I’m sometimes asked what I do with myself now that I’m no longer working. I’m many ways today was a fairly typical day for me. In a couple it was not so typical. So here’s my day:

What was typical

Woke up around 8:00 am. It was snowing (not so typical) – the first snow this year. Went out to pick up the paper and then took out the camera and went outside and took a few pictures. Came back in and processed them. This took me to about 9:00 am.

Browsed around on the internet e.g. looking for old cameras to purchase. From time to time I bump into one that I don’t know much about so I spend some time digging up additional information. Now it’s nearly 10:00 am

10:00 am. My wife comes down. She stays up late and sleeps late. I too stay up late but I tend to wake up early. We have coffee and breakfast. I continue to browse around on the internet while she reads the New York Times and reads portions to me while she has breakfast (I don’t typically have breakfast). This is one of my favourite parts of the day.

Now it’s nearly time for lunch. I like to cook and so do most of the cooking – it’s only fair since Eirah did the cooking, most of the child rearing, driving etc. while working full time for the first 30 or so years of our life together. I prepare lunch: homemade pumpkin soup with oat bread I’d made a couple of days ago. Followed by pork and spinach dumplings. By the time I’m finished and we’ve eaten lunch it’s around 2:00pm.

It’s time to update my blog. Eight posts later and it’s almost 4:00 pm. Time to start thinking about dinner. I’ll be meeting up in the city tomorrow with an old friend from Geneva days, Brian Kelleher.

So I decide to make dinner not just for tonight, but also for tomorrow. I found some other stuff in the freezer so I decided to make an additional dish. I’m making my take on Kung Pao pork for tonight; Pork and Chicken Adobo (a classic dish from the Philippines) and Spaghetti Bolognese. This way when I’m out tomorrow my wife won’t need to make dinner.

Around 5:00 pm Eirah leaves for her almost daily dance/exercise class. I continue cooking.

6:00 pm. Still cooking. Time to feed our dog, Jackson while I listen to music – the soundtrack to the movie Local Hero.

7:15 pm. Writing this post. Two of my dishes still simmering. I’m now listening to Mahler’s eighth symphony. I have 30 minutes before I make the final dish so we can have dinner when Eirah returns from her dance/exercise class around 8:15pm.

7:45 pm. Cutting up peppers, mincing ginger, cutting up garlic, making rice. Still listening to Mahler while I browse photo.net and rangefinderforum.com.

8:12 pm. Eirah returns. Time for dinner. Still listening to Mahler.

9:00 pm. Dinner over. Washing up done. I refuse to watch TV before 10:00pm so some time to relax listening to some music. Vladimir Horowitz. Legendary RCA Recordings.

10:00-midnight. Watching something mindless on TV.

Midnight. Time for bed. A bit early for me so I’ll probably read for a while.

What’s not so typical about today

I didn’t get out as much as I usually do. Normally I like to spend some time taking pictures, but apart from the relatively few snow pictures (taken on our patio and in the garden) I didn’t leave the house today As I mentioned it had snowed. There wasn’t a lot of snow, but it was a grey, gloomy day and I felt like sitting around in the house watching the lake.

I didn’t take Jackson for a walk. I like to take him for a walk of at least one hour per day. He’s an active terrier and he needs the exercise and so do I. By the time I’ve taken him somewhere, done the walk, and returned home usually about two hours has gone by. He’s sitting here at the moment looking at me as if I’ve betrayed him. I’ve noticed that dogs have a wider variety of expressions than cats. Our cat seems to have two expressions: normal and angry. Jackson can look happy, sad, puzzled, excited and show a number of other emotions. I’m not clear how he does it.

I usually decide what I want to cook and then go out and get the ingredients. This can take more and hour or two since none of the supermarkets are close by. Today, however, I had the stuff I needed so I didn’t need to go out.

This was certainly not typical. I cut up about seven Szechuan peppers for my Kung Pao like pork. At the time I thought that I must remember to wash my hands. Of course I forgot and then rubbed my eyes. Not a pleasant experience. I don’t recommend it. After much flushing with water and liberal application of eye drops I’m fine now although my left eye still hurts a bit.

So all in all a quiet, but busy day. When I stopped working I was afraid that I wouldn’t know what to do with my time. It’s turned out to be quite the opposite. The days go by so quickly that I wonder where the time goes. Do I miss the work? No. Do I miss the people at work? Yes (at least some of them), which is why I go into the city every few weeks to have lunch/drinks with some of them.

So that’s a fairly typical day for me. It’s supposed to be sunny tomorrow so hopefully I’ll be able to get out and take some pictures before going into the city to meet Brian.

Church of St. Trophime, Arles

A lot of pictures on this site are black and white. My niece recently commented on some black and white family pictures: “Black and white ones are so cool!” In response my wife replied: “They do have an interesting quality but I prefer colored ones. H (that’s me) loves b/w photos”. So why so many black and whites?

First it’s not that I have anything against color. I’ve seen many exceptional color photographs. It’s just that I’m not very good with color. It seems to be so simple. Everything around us is in color so we should be taking color pictures. Right? I think that the problem is that while all around us is color, much of it is mundane. To me a good color photograph is one where color plays a major role. The color makes the picture rather than just being there. I’m not very good with color theory so I don’t understand well enough, which colors when combined together will achieve the maximum effect. I thought maybe reading up on color theory might help so I bought this book. I could barely understand much of it. We recently had a water leak in our house and this book was destroyed. I won’t miss it. I’ll keep trying though. Maybe over time I’ll get better. From time to time I get a decent color pictures – more by luck than judgement though.

Second, and linked to the first, I tend to see tones rather than colors. Take a color photograph. Convert it to black and white. I’ve read that if it doesn’t lose much then it wasn’t a very good color photograph to begin with. An example:

In the above pictures the black white conversion doesn’t really work. The color contributes too much to the image. Take it away and the picture doesn’t work as well. Or maybe I just didn’t do a very good black and white conversion….On the other hand I have from time to time “rescued” a mediocre/poor color photo by converting it to black and white.

It’s often said that light is the most important element in creating a good photograph. I think this is true, and it’s particularly true of color photographs, perhaps even more than for black and white. it’s also often said that the best light is early in the morning or early in the evening. I’m usually too lazy to get up in the mornings and I’m usually too busy early in the evening. So I tend to miss the really good light and don’t tend to get good color pictures.

I’m of an age (61) where “classy” photography was always in black and white. Many of the great photographers photographed in black and white. I was also influenced by movies in black and white (even though I suppose most of them were already in color at that time). My earliest experience of movies was of being taken to see “Batman” serials. They were in black and white. Later I would watch old movies late at night. They too were in black and white. So I suppose black and white kind of went into my psyche.

If I like black and white so much why don’t I just shoot black and white film? I’ve never developed my own film so I would have to get it processed somewhere and and such places are getting harder and harder to find and more and more expensive. Although I enjoy occasional film photography I also like the convenience of digital and the control I can get in digital processing. Maybe if I could get into developing my own film I’d shoot more and more black and white film. One day…

My wife got it right when she said “H loves b/w photos”.