sun day

I'm going to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Celebration tomorrow, as I did last year, and it promises to be a fruitful day of photography.

It begins with a parade at noon, but I'll be there earlier to get shots of the gathering participants mounting their floats and donning their pagan regalia. After an hour or so of capturing the mounting and the donning I'll position myself for the parading, setting up stationary with backgrounds in mind for a roll or two and then moving along with the flow for whatever happens.

Eventually I'll make my way to Alameda Park where the solsticianados will do whatever they do for part two which, I guess, is dismounting and undonning and prancing around in gratitude for the sun. I figure it'll be a day of music and food and papier maché and lots and lots of yellow.

As evening approaches, part three will swing into gear on a stage near the courthouse. I suspect my brain will be fried by then. Several hours of image hunting, that mode of moving about almost completely in a visual awareness, unfocused but with receptors in tune and on full intake, is great fun but it really burns up the synapses. Color and composition and shape and shadow are the real fun of crowds for me.

And, of course, you know, the females. But who has time to enjoy women when there's hard hard lenswork to do, angles to figure, light to measure, huh? Get the shot, yes, that's my motto, yessireebob.

*****

These last few weeks have been happy ones for me. The fun of the phone booth, the yard shaping up slowly but surely, the solid marriage, Amy doing well in school; all this has combined to satisfy me nicely. To this circumstantial satisfaction add a rapid onset of "old man calm" that seems to have settled on me and you end up with one smiley guy.

If I were a thinking man, I'd talk myself out of this happiness in a New York minute by remembering that I have an appointment with my urologist at the end of the month wherein I'll receive what should be the final analysis of my wee-wee woe. Thankfully, I'm not encumbered by cognitive skills, and can cruise contentedly till then.

*****

That's it. Brief. Off to bed to dream of shutter speeds. And in among the camera dreams will be a dream or two about the desert, I'm sure. The next trip is only eleven days away. You will be there, won't you? Thursday, July 1, 1999, middle of the Mojave. I figure it'll be 114 degrees Fahrenheit and very cool.

"Looking For The Summer" -- Chris Rea -- THE BEST OF CHRIS REA

today's wisdom:

"The sun -- my almighty physician."

- Thomas Jefferson