Remembering Cabrillo

Cabrillo National Monument and its Point Loma Lighthouse in San Diego brings back memories of my photography past. Sometime back in the mid-80s in the 9th grade I had an English teacher that participated in a program that was designed to use photography to help students learn better writing skills. We were all given Polariod cameras with film and taken on field trips to different parts of San Diego to snap photos. We were then instructed to use those photos as inspiration to write essays on our experiences. Since English class and writing, in general, was not my favorite subject in school, I don't really remember what I wrote about or how good the writing was. But I can remember those Polaroids as vividly as if I took them yesterday. I actually still have those Polaroids in a shoebox somewhere and stumble across them every several years.

I still can't really put a finger on exactly what motivates me to go out and make photos. But remembering those Polaroids, composing the shot, the way they made me feel when I peeled open film to reveal the photo, and the vivid memories they trigger whenever I come across them in my dusty shoe boxes of prints, gives me a little insight. Perhaps I make photographs to slow this fast paced world, be in the moment (the 1/250th of a second moment), or to preserve those moments for my future self.

Polaroid has come and gone. I'm sure that I'll look back someday at my Nikon D70s with its 6.1 megapixel 2-dimensional image sensor and laugh at how crude of a photographic tool it was, but will smile and feel contentment as I remember these Cabrillo photos as vividly as I do today.

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These photos were taken in January 2010. For the first photo, I had composition that I liked, but the colors were so-so and, overall, it really didn't pop for me. Remembering that I bought the image editor Pixelmator in the after-Thanksgiving sales last year and haven't used it yet, I thought I'd give it a try to see if I can improve the photo. The interface is very similar to Photoshop, but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that I had in CS2. However, I think it has enough for the majority of my needs. In the first photo, I used the cloning tool to remove a distracting flag pole, added the border to make it look like its double matted, and applied an interesting filter called "gloom" to add that dark, diffuse look.