France Day 1 — Paris

May 13, 2013May 12, 2013 Timothy Price7 Comments

We didn’t sleep a wink on the flight from Salt Lake City to Paris, so if parts of today’s blog doesn’t make sense, it’s because I haven’t slept in in past 40 hours. I don’t think many did by the number of monitors of at around 5:00 am. There was darkness then cloud cover over the Atlantic and England, but the clouds started to breakup along France’s shoreline, and the there was green and yellow farmland up to and surrounding the airport.

Our plane landed about 20 minutes early, but we ended up getting off the plane about 45 minutes later because there was a problem at our gate, so the tower sent our plane to back to the remote unloading area, but then either solved the problem at the original gate or got us another gate close the the original, because the pilot taxied the lane across the the airport again before docking the plane and allowing us to get off. So we were among the late arrivals.

The class met outside the Hotel at 2:30 and we all followed our professor as he lead us on our way to lunch. When we got to the spot where the restaurant used to be, it wasn’t there, a gift/luggage shop was in its place, so we headed for a Greek, Gyros place for lunch/dinner.

After we ate we headed to the Eiffel Tower, via the long RER and Metro route. Part of the long route was metro seasoning for the students, but it also put us out at the top of the park, with a full view of the tower. It’s impressive, but the really fun part of photographing the Eiffel Tower is photographing other tourists photographing each other doing silly things in front of the Eiffel Tower. Most of us climbed the stairs up to the 2nd level of the tower, but the had the top closed because of wind when we got the tickets to climb the stairs, so no one in the class got the the top.

Before we climbed the steps, the professor gave each student a metro ticket and left us — our assignment was to make it back to the hotel without his help either by ourselves or in groups.

Somewhere Over the Middle of Nowhere

May 12, 2013May 11, 2013 Timothy Price2 Comments

“Oh I am on my way I know am!” To someplace far away from here! We are somewhere over the middle of nowhere — we are on our way.

Fly, Fly Away

May 11, 2013 Timothy Price2 Comments

We’re leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when we’ll be back again. Well, we’ll be back sometime. With being in the air for around 14 hours, I might actually end up missing a day on the blog — c’est la vie!

Kitties and Cameras

May 10, 2013 Timothy Price6 Comments

Every morning I have to extricate myself from a clowder of cats and this morning they were wanting me to stay in bed with them. I think they can sense that something is up with all our preparations to leave for France on Saturday, because they have been clinging to us a little more the past few days. Another glass got broken this morning, and it ended up looking pretty artsy. We really like the large stemware, but they have a way of making their way to the edges of counters and tables where we tend to brush by and knock them off.

Speaking of France, I have had several inquires about what photo equipment I’m taking to France. The last two photos show the lineup of bodies and lenses, sans my Fuji X-Pro1 which I used to take the photos. The two Canon 1Ds bodies, the 17-40mm ƒ/4 and 70-200mm ƒ/4 zoom lenses, the 50mm ƒ/1.4 and 40mm ƒ/2.8 lenses, plus extra batteries may seem like a lot to carry, but they are not, really. I’ve been carrying one body, either a 5D or a 1Ds, the two zoom lenses, the 50mm lens and an extra battery with me everyday for the past 6 months in my laptop/camera messenger bag (not shown). The last photo shows how the cameras and lenses all fit nicely into my Lowepro Passport Sling Camera bag that I’ve had for a couple of years now. The Lowepro Passport is a compact, yet roomy bag that is really comfortable to carry. The zoom lenses give me a range from super-wide angle to telephoto, and the 50mm gives me a “fast” normal lens. The 40mm lens is a compact lens, and while not a true macro lens, it focuses close enough to allow me to crop to near macro levels, allowing me to leave my much larger 100mm macro lens at home.

Must Ask You To Leave

May 9, 2013 Timothy Price1 Comment

I had to meet a guy at a call center, and while I was waiting I noticed the Sandias reflecting on the building were nicely cubist, so I snapped a photo. I waited almost 10 minutes after I took the photo for the person I was meeting to show up. Soon after he came out, a security guard came walking up from the other direction and when he got up to where we were standing, he told me “Photographing the building is not allowed. I must ask you to leave!” The person I was meeting with said “Oh! Really? I didn’t know that!” I left right after that, but I find these supposed “no photographing buildings” policies to be very strange — when I looked up the address on Google maps, there was a nice, extremely clear satellite image of the building, and “street view” images of the building. When I got home, I looked up Google Images using the address and found a lot of photographs of the building that were taken on the property, as well. Despite what the guard told me, photographing the building is very much allowed, because there are images of it all over the Internet.

Morning Dust

May 8, 2013 Timothy Price1 Comment

This is the week we have water in the irrigation ditch, so I went out at 2:30 am and let the water in. I barely got everything watered before it got taken upstream at 8:30 am. When I went out to check on the water at sunrise, the cottonwoods were casting shadows on the dust hanging over the ditch bank, and the backlighting on the dried Brown Eyed Susans and Harry Lauder Walking Stick was quite nice.

Party Bus

May 7, 2013 Timothy Price3 Comments

We were talking about bus conversions during lunch on Sunday, and the discussion turned to converting double decker buses into RVs. There was a double decker bus converted into a party bus parked on 6th Street on the way home yesterday afternoon.

The Trouble With Bras

May 6, 2013 Timothy Price28 Comments

The only aisle that is a straight shot from household goods to groceries in Walmart runs right through the bras. For as much as people complain about Walmart, they are good at merchandising, because I have never seen a woman walk past the bras on her way to household or groceries and not stop and at least flip through the large variety of brightly colored, multi-patterned bras hanging on the displays. If she decides to try on a few, and she happens to have a man in tow, he will slowly die of hunger and thirst waiting for his lovely gal to find a bra that fits just right.

Since l was done with the grocery shopping and there was nothing else I needed or wanted to look for, I sat on the wire bench outside the fitting rooms while I waited for Laurie. While fidgeting around trying to get comfortable, I started thinking about how suicide bombers believe they get 72 virgins after they blow themselves to hell. “Hmmm!” I thought to myself, what if they actually got condemned to shopping for bras with their 72 virgins for eternity? Now that would be hell! Think about it, sitting on an uncomfortable bench watching his 72 virgins all lined to get into the fitting room, each with a half a dozen bras in their hands. One by one they would come out and explain to him in detail why each bra didn’t fit quite right — “The cups fit on this one, but the straps dug into the fat! This one bloops out unless I stand up really straight and stick my chest out… this one’s underwire poked me, and this one…” And she’s off to grab another handful of bras to try on. While he’s waiting for his next virgin to give him the run down on the inadequacies of the load of bras she hauled into the fitting room, he has the rather round and tired old lady who’s at the end of her shift that never comes to keep him company. She’s nice enough, but he’s not enjoying fantasizing about what she would look like in her underwear. Another virgin interrupts his fantasy to describe her delicate dilemmas with the colorful display of cups and straps she’s dangling in his face — “This one doesn’t….”

Hey Jude

May 5, 2013 Timothy Price6 Comments

On my way to class on Friday, the young man with the guitar was sitting alone playing and singing at the to of his lungs, and not very well. As I walked by after class, the blonde with the harmonica had joined him in performing a horrible rendition of “Hey Jude” (to be fair, only the singing was really bad, but not terribly objectionable for some reason). They were so involved in the song they didn’t noticed that I had stopped to photograph them, and they were doing the song so badly, they bordered on performance art. As I continued on my way, the guitarist started singing “nah nah nah nana nah nah…” so off key, and out of compas, that I burst out laughing and laughed all the way back to the office.

I took a load of trash to the dump today. I left early and got up to the entrance I’d always turned into and there were no other cars. “Nice!” I thought to myself. As I drove up to the building to pay, the attendant came out and said “The dump entrance is up the road before the light — this is recycling.” He told me to drive straight ahead and follow the road around. I followed the road through about twenty people eagerly waiting for stuff to recycle — they looked disappointed when I drove on by. I got back out on the main road, drove up toward the light, and found a long line of trucks waiting to get into the landfill. Forty-five minutes later I discovered I was in the line for the scale, but I couldn’t change lanes, so I drove onto the scale, walked up to the window and told the attendant that I didn’t need to be weighed. She said “that’s okay, but the people behind you will be mad when they see you turn the other way!” She asked for my license plate number, my proof of residence in Corrales, and driver’s license, then when I went to give her a $5 bill to pay the $4.75 fee, she told me it was a “free day!” “So that accounts for the long line of trucks them?” I asked. She nodded “Yep!” and told me the line would probably go down to the roundabout by noon. If I’d known it was a “free day” I wouldn’t have gone. I would have preferred to pay $4.75 to dump the trash then spend an extra 45 minutes waiting in line to dump the trash. I took the photo of the Sandias on the way home from the dump.