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Several people have asked recently how I arrived in San Diego after being born and raised in Texas. It’s not a pleasant story but it does have a happy ending, and since I’ve published it before at other blogging sites, no reason why I should not share with my readership here at WordPress.

Enter

On April 15, 1993, I was standing in line at the bank to transfer money from savings to checking so I could write the IRS a big check, probably more than Mitt Romney has ever paid [that's an editorial comment for the political season].

The line was long, and I stood there thinking about the world that might exist outside the borders of the “Great Nation of Texas.”

Later that day, I disappeared. I had packed the 1989 Mustang GT with 100 CDs — Beatles, Who, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Doobie Brothers, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and other groups that I could sing to while rolling on down the highway — and told only one person what I was doing.

Midlife crisis had arrived….

Actually, I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t want to live in this world anymore. I was going to drive north to Canada and end it all; too patriotic to do it in the United States. Let Canada deal with a dead body.

I also took $8,000 in cash with me. I didn’t want to use credit cards because I didn’t want to be tracked, like they do on TV.

When I got to Fargo, North Dakota, I still had $7,800 left. Wow! Maybe I should do a little touring and use up all that cash before offing myself….

I took Interstates 94 and 90 west to Seattle. Still had $7,400 left. Off to Vancouver, thinking that I would spend everything in Canada and then….

As I was sitting in Vancouver’s Stanley Park that first morning watching the early morning joggers, one of the male joggers sat down by me and actually asked me how I was doing. I decided to answer honestly. He was shocked. A few minutes later, his jogging buddy caught up with him and sat down too.

The two of them were not only jogging together, but they were a gay couple who lived in San Diego, were originally from Houston, and were vacationing in Vancouver to celebrate their fifth anniversary together. They convinced me to hang out with them for three or four days in Vancouver and explore the gay culture there. After four days, they had convinced me that I could live as an openly gay man in virtually any big city on the West Coast. Off I went….

I got back to Seattle and it was raining. I don’t like the rain. If it’s going to rain where I live, let it rain while I’m asleep or on vacation elsewhere. Remember that I grew up in Texas with daily afternoon thunderstorms and fall hurricanes. I left for Portland….

The three-hour drive from Seattle to Portland was done in the rain, and it continued raining in Portland. Not for me….

Next big city: Sacramento. Just a smaller version of Houston. Not appealing, especially since 30 miles west was the University of California Davis. UC Davis is the Aggies. My alma mater, Texas A&M University (where yesterday’s shooting was and from which Texas Gov. Rick Perry also graduated), is also the Aggies. There was just too much similarity between the Sacramento-Davis and the Houston-College Station areas for me. It was exactly what I was trying to escape. Travel on….

I spent a couple of days in the San Francisco Bay Area and simply did not like it. Everything was a little too weird for a conservative Republican Texan.

My next stop was in Bakersfield, mainly to see an old friend from Texas A&M. He told me what to expect so I was sure I wouldn’t be staying, and I didn’t.

I had relatives in Los Angeles, and I had been there a couple of times. It was a possibility. I hit Interstate 5 intent on spending a couple of days in Los Angeles. I drove, and drove, and drove. When I finally decided to pull over to see exactly where I was, turns out I was in Oceanside, way past Los Angeles. I figured that was L.A.’s way of saying that it didn’t want me.

Last stop: San Diego. If I couldn’t find a life in San Diego, I’d simply go across the border to Tijuana and let the Mexican authorities deal with a dead body.

Eleven months earlier I had visited San Diego on my way to visit a friend/former employee/ former roommate who was graduating from the Army’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey. I remember thinking then, as I was standing at Torrey Pines Glider Port looking at Blacks Beach 300 feet below, that I would eventually retire to San Diego. Back in the present, I thought it was a real possibility to create a life in San Diego.

The first place I went was to the San Diego’s Center for Social Services. It was actually San Diego’s Lesbian & Gay Men’s Community Center, but Lesbian and Gay were socially stigmatic labels back then [and in some areas of the country, still are]. I started my coming out process at the “Coming Out Support Group” at the Center. I retired for 11 months while working on getting comfortable with myself, with who I am as a person.

Finally I put myself back in the work force as a temp working Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I needed the long weekends to play at the beaches. My first temp job was with a guy creating a company and needing help with all the paper work that is involved in doing that. Unfortunately, he had a mouth on him that would have put my granddad to shame (see I wanted to follow you but, uh, no). I only worked there one day.

My next job was with a telecommunications company building out cell sites to make our cell phones work, first in San Diego, then in Detroit, beginning in April 1994. While I was in Detroit, the company paid me a $1,500 monthly living allowance, an extremely nice salary, car rental, and a trip home to San Diego each month. On my first trip home in May, I met Jim. We’ve been together ever since, and here I am today.

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?

I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572

If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!

What comes out of the camera
is just the basics to start with
(part 2)

Part 1

One of the photography forums I hang out at is called Ugly Hedgehog. It’s a mix of the amateur, the professional wannabes, and even some professional photographers.

As I’m reading through the many posts each day, invariably I find at least one person claiming that you’re not a photographer unless you can get your picture correct with the camera — no photoshopping allowed.

Of course, in the digital world, if you shoot using just the RAW setting on your camera, you summarily are not a photographer and never will be by their definitions because RAW requires that you do post-camera processing somewhere just to get a picture that you can then post or print. There is no other way.

Their attitude also fails to take into account what we did before digital came along. In my darkroom, I used filters, special developing chemicals, special papers…. I dodged and burned…. I used every trick available to me in order to get the picture that I wanted, even if the camera didn’t originally give it to me.

I don’t remember what my first camera was because it was provided to me by the school so that I could take pictures of our sixth-grade sports teams. The first camera I owned was a Canon A-1 that I bought in June 1978. It lasted me until April 1993 when I moved to San Diego and left it behind in College Station, Texas.

A year later I bought a Kodak digital camera…. loaded it with all the digital goodies…. Its digital resolution was a whopping 1 MP…. one…. I was impressed with that camera. And well I should have been because it cost me over $5,000. Sadly, Kodak is in bankruptcy, having failed to keep up with the digital revolution even though they had more than a thousand patents relating to digital photography. I read somewhere that they created the first digital camera back in the late 1970s, just about the time I was buying my Canon A-1.

I currently have 11 point & shoot cameras (bought them for my employees since they needed them), including Kodak, GE, Samsung, HP, and Canon.

I have two DSLR cameras, a Canon Rebel XSi and a Canon 550D. I had the 550D imported from London since its American counterpart, the Rebel T2i, was not yet available in America. I really wanted the video function and the increased resolution.

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t explored all the setting on either the XSi or the 550D…. too busy taking pictures….

At Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago, I bought a magazine for $29.99(!) titled “The Complete Canon SLR Handbook.” On page 109 is a small article titled “How to change your Picture Style.”

How interesting.

Just because Canon’s programmers chose something for me doesn’t mean that I can’t change it. I started playing around, especially with the Standard settings.

I spend a lot of time at the computer using Photoshop CS6 Beta, PaintShop Pro X4, Photo-Paint X5, Lightroom 4, and even Word 2010, to see if I can make my pictures better.

I discovered that I could. I also discovered that I was almost always increasing the contrast and clarity.

In looking at the Picture Styles, I discovered that I could increase or decrease the Sharpness, Contrast, Saturation, and Color tone, so I did.

The default setting for Standard pictures is 3,0,0,0 (Sharpness, Contrast, Saturation, and Color tone). After playing around, I decided on a setting of 7,2,2,2.

I got my first pictures where I was happy with how they came out of the camera…. added no contrast or clarity to them in post-processing. All I did was crop some of them. I did try adding contrast and clarity but found them too sharp and edgy, almost looking like a lot of noise.

I even got the first picture of a dark, dreary, foggy morning that I was actually happy with:

This is just another example that, as my wise old grandmother said, “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.” However, now I know that I can decide what comes out of the camera and what the basics to start with actually are!

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