Two new thoughts tonight. One, I take a lot of things too seriously. Two, taking things too seriously too often results in my not actually getting anything done. Granted, not being able to find a job isn’t exactly helping the situation, but even with that I could be doing more. I need to start getting more done and more actively working towards something, even if I’m not yet sure what I’m working towards.
One thing that I can keep in mind as something to work towards that is looking better and better in my mind with every day that passes is a road trip. Hopefully next summer, spend a few weeks out west, just me, my 8×10, and the road. Well, and my notebook, too, but I figure that much is a given. Aside from needing a new car before I could do this, it wouldn’t necessarily have to be all that expensive a venture, either. If you live on peanut butter & jelly and camp every night, the cost of a trip plummets compared to staying in hotels every night and eating out every meal. Film for the trip would be a little pricey, but nothing totally unmanageable. If you figure 3 weeks on the road, an average of 5 images per day, you come to just over 200 sheets of film. Granted, this comes to around $450, but it could be a lot worse than that. If I were shooting color, for example, it could easily cost twice that.
But I digress. The thing I really like about this plan is that it is an intermediate step. Meaning that while it’s something to work for, it isn’t an end in itself in the grand scheme of things (career-wise). Not only can I go on this trip and then decide whether I want to go to NYC or Tokyo or wherever, there’s a good chance I’d be better off doing this trip and only deciding afterwards what I want to do. How so? I get the feeling that this trip would do much for my maturity and clarity of thought. Sort of something to help me get my priorities in order and make better sense of my thoughts. I could make lots of great new photographs (that are salable, too, in the fine-art sense) and so much more. Make some images, write in my notebook, contemplate the Tao of everything, etc.
Where would I go? I’m mostly thinking of the Sangre de Cristo range in Colorado and New Mexico. Beautiful mountains, and it’s where Horseshoe Mountain is (a special place for me). Other thoughts include the Sandhills, the Pacific Northwest, and Mexico. Time will tell where I actually end up.
In other news, I refinished the wooden legs of my big tripod. I love this tripod, and it was getting rather sorry-looking. It’s at least 30 years old and wasn’t babied by the previous owner or owners. It wasn’t abused, either, but it has obviously been used quite a lot. Structurally everything was just fine – a testament to the quality of this thing that it had been used for a third of a century or more and was still sturdy enough to hold my weight and barely even flex. It’s a Ries tripod, a brand that commands great respect and a huge price tag. Mine is an older equivalent of the current A-100 tripod, which retails for close to $600 if my memory serves me right. I bought mine on eBay from a guy in Kansas who sold it to me for about $250. A bargain at that price. Anyway, the original finish on the wooden legs was a clear varnish of sorts. Probably looked decent when it was new, but by this point it had darkened so much and was so scratched and scuffed that it essentially looked like hell. So on Wednesday evening, I disassembled the legs, took all the metal components off of the inner and outer leg sections, and set about stripping the old finish.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever used chemical paint stripper before, but let me just say that paint stripper is nasty stuff. The kind of nasty that ate through fifteen pair of nitrile gloves while I was stripping the finish off the tripod legs. Nitrile gloves are far more resistant to chemicals than latex gloves are, too, so had I been using latex gloves I may well have gone through twice as many. Anyway, the stripping process took me about four hours overall. The general procedure consists of putting a thick coat of the stuff (which comes out of the can looking like the world’s biggest loogie) on the finish, wait until it soaks in and the finish starts to blister, and then using some manner of scraping implement, scrape the mess off the wood. Following that, it’s best to wash the wood down with warm water with a little soap in it so as to remove any residue from the stripper. [Stripper residue. Heh.] Yesterday I took to giving all the parts a decent sanding. Not to much, as you wouldn’t want the parts to get too loose and thereby prevent proper tightening of the leg locks, but enough to remove any rough spots on the surface and lessen any stains the wood might have picked up that.
Following that came the new finish. Tun oil. Tung oil is a drying oil that comes from the nut of the Tung tree, which I believe is found somewhere in Asia. It provides a clear, fairly hard, water-resistant, durable, and low-profile finish. As compared to something like polyurethane, which builds up what amounts to a layer of plastic on the surface of the wood, finishing oils like Tung oil soak in and create a finish within the top layer of the wood itself. Consequently, unlike with finishes that build up on top of the wood, with stuff like Tung oil, you maintain a natural look and feel to the wood. I’m a big fan of a natural finish on wood. I don’t like to put the surface of the wood under a thick clearcoat or cover it entirely with paint (paint is evil). Wood is beautiful stuff – let it show, dammit.
Anyhow, after everything was sanded, I put on two light coats of Tung oil and set out everything to dry overnight. I also re-glued and clamped the bottom of one of the legs where it had previously split. This morning I went over everything lightly with fine steel wool, ran a tack cloth over everything again, and put on one more (final) coat of oil. About six hours later I buffed all the wood pieces and spent about 45 min reassembling everything. I am happy to say that the tripod has never looked more beautiful. It’s even more pleasing to work with now (which says a lot) and looks absolutely gorgeous. Well, aside from the metal parts that are covered with old black paint that is slowly flaking off, anyway. All in all, I have to wonder why the hell I didn’t do this like two years ago. It was quick, it was easy, it was very rewarding. It especially looks nice holding up my 8×10, which I refinished entirely by hand when I first got it back in 1999.
My printer currently hates me. For the last two days, anything I’ve tried to print just comes out as a mass of layers of big inky rectangles. Like the printer is just trying to color in the page. The size and approximate shape of these blobs corresponds to the size and shape of the text I’m trying to print (think paragraphs), so I know some of the data is getting through correctly, but obviously not enough. I tried reinstalling the print driver, which I think will solve other problems once I get this cleared up, but as yet things remain unchanged. Blah. I think it’s a printer-end problem, too, which is unsettling. This is a $500 inkjet printer which I bought about two years ago, dammit, it shouldn’t be dying yet. I’ll email Epson customer service tomorrow if I remember.
OK, that’s enough. I’m sure I’ve bored all of you enough for one night. This, of course, assumes I have more than one or two readers, but I’ll just go on assuming that I do have multiple readers rather than trouble myself with the idea that this whole weblog really is as pointless as the vast majority of weblogs are.
EET MOR CHIKN!!!
