Call Me a Dreamer

I would like to direct your attention to Terry Karney, aka pecunium. Terry is a pretty cool guy. I've gotten to know him a little bit through his journal. He served as a member of the Army for many years and is now a civilian again. He posts beautiful photographs and thoughtful essays.

Terry Karney has a dream. He wants to travel the less-trodden paths of Great Britain, taking pictures and journaling as he goes. He first posted about The Brass Ring" yesterday. I love his description of his dream in his follow-up post today:

When they say, "name your dream", this is one of mine. Toad and his gyspy wagon. The time on the canal.... following the mule. That was what I flashed on. The Wind in the Willow was one of the shaping books of my youth. When I was a kid in Ohio we had a wood behind the house, about four acres. That's a fair chunk of tangled deadfall and mysterious nooks and crannies. It was where I set Bagder's House in my minds eye (there was a patch of fallen branches which was covered in leaves an twigs and snow in the winter. Beneath it was a small bit of dark dryness. The wood-rats Ratty scared off with his brace of pistols and cudgel could have lived in it).

Those are some of the things I would love to catch.

And the morning light, Otter's, "Piper at the Gates of Dawn", which I've always tied into Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" (why yes, my mind is a strange clutter of bizarre free association).

You can help him achieve this dream. The Name Your Dream Assignment contest, sponsored by Lenovo and Microsoft, is offering $50,000, plus a digital camcorder and the Lenovo® ThinkPad® W700ds with Microsoft Windows Vista^®, to the photographer whose assignment has the most votes.

In order to vote for an assignment, you do have to sign up, but there is no fee for doing so. If you'd like to help pecunium achieve his dream, please click the image below:

I've just spent a couple of hours searching for a photograph--not online, but in my own collection of photographs. You see, I'm working on a graphic image for a website I'm building for our local science fiction convention. After consultation with the con comm, we decided we wanted an image that incorporated elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. (This was based on a couple of sample images I showed them, but requires all new artwork.)

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In order to complete the scene I want to include an image of a woman in a long dress, facing away from the camera and standing in the prow of a boat heading toward the center of the image. Oh, and I don't know that I'll be able to pull this off, but I'd love to have skeletons swimming in the water next to the boat.

I had no, have! a photo, in which I am wearing a flamenco dress and staring out a window. I wanted to crop the photo, so I could position the figure in the prow of a boat. (I'm not sure how well that would turn out and I don't know where I'm going to get the boat image as I haven't found the right image in either my photos or public domain, or if I'm going to have to try to draw the boat, but I hope I can make it work, somehow.)

Unfortunately, the album in which the photograph was stored was not in its usual place and is nowhere to be found. So, I went through the boxes and boxes of duplicate prints and other photos that never made it into albums, but although I found many wonderful memories, I didn't find the photo I was looking for. In fact, all my photos from Spain are missing. :(

They will turn up again. Just not right now, it would seem.

Tucson gets magnificent sunsets, but every once in a while we get one so extraordinary it's hard to believe. This evening, we had one of those. I managed to capture it on my cell phone, and while the quality isn't great, I'm going to share, because this is the kind of thing that's hard to believe.



Can you see the way the sky is divided, with one half blue and the other pinkish? It was far more spectacular and obvious seeing it directly and I really wish I'd had a better camera and a better place to stand; this was taken in my back yard, with the house and various landscapey things in the way. The sky was a paler blue to the South, and a rosier pink to the North.