Juxtaposition... That's a terrible English word. It has the sound of someone coughing up some spiky mess. JuxT-A-PoSi-TION!!!!! Do the French have words like this? Even an angry Frenchman sounds like he's singing a love song... Oooops, I just checked and that's a French word! How can that be? Well, it's all in the pronunciation I suppose. In French that T's got to be muted. And the TION... ain't SHUN, it's more sensual as their tongues glide over the sition ... to a more graceful see-shown... In French it's a six syllable word while we English speakers compressed it to a harsher five.
Well anyway... As I crafted this Duomo bus stop something began to pique at me... How many technologies are obvious in the image? I count three... (1) the cathedral itself's a big lump of medieval tech, then (2) there's that electric light glowing in the lamp that's popped on until twilight turns to day. Finally (3) the big package of bus that's stopped to intake and outtake passengers. But do we count what's going on behind the screened trellises glommed onto the building? And while the sidewalks seem ancient, how about that road bed. Are the wafting banners woven on ancient looms? I doubt it.
How many "advances" have wandered into this plane over a millennia? Technologies are ideas made whole. They're imaginations we can touch, just as solidly as the Duomo of Florence's walls and windows. My fingers are dancing upon someone's thoughts. Is she or he - the designer of my keypad - still alive? The designers of my software? The imagineers of my typeface, pixels, colors, mice?
And did all of these wonderers ever eat... pizza? Was there a Dominos' parlor on each corner of downtown Firenze in 1296 as they broke ground for that astonishing building? If not Dominos... well were there pizzas then? Same recipe? Anyone there eat New York or Chicago slices? Did Pizza chefs in Old Tyme Rome compete with Pompeii's vacation parlors?
Did Marco Polo's import of pasta sweep the Italian boot by the time the Duomo went up? Imagine, this all might have happened before noodles arrived... Which makes me wonder... what lovely scents wafted through the air at this bus stop place in 1296. Garlic? Tomatoes? Pizza?
We still have these lumps of tech, but those ancient scents and sounds? Nope. Lost to history. Smell-Ography's yet to be. We can only look at the early evening juxtaposition and wonder what's missing forever, huh?
By the way, is scent a dimension? Would it not bring an additional fullness to my bus stop up there? Hmmmmm....
4 comments:
THAT morning? When I stupidly insisted on a tripod, while you hopped around the church like a young buck, not caring about noise at all?
I was so much older then, when I was young :)
Hmmmm.... You are right! We were exploring st sunrise not twilight. Well, perhaps twilight happens twice a day? OK, I’m going to go with that :-) Good times Andreas. BTW, what % of your daily postings are hand held these days? You still got any of the pix you took on our Florence expedition that were never published? Maybe you could find one for a daily post? I still have dozens that I’ve never worked on, gotta mine that vein again.
100%. I've not used a tripod in years :)
Modern cameras have so incredibly good 5-axis stabilization, that a tripod is unnecessary for anything but moonlight photography in the wilderness.
Yeah, there are some images from Firenze left, but not many and certainly not good ones. At the moment my problem is, that I'm in April 2018 with the images on my blog, and in May 2018 as regards processing. Still, what I currently have processed, will last me for the rest of the year.
But anyway, yes, I sometimes process old images. By now, I have all my images in Lightroom, but only half of 2006 and 2010-now are properly tagged.
While tagging 2006, I have re-processed some of my images from that year. They were taken with a Nikon D200 (10 mpx, CCD sensor). It's amazing how much better Adobe's RAW processing is today. Practically everything I touch looks much, much better using the current Lightroom.
I'm too lazy to use Lightroom. Since I process only in PSCC, Bridge is fine for filing and cataloguing. I figure if my system ain't broke, why fix it, eh? Adobe's RAW processing is, of course consistent with my system and I agree with you. The only time have camera shake problems is when I forget to adjust my ISO. When stupidity is sufficient explanation... why look farther.
As you know, I find my excitement in post processing but that still starts with the best possible original capture. And again, I'm so far behind in processing my inventory that there're whole lumps of gold in there that are nagging me to mine them. I feel as if I only tug out the most obvious highlights from any shoot. Which is why I only accidentally discovered this Firenze shot a day or so ago. There's so much in the Italy storage, and Spain, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Slovakia, and of course, Amsterdam. Plus I've hardly scratched Patagonia. And now we're planning to go off to Morocco this winter.
Gotta' get ahead before we get on the next plane. Especially since we'll be spending some of that trip in Paris. Sigh...
It's all so odd, since I retired from writing and editing magazines, time is my scarcest resource. Go figure...
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