had time for coffee and a long chat. Life is sweet.

A healthy dose of humility

Sunrise this morning in my front yard

One of the things I love about blogging is taking photos. I'm no longer interested in keeping albums or shoeboxes full of prints, and I don't publish newspapers anymore so I'm not shooting for print, but I still love photography. This blog seems to be the most appropriate place to put my humble efforts.


So I had all sorts of hopes for the new camera club that started here in town... that I would make friends with other, more skilled photographers, that I'd learn new skills and master some of the more advanced bells and whistles on my Oympus. A lot of people in town had the same expectation, and the meeting room was so crowded I almost didn't find a chair.


Our hosts M and G, a couple of very advanced professional photographers, started off making it clear that successful shooting is more about expertise and artistry and not so much about gear. Ansel Adams, they pointed out, had nothing but a pinhole camera, with one f-stop.

We would be learning more about f-stops and apertures, color management and sweet spots, "tack sharp" clarity and  using manual settings for more control. PhotoShop is the new darkroom, they said, and we'd learn how to use it more successfully. We would graduate from doing "point and shoot snapshots" to taking awesome photographs that could be successfully enlarged to poster size without losing detail.


Then G did a show-and-tell of his gear and I began to wonder if I'd wandered into the wrong meeting. Tripods, lenses, filters, gadgets that calibrated color, automatic shutter releases, etc. filled one whole corner of the room. How would somebody get all that into a bag and lug it on a shooting hike? Then the discussion turned to printers, and I discovered that my Lexmark inkjet and Brother laser printers were not even worth discussing. And as for cameras: if I didn't have a Canon or a Nikon, I could never hope to delve into the costly array of lenses that would allow me to capture the eye of a fly at a thousand feet, or shoot a panarama of the entire bay in one click of the shutter.

Several of us had brought our little Japanese digitals, some of them no bigger than a cellphone and we winced at M's disparaging remarks about "point and shoot" cameras and "snapshots." I felt humiliated over my limited knowledge about the mechanical aspects of my camera and was glad nobody asked me about my lens, my zoom or my pixel capacity.


But we all have to start somewhere. So I'll keep going to meetings, take notes and absorb as much knowledge as possible. One of the things that keeps a person from growing is the reluctance to show her ignorance.