View from the Mountain

Memories That Weave Our Stories

In my book, The Road to My Country, I wrote the following.

In some ways, memories are like small towns along a highway. You're in the dark until all of sudden, you round a corner onto Main Street, where the memories are waiting for you like the inviting lights in a late-night diner.

I have been fascinated by memories since I took a communications course at Harvard in the late sixties.  In the class I did some experiments about photos triggering memories.  I knew going in that a photo which was recognizable to someone present when it was taken would bring back distinct memories for each person.  What I tried to explore was how some photos might trigger different memories in people not present when the photo was taken.

My simple paper did not reach a momentous conclusion, but a few decades of looking at photos have convinced me that photos are powerful triggers to memories and in some cases the photo becomes the memory.  Sometimes it is hard to tell which has more relevance the memory or the photo which has becomes the tangible representation of a memory and sometimes even creates a memory where time has erased the first memory.

My friends might find this hard to believe but I wish that I taken more pictures over my life.  I have lots of memories but some special ones have no pictures to substantiate them. Sometimes I wonder if I need to try especially hard to burn those memories into my subconscious so that they will not fade away.  Often my first effort is to do that with writing.   It would have been great if digital cameras had been invented a few decades earlier, but we cannot change history.  Old fashioned photos and slides were expensive and often you could take a roll of film and not get the shot you wanted.  Polaroid cameras were great for getting the shot you wanted but even more expensive and the photos themselves fade over time.  However, digital ink is inexpensive.

Memories can be attached to dates, places, people, animals, organizations and objects that are part of our lives.  Today is a cold March 20, the first day of spring.  My mother died on a cold first day of spring twelve years ago.   Thinking of my mother brings back lots of memories but this being a cold spring day by the water, the first memory is the time she took my friend Mike and me fishing on a snowy first spring day.  We caught some fish, brought them home, cleaned them and cooked them.

The other day my wife decided to give our windmill palm a trimming.  I was amazed at how much it has grown. It is an impressive palm as you can see by this picture.  I searched my archive of thousands of pictures until I found one taken eight years ago when the palm was first given to me as a birthday present by daughter and her partner.  The windmill palm is a living birthday present that will always have a happy place in my memory.

Last year I had to retire the kayak that I bought the first fall we moved to the coast.  It was a great kayak but it developed a leak.  I liked the kayak so much that I went through some heroic efforts to stop the leaks.  Unfortunately it must have scratched one too many oyster rocks because the leaks continued.  A picture of that blue Wilderness Pungo kayak on our bulkhead always makes me remember the first over 20 inch red drum that I caught.  I even wrote up the story of the catching the drum.  It was one of those kayak trips where fishing was an afterthought and I had left my net and stringer at the dock.  That would be the time that I would hook the drum of my dreams, but I still managed to land the drum and get the fish safely back to the dock.

The picture at the top of this post is one of my favorites and the memories just swell up when I see it.  I have been in love the beach for many years and this particular picture which I have used in another post, Enjoying the South & Our Beaches, makes me remember those specific days when my granddaughter and her mother each found the right moment to fall in love with our beaches.  I hope their pictures will have as many memories attached to them as mine do.

So if you ever call and my wife says that I am playing with my pictures, you will know the truth.  I am actually refreshing my memories.

Our Disappearing Photographic History

Update (November 2019) It is hard to write a technology article about photos without having to come back and update it.

In the last year, I have become more reliant on Google Photos. Part of me worries about being reliant on a free Google product that can disappear, but it cannot be much worse than the multiple disappearances of photos that I have faced with Apple's history of failure on web storage of photos. On top of that I have multiple Apple photo databases that are becoming harder and harder to access.

All of my Picasa photos are still safely in Google photos.  While the URLs changed, the photos are all there. Also editing photos in your browser with Google photos has gotten much better. Google photo editing is good enough for 95% of my photos.

While photos that I take with my Google Pixel 2XL go straight to Google photos, I still import all camera photos using Adobe's Lightroom.  I save selected ones to Microsoft's OneDrive that often includes some that I have downloaded from Google Photos. I am agnostic as to whether I import the photos on a Mac or a Windows machine.  However, if I am downloading from Google photos, I prefer to do it on a Windows 10 machine.  Windows has evolved to have some very simple photo tools that make it very easy to resize or manipulate a downloaded photo. As far as I am concerned there is nothing in Apple's photo tools even worth considering. I use two Panasonic Lumix cameras which have very effective wireless modes that allow me to take selected photos directly to my phone which sends them automatically to Google photos.

The article below was written in 2016.  I no longer use Picasa but I do miss it. I also no longer use AirDroid.  Google moves the photos seamlessly from my phone to the web where I can choose what I want to do with the photos.

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While Apple will likely disagree with me and there is nothing new in that (See Applepeels), your iPhone is likely eating your photos. Before you get too upset, things are only slightly better in the Android world.  Please do not expect Facebook to rescue your favorite photos either.

Long ago people took photos, got prints from them and sometimes put the best of them in albums.  The rest went into shoe boxes or whatever.  People also took slides and they also often ended up in boxes on a shelf in a closet.  As hard as it might have been, you could thumb through them.

Our problem in the digital world is that we are drowning in photographs. There is lots of sharing of photographs going on but almost no archiving.  Sometimes people worry about getting their photos off of their phones onto their computers and even once in a while, someone will worry about migrating their photos to another computer.

Even if you do that, how do you put your fingers on that great photo you took ten years ago or thirty years ago?  Trust me, the more pictures you take, the harder it is unless you sort your photos as you take them and have a plan for storing the best of them.

The great value in having photos in not in having so many but in having some special ones that evoke wonderful memories.

Three years ago I wrote an article,  Photo Finishing Your Memories Old and New.  It offered some tips to keep from losing your photos.  I stand by my advice to not trust Apple with your photos.  They have never been a reliable cloud storage company and their desktop apps have always stored photos in proprietary formats. 

The biggest problem with Apple's photo strategy is they assume you want the same photos on all your devices and of course they have to be Apple devices.  Your data, that is your photos, needs to be independent of your devices.  You need a shoe box where you can put the ones you want to remember and grab something whenever you want to.  Web albums that you can edit from the web and can accept photos from any device are a much better idea than having changes that you make on your phone show up on your desktop and laptop.

I have also found Apple's new Photo app very limited as to its utility. (I might have to change this recommendation based on Google's recent announcement that they are abandoning Picasa)  I continue to recommend Picasa which is available on Mac or Windows machines. Picasa's one great advantage is that is doesn't cram the photos into a database that will likely get corrupt over time.  It is very easy to suck your photos into Picasa and it is free.  When you install Picasa on a hard drive, Picasa creates pointers to your photos automatically. If you need more than Picasa, the only game in town is Lightroom. 

I use a Mac much of the time, but it is just not the heart of my digital world like it used to be.

Because I take so many photos, I typically sort through each day's photos during the same day.  Photos that I like usually get a descriptive name and are exported to a folder in the Google cloud that has the day's date as its name. 

From that folder, I can share it to Facebook, Pinterest, or upload it to my Flickr account.  I also put photos into that folder from multiple programs. Sometimes I make albums directly from Picasa to Picasa web albums. 

Another part of my filtering process is that I will normally star a photo in Picasa if I like it and I will make some a favorite in Lightroom. That lets me have access to special photos in a non-date related storage.  Think of it of having two different catalog systems that have slightly different ways of letting me find my photos.  

While I use Picasa to import photos to my laptop, I also use Lightroom to import the same photos to my desktop. Immediately that gives me two copies of my photos. There is a copy of Picasa running on the desktop and it automatically catalogs the photos that I import with Lightroom. I also move photos that I like from my phone to my computer.  I try to do it the same day I take the picture. The program I like best for moving photos to computer from my phone is AirDroid.

I have also taken the time to put together collections of photos that I enjoy.  Some of those collections I host on the web myself and others I entrust to Google in Picasa web albums which are very easy to share even if the photos are over forty years old like these ones were taken in Nova Scotia in the seventies.

The one piece of advice that you need to take seriously is do not expect that you will ever have the time to sort through all your photos.  Force yourself to start working on picking out your favorite photos now.

A few years ago I did a Kindle picture book, 100 Pictures, 1000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year.  I took 40,000 pictures that year.  It was a monumental challenge to decide which 100 pictures from the year I liked the best. Doing great pictures on a Kindle is not particularly easy either (See How to share a place you love- Going Beyond a Blog section).  If I had not been sorting them along the way, it would have been an impossible challenge.

Great pictures are worth saving, they need to be someplace better than on your phone or the hard drive of your computer. Take the time to start sorting and archiving.  Someday someone will enjoy some of your special photos and be very pleased that you did.

The Picture

Our lives seem to be on a treadmill.  Often just when we need to slow down, there is enormous pressure to speed up.

There will be few people who recognize the picture featured in this post. It is actually my great grandfather and grandmother from my mother's side of the family. I am guessing the picture was taken between 1900 and 1917.  I am actually using it to represent another picture from a much more modern time.  The newer picture has an interesting story and unfortunately my digital copy of it is buried on a computer that I have in storage.

First a little history will set the stage. In 1987 our family moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Columbia, Maryland.  I was working for Apple and our Columbia based team was part of the Southern Operations group.   That fall we had one of the many meetings which seem to define our life at Apple.  At the time Apple had a very large distribution center in Charlotte, North Carolina and our sales group was also based there.  Our meeting was in Williamsburg, Virginia and our director arranged for a picture to be taken of the whole group of well over one hundred people.  The picture ended up in the Charlotte sales office.

Though I had been at Apple for three years, moving to the states taught me a quick lesson in working in corporations.  When you move, you sometimes have to start all over again.  That was certainly to be my experience over and over at Apple.  Any new job meant that you had to prove yourself once again.  In 1987, I had gone from being one of the top sales reps in Canada to just another sales rep face in the crowd.

Five or six years later I become a manager at Apple.  If you are a keen Apple historian, you probably know that the nineties were a very interesting time at Apple.  The company was pulling the rug out from under its own feet, and sometimes it was hard to tell where first base was much less who was on it.

As soon as I was promoted, I quickly moved my team from Columbia to the Reston, Virginia office.  Being the low dog on the totem pole in that office, I was forced to share a cubicle with my area associate.  The building housed something over 75 people focused on Apple's federal business.  I did not mind sharing with my area associate since I spent much of time on the road visiting higher education customers who were spread from Pennsylvania to North Carolina.  Roanoke, Virginia which became our home happened to be much closer to the geographic center of my customers than Reston.

Within the first year of moving to Reston, Apple closed the Columbia office and almost all of those folks disappeared.  Next the Charlotte distribution center was closed much to the chagrin of our customers who loved the job that the Charlotte folks did.  Not much over a year after my manager hired me, he lost his job and I ended up reporting to an office in Philadelphia.  About a year after that I was the last manager standing in the North Carolina area and was given the job of closing down the Charlotte office.

As we were disposing of things I came upon the picture that was taken that first fall in Williamsburg.  Almost all the managers in the picture and a great many of the people were no longer at Apple.  The picture was in a pile that was slated to carted off to the trash bins.  It was a large picture and I knew that I would get in trouble with my wife, but I hauled it home.  The picture still meant something to me and I hoped that I could find a proper home for it. 

If you fast forward a couple of years, I am no longer in charge of a higher education district but I have been given an enterprise district based in Reston, Virginia and it has the remnants of Apple's federal team which is down to one person.  I am now in a stronger position so I take the picture to the Reston office and we find a spot to hang it though few people other than me in the office know anyone in the picture.

Fast forward another few years to 2002 or so, I am now the manager in charge of the Reston facility and we are building another federal team.  The picture is on the wall but Apple decides to renovate the office space.  I am worried that the picture which even fewer people can relate to will get thrown away.  I take it back to Roanoke, Virginia where it stays tucked behind a filing cabinet.

In 2012, I have been gone from Apple for eight years.  As we are moving from Roanoke and cleaning out the house, the picture once again surfaces.  This time I am determined to find it a home. No one in my family knows anyone in the picture besides me and I am hard to find.  It does not take me long to find the one person in the picture still working at Apple and within driving distance of our home.  I call him up and arrange to have lunch with him and convince him to take the picture home with him.  What will happen to the picture when he has to clean out his office is something I cannot let enter my mind.  I have done the best that I can to honor the picture and the good memories that are attached to it.  Apple never placed any value on it and actually fired or laid off almost everyone in the picture.  Did I honor the picture by hanging onto it for twenty years even though much of the time it was not hanging on a wall?  I like to think being behind my filing cabinet was better than ending up in a garbage dump.

It occurs to me that as a society we are singularly unskilled at preserving information about items that might have great sentimental value with just a little context.  When we were cleaning our house out, we were also going through photos that we had inherited from my mother.  There were many that no living relative could identify.  I certainly could not put a name on them.  Other than a handful that I saved for artistic value, we threw all of them away.  I wish that the pictures had been labeled.

Our children have asked their mother to write down where many family items originated.  We are working on that slowly.  We are fortunate to have at least one young adult in the family who is very organized and loves to structure information and things.

When I was at Apple after my area associate had been with me for a number of years, she became the historian of things in our Reston office.  Once Apple decided that they no longer needed her, I am certain that the knowledge that she had amassed disappeared.  Corporations rarely care about their own history and institutions often do not take the time or make it a priority for people to write down things which might help others understand the significance of things like the picture that I protected for nearly two decades.

I have worked hard over the last few years, scanning pictures and documents and labelling them when necessary.  I have also taken a number of pictures of important family items.  On top of that I have written three books which have pictures of many of those same items and the people who are important to our family.  The books will have great value to our family without ever coming close to being best sellers. Our family's story can be passed down from generation to generation as well as I could piece it together.

Perhaps graduating with a focus in history has made history important to me, but I worry that much of what we have as a society is losing value because the only ones who understand the true meaning of these things are dying off. There is so little effort to write down the important things that our elders know  and which will disappear with them when they are gone. 

Without a massive change which I do not see on the horizon, this is where our society is headed. We will be throwing things away that might well have helped to define us and explain why we are who we are.  If we took the time we spend on Facebook or sending text messages, we could easily add a wealth of knowledge from the generation that will gone in the blink of an eye.

We all need to look around and see what is hanging on the walls. There are stories to be recorded and memories to be saved if we will only take the time.

The Canon SX50 HS - A Great All Around Camera

 

Canon Powershot SX50 HS

My experience with exceptional cameras goes back to the Nikon F1 that I started using in 1969 when a college roommate and I headed off to Alaska.

Cameras have come a long way since then and some would argue that smartphone cameras are quickly on the way to replacing cameras.

Then there are those of us who believe the camera in your hand does matter if you are seeking to capture a memorable image.  You can bombard me with all the advertisements that you want but you will not convince me that the photographs that we will remember twenty years from now will all come from smartphones.  There will be some but there are times when having a real camera matters.

About sixteen months ago, I wrote an article, The Nikon Coolpix P500, My Favorite Beach Camera.  In March of 2013, after fourteen months of stellar service, my Nikon Coolpix P500 moved into the status of backup camera.

I made the decision to switch cameras because I was missing a lot of shots.  The Nikon Coolpix could not focus fast enough to catch many of the birds that I chase during the winter months. I tried switching to my Nikon D3100 but I could not afford a telephoto lens to match the 36X zoom power of the Coolpix. Even if I could have come up with the money, it would have weighted far too much for the type of hiking that I do.

I came very close to ordering a Nikon Coolpix P520 but after reading several reviews, I chose to go with a Canon SX50 HS.  There were a couple of factors but the two most important ones were the speed of focusing and the ability to take raw images.  The battery life is also much better with the Canon. On hikes of four to five miles, I often ran out of juice on my Coolpix

While I am still learning some of the features of the Canon, it has been a fairly easy transition.  About the only time that I really feel the need for my DSLR is when I want to take ocean wave pictures.

The 50X zoom on the Canon is amazing and I find that the image stabilization is very good.  The camera is light weight, turns on quickly, and has enough custom settings to please me.  I have not tried the video extensively but I have a video camera which I am more likely to use for video anyway.  One feature that I love on the Canon is the silent mode for the camera.  While many of the large egrets that I photograph seemed to hear the sound of the shutter in my Nikon Coolpix, the Canon in silent mode goes unnoticed.

The Canon lacks the GPS capability of the Nikon P520 but I have found a very satisfactory substitute through using MyTracks on my Android phone. I am able to import to the GPX file into Lightroom and sync the GPS data with my photos.  It is a simple and elegant solution which avoids waiting for a camera to acquire a GPS signal.  The GIS data in this album of a hike at the Point on Emerald Isle came from MyTracks on my LG Spectrum photo.  The photos are from my Canon Powershot SX50 HS.

Unless I have made a mistake and one of the images from another of my cameras slipped in, I believe all the pictures in this album were taken my Canon SX50 HS.  The Canon also does an exceptional job on landscape pictures.  I offer up this image of the Edenton, NC waterfront.

If you need a versatile camera that is light weight, quickly focuses, takes great pictures, and has an unbelievable zoom ability, take a close look at the Canon SX50 HS. 

I have been a Nikon user for over forty years and this camera is one of the best that I have ever used.  I paid only $389 for the camera. It is a fantastic camera for the money.

The camera was well worth the money and I think the shots that I got from it were welcome additions to our book, A Week at the Beach- The Emerald Isle Travel Guide. In our latest Kindle addition I sized the photos for optimal viewing on the latest tablets.  The rich colors of the Canon and quick focusing are hard to beat in a camera in this price range.

A Life with Meaning

There comes a time in most people's lives when if they are lucky, they try to do what they want to do instead of what they have to do.

Often for people today doing what they want to do might not be playing golf everyday, it might be working at a job they enjoy instead of one they dread each morning. It also might mean working at a job that pays less but allows them to live somewhere that they love.

Maybe they are willing to give up vacations and fancy meals out to be near family or in place where family and friends love to visit.

Nearly ten years ago I got to the point that I was tired of living in a world where the older you are, the less-likely it is that people take you seriously.  In many large high tech companies, if you are over fifty-five, no matter how good you are at your job, there is a perception that it is impossible for you to stay on top of the technology.

I know a number of older people who care nothing for computers, but I also know some very technologically literate older people.  However, those of us old folks who live and breath technology are not going to change the minds of the young who already know everything.  My solution ten years ago was to move on to a new career or perhaps more realistically a new portfolio of jobs. I have never looked back and certainly do not regret the decision.

While it took some time, I found a smaller tech company with senior leadership that respects my abilities.  I also write books, take pictures, and sometimes do other freelance jobs.  I have chosen to do all of these things in an area, North Carolina's Crystal Coast, that nourishes my spirit.

I love the water and live to be out on it. there are few if any places with more choice as to how to enjoy the water. As I continue to work hard, I have made a conscious effort to do my job in a way that lets me enjoy where I live and the people around me.

My wife of over forty years continues to be a source of great support and a terrific editor for my writing.  Her proofing skills are valued in our high tech company and she does a wonderful job on the books that we jointly publish.  Two heads are always better than one in my book.

None of us are ever completely in charge of our lives, but in those areas where I have a choice, I have chosen those things that make me the happiest not the wealthiest.

My job as a sales and marketing vice president does not involve a lot of stress, significant travel, or a lot of reinventing the wheel which I found to be necessary when working with young start ups.  While the money will not be what it was at Apple, this current job is unlikely to kill me with stress.  I am pleased to have chosen another road and that I have a CEO who does not mind me taking the occasional fishing afternoon.

On top of enjoying our lives here, there is plenty of time for family.  I get to enjoy my granddaughter, our children, and our extended family and friends.  Watching my children master the challenges of life and learn how to be good to others in their lives is a much worthier goal that obsessing over how high Apple's stock price will go.

There are afternoons here on the Southern Outer Banks where my office is either my skiff when I am fishing or my kayak when I am kayaking.  Sometimes I am standing in the surf fishing when I get a phone call.  It is not very hard to lose the stress, or tell someone you will get back to them later when a soft wind is blowing in your face, the warm Carolina sun is on your back, and a fish is pulling on the end of your line.

Life is too short to be miserable. I would rather smile a little more, drive an older vehicle, and no worry about quarterly reports.  My life certainly isn't worry free, but it is free of the kind of stress that comes from working in a technology company that is also a snake-pit of employees trying to out maneuver each other to the top.

When I stand on my dock each morning and survey Raymond's Gut which leads out to the White Oak River, I don't have to worry about irritating Steve Jobs or one of his empty suit vice presidents.  I can stand on the dock and know that I have treated everyone like I would like to be treated. Once you have reached that point, it is pretty easy to let the cards fall where they may.

If things get tough, a walk along the beach or a ride down the river will usually cure it.  If enjoying life can be considered a benefit, I have all the benefits that I need, and I never have trouble falling asleep at night.

Come for a visit and enjoy our area's magic.  I can recommend a nice free online travel guide to help you get started with your planning.