If a photo is a thousand words, a better photo is 12 megawords

Fia, in her glory

Not all things that are stunningly beautiful and wonderful in the garden are flowers and leaves opening, or plants surviving my poor care. There is my dog, and there is my Nikon D300 and Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens with which to shoot all things great and small for posterity.

I prefer shooting with a camera. There's no blood.

This particular shot was a huge stroke of luck, outside of Fia simply being lovely. I was failing trying to get the light exposure right on Shadow, who was being unusually cooperative, but usually vocal, when I heard a noise, turned to look and focused as fast as my right hand would let me and still get the photograph. I was shooting with this old, but superb, Nikon lens, which is another of the manifold reasons to use Nikon equipment. This lens dates from the early 1980's, and because no one, according to Ken Rockwell, shoots with 50mm lenses anymore, I got it pretty cheap, and I can use it on my D300 is from 2007, where it behaves more like a 75mm lens on this APS-C DSLR camera.

This is where my eyes start to glaze over. I got that information from Photozone's review/lab test report of the lens. Ken Rockwell reviews the AI version, but only the E-Series for the Ai-S.

Reading Ken Rockwell has me shopping eBay for lenses again. Please do not tell my husband. He thinks one lens is enough, like the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 VR lens that came with the D300 he gave me for Christmas. It is absolutely marvelous. I absolutely do love it. It is absolutely enormously convenient, but here is what Ken Rockwell has to say about it.

I feel foolish. My husband is right. It looks like I only need one lens now (until I can afford a 12-24 f/4 AF-S DX, or the more recent 10-24mm). And to learn to use my D300 fully.

I'm still not selling my other lenses.

Every day, I go out into the garden with my camera and look for what is new. A bud that might have bloomed, a plant that is still not dead, and I take photos of it all. I can do it forever, and I practically do. I am going to wear my camera out. I must say that I do wonder what exactly the point is. What good do these photographs do? What use will I make of them? What use will anyone make of them? I love them for the fact that they can be.

My husband asked the other night at dinner if we had sold the other camera yet. It was going to be a delicate subject. There was the D300 I had bought for myself, and there was the one he gave me for Christmas, and there is the Canon EOS Rebel XTi I had bought used and given Sam for his birthday a couple of years ago. That was the camera to sell. We had talked about it before, but my husband's memory is as bad for most things as mine is for others. Notably, anything having to do with money, but I refuse to appear to be unkind or ungrateful. It's my son who is the photographer in the making, not I, and yet it is I who have the better camera. It's all a question of timing.

When we gave him his camera, he was hoping to become a photographer in the making, and I was still using the Fuji FinePix 3800 my mother had given me to take better pictures than I was sending digitally, taken with an Aiptek 8 years ago. Those images understandably frustrated everyone. On screen, they looked like film photos taken in 1926. He had done a lot of research and found this camera, used, in Versailles, at a great price in the price range we could swallow. All was good.

Then, I saw what he could do with his camera in the garden, and I started to feel restless. Last fall, I began to research cameras. I'd get a Nikon, that much I knew, since I had a FE and 3 great Nikkor lenses. There was the D90, and then there was the D300. I could get the camera body alone for about the D90 with a lens, and I would have a lot more camera for the money. I could use my old lenses until I felt I had paid enough dues to get a great lens for it. I would also have a camera considered professional, meaning that it is the lowest priced camera to qualify under the Getty rules for publishing.

Not that this really meant anything for me. This does not count as publishing.

That was when my husband started to think about the same thing for me. For years, anytime we went anywhere, he walked ahead, while I dragged along, taking photographs of everything, from door hinges to domes. One weekend, I managed 500 or 600 photos in Prague. From his point of view, we had hit a new low in quality couple time. The next trip, I left the camera home, and he didn't even notice. I had to point it out to him. To be fair, it is only what he expects when he makes the effort to go someplace with his wife: her company, and not the company of her camera as an unwelcome third. When he got me my D300, it appeared that it seemed normal to him that Sam had one, as he thought he did, not realizing that that D300 was mine, since he didn't know Sam had finally taken his Canon to Paris.

This was when we should have realized he was basically giving up on the law.

It did not now appear so normal, it seemed, but these are the heated discussions in which parents find themselves engaged with the passion with which they also (one hopes) love.

"Il n'a pas besoin d'un appareil de photo professionnel," said he, predictably, and feeling pretty sure he'd won. What argument could I give to justify a first year university student in a program of legal studies needing a professional quality camera?

"Mais," -- this is always a good way to start a rebuttal -- "il y a des photos qu'on ne peut même pas prendre avec un appareil moins bien," I countered.

Not that this was necessarily true from a Canon EOS Rebel XTi to a Nikon D300. What was true is that you can see the difference in the quality of the photographs they take, and if you care a lot about that, then it makes a really big difference. Once you can get an image of that quality, it's awfully hard to accept less. In fact, you want more still, even for your not yet professional photographer son, but as much as I wanted to win this, I also wanted my husband to think sweetly of me. I would have to put my foot down and whine convincingly, making the same argument over and over until he essentially gave up, also preferring to think sweet thoughts of his wife. I think this has something to do with his daughter.

I have been especially sweet of late.

"Ben, d'accord," he relented, "mais je pense qu'il devrait au moins nous donner ce qu'il reçoit pour le Canon."

This was actually pretty fair, but I wanted him to be able to get a lens, and he had done some research and found one that would make him happy for his uses that was only about 130 euros.

"Oui, la différence entre le prix de l'appareil de photo et l'objectif qu'il veut pour le D300. Il n'est pas très cher."

He gave up. This is what Sam and I do, and what we share, other than skiing and loving our dogs. We take photographs. We even do it together. And we show one another our photographs. It's a sort of language to talk about the way we see the world and what we notice. A way to know one another that a life without cameras would not allow us, unless we drew, or painted, or talked endlessly. Seeing what makes him take a photograph tells me what moves him, from a blue Birkin bag perfectly matched with dress and shoes to rapture on a cupid's stone face, and the better the equipment, the finer the result, the more powerful is our speech.

It's like suddenly having full possession of a language, with its full vocabulary and grammar.

It's like playing or listening to a fine violin after a scratchy elementary school beginner instrument. There is no going back when you can hear the difference, but I can understand the question of means.

For me, it's a little more monotonous, ranging from my dogs a million times to my flowers a billion times. Each year.

....

Bending, a Christmas tale

Winter on the fields

As far as Christmas is concerned, the snowfall came too soon. The snow that covered the trees, bushes, fields and roofs is mostly melted here, although it still lies fairly thick once you pass Poissy and head into the Forêt de Marly toward Paris, where drivers, stuck in the heavy traffic, lowered their car and truck windows, pointed their iPhones toward the snow-covered tree trunks and branches and clicked.

"Ils n'ont que ça a faire," said my husband as his window slid down and he pointed his iPhone toward the white-frosted trees.

It was true. Sitting there in stop and go traffic on our way to the shopping mall in Versailles, there was nothing else to do but appreciate the winter forest landscape and take pictures. I hit the button again, and his window slid back up. The car in front of us moved forward a meter. The driver seated high up above me smiled over our way. I nodded slightly and smiled back. 'Tis the season.

There, the snow looked as though it had just fallen, where here, we only had the tiniest of flurries, hardly more significant than a delicate dusting of frost accumulating on the leaves that have not fallen and the crusty bits of melted snow that had hung on. Those minuscule flurries made me hope this morning, when I went down to the wood pile and peeled back the tarp to fill my rubber bucket, but now, there is no reason to hope for the white Christmas that seemed almost certain. Bright sunshine is forecast for Christmas day tomorrow, although temperatures will dip further below zero.

I also noticed that the frightfully overgrown yew down in the lower garden is still bent over to make an arched tunnel over the opening in the privet hedge, however, bringing it to within reach of my long-handled pruning shears. I ought to go down and prune it while I can, but at nearly 4 pm, it will be dark soon.

(I really ought to go clean up all the mounds of decaying dog pooh left apparent by the snow's withdrawal before it is too dark to see them. Not that anyone is at risk to step in it, over by the France Telecom utility building. No one but me and my dogs goes there, except whatever other dog on the poor diet it is who contributes his poohs without a similar contribution in clean-up by his master.)

When the snow was at its thickest on the branches and the tops of the clipped shrubberies, the boughs, as well as entire shrubs, bent their heads nearly to their feet, the falling snow mixing with the weight of the snow on them to fasten them tightly to the ground. My stepdaughter was alarmed.

"Papa, ils sont cassés," she reported, leaving the panes of glass in the French window.

"Qu'est-ce qui est cassé?" he asked.

"Les plantes. Elles sont cassées sous le poids de la neige."

I had seen them already. I knew they were bent. It's another miracle of nature that she can design boughs to withstand the force of wind, snow and ice, bending but not breaking, at least not until the forces are extreme. I know this, and I felt superior in my knowledge.

You paid attention in school and in life, the voice I know as my meaner self said to me. I didn't like the sound of that. I tried not to let it out.

"Les plantes ne sont pas cassées," I said, deliberately checking the impatience in my voice, and wondering if I had hit the right measure between checking too much and not checking at all, the terrible one that would leave her wondering if I had been unkind, or not. "Les branches sont souples, capables de se plier en réponse aux forces importantes de la neige, de la glace et du vent."

You could have added that you know they are nearly to their breaking point. In some cases out there, anyway, the voice I know as my meaner self, frustrated by my having attempted to check it, said in a counter effort to let me know I hadn't done such a good job in the event that I had failed to notice the edge in my spoken words. It hadn't escaped me. Like I said, I knew what I was doing, but I hoped it wasn't too noticeable, neither to my meaner self nor to her. I grabbed my gloves, slipped my boots on and crossed the terrace to the Nandina domestica.

The "heavenly" bamboo.

The slender branches that normally reach toward the sky and bend only towards their tips under the weight of the bouquets of thin leaves and airy bunches of green fruits that turn orange in the autumn and bright red in the winter, arched to the ground, where their heads rested on the crusted snow. Two short branches already lay nearby, broken clean off. I picked them up and considered my attitude one more time; it kind of looked like some plants were "cassées".

I took a branch and gave it a shake. Hard bits of snow flew in all directions, stinging my cheeks and making slightly metallic noises as they rained to the hardening snow, like bits of plastic confetti on a glass tabletop, or frozen rain on frozen snow, actually. It nearly broke off in my hand. I took more care with the next ones, shaking as much frozen snow from them as I could so they could stand almost as straight as they usually do.

Over the course of the afternoon, I watched the snow begin to melt and fall from the bowed branches of the yews at the top of the garden stairs, my sentinel yews, making faint, dull thuds. Each thud gave me the faint, dull pleasure of vindication.

See? Nature is hardy enough to survive what she throws at herself. It was my meaner self again, but I did not give her the pleasure of a hearing.

But, are our relationships? Those most fragile of human relationships, the "steps"? Can they take what we throw at them? The jealousies and the barbs of alterity and territoriality?

"You women think you have a maternal sense," my husband once said to me, "but you are essentially animals because it is only for your own. We care for all children, yours as well ours."

"That's not true," I had charged right back, my hackles up as though he had attacked my child, not merely my sense of maternity and sorority.

Maybe it is true, said the voice of the self I recognize as my better one. It sounds like it might be, you know. Look at you and how you feel about his children.

"Not all of them," I said, my defense at the ready, arguments all lined up and ready to go. "And that's not how I felt when once before I nearly had two stepdaughters. I missed them so much later that I cried, and it wasn't just because I hadn't had my own child yet, like he likes to say it is; it was because their mother didn't hate me for her own failings and try to ruin things. She let her daughters love me."

This was true. My better self had nothing to say, and since his daughter has come to live with us, my husband's will has bent under the weight of the consciousness that I am doing at least as much for her as I did for the heavenly bamboo, or that I am trying to anyway, and that counts between us nearly as much or more (but in a different way) than my succeeding. If we fail, we will have failed together now.

Two people can stand straight-backed in their mutual opposition, each defending his own position and giving the best of arguments for refusing to bend toward the other, but the truth, the very difficult truth is that it is only in accepting that there is also truth in the other's point of view and in his needs can one's own truth have any force of effect. In the absence of that acceptance, there is only sadness and loss. Truth falls to power, and with it goes down love.

So why is it so hard, then? Why is it so hard to answer the need in the other and give up insisting on one's own, when time and time again it is shown that in doing that, so much that one says one truly wants finally becomes possible? Is it more satisfying to continue to claim one's wants than to give in order to see them satisfied an hundred times over? Is that why Men continue to wage wars?

In the car, on the way to do our Christmas shopping for the older children, grown to make couples and careers now, I turned to him and asked, "Est-ce qu'on peut se mettre d'accord qu'on ne se fait pas de cadeaux cette année?"

I asked this question even though I had reason to believe that he had already gotten me a present. I hoped to avoid spending money we need for his daughter's riding lessons and that we will need for her competitions, soon. He hesitated a second before replying, just long enough to show me that I had been right. "Tu m'as déjà fait un cadeau alors?"

"Oui, mais ça n'a pas marché."

"Alors, on peut dire qu'on ne se fait pas de cadeaux de Noël cette année?" He nodded.

"Tu veux savoir ce que ça a été?"

Did I want to know what my failed Christmas present was, he wanted to know. I saw him smile a little sadly. I nodded. He paused, and then he said, "Un D300."

A D300? My brain turned over once, twice, and I understood.

"Un appareil de photo? Tu m'as acheté un Nikon D300? Mais -- j'en ai déjà un --"

"Je sais. Sam me l'a dit."

He knew I had one already, but that knowledge came too late. Sam had told him. But, why? How could he not have known? I use it every day.

He explained that thrilled with his purchase for me, he had told Sam that now we would have three lenses for our cameras. Sam had looked at him, not understanding what he meant by three lenses for our two cameras.

"J'ai acheté un D300 pour ta maman pour Noël," he told Sam, probably beaming.

"Mais, elle en a un déjà," Sam told him, most likely as confused as I was.

"Ce n'est pas le tien alors?" he asked, disappointment certainly creeping in along with the dawning light of realization that something had gone very wrong.

"Non. J'ai un Canon."

"Mais, Maman avait ton appareil, non? Tu l'avais laissé pour elle à utiliser."

"Oui, mais elle s'en est acheté un, alors j'ai repris le mien, le Canon, pour l'avoir avec moi à Paris. Les objectifs sont les siens. Elles les a eu avant."

Somehow, my husband had entirely forgotten whole conversations, but this is not amazing nor new. It is somewhat disconcerting, but less so since he has nearly always done that. I don't think Alzheimers starts at 30, and if it does, it generally gets much worse than it is now after a quarter century more has passed. And, were that the case, he should have been lost in the winter snow naked, only several fields over, long ago. He is otherwise thriving, albeit occasionally doubtful and disappointed about the various things he has to accept that he has indeed been told, and completely forgotten.

The very day I received my camera, I was exclaiming about the fact that I could take a picture of him from across the room, in the dim of the evening without a flash, and still see the herringbone pattern on the wool sweater I shrunk shortly thereafter.

"Avec l'appareil de photo de Sam?" he had asked.

"Non, avec le mien. J'ai acheté un Nikon D300 d'occas sur eBay, et Sam est allé le chercher pour moi à Paris aujourd'hui."

Another time, he asked if the camera I was using was Sam's. No, I explained again, trying to pronounce my words with extra clarity so he would be sure to hear them; Sam had taken his camera to Paris since I had gotten one of my own. I added that I had realized using his just how big a difference there was between my previously wonderful Fuji digital SLR-type camera after the little Russian Aptek I had used for my first "Garden Updates", emailed to friends and family, and his Canon Rebel XTi, and since I couldn't keep his camera forever and wanted to be able to photograph the dogs, my garden, travels and everything and everyone I love (or for whom I at least care, for one reason or another), I had searched for an used Nikon digital SLR for myself.

Now, he will not forget again.

Later, in between the freezing cold sheets, I put my even colder hand in his still colder one and said, "Merci de mon cadeau. N'importe quel des deux que je garde, l'appareil de photo sera toujours mon cadeau de Noël."

"Merci, mais c'est bête. Je suis quand même déçu."

"Il n'y a aucune raison d'être déçu," I said to him. "C'est vraiment un cas quand c'est l'intention qui compte. Tu as voulu faire le plus beau des cadeaux pour moi et c'était très généreux. Je ne m'attendais pas à autant."

In my mind, it really was the perfect case of the intention being as important as the gift. He had wanted to offer an exceptionally generous and considerate present to me, and it hadn't failed at all. The camera, whichever I will keep, will be from him because he wanted to give me that.

"C'était parce que je t'aime, et j'ai voulu te le montrer comme je peux," he said. Very quietly.

"Je sais," I said.

I know. I do know. I also know that it is because I bent and accepted the weight of his daughter, and it is amazing how far you can bend without breaking and become stronger for it.

Our hands felt a little warmer in the dark.

Joyeux Noël to all, or the joy and the peace of the spirit of Christmas to each of you.

....

My Nikon 300D

Fia

11 weeks old, and 2 weeks here in her home. It was quiet. I looked at my watch. 3:50 pm. I ought to have put her in her gated-off area 5 minutes before. I got up from where I was sitting, photoshopping another batch of photographs I have shot with Sam's Canon EOS Rebel Xti and glanced toward Rapide's bed. No Fia.

I looked under the dining table, where she sometimes goes to lie amongst the chair legs. No Fia.

I bent to look where she often fell asleep her first week home, under the sofa below where I sat. No Fia.

I started to get a little worried. There was no movement, and she was in none of her usual places. I walked farther towards the kitchen, and I saw black on the fleece blanket covering her cushion behind the gate. I leave it open so that she can choose to go there when she is free to roam, and for the first time, she had gone there all by herself, and curled up to faire dodo.

The indescribable joy when something works the way it is supposed to.

Yesterday, Fia helped me close the pool. After her mésaventure the previous week, falling in twice, not grasping what a corner means, I wasn't certain she'd agree to spend even 5 minutes anywhere near the pool. For several days after, the second I put her down at the bottom of the garden stairs and went to purge the pump, she'd be gone straight back up them. I'd find her just inside the living room door, waiting. But, she did. She trotted around the poolside, sniffing away, and snatched the skimmer basket I had just removed and emptied, darting away with it in her mouth, zig-zagging across the grass, unable to see where she was going for the big white thing she was not about to relinquish.

"Apporte, Fia. Apporte."

Right.

It does work. Sometimes. But she is getting really serious about "assis" ("sit") and is actually showing a faint sign of progress with "reste" ("stay"). The idea is to put the two together for "reste assis" until I give the sign "okay", then she can get up/eat/leave my side.




Today, Sam brought the used Nikon D300 I bought on eBay and that he picked up in Paris for me. Now, I just have to find my Nikkor lenses and reassure myself they really do work. They're not VF, but having become irrelevant to everyone except my dogs, garden and immediate family, and having no business that brings in income, I must be patient. Only, having discovered what a really good digital camera means -- you can take photographs that you could not otherwise dream of taking --, and knowing I will only have so many puppies in my life, at least this much was indispensable, but maybe I'll study and practice and offer pet portrait photography.

That's a job, right?

Meanwhile, my back-ordered copy of Sean Ellis' Kubrick the Dog arrived today from Amazon.co.uk.

"What's that book?" asked Sam, who had just arrived home from the train, picking it up to look at the photos.

"It's a book the fashion photographer and filmmaker Sean Ellis made of his Vizsla, Kubrick. My books about Baccarat are just like it!" I said, feeling rather proud and excited, "Well, minus Stella McCartney and top models at lingerie shoots," I conceded. Sam continued turning the pages.

"His photos are really good, Mom," he replied. There was just the slightest, almost imperceptible emphasis on "his". Only the introductory "but" was missing. Sam is considerate.

"Yeah, well, I didn't have a camera like he does." Now I almost do.

Where are those lenses?
....