Monday, October 23, 2006

A Bur Up My.....

Ego is sometimes a mean task master. It can tell you all kinds of wild tales. Patience and humility are not part of ego's makeup.

Andrew Sullivan, the political blogger who has been doing "The View from your Window" asked for more submissions so I thought I would try again. He said including part of the window frame would take you to the front of the line. So I did.

This is the real deal folks, the view from my kitchen looking out over tropical suburbia and my neighbor's collectibles to the Pacific Ocean beyond.















So I sent my lovely view in and the very next day what do I see, a picture from Maui at the other end of town. I know the house and the fishpond in that picture. I can pretty much figure out where that picture was taken and can tell you that a Rented Window was used in that picture.

Sure it is a million dollar view, probably a two million dollar view by now. My lower middle class partial view apparently didn't make the grade.

Fine then, I can certainly borrow a window and compete with that view.














I read his political blog regularly and "The View from your Window" pictures from around the world are a definite treat. Having seen them from the beginning, I might say Vista is a more appropriate word than View for the pictures he selects to post.

Determined creature that I am to have my ego stroked with one of my pictures posted on his well read blog, I sent him this 4.2 million dollar Borrowed Vista. It is from the back porch off of the mostly glass walled living room of a house I am very familiar with. I had to be there anyway today.















This is the view from the bedroom windows.















Sitting on the front porch.
















But poor me, I have to put up with this cheapo sunset view back at home.















He has posted "Window?" pictures from Maui and Oahu two or three times already. I'm sure he doesn't want to bunch up views from one place when there are so many to choose from. Now it is time to wait and see if the 4.2 mil Borrowed Vista makes the cut.

4 comments:

Annie in Austin said...

Good luck with the photos and the mind games! I hope you win, Christopher.

I went to the site, but couldn't figure out how to only look at the window photos without reading the other stuff. It was a little too busy over there for me.

Annie

christin m p in massachusetts said...

I envy your gorgeous sunset view. Being a suburbanite myself, I can see how a window view photo contest can be challenging for us. In the suburbs, there are realities like cars and parking spaces, telephone poles and cables, street signs, swimming pools, fire hydrants, fences, ... caught in our window views. I imagine the sight of those objects must look very attractive to anyone who ever became lost alone in the wilderness for a couple of days, though. We humans seem always to long for whatever is missing, no matter how many good things surround us already. I'm guessing that Andrew Sullivan lives and works in a heavily populated area, if he favors scenes that give the feeling that the viewer is solitary.

Even though your next contest entry is a "borrowed" view, it's still a striking photograph. For me, if a scene makes me imagine I'm there -- want to be there -- I consider it to be a beautiful work of art. The scene you photographed there makes me want to walk down the hill to feel the pristine earth under my feet, and gaze out over that deep blue water with the ethereal mist bridging it to the wispy clouds and the deep blue sky. What time of day was that?

I also want to comment on the photograph captioned "Sitting on the front porch" -- Did you create that garden yourself? What is the name of that tree with the pink flowers, and also the one toward the left that looks like a pine tree? And what about the hedge row? I would like to know what all of the plants and flowers in the garden are called, but I know there are too many varieties for you to do that without a diagram.

christin m p in massachusetts said...

I also thought this might be a good occasion to ask for help on taking digital photographs. It seems that when I get the foreground into clear focus, the background blurs -- and vice versa. The only way I can manage to get the whole picture to look clear is to reduce the size all the way down to 50 percent.

Just so you can see what I mean about the blurred background, I'll show you an example of what I got when I tried to photograph one of the views from our porch -- complete with telephone and electric cable lines, street lights, and tiny cars in the distance...

A blurred view from our porch

Christopher C. NC said...

The plants in the view from the porch are a Pink Hibiscus being trained into a small tree form. The pine looking one is a Norfolk Island Pine and the hedge row in the background is Stephanotis Vine on a fence with Bulbine in front with the yellow flowers. The bed the Hibiscus is in has Agapanthus which just finished blooming, Blue Louisiana Iris, Society Garlic green and variegated, a few lingering Gardenias and Impatiens which are weeds and seed like crazy.

This garden is best described as a collaboration between me and John the owner, two men with strong opinions and I do all the actual work except mow the lawn with his fancy riding mower.

My camera is just point and click and takes great pictures but not very good closeups which get blurry. If your camera has settings or a lense to focus check that and read the manual if you have one. I'm not much help with camera stuff. It looks like you have a nice view from your porch though. Nice fall colors which was Andrew's photo choice for today.

The "View from your Window" is not a contest per se. It is just send them in and if I like it I'll post it. No credit is even given to the photographer. It is filler in a very political blog.

The only way I know to win a mind game with yourself is to surrender and stop fighting!