I didn't take these photos

....but they were posted  on the iPhone Photo Academy's website for inspiration.  I'm inspired to learn ways to take better photos on my iPhone!

If you're inspired to learn ways to use your phone camera, check out this link: https://iphonephotographyschool.com

Organic Weed Killer

I copied these from a sign in the window of Natural Grocers yesterday and bought the ingredients to kill weeds in my back yard.

I had never heard the word, surfactant, until Sunday at writing group when Becky used it in her writing--and then there it was again on Monday!

Tuesday

Today is such a beautiful spring day in Texas!

I drove out to Helotes to watch a ballet class, then we five had a delicious dinner at Fujiya Gardens.  Those kids like sushi like I like cake.  We were celebrating good report cards, Nathan making drumroll and their new car.

Nathan likes to sneak up and hug from behind--always such a happy surprise!

Having stayed up way too late watching photo tutorials and "Call The Midwife,"  my plan is to take a little morning nap and catch up on sleep. Writing group was wonderful yesterday and I am always jazzed afterwards for a few hours and unable to sleep.

So I turned the phone to vibrate, got out my Hank Hung The Moon to read myself back to sleep, and heard a vibration.

"I bet you're wondering why I'm not in school," Nathan said, sniffling a bit.  "Allergies!  If there weren't enough people and cars to suck up all the pollen, there'd be mounds of it everywhere!"

"How are you otherwise?" I asked later.

"Pretty good," he said, "If you consider making the Drumroll good!"

So our Nathan is officially in the middle school band and so excited!  I told him I'd tell everybody and he said I could be his assistant in communications!

So there you have it--my first official duty as Nathan's publicity assistant, informing those who know him and those who don't that Nathan M. Lininger is now a drummer boy!

iphonephotographyschool.com

Talk about bangs for bucks--this Photography Class is the best deal ever!  Not only am I learning techniques to use with the iPhone camera, but also with my larger Nikon.

My favorite photos are reflections, and our young agile teacher shows me something I never knew:  to get the best reflections, you need to hold the lens of the camera as close as possible to the surface of the reflecting glass or water.  If you can easily squat, take advantage of that posture as often as you can before you wake up one day and discover that you can't get up and down quite as nimbly as you used to.

This young teacher, however, teaches an alternate method for those who are unable to do this: Use a selfie stick to hold the phone right at the surface of the water.  Brilliant!

What amazes me is how many options are right there on the screen of the iPhone that I never even knew were there: the ability to lock the focus, to add or subtract lights, etc--all by touching, holding, and swiping certain areas on the screen.  

Besides all this (and I'm only on Module 4 of 8) he sends videos and articles about the best apps (most free) whereby you can change your photos much like you would do in PhotoShop.  You can do selective lighting, re-color certain parts of the picture, and even remove elements that you wish hadn't been in the frame.

Once you have a good digital photograph, you can straighten the horizon later (if you captured it crookedly) and do all kinds of things to improve the quality of the picture.

While a DSLR camera is excellent for road trips (it's right there beside you in the car), smart phone cameras are now so sophisticated that they may be the best choice when you're traveling light or flying.

iPhone Photography School. PS

This class is excellent--very well organized and clear.  Emil, the young teacher, is from Latvia and has a slight accent, but he's completely understandable and gives great examples.

I'm only in Module 2 and I'm amazed at how much the iPhone camera can do.  With simple swipes, there are commands and controls I never even knew were in there!

This class lasts several hours--there are 8 modules--so you definitely get way more than your money's worth and can keep the class and view it as many times as you like.

At the beginning of the class, you can download many pages--these pages go along with each lecture, so you don't even have to take notes.

This is by far the best photography class I've ever taken.  I like doing it on my own, at my own pace, pausing if necessary, and even watching some lessons in each module again.

You will learn how to edit with a free app, Snapseed, and how to take brilliant panoramas and even how to use your earphones to snap pictures from a distance if you want to put your phone on a tripod for stability.

Voices in the Night

Last night, I slept with a bunch of  people I've never met in person, including a philosopher, a professor, and a poet.

The reason I came to sleep with these three (and a couple of others) is that--sick to death of news--I fell asleep listening to podcasts.  They came to me courtesy of one of my favorite podcasts,   Krista Tippet's On Being.  When one ended, the next one began, so I'm hoping that even sleeping, I absorbed some wisdom.

"The only true religion is learning," one said.  I remember those words because they intrigued me, but I fell back to sleep before I found out who said it.

For each episode online, you can hear the actual produced version of Krista's interview (55 minutes) or you can choose the unedited raw version, including the outtakes and chit-chat.  I like to listen in on the chit-chat.

Every time I'd turn over in bed, my left arm would protest, having been stuck with a shingles needle yesterday morning.  Each time I briefly awoke, I'd hear one of these wide-awake people in my bed sharing personal revelations.  Charlotte told me at lunch that there was wicked loud thunder last night, but I didn't hear it at all.

IRIS

Pam brought me this book from the library today:

You may have seen the documentary about Iris on Netflix....

This woman is a fashion icon in her nineties!

Here are some words of advice to youngsters like me--women only on the cusp of seventy:

When you get older, as I often paraphrase an old family friend, if you have two of anything, chances are one of them is going to hurt when you get up in the morning.  But you have to get up and move beyond the pain.  If you want to stay young, you have to think young.

Having a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, and a sense of curiosity--these are my tonic.  They keep me young, childlike, open to new people and things, ready for another adventure.

I never want to be an old fuddy-duddy; I hold the self-proclaimed record for being the World's Oldest Living Teenager and I intend to keep it that way.  

iPhone Photography School.

Several years ago, before iPhones, Lea and I took a class in digital photography at the Southwest Crafts Center.  (I had taken one many years before there, taught by Trish Simonite, and it was excellent!)

Lea and I walked in with our little tiny digital cameras and everyone else came in with great big cameras and extra lenses and we felt, well, small.

That particular teacher was disorganized and focused mostly on the big camera people and we were, well, ignored.  I never did master that little Sony or whatever it was.

Well, here's the good news I just discovered today: An excellent online photography class for iPhone picture taking!

It costs $97 with a 30-day-money-back guarantee: iPhone Photography School.  Google it and sign up today if you want to learn all the cool things you can do with your iPhone.  I'm just on module #1 (there are 8 modules) and I've already learned so many things I didn't know the iPhone would do.  The teacher is excellent and he gives you a whole book you can print out to go along with the lectures.

I'd thought about taking a camera class at the camera store, but the cost is $60 an hour.  This is really a bargain if you're looking for ways to take better pictures with the phone you probably have with you all the time.  Once you sign up for the class, you can watch it again and again, as many times as you like.

You can also email the teacher: Emil Pakarkles:  emil@iphonephotographyschool.com

Hank Hung The Moon

On the road, I'm not particularly concerned about getting anywhere.  The Middle of Nowhere is the way and the destination.  Cities overwhelm me, but small towns and roadsides put everything in human scale--or at least in a scale I can manage to take in.

Those of us who grew up in small towns and rural areas love the symmetry of furrows and orchards, red dirt roads, ditches, old cemeteries, rusted tractors that remind us of our grandfathers'....

While we don't like to romanticize The South, and we never met a good Southern book by a non-Southerner, we love to encounter the real South put into words by someone who knows it like we do.

At Conundrums Book Store in St. Francisville, I bought a book called Hank Hung The Moon by a writer named Rheta Grimsley Johnson who lived a lot of her life in South Georgia, Florida and Alabama about the time Betty and Bob and I were growing up in Cochran.

It's about Hank Williams, who died at 29 and lives on and on in all of us who loved his music, but it's about a familiar time and place she describes so well it takes my breath away!

Especially to Nellie, Betty, Carlene, Lea, and Bob--this book might just be the next book you want to read!

Some cuttings I can't resist sharing, putting some lines in bold so you won't miss 'em.

       As children, my sisters and I would use a stick to draw a hop-scotch board in the white sand just beyond the front gate, using ubiquitous, small red rocks chock full of iron as our markers.  Often, we'd climb the mimosa that grew just outside the kitchen window, inventing elaborate games that made good use of its powder-puff pink blooms.  There were blackberries to pick all along the dirt road in the summertime, and at Christmas a poinsettia bloomed in the chimney corner.  By the time we came along it seemed an idyllic place to grow up, a cacophony of sounds and smells that blended together in some rural recipe and came out as "home." 

       In Chapter Two, the author tells us about the visiting music teacher at her elementary school:

      A special, visiting music teacher made the rounds, weaving her way down the hallway on stilettos, beaming a fluorescent smile at all of us expectant children tucked like crabs into the shells of individual blond desks.   Maybe she longed to be elsewhere, performing on Broadway, or at least on a stage not defined by a linoleum rug. You wouldn't have known it, though.  Southern women of the early Sixties were conditioned to act like they loved whatever they were doing, whether it was ringing a doorbell with your Avon order or dishing out fish sticks in a school cafeteria.  A Southern woman put her best foot forward, made lemonade from lemons, bloomed where she was planted.
       And so the poor woman smiled.


       From second grade through sixth, I attended Dalraida Elementary School in Montgomery, a typical red brick maze of an institution ruled by women and shaded by pines.  It took up a suburban block right out of Ozzie and Harriet, if Ozzie and Harriet had had a little less money and lived near an airfield. I loved the school, and felt exceedingly safe there, from morning til 3 o'clock dismissal....It was a forgotten time long ago, before bullies and bullets enrolled in elementary schools, and before the music died.