Inspired Photo Blog

My mornings begin with a cursory glance at The Columbian ending with the horoscopes. Today’s words of wisdom rang with the resounding sound of truth.

You have vision and talent. In stolen moments, you dream of your destiny. Someone might say you can’t do it. That’s the first sign that your desire is worthy of you.”

Never mind that there are thousands of other readers with the same wisdom dappled into their lives, this one is mine and I’m owning it. This year is about change and about growth as an artist. That growth comes at a price and I keep reminding myself that we are never given more than we can handle.

Part of that growth comes from inspiration and for me, movies are a continual source of inspiration. Two years ago, I wrote a post called Cinematic Wisdom. In that post I wrote about the one line in every movie that gives you pause. From a movie I watched last night called Feast of Love comes this wisdom by Morgan Freeman’s character.

“Listen…we just gotta stay alert. Everything we need to know is going on right in front of our eyes. Yeah, we have our illusions about people, our hopes—and they can blind us. But the end is always right there in the beginning.”

Love, like art is a process. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Along that journey we find out about ourselves. What cinematic wisdom has inspired you?

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It’s not every year that you celebrate a milestone birthday. My dear friend James decided to celebrate 50 in his own unique way. (You may recall Mr. Bowman from this post and the movie 300 post). Not only was his birthday a personal milestone, it also happened in a leap year, so he may not be as old as you think. Depends on how you count birthdays when leap years are involved.

James celebrated with two parties. One in Oregon at the Lone Oak Farm (where he currently resides) and another in Seattle with his closest friends. I attended both parties and did my best to embarrass my friend in an appropriate fashion. The Seattle trip was especially fond as we both journeyed down memory lane with old friends that we haven’t seen in years and dined at our favorite restaurants.

As a quick aside for all you photographers. All of these images were taken with my trusty Canon PowerShot. On to the photographs. This is the lone oak from which the farm draws it’s name. It’s inspired much conversation and many hours of contemplation. Trees are a lot like people, just ask James and you’ll see trees in a new way.

James has a great laugh. Hearty and robust. It rises above the chatter in any room and instantly makes you smile. A laugh so warm and genuine that you will do anything to hear James laugh.

Having spent most of my life in Seattle, it’s always a mixture of feelings to be walking the streets again. Familiar smells, even the quality of light is different there. This is the corner of a building in Ballard that I captured while walking with friends.

There is peace in your soul in the company of friends. Anne and James have shared many years of memories with me. Our Seattle weekend started with breakfast at Vera’s. A little restaurant, tucked in the heart of Ballard, it’s one of the few things that haven’t been touched by change in Seattle. It’s nice when the day slows down enough to be in the moment with friends at place that’s exactly as you remembered.

Anne has become quite the cupcake connoisseur in the past few years. After breakfast, we walked across the street to Cupcake Royale for a sample of their award winning Lavendar cupcake. Typical Ballard sense of humor as seen in this sign. They also call their cupcake designers frostitutues. Think about it…

Anne was inspired to create her own red velvet cupcakes with a velvety meringue frosting while James and I sipped Irish Whiskey and laughed till our faces hurt.

Did I mention how great it is to hear James laugh?

Another aside…this is the only image that was NOT taken with my PowerShot. I was inspired with the quality of light streaming through the window of Anne’s townhouse and grabbed her Canon Rebel for my birthday portrait of James, au naturale (meaning no artificial light was used in the making of this portrait).

Happy Birthday James! It was great seeing old friends (Julie and Kevin, Tom, Anne, Steve and Suzanne, Pat and Linda) and share gourmet handmade pizza and lots and lots of wine and a tremendous backyard bonfire. My face and sides still hurt from all the laughter. We shared a rubbish pint of Guiness, but a very proper shot of Irish Whiskey. In the end we were left with great memories and the knowledge that this is what life is all about and the wisdom to do it over again.

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My first computer was a Macintosh Classic in 1990. There was no hard drive and the operating system was on a disc. To use a program such as a text editor, you had to eject the disc with the operating system and insert the disc with the program. A floppy dance, swapping them back and forth. I remember buying a 40MB hard external hard drive and thinking I would never fill it.

I still use Macs to this day and while there were some very dark days for Apple in the 1990’s, it’s great to see them back on top. With this success comes a new generation of users and software applications being developed at a record pace. The choices are endless and nothing makes smile more than a new piece of software that makes my life easier.

Thanks to JP at ShutterMonkey (a recent Mac convert) for bringing this time saver to my attention. 1 Password will remember all your username and password combinations for web sites and even keep a secure wallet with your credit card information. Need to fill out a form? It will do that too based on an identity that you create. Best of all, it will even generate unique, strong passwords for you and remember those as well. It’s well documented that with so many sites requiring unique login information that people are using the same password for everything. This is a very dangerous! Within my first week of using this software, I created over 20 new combinations for sites that I frequent daily. One password is all you need!

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