A Lesson in Light

Street Scene, 2010

When I was in Providence back in September, I took a lot of pictures at night. One of the challenges of photographing at night is getting the light right. It’s not just a matter of lights and darks, but rather a matter of also considering the various light sources in the scene.

No doubt you’ve noticed that different kinds of lighting fixtures cast different kinds of light: incandescent; fluorescent; halogen, mercury vapor and so on. The first time you took a picture in fluorescent light you probably wondered why it came out looking so green. That was the result of the jittery motion of excited atoms creating light that is amplified by phosphors. In the old fixtures, they cast a green or blue light. In modern compact fluorescent light bulbs, the phosphors are mixed to create a more “cool white” light.

These differences are noticeable to your eye. But your brain adjusts them to make sense to you. Studio photographers compensate by using uniform light. Cameras are smart these days. A long nighttime exposure of the sky will pick up light blues your eyes wouldn’t see. But the camera still isn’t as smart as your brain. To film or the digital sensor, each fixture casts light at a different temperature and consequently shows up a little differently in your image.

In the photo above, there are at least three different types of light: the lamppost at right, the porch light in the middle and the light down the street to the left. Each one casts light of a different temperature and therefore comes across as a different color in this digital image. I’m not up on this enough to remember which is which other than to observe that the lamppost looked like incandescent; the porch light was a bright white light and the streetlight to the left cast an almost yellow shade.

By the time the sensor in my camera saw these different lights, the lamppost became pink, the porch light blue and the street light to the left yellow-green. To be honest, I kind of liked that. As long as there were no people in the scene to be made ghoulish by the blue light, the result was interestingly atmospheric.

But I wanted it to be more realistic.

Fortunately, programs like Photoshop can help you here. You can turn your faith over to the computer program’s pre-sets if you have just one kind of light to deal with, or you can adjust the colors separately if you have several kinds of light to deal with. That’s what I did. I reduced the blue saturation in the porch light and the red saturation in the lamppost. Each person's taste is different. I chose to leave a hint of both the blue and the pink to give the picture a little more interest.

Who is That Woman on the Cobb?

The Cobb at Lyme Regis, 1989

I will confess that there are two times I’ve traveled to places I wanted to see because they were shown in movies or TV shows. Actually, there are a lot more if you consider all the movies filmed in places like New York, Paris, London and Venice. But I didn’t go to those places just because I’d seen then on movies or on TV.

I was a big fan of the television series Twin Peaks. It didn’t really matter who killed Laura Palmer. Each week’s episode revealed yet another strange character, plot twist or something just so intriguingly weird that you had to keep coming back to see if there’d ever be an explanation for any of it.

At some point during the run of the show, I found myself on assignment in Seattle with a day to myself. It was winter, rainy and cold, not really suitable for walking around downtown. Instead, I got a map and a rental car and drove out to Snoqualmie Falls, which was either the inspiration or the actual location—I can’t remember which—where many of the Twin Peaks scenes took place. I had lunch at The Salish Lodge overlooking the falls and returned to Seattle. I felt a little silly that I’d gone somewhere to see a TV show location. But there you are.

This wasn’t without precedent, however. In 1989, my wife and I went to England for the first time. After several days in London we headed out for two weeks of driving around the countryside.

Our first night out of London was spent at Lyme Regis, a small Regency-style village on the south coast of England heralded today by the local tourism touts as “the pearl of Dorset.” In 1989, “pearl” wasn’t exactly the word we’d have used. The pub and inn down by the harbor was teeming with a rough and drunken crowd. Fights spilled out onto the lane in front of the place. We thought it better to find another inn up the hill.

Our original reason for going to Lyme Regis was not because we had any connection with the place or historic interest. It was because the seawall at Lyme Regis was featured prominently in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman. For reasons no one’s quite sure of, the harbor at Lyme Regis is call “the cobb.” If you remember the movie, you’ll remember that the character played by Jeremy Irons is intrigued by a woman named Sarah, played by Merrill Streep, who walks out on the seawall hoping that her French lover will return. “Who is that woman on the cobb?” he asks, only to find that she’s considered the town floozy. You don’t have to guess how the story ends.

We went down to the cobb the next morning and stayed long enough to take a picture and get soaked in the rain. Afterwards we followed the coast west to a place called Beer Head that sounded like it might hold promise. Along the shore there we picked up a bunch of white rocks—one of which is atop my bedroom dresser today—and found absolutely no beer. A little further down the road we visited a botanical garden at Bicton Park and tried to act excited about British palm trees.

SoCal

California Manicure, 2010

If all goes according to schedule, I should be in sunny San Diego as you read this, talking to Californians about their various plights.

Despite its proximity to the international border, I find San Diego to be the most normal of the California cities, sort of like the way I find Tampa and Jacksonville to be the most normal cities in Florida. Most people just go about their business here. They didn’t come here to be discovered. They’re not trying to make a statement about something. They’re just trying to enjoy themselves and a pleasant climate.

I know a French newspaper executive who, like a modern de Tocqueville, is fascinated by Southern California, particularly places like Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach and La Jolla. He comes here often to visit. The lifestyles he witnesses are so otherworldly, so narcotic to his Parisian sensibilities that he refers to this place as the “land of the lotus eaters.”

I chose to illustrate this post with California Manicure, above, because it so sums up Southern California for me. Even slum neighborhoods are verdant. And better off neighborhoods seem to be nothing if not well groomed. Bring on the lotuses.

I can’t say I’ve been as mythologically inspired by California as my French friend. (I also, as it turns out, don’t have the allure of a Southern Californian mistress to be my SoCal siren call.) Over the years I’ve had the chance to visit a lot of California. I like a lot of it. But I go there, do my business and am happy to come home. And I won’t be looking to the gods on Olympus to get me back to the East Coast safely. This time I’m depending on US Airways.

The Lost Sock

Long-Term Care, 2010

You come into life with nothing but potential. You leave with…well, who really knows? If you’re lucky, you’ve loved and been loved. Maybe your presence left a legacy of some kind. Along the way, you consume a lot of stuff, some of which probably seems very important at the time, but most of which won’t matter in the big scheme of things.

My mother’s quietly walking to the end of the line with fewer and fewer things. It started years ago when she moved from a house to an apartment. Then she went to a single spacious room in assisted living, then a smaller room and then a shared room. She’s transitioned in and out of hospitals and nursing facilities enough to be down now to where her sphere of interest extends little further than the end of her bed.

Each time she’s moved she’s let go of things. Furniture. Television sets. Window air conditioning units. Linens. Silver. China. The grand piano. Now she’s down to a dozen or so photographs of her siblings, her children and some of her grandchildren and great grandchildren. Aside from that, it’s mostly nightgowns, tops and underwear.

And even some of those things seem to be going on their own walkabouts.

When she admitted to the hospital about six weeks ago she had just one shoe with her. We don’t know what happened to the other one. By the time I arrived at the hospital, the shopping bag containing her personal items held but the one shoe. By the time she discharged to the nursing home, was readmitted to the hospital and was once again discharged to the nursing home, even the one shoe had disappeared. Not that she’s going to be needing it. But it’s the principle, you know.

When she was sent back to the hospital, the nursing home bundled up her things—some clothes, a desktop Santa figurine, a bag of hard candy—and promptly lost them. When she returned a week later, we rummaged around the housekeeping department and found most of it.

Yesterday we moved her things out of the assisted living facility where she’s resided for the past five and half years. Several things turned up missing there, too, not the least of which was her roommate. (Turns out she’s in the same nursing facility as my mother.) But how do you explain the missing left footrest for the wheel chair, especially when it’s the left one she needs? What about her world-class collection of nail clippers, tweezers and toothpicks? And her powder bowl? Like a lot of Southern ladies of a certain age, my mother was nothing if not well powdered.

Like that matching sock that never seems to make it back from the dryer, things disappear. Maybe they’re quietly gathering in some parallel dimension for a mismatched afterlife wardrobe. I don’t know.

Fortunately, none of these losses are noted by my mother, who even though her sphere of control is geographically short still has strong ideas about where things should be. We spent ten minutes yesterday afternoon deciding where to place the little desk clock we brought her to replace the broken wall clock in her nursing home room. We spent another ten minutes reminding her that the desk clock is accurate and the wall clock isn’t. I don’t know why it took us that long to realize we should just take the wall clock down and hide it behind the Santa figurine. But it did. Sometimes we just overthink the obvious.

On Freemason Street

Freemason Street Ginkgos, 2003

It’s funny how pictures trigger memories. I went back into the files the other night looking for older pictures that gave me great joy when I took them.

It turns out there are lots of them. They aren’t all great pictures. What defines them, though, is the way they surprised me at the time I took them. Freemason Street Ginkgos is a good example.

From the early 1930s until the late-1950s, my widowed grandmother operated a large boarding house on Freemason Street. She and her three children lived there, cooking for and helping a small staff look after a changing roster of shipyard craftsmen, government workers, traveling salesmen, clerks and others, some of them war veterans, who really didn’t have any other place to call home. (The boarding house occupied the two residences in the middle of the newspaper picture below.)

Freemason Street Boarding House Profile

Boarding houses were a more respectable category of lodging in those days. They didn’t have names. People just got sent around to see Mrs. Jones when they needed a place to live. Some stayed long enough to become part of the family. One of the boarders married my mother’s older sister and they lived at the boarding house with their first child until they could afford a place of their own. My mother and father met in the choir at Epworth Methodist Church, just down the street, and were later married there.

In those days the Norfolk waterfront was not the tourist attraction it is today. There were no fancy condominiums lining the shore. My sister and older cousins spent a lot of time playing at the boarding house and remember that they weren’t allowed to play in the street, for example, because so many rats wandered in from the passing ships.

Along Freemason Street, 2003

My grandmother closed the boarding house just about the time I was old enough to remember much about it. But I can still remember the taste of the fried chicken that was a staple of Sunday dinner at the boarding house. And I know that I have a life-long affection for iced tea glasses with horizontal colored rings around them because that’s what the iced tea glasses at the boarding house looked like.

Our family’s connection to Freemason Street continued for many years. One of my cousins and his girlfriend lived in the next block during the 1970s. I worked just a block away during the 1980s.

Converted to Offices, 2003

During the late 1700s and through the 1800s, Freemason Street was one of Norfolk’s most stylish streets. There was a Carnegie library in the next block up from the boarding house, and the Elizabeth River was at the end of the next block after that. The street fell on hard times during the 1950s and 1960s, the victim of “white flight” and the suburbanization that occurred following WWII. By the late 1970s, though, the neighborhood started coming back. Upscale residences started being built there again. Professionals began to move into the old family mansions.

In the fall of 2003, I had just purchased my first digital SLR camera. I was anxious to find something to shoot with it and happened to be in downtown Norfolk. So I parked the car and walked those familiar blocks of Freemason Street. The ginkgo leaves has just started falling and I knelt down and captured this low perspective shown above.

I don’t know if it was the composition, the color of the leaves or the thrill of seeing the photograph so fully realized on the computer screen later that day. It’s not a great picture. But it was and remains a favorite shot that gives me great satisfaction whenever I look at it.

Roper Residence, 2003

Our Mind's Best and Last Gift

Berkley, c. 1924

In the course of the decline of my mother’s health, I’ve learned some surprising things. The easiest thing to notice is the shortening of the attention span. This becomes evident when you start repeating stories just a few minutes after you last told them. Your children and the other people around you can become frustrated, even angry, about this. But over time they adjust and recognize that something’s going on with you, that maybe they have to keep a little closer watch on you. (And by all means, take away the car keys!)

My mother wasn’t always an easy person to be around. She carried the baggage of some tough personal history heavily. She was on a first-name basis with depression. She nursed grudges for decades. Her choices cost her comfort and relationships. But she marched on defiantly to the beat of her own drummer, searching for answers and explanations for her life.

Rather than these behaviors becoming more extreme as she aged, though, advancing senility washed a lot of the hostility away. An ever-shortening attention span narrowed her focus and memory. No longer the proudly independent and fiercely reclusive person that she was for much of her mid-life, dementia made my mother into the sweet little old lady that everyone at the assisted living facility liked to stop in and chat with. That she’s held onto her good looks made her a favorite among some of the older single guys at the facility who still have a few stirrings of romance.

My mother’s condition has recently declined seriously. She’s at the center of a perfect storm of adverse health conditions, any one of which could be fatal, but none of which has quite tipped her over yet. It’s really quite sad, especially because even the most humane approach to her treatment has the potential to be more arduous than a person of her age and condition should have to suffer.

But it turns out there’s something of a silver lining to this stage of life. I’m not an expert on these things. But I gather than senility gradually transitions into dementia. It’s not an insane thing, but rather a deterioration of cognitive capacity that makes thoughts bounce around the head like ping-pong balls rather than follow a logical path. Names come into conversation that you haven’t heard in years. She sees and has conversations with people who haven’t been alive for decades. Sometimes if you walk out of her room and then back into it a few minutes later, she’ll greet you as if she hasn’t seen you in ages.

This can be a little disconcerting the first few times you experience it. You can easily become frustrated that the important conversation you just had with her has just as quickly left her verbal mind. But over time I’ve come to recognize that dementia might just be our body’s last and best gift to us as we approach the end of life.

My mother’s dementia prevents her from feeling the cumulative weight of all she’s been through. She lives in the moment, and as long as she’s comfortable in the moment she has no fears about the future. When you’re preparing to leave her room she remembers the manners her mother taught her and thanks you for coming to visit.

In describing the way dementia is protecting his mother, a good friend writes:

“… she would certainly be severely depressed at her condition and prospects if she could think beyond the moment. I would never have thought such a thing was a blessing, but I do now.”

Amen.

I was not around in 1924 to take the confused picture shown above. (I suspect it was taken by my maternal grandfather, who would himself leave the scene not long thereafter.) It shows my grandmother with her three children and what may be her sisters and their children in front of her house in the Berkley section of Norfolk. The double (or triple) exposure seems a good metaphor for the slipping memory of old age.

None of the Comforts of Work

Unnamed Omaha Hotel, 2010

There was a story in yesterday’s New York Times about how hotels are tuning into the needs of business travelers. (Haven’t we heard all this before?) This time, the story says, they’re zeroing in on workspace.

In my experience, a few of the national chains have done a good job on desks, lighting and power supplies that make it easy for me to work in my hotel room. But they’re clustered at the upper end of the hotel market and are not always within my clients’ travel budgets.

I do a lot of writing in hotel rooms, so it’s important for me to have someplace where the desktop ergonomics work well.

I actually have a few beefs with hotel rooms. I have been known to check out of otherwise respectable places that didn’t seem to understand why anyone would want more than a 40 watt light bulb to read and work by.

Like many regular travelers, I’m also increasingly attuned to the hygiene of hotel rooms. No details needed there. I’ll leave a comment at Yelp in a flash, too, if a hotel promises in-room wi-fi and then doesn’t have it or only has it in the lobby.

The picture above demonstrates one of my biggest beefs with hotel rooms; namely, elevation. This is a respectable chain hotel near the Omaha airport. It’s clean and well kept. Its staff is friendly and attentive. But the people who fitted out this hotel seem to have believed that their business guests would all be six feet tall, or at least have elongated upper bodies.

Let’s just say I’m neither six feet tall nor do I have an elongated upper body.

I travel with a laptop. It’s thin. But even with its low profile, hotel room desktop surfaces are often too high above chair level to be accessible without creating a lot of arm and back pain.

And let’s not get me started on hotel desk chairs. The worst kind is the kind that teases you with the prospect of adjustability and then doesn’t work. I’ll endure a hard wooden chair if its seat is high enough for me to have my elbows at desktop level. But that’s only rarely the case.

The picture demonstrates my usual solution, which is to pile bed pillows onto the chair to lift me to the right level. I feel like the princess and the pea when I do this. Depending on the kind of pillows available, it can be a precarious perch. And after I’ve been resting my tush on them for a few hours in the chair they make for pretty flat bed pillows.

Oh, the travails we endure in the pursuit of a living!