Landscape Me Wakes Up

6FPS V3#12 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
December 13, 2021

 

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

I’m trying to figure out how to turned into December, but hello and welcome to the final newsletter of 2021. To those of you who celebrate Christmas religiously or socially (I’m the latter), a hearty HO HO HO! to you. To everyone, whatever you celebrate this time of year, I hope it’s a good time with better days ahead.

Of biggest note since we last chatted is that my company (Farsight Security) has been bought by another company (DomainTools), which is owned by a Venture Firm (Battery Ventures), and so I am now an employee of DomainTools. Other than that, nothing has changed, other than we are now working to figure out how to merge the organizations together while both sides are continuing to work on deadline projects.

I don’t expect this to significantly change my role in the new merged company but I expect the scope of what I do to grow to include the DT product lines as well. I’m still working remotely out of the home office, and still basically doing the same things, although figuring out where I’ll need to add new things into the mix.

Here at the house, as I write this we’ve started putting up the christmas tree, I’ve been trying to get out and bird more and explore new birding locations — and figuring out the joy of birding in 40F weather. I need better gloves.

The bird feeders are still down, and the trap camera shows we have two bears still visiting the area every couple of nights. Feeders are staying down until they stop showing up to check. sigh.

End of December the new pellet stoves for the garage and downstairs arrive, so we’ll be able to supplement the furnace to warm the place. Turns out, that’s not a bad idea around here, and it’ll make working in the garage better. In January the electrician will come out to quote the updates I want to the garage to get going on the shop — it needs better lighting and some minor tweaks to the wiring. I still don’t have a date for the install of the stair lift, because the company we’re working with is swamped and understaffed, like pretty much every craft I’m talking to these days. I honestly don’t mind the walk outside to the office every day, though, and will probably continue it as a good mental commute into and out of work-focus.

If this all sounds kind of boring and routine, well, yeah, and that’s not a bad thing. A busy month, but it’s mostly just doing the day to day things. It’s kind of nice to be settling down into that kind of routine now, after months of kinda crazy chaos moving.

New Wallpaper Images

I’ve released the next set of wallpaper images, just for you, my favorite subscribers. You can find info on downloading any or all below. I’ll also note I’ve had a couple of requests for higher res versions, and for iPhone wallpaper images, and those are both things I need to research. Nothing available at the moment, but if they arrive, you’ll get them first.

New Ebook: 2020.1

Also, don’t forget to grab a copy of my latest ebook, a compilation of my favorite images of 2020:

2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

I’m pretty happy with the design of this one. It contains both images from the before and after times of Covid, but does not include a set of blank pages to represent the months where I never turned on a camera due to the lockdowns.

More Active and Chatty on Twitter

For a number of months, I’ve been fairly quiet on Twitter, partly because there’s just been so much going on and partly because I needed a break from the parts of social media that can get super negative or toxic. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started making more of an effort to be active on twitter (find me at @chuq) and engaging with people more and sharing stuff that is kind of spur of the moment and/or fun and silly. If you are interested in saying hi, it’s a good place to catch me with something you find interesting or for a comment on something I’ve done, and I’m trying to be better about responding and chatting with all of you out there. Sometimes you just need a break to recharge the batteries.

Facebook is still toxic as hell, so deleting my account there still feels like a great thing to have done…

And just as this was about to be sent…

This happened. Happy Holidays!

Also, christmasing the house has begun in full force

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

Landscape Me Wakes Up

One of the things I’ve noticed since moving here is that the landscape photographer that lives inside me has woken up. It’s been a good while since I’ve done any significant landscape photograpy, in part due to a general lack of time, and in part due to having no real interest or motivation — I simply didn’t find Silicon Valley interesting to photograph, and I rarely had time to do the travel needed to get to places where there were compositions to find made it more of a hassle than it was worth. At some level, it turned photography from a relaxation into work, and I just wasn’t that into it because of it.

Here at the new place, I’ve started recognizing potential composition on the property and pondering how to bring out the thing I’m seeing into something worth making a photograph of. Below are some iPhone images that are very much what David duChemin defines as sketch images, things to give me something to start with and consider how to take it as a starting point to a great images. They are all, to name one issue, in flat, overcast light, but I think they all have potential.

These are now, clearly, epic landscape images with grand vistas or majestic sunsets, but more the intimate landscape I’m now drawn to, and which was the focus of that 2019 workshop I took with Art Wolfe. This new place has rekindled an interest in carrying what I started there forward again, which I am happy to see happening. It’s also influenced by the Youtube channel of Simon Baxter, which I recommend to you if you haven’t discovered it yet.

It is, for now, an experiment, both in trying to start thinking in compositions and then working them to bring out the best of what I’m seeing, and also the technical details of integrating the iPhone into my workflow in terms of when I start taking “serious” images with it — and using it as a scouting tool as I see things worth following up on later.

Now I think I need to pack my bag, grab my tripod and spend some time with some of these compositions and do more than snap a quick reminder shot of them, and see what might happen. And when the weather improves again, I’ll be looking to explore this region more widely as well, and off into Olympic National Park to see what I can find.

But even if it’s “just” scouting shots, it’s nice that a part of me that been in hibernation for a while shows signs of waking up and getting back at it. I was hoping that would happen up here, and it’s nice to see that it seems to be…

Photo Wednesday

This month, instead of a normal Photo Wednesday, I wanted to share with you scans of a set of Christmas cards my mom designed and painted to send out for Christmas; she painted 30-40 of these a year for over a decade as a way to share a bit of herself with her friends and family. You can read more about these and see full-sized versions on my blog.

The images I posted in the last month to the blog for Photo Wednesday and Feathery Friday are also available, of course. To see all of these images at full size and read the stories behind their creation, you can visit:

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Health and Fitness

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

See you soon!

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@mac.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

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