Virginia Breeze

, originally uploaded by Davidlind.

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Beth and I both enjoyed this sailboat.  Blue is a favorite color for both of us.  Doesn’t this look like a lot of fun?  One person can run things and I bet it goes fast under the right conditions. I will add a few NextGen photos of sailboats here this evening.  They are a cheerful island in a sea of gray photos I took this past weekend.  I’m so sick of looking at most of them.   Everything is gray and white.   I thought maybe the camera was busted after looking at them awhile.  But occasionally a colorful bathing suit or sail will pop up in a photo.

First, the D40 is twice as sensitive to light as the D40x and D80. (The D40’s ISO defaults to ISO 200 instead of the less sensitive ISO 100, making for sharper photos in any light.)

Second, the D40 is far more flexible with flash in daylight. The maximum shutter speed of every Nikon other than the D40 when used with flash is only 1/250 second, while the D40 easily shoots at 1/500 with flash with no loss of performance.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d40.htm

It’s pretty interesting stuff ( I thought my D70 defaulted to ISO 200).  He has without question guided me towards a lens that has been just amazing in terms of taking photos thru a wide range of distances with amazing clarity.

It’s a miracle! I bought mine in November 2005 and love it. It’s replaced an entire bag of lenses. All I bring anywhere is my 18-200mm, and maybe my 12-24mm for 99% of everything I shoot.

It’s small, fun, flexible, sharp and fast. VR, instant auto/manual focus override and macro and zooming all work perfectly. This lens is too much fun!–Ken Rockwell

He is talking about the Nikon 18-200mm  VR

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/18200.htmI

You can save a lot of money reading this guy.  I swear.  Eventually I will get a Nikon D700 most probably.  But right now I still have too much to learn to plunk down 2500 bucks for a camera.   Although I did spend that much for a computer a few years ago (it’s all about conditioning).    And  televisions can easily cost that much these days.   But some of these cameras are heavy.  And this one ( the D40) is supposed to be very light.  I saw a couple of guys at the beach this weekend with some very heavy cameras and lenses sitting on a tripod.  I’m just not ready to go there yet.  i want to travel light and (hopefully) capture more just by being in the right place at the right time.

I finally got the photos I took this weekend out of the camera and into a computer. It has been awhile since I posted photos here in VB so here are a bunch of them. How many is a bunch?

There are more photos from this weekend on my Flickr page.

More Beach Photos

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Last night I was glued to the tube watching Frontline and their documentary about life in China. It is not reality tv. It is harsh reality television.

It is “Thank God I don’t live there” television. I was walking around today thinking about the young woman who had to fight off her parents and her community to avoid an arranged marriage. And finally managed to do it.

The alternative? She has a job working in the city in some sort of high tech factory. And she works eleven hours per day seven days per week. Her task is to put four wires into a receptacle six hundred times per hour. That is ten times per minute for eleven hours. Over and over again.

Maybe she gets a half hour for lunch.

But the good news is that she meets someone she genuinely likes and they fall in love. So she has some happiness in her life. And she is a cute little thing. I feel like sending her a wedding present.

She will probably insert millions of wires into receptacles before she is done.

AAggghhhhhhhh.

Anyway. Moving on. There are many interesting characters that we discover. There is a young guy with a winning smile and a very attractive shirt who plans to tailor shirts for individuals and sell them on the internet. And the next time we see him he has ten women working on sewing machines and boxes of shirts ready to go. Amazing!

He becomes a Christian and seems totally satisfied. There’s no girlfriend in the picture so he doesn’t have to worry about supporting a family. It’s just him and dear old mom.

Smart guy!

Most of them are not so lucky. Loneliness takes its toll. But everything revolves around money. Relationships suffer. It’s a hard life. I couldn’t handle it. I would have to take a slow boat to the United States. And that option is available to some of them. But the parents exert an amazing influence on them and they stay.

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/

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Spring finally came to Boston as Cathy and I often went down to the Charles River to study. At least we tried to study. But there were sail boats fluttering by and flowers waving in the wind. She seemed fairly happy and I was enjoying the relative peace and calm our relationship had found after months of turmoil. At one point I suggested that we should live together. It was a foolish thought and she demonstrated this to me by showing up one evening with a small suitcase and her hair curlers. She sat on the bed and looked around at the shabbiness that surrounded her. I had moved out of the Babcock Street house and left Madam Blavatsky’s disciple to her secret thoughts.

The apartment was too small and the ridiculous nature of my thought was soon apparent even to me.

There were no more trips in her father’s small plane either. It was clear to me that she idolized this man who had built a successful business. I remember him showing me a warehouse out behind their house when we were in Williamsport. There was tons of frozen food out there and I imagine he was a local food distributor and a very busy guy.

So one evening we were watching television when there was a knock on the door and a close family friend stood in the doorway. I remember her answering the door and then a conversation about shoes. He had just bought some expensive shoes. Maybe they were made out of alligator skin. It’s funny the things we remember from decades earlier. It’s clear to me now that he must have been looking at the floor rather intensely and this drew her attention to his shoes.

And then he told her that her father had flown his small Cessna into the ground and was gone. As I jumped to my feet she fell to the ground and started to scream. And there was nothing any one of us could do at that moment except feel her anguish as she discovered the darkest depths of love lost.

I slept on the couch that night and she slept in her room with her family friend. The following day I went with them to the airport and said good-bye. Eventually she returned to school and I stopped by to see her. We had a short talk and she told me about a discussion she had with her mother while she was gone.

Her mother told her that she was playing a cruel game with me and should stop doing it. Apparently her mother had discovered a few things recently and wanted to help her daughter. I don’t know the details. I can only imagine.

Later that summer I fell in love with a beautiful girl and a few years later we were married. One day I was waiting for her on the front steps of my apartment when Cathy showed up in her convertible. We talked for awhile and then my future wife rolled in on her ten speed bicycle.

That was the last time I saw her. I hope she found some happiness somewhere along the line. We all do, hopefully, from time to time. It is so very important to find someone whom you can love and trust in this world.

When you find someone like this who loves you back remember to give them a hug every day of your life. And tell them how much they mean to you.

Always.

Part One

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Part Two

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Grab a feed and be here when it happens.

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