This is what a 70° day can look like in Northern Vermont. Yes, that is Lake Champlain. Yes, that is snow on top of the ice on Lake Champlain.
Looking southerly:
Looking west (that speck in the distance may be what’s left of a fishing shanty):
Looking northerly:
I like the Keys. I like living in the Keys. I like writing in the Keys. I like people watching in the Keys. I like sitting on the beach in the Keys. I like the Keys.
I do not like shopping in the Keys. It is simplicity itself to find a hat shaped like Flipper or a concrete mailbox support shaped like a mermaid or a manatee in the Keys. But KMart never has Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi when it is on sale, Home Depot doesn’t have the hinges I need for my kitchen cabinets, and Walgreens is out of milk. Again.
Who cares.
It’s the Keys, mon.
Last week a manatee came right up to the boat to say Hi. With Mother’s Day just passed, another momma manatee with two calves swam in and out of our canals. Fisheries experts count just 1,000-3,000 manatee in all of Florida, so passing the time with one right here is special. I also saw my first leopard ray at my own beach last week. I swam with the dolphins. OK, OK, I actually swam near the dolphins but that was probably wise when a pod of them herded their evening meal up near the beach.
And today, I was attacked by a little amber colored crab in about three feet of water. That sucker was outgunned about 1,040:1 if we count sheer avoirdupois. I guess I should be glad he saw my back before he realized he could swim up the leg of my trunks.
I took one of my most praiseworthy photographs in the Keys last year (You can see that one along with some other seascapes here). But I took the best ever photo today and you can see that one right here.
![[Image]](http://www.dickharper.com/gallery/_media/thumbs/feets_7038t.jpg)
I like the Keys.
In real life, I am an engineer. I do own a business. I do write a weekly newspaper column and all the rest. And I do work as a photographer. But underneath it all, I am an engineer.
It is more than just education or training; it is a state of mind.
A friend–I’ll call him Ralph because that’s his name, or not–is heavily into astrophotography. He emailed that he had just found a digital camera to lust after for his night shots. It apparently has intervalography functionality, a bruckjurnometer, and I think, the much desired high hepjabossity index. He says it has to plug in to his computer to work but the images go straight to the hard drive.
He sometimes runs one of his existing digital cameras from the computer; another friend–I’ll call him Clyde because that’s his name, or not, too–also does that, so I asked Ralph if he doesn’t think he has enough tricks now to turn pro.
Clyde runs big, ghastly expensive CCDs, Ralph told me. Clyde is in essence a pro, especially since he discovered a supernova.
Ralph says he (Ralph) wants to stay a prosumer which he defines as “really good at being mediocre.”
Why, I wondered?
Seriously.
He has the level of expertise. He has the interest. He has probably made at least the same order of magnitude of investment. He’s data-driven, for heaven’s sake. It seems like the reasonable next step.
“Nah,” he said. The real pros take the photos you see on magazine covers, in National Geographic, and so on. They are very very good. And their gear is very very expensive.
Unfortunately, that could be my competition, too, the cover shooters. Fortunately, the entry bar is still low enough in daylight photography that a gifted amateur with decent equipment can sell pretty well. After all, Ansel Adams’ first camera was a Kodak Brownie box; he also tested the Polaroid and promoted its use to his associates.
Still, Ralph has “no wish to devote that much energy on something with so little potential for tangible reward.”
“I am an engineer,” he said, “not an artist.”
I am both.
The relatively low entry bar is also true in some other branches of the arts. Were I a painter with the same ability as I have in photography, I could sell paintings at a price that is reasonable. I can already sell landscape photographs at a price that is reasonable. I can sell words at a price that is, unfortunately, unreasonable, meaning about the same in actual dollars as it was 50 and even 100 years ago. But I can sell them.
At the end of the day, that’s my bottom line.