I've been wanting to write for days but each time I get home some task takes my attention and I wind up preoccupied until it's time to go to sleep. It almost happened tonight, too, if I hadn't given up on cleaning my camera sensor. Given up isn't the right phrase; I'd run out of sensor swabs. Apparently I have a few very stuck-on pieces of dust or other particulate matter pressed against my sensor. Think of dead flies stuck to your windshield after a few hours of a long road trip. I swabbed and swabbed and only reduced the appearance of the spots marginally. Still, it's better than it was originally, and even then the spots were hard to notice in photographs. Maybe after my trip to Utah I'll send the camera in to Sony for a real thorough cleaning.
Speaking of Utah, it's the other task that's been eating all of my time. I leave for another solo photo trip next week, so I have to draw up a thin plan prior; a place to stay, a loose itinerary, weather reports, photography tours for Antelope Canyon, flights, car rentals. I hadn't known this prior to booking a flight, but you need to enter Antelope Canyon with a photography guide if you want to bring in a tripod and have a few minutes to grab a shot. It's mandatory. They charge you obviously, and make the whole process seem kind of hurried and transactional, but what am I to do. Looking at the pictures of the place, bathed in haunting beams of light and delicately curved rocks, you wouldn't ever know wolfish things were happening out of frame. A metaphor for life I guess.
It's funny just how little of life's big picture we actually do get to see. The area we see is always blurry and out of focus, tight, underexposed, crooked and oddly composed. And then, once we're finally able to make sense of it, only after looking at it for so long that we stop seeing it - and then we really see it - it usually turns out to be something entirely different than what we thought it to be. Does that even make sense? If it doesn't, you're not looking at it right; it's not what you think it is.
What else?
A new Bob Dylan album was released the last week of March. I stumbled across it this afternoon while I was at work looking for some groovy-ass melodic distractions. The album is fucking fantastic! It's a collection of old recordings, 25 of them, including some great covers and live performances I'd never heard before. One of them is a cover of a Lead Belly song made famous when Nirvana covered it during that notorious unplugged session on MTV, called "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," or, "In the Pines." Dylan's version is equally stunning, sounding like Kurt could've stolen it, but his cover of "House of the Rising Sun" easily eclipses it. He seems more willing to howl on this record; his harmonica playing more frantic, his pleas more desperate. It has a rambling, southern, highway-traveling sort of sound to it. Brilliant, dirty, bluesy folk.
I know what I'll be listening to in Utah next week, riding alone with the windows rolled down, speeding through rock canyons and slapping the steering wheel like a drum, racing toward the horizon, trying to beat the sun.
Back to sensors and spots for a second. There's something symbolic about the concept of cleaning your sensor. Ideas are like lenses - every time you switch one to get a different perspective, a little bit of dust falls onto your sensor, altering it, changing what you see when you look through the lens. These little relics subtlety decorate the photo, hiding in corners and floating against bright blue skies. You can see them if you stare up long enough. It's important that we take the time, and the risk, to try and wipe our sensors clean.
To see the world as it is, we must remember those dark spots aren't actually there.
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