Another buttload of photos today, listed more or less in reverse chronological order.

The one above is a panorama of a hill near where I live in Los Gatos. I think it’s great that I can find fairly wild-looking natural spots close to my house. I feed on nature. I shot these first three photos on my iPhone SE, which as the same camera as the 6S model, but which has the same small size in my pocket as the 5. This seems like the first iPhone that’s actually usable for (fairly) decent photos. The panorama feature works really well, once you frikkin figure it out.

It’s kind of a cliche to shoot a single bush on a hillcrest, but it’s a nice tras effect. I think at a deeper level it speaks to a person as an image of themselves, alone (at least a lot of the time) in the world. Wonderful clouds on this one particular day.  Like thoughts in the sky.

I like the path along this hill, it’s near the Testarossa Winery in Los Gatos. The path looks, in my mind, like a smile. Or the expression when someone’s eyes are amilng, but they’re holding their mouth straight, or even downturned a bit, because for some reason at that moment they have to look serious, but really they’re smiling. The hill is alive.

Switching now to my Fujifilm X 100T camera. It has a fixed wide-angle 23mm lens, and basically I PhotoShop and crop nearly image I shoot with it. Like just shoot what’s in front of me like I’m fogging a swarm of bugs, and then I scoop out a sections I want. Anwyay, this is a cropped timer photo of me with Nick Herbert, ten years my senior, that is, about 80, and a freak from the way-back. I think we didn’t quite think the timer would work, which is why we look so casual. Nick says his three big influences were the Catholic Church (as a boy), LSD (in his 20s or 30s), and quantum mechanics.

Nick lives in a fairly primitive cabin near Boulder Creek, and he spends a lot of time on his battered porch among the redwoods. I think this is a bucket of rainwater. I hope it’s not piss. I dug the dust and the dead bugs and the sun reflection in the bucket.  Like god within the lowliest elements of the world.

Nick’s wiring is a little like what you see in photos of third world countries. That cool ball is, I think, originally for brewing tea, and I’m not sure why it’s there now, although it looks great. Nick has a theory that at some point we’ll be able to apply quantum effects to our mind—I wrote about this idea in my last novel, The Big Aha, a great work, although curiously neglected by the public at large (as I so often end up saying about my books). So maybe those wires and that ball make Nick’s porch into a macro-quantum-effect platform.

For some other unkown reason Nick has three branches tied into the shape of a triangle in the air. A “feral triangle” I termed it to a friend, and he warned, “they’re vicious when cornered.”

I love reflections like this. A familiar photographic trope…I think the mirror suggests the idea of introspection and the notion of some skewed alternate reality which perhaps we inhabit. Re. Nick’d ideas about quantum consciousness, here’s a great essay by himcalled Holistic Physics – Or – An Introduction to Quantum Tantra. I drew on this essay a lot for my (did I already say curiously neglected?) novel The Big Aha.

When I visit a place with a lot of clutter, I like to take my camera and carve out little compositions. Always a good trove at Nick’s.

I wanted to talk to him about the unny tunnels a.k.a. Einstein-Rosen bridges a.k.a. wormholes that my characters travel through in my novel Million Mile Road Trip. But we never quite got into that. Didn’t matter. Good to have a day off.

Now back to a couple of earlier shots. A ceiling fan is always a fascinating theme. A symbol of divine grace? Breath from above.

This one’s near Aldo’s restaurant in Santa Cruz Harbor.  Love all the action.

Here I am with my nephew Embry Rucker III, who’s an extremely accomplished pro photographer. He has a great eye, and great timing. Helps you see. Little E always liked me when he was growing up…I was the off-beat uncle. He’d call me Uncle Dudley. Always great to see him. Passage of time.  I can’t believe Embry’s in his forties, and I’m a seventy-year-old man. Let’s go back to those old Christmas mornings and Thanksgiving dinners and vacations in Maine!

And here we are back in the hills of Los Gatos. Getting exercise for my healing leg. It’s just about summer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2016 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.