My voice is permanently hoarse from little polyps growing on the vocal cords. There’s some dispute as to the cause of these polyps. I’m convinced they come from my nine years of working in biotech at Genentech in South San Francisco which ended in a bad way after me being exposed to concentrated phenol. To be honest, I was terrible at the job. Artists should never work in a regulated repetitive job.
That aside, one of the repeated problems of the polyps is they grow enough that I occasionally need an operation to remove them. After the operation I can’t speak for a few days. There was one time when I went to Death Valley national Park after an operation. I had never really spent a pile of time there because of the heat, but wanted to see the sand dunes and figured it was a good place to go for a person not wanting to talk.
One thing about working in science (Genentech) is I had to actually study science (Aquatic Biology, UC Santa Barbara). A foundation to science is of course math. I struggled in math my entire life until encountering calculus. For my visual brain it’s the math that makes sense. Algebra never made sense in my brain. Neither did chemistry. Calculus and physics on the other hand, have always talked to me in my basic brain way. Not in a super smart brainiac way. Just in a basic “Oh wow, that’s really cool!”.
The animal science lady Temple Grandin has written about this extensively. Until reading what she had to say about how some people see the world in entirely visual ways instead of through words I always felt a little stupid. I did terribly on the SAT style tests, like her, yet got A’s in college physics and calculus. The one-size-fits-all tradition of thinking needs to change to include visual people like me. I digress.
When I saw these forms on the sand dunes my mind instantly thought of one of those pictures you see at the beginning of the chapter in a school book. Specifically I was thinking of a chapter you might see in a calculus book. Those lines, to me, shout “Differential!” or “Maximum/Minimum!”
My favorite ex-girlfriend was a mathematician and even though I shot this picture long after she was gone, I wonder if she might’ve seen it the same way.
In the end, I really loved this in black and white to emphasize the shapes. The shapes are the lines of the calculus graph they represent in my mind and show my appreciation and curiousity for visual, physical mathematics.
It has been awhile since being able to add to the posts. I’ve been busy with stuff outside of the world of photography. My wife blew out her ACL, meniscus and fractured some bones while skiing and was home after the operation. A Type A+ personality at home tends to keep a slacker like myself overly busy. Plus we all went to Costa Rica for spring break. Plus I’ve been trying to figure out the puzzle of Instagram for my business. Lots of things going on. Also I’m trying to shift everything to Pet Portrait Photography and lighting animals is proving to be another challenge. They have big noses creating big shadows that need to be lit. Plus a person has to have the nose to the ear in focus, which requires a lot of light power. So this has taken a back seat.
My wife is getting back to work, I’m saving for some more powerful lights for the pets, and I’m waiting for a book on instagram for photographers to arrive in the mail to get busy on that problem.
As a further aside and totally off topic: I have to say Costa Rica is totally overrated. It’s insanely expensive. Driving on the roads is a nightmare. There’s no real hiking in the parks. The best dinner we had was Indian food. And it cost $200 for three people. I’ll take Hawaii any day of the week. After a few days there I couldn’t wait to leave.