Plaza de San Francisco de Asis
Havana, Cuba
December 28, 2006

I’m posting another photo from Cuba as a little diversion from reading about airplane engines for my ground school class tomorrow night. This is the busiest time of the week for me: reading for class on Wednesday, work, race home, straight to class, three-hour class, arrive home late (11:30ish), work, therapy group, and then TGI FRIDAY.

Finding time to eat is a bit of a challenge, so sometimes I eat in the car. Thursday nights don’t require prep but they’re a heavy two hours. By the time Friday rolls around I’m so grateful for the weekend! It reminds me of when I was a full-time student in addition to my full-time job (2001-2004) — eating habits slid downhill, sleep became precious. I’m not afraid of hard work — in fact, I usually relish it — but it does tend to take a toll on such things as healthy eating habits and enjoyable pastimes. It takes more effort to strike a balance.

One reason why I enjoy photography so much is because it naturally slows me down. Take for instance this photo, which I took one windy evening. The clouds were moving very quickly, obscuring the moon in an eerie way. I wanted as much cloud as possible, but of course no-one has any control over that. It’s a waiting game, a timing game, but more often than not it’s luck and a practised shutter-button finger. In the “old days” of film it meant bracketing and crossing fingers and toes that at least one of them turned out, but it was an unknown quantity until the roll came back from the lab. By then, of course, it was far too late to reshoot. The digital age has reduced the need for educated guesswork with more sophisticated chip sensors and image editing software, but the goal is always to capture the picture in-camera as you see it with your own eyes.

Photography is an exercise in patience and persistence. I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for birds to make up their minds whether to take off or not, how many photos of the kidlets I’ve taken before I settled on one expression, how many clouds I waited to pass across the sky to achieve the highest brightness and longest shadows, the number of intersection lights to turn green so I could shoot car headlights in motion blur, the aerial shots I wasted trying to focus through a spotty airplane window, and oh boy, the many shots I missed entirely because I couldn’t change the batteries fast enough or I filled up the memory card to capacity with lots of dud pictures!

When I think of how many shots I discard, keep, try to fix, and eventually upload the ratio is something like 10:1 or worse. In film terms, that would make photography a prohibitively expensive hobby. I’m glad I belong to a generation when I can remember film as the norm and appreciate digital for what it’s been able to afford me: practise. I can continue to learn without breaking the bank. It couldn’t come at a better time, really, because flight instruction has become more costly than ever before!

Speaking of which, I should get back to reading about engines…