built on solid foundations

There is a song written by Linda Creed called "The Greatest Love of All", as a young person listening to it I often wondered about the focus of the lyrics on the self. I felt it was somehow selfish.

As I grew older I became re-acquainted with the song and (having journeyed some more in life) understood how many people suffer from problems of self worth and self respect.

While I now understand the reference to the self esteem it still seems just a prelude to the greatest love ...

Linda was (so I am told) struggling with cancer when she wrote the song lyrics, so perhaps she was going through a bit of an existential crisis (suffering from breast cancer and struggling with understanding her own mortality).  Having battled with the loss of my lovely wife and in parallel battled with my personal health issues I think I can relate to personal existential crises. From the lyrics something that resonates with me is the theme of needing to love yourself and teach others to love themselves.

I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier

I agree with so much of that. However to make what easier? For me that comes in the lines:

Everybody is searching for a hero
People need someone to look up to
I never found anyone to fulfill my needs
A lonely place to be
So I learned to depend on me

which is at the same time both profound and tragic.
It is profound because the truth is that you must love yourself before you can find strength and before you can even accept love.
It is tragic to me that so many people go through life never loving. Never loving themselves and also never feeling that love from somone else. Linda seems to have learned (from the harshness she found in life?) to depend on herself. Perhaps from that trust then came love.



Loving yourself is a truly important step, but should be the foundation for the love that comes from outside. Its like the base of the Maslow hierarchy if you will, a foundation to be built on to allow you to fulfill more in your life.

Great houses can only be built on strong foundations.

Only from the foundation of loving yourself can come the love for and from others. Without that base the love of others will fall on difficult soil. I believe that without that foundation, that accepting others love will be somehow skewed, as will the love you feel for others.

I'm glad that Linda found the love of her self, for it is a truly important step. But that she perhaps never found another to love her as she (I hope) loved herself is a tragedy. Without that it can be difficult or perhaps impossible to build a loving relationship with another. The love that my wife and I shared was built on the foundations of self respect and self love. From this we developed a relationship where love is given and love is received.

As I examine what I have lost in my wifes passing, I have come to understand just how fortunate I have been to have been able to feel that love (from her to me) and to be able to give her that love too. For no matter what has been taken away from me, I still have the love of myself and (it may seem strange) the love she gave me.
Love is made to be given, so my view is that Linda's song about the Greatest Love of All is just a prelude, a prelude to the greater love that can grow in the hearts of two people who love themselves and each other.

Learning to love your self is the first step on the road to knowing love.  I'd like to write as well as Linda, but I can't. So instead I'll just change the lines a little:

I found that the greatest love of all 
was happening to me.
I found that the greatest love of all
beside of me.
...
It is the greatest love of all

The song ends on a note of hope:

And if by chance, that special place
That you've been dreaming of
Leads you to a lonely place
Find your strength in love

Sadly now I have gone from that special place, to a lonely one. But I have some strength to face it in the love we have. I say have because it can never die.

:-)

its not warm when she's away...

From the time I fell in love with her every time we were apart I felt a little anxious and a little sad. Even when we began sharing a house, whenever she went away for some days (to help her grandparents for example) I felt sad.

But there came a time when I had certainty that she would always be there, that we would be together for all our lives. Of course I knew that one day I would be dead. Its strange that we both always acted on the obvious thing that I'd be the one to die first.

Life can be unexpected.

Tonight I was watching a movie, and there was this Bill Withers song on in the background.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away.
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she's always gone too long
Anytime she goes away.

Wonder this time where she's gone 
Wonder if she's gone to stay
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And this house just ain't no home
Anytime she goes away.

I know that she has passed away, but (unlike the dyed in the wool atheists) just don't know if "she's gone to stay". By this I mean simply ceased.

Perhaps I'm just twisting reality to see it as I wish, but little things keep telling me that while "shes gone to stay" that like when she walked onto that plane in Incheon that she still is somewhere, and that I'll make a journey to the furthest point in my world to be with her when its time.

Today I've been out riding around in the sunshine of a perfect day on the scooter and somehow feeling her presence. I felt overwhelmingly sad at times, perhaps because I can feel her presence. Personally I'd rather go through feeling sad when I feel her around than not feel her around.

Anyway, as I went to write this I turned on my tablet and was surprised to find a 'theme' of raindrops had been applied to my FTP app, yet I had applied no theme. It was like a little smack in my face (or a tug on my ear as she used to do).

My heart is inclined to feel that she put it there. She liked rides on the scooter, so I'm glad she could come along.

a stitch in time

and you should never under estimate the benefit of a fresh piece of cloth.

So while you can sometimes make something with stitching things together, you can't always use stitching (or HDRI) to make up for the short comings of gear.

Conventional "wisdom" out there at the moment seems to be use image stitching techniques for making your wide angle lens wider (or your normal a wide). Such as this image ...



This image was made with a mild telephoto and stitched together from 5 images taken in portrait to make a highly detailed wide format landscape.

Sadly however this doesn't always work, as nature often is not as patient as me and spoils things by moving.

So when I tried to align these two images the churning clouds have moved between images and re-orienting the camera to make adjustment difficult / painful / tedious or plain old impossible. The above image was (as it happens) taken with my Bessa I on two sections of 6x9 film. I wish I had of had my 6x12 camera and a 75mm lens.

Sometimes there just is no substitute for one take.

tuning focus on an Epson Perfection scanner

For people who like to tune their flatbed scanners with some 'adjustment' one of the things people most commonly do is adjust the height of their film holders to get the film in the place where its focused.

This is because Epson Perfection scanners are not really calibrated in the factory (well come on, they only cost $700). So for those seeking the best out of their scanner dollar (and lets face it, you can't buy the Nikons anymore) we try to make the tools we have just that bit sharper than they are 'out of the box'

I thought I'd share with you the little shortcut I use to find the sweet spot. Its a stack of coins. In this case its the 5c coin.

Sticking them on the glass so that they hang over each other one can see pretty quickly where the focus point is.

Obviously coin 1 is on the glass ...

 

Its at coin 4 through to 5 that things appear their sharpest. So, now by measuring the coin thickness you can quickly set up your Better Scanning holders to get the best out of your film scans.

How much better?

Well about like this:

and this is a 100% crop of a 1200dpi scan of a slide which I wasn't really that happy with (crummy lens). Chalk and Cheese isn't it ...

Hmmm ... speaking of which, its time for some cheese to go with my red wine I think...

Happy Adjusting