At my age I have come to accept the fact that my art will cause no revolutions of any sort.  So I content myself with the joy of creation and follow where my eye and heart lead. One path that I do seem to be traversing is tweaking processes to take them to a higher level. It started with coffee. I was wondering if I could get a better cup of coffee from a drip coffeemaker. I tried the- hipster grinding of the latest artisanal coffee- process but it just didn’t do it for me. Too performative. I discovered though, to my surprise, a brand of coffeemaker that I never heard of but recommended by this consumer research site. Lo and behold I got a noticeably better cup of coffee using my usual pre ground coffee. I am starting to experiment with different coffees and also contemplating grinding my own beans. Good times.

If it was just coffee I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. But I noticed I am now looking into DACs also. DACs are digital to analog converters. Basically it is taking the digitized signal, which is actually a sample set from the original analog signal, and turning it back to a waveform. I am a big music fan and have been listening to the oeuvre of Bill Frisell lately, from Americana to Jazz. I bought these high end -ish AKG headphones which I really like. My wife says they make me look like a martian walking down a suburban street. But the sound you get is well worth the ridicule. You can almost feel the strings on the guitar and practically see and feel the strings vibrating. I am hoping recreate the sound for my home stereo setup. It’s modest but I have a pair of Criterion ’77 speakers which have a really nice sound. They must 40 years old. Attached to the speakers are an Onkyo audiophile CD player and Onkyo receiver. My study of DACs continues.

I would like to bring this sense of tweaking to my photography. What I have decided to try to do is to really have as my meta objective in photography, the quality of light. That will be my primary subject as I go about the world with my camera. Whether it’s looking up or looking straight ahead I want the light in the photograph to really capture your attention but not be the overwhelming subject of the image. I have posted a few examples to help you see what I mean.

On a side note my “year of film continues” with a Leica CL I purchased and will be taking with me to Costa Rica in April. Of course I will have my beloved Fuji camera too. Two different cameras, two different representations (Daido Moriyama would say copies) of the world.