Investing in myself

I’ve been tak­ing this time off from work to take care of myself. My sleep has been spo­radic, but I’m get­ting back to a lot of the prac­tices that have nour­ished me in the past. I’m spend­ing time in med­i­ta­tion, jour­nal­ing, exer­cis­ing, spend­ing time with oth­er peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in groups.

I still haven’t been draw­ing, but I have been work­ing on posters using a process that’s pret­ty excit­ing to me. It’s frus­trat­ing not to be draw­ing, but that’s got to come back. Even if I can’t bring myself to pick up the pen, I should at least try to work some­thing out on the digitizer.

A Chris­t­ian friend of mine recent­ly said to me that we have to walk in faith and love. He said that if I’ve only got ten dol­lars and I don’t know where the rent mon­ey is com­ing from, that I have to give the ten dol­lars to the poor, because hang­ing on to it is what’s keep­ing me from open­ing my hands to receive the rent mon­ey. It’s not a per­fect metaphor, but I like it and think it applies to me more than to some­one on his last ten bucks. I’m so pro­tec­tive of my cre­ativ­i­ty that I won’t let it see the light of day. I hide it away and don’t let peo­ple know that once upon a time I actu­al­ly made a liv­ing from graph­ic design and illus­tra­tion. It was noth­ing glamorous—I was doing cat­a­logs and tourist map advertisements—but I was work­ing and devel­op­ing a set of skills, tech­ni­cal and cre­ative, for mak­ing things appear in paper and ink in an effec­tive and some­times pleas­ing way.

I’ve been mak­ing it a point to show peo­ple who know me what I have done and to talk about the projects I want to embark on. It sur­pris­es me how many of the peo­ple I’m close to have no idea that I once con­sid­ered myself a graph­ic artist, not a pro­gram­mer. It sur­pris­es me that no one has seen any of my draw­ings or my pho­tographs. Per­haps it’s because I don’t car­ry a sketch­book, or at least I rarely take it out.

It was­n’t all that long ago that my friends knew me as a cre­ative, not a tech. Now very few know that I even used to con­sid­er myself creative.

So while I’ve been off of work and my income is a frac­tion of what it was while I was pulling in a pay­check, it has seemed to me to be that time when I’m afraid the rent would­n’t come in. Except this real­ly is not a finan­cial cri­sis, it’s a spir­i­tu­al one.

When I left CNET nine years ago, one of my co-work­ers bought part of a com­put­er for me. I assem­bled this machine from parts picked up at Fry’s and this fel­low paid for the moth­er­board, proces­sor and case, per­haps more. He did it because he want­ed to see what I would do with it. He invest­ed in my cre­ative pursuits.

Despite the fact that I have less mon­ey right now, it’s become clear to me that if I don’t invest in myself, I can’t expect any­one else to, finan­cial­ly, mate­ri­al­ly, emo­tion­al­ly or spir­i­tu­al­ly. So I’ve been mak­ing some of the pur­chas­es that I’ve been afraid to or have felt would be a waste because I’ve been mak­ing my liv­ing pro­gram­ming and not in design. I bought the Adobe Cre­ative Suite 2 so that I can once again work with CMYK images (Pho­to­shop Ele­ments does­n’t sup­port col­or mod­els oth­er than RGB and grayscale) and so that I can get up to speed on InDe­sign now that Quark seems to have shot down XPress. Also, with Adobe’s pur­chase of Macro­me­dia, it seems fool­ish for me to try to keep work­ing with Freehand.

That by itself was a big chunk of cash for a guy on a reduced income, but it was either that or pirate it. That was OK when I was a kid, but as an adult I feel I need to play by the rules, espe­cial­ly when it comes to my pro­fes­sion­al tools. I would­n’t start a career as a car­pen­ter with a stolen ham­mer, and I don’t use unli­censed software.

With that I fin­ished an exper­i­men­tal project that had been in progress for a while, but which had been on hold because I did­n’t have the soft­ware to work in the CMYK col­or space. A crude sec­tion of this project can be seen here:

http://paroxysm.com/splicer/Power_screen_2_section.gif

That’s a small sec­tion of a larg­er piece that I’ve now had print­ed at a size of four feet by five and a half feet. From across the room, it looks like this:

I’m work­ing on more of these. It’s not going as quick­ly as I’d like, but it is going. If I had enough space, I’d mount it and hang it up. I think it needs enough space to step back from to do jus­tice to it. Still, I might get a small­er proof mounted.

While I built that fair­ly large piece up from a low-res­o­lu­tion dig­i­tal image, I’m real­ly push­ing the lim­its of what I can get away with with­out reveal­ing the lim­its of the image. I’ve been think­ing about get­ting a new cam­era for years. Oth­er than almost dis­pos­able “mini­cams” all I have is a Kodak DC120, which was top of the line for a con­sumer cam­era in 1997, the first “Mega Pix­el” cam­era that could be bought for $1000 (In fact, the CCD had a real res­o­lu­tion of only about 850,000 pix­els.) The rea­sons that cam­era no longer works for me goes far beyond the res­o­lu­tion of the images it cre­ates. It gave me years of good ser­vice, but it has been right­ful­ly retired.

So I’m final­ly step­ping up to a dig­i­tal SLR. I’d want­ed to get a Nikon D200; by all reports it’s about the best cam­era in pro­duc­tion, sur­pass­ing in fea­tures and image qual­i­ty the cam­eras avail­able at three to four times its price. The prob­lem is that that price is not small. $1700 gets you on a four-week wait­ing list for a cam­era body with­out lens­es. If you want one faster than that, they’re going on eBay for $400-$500 over list price.

I could have scraped that up, but it would have left me on real­ly shaky ground finan­cial­ly. There’s a dif­fer­ence between putting myself out there and cut­ting myself off at the knees.

So instead I’ve just ordered Nikon’s entry-lev­el SLR, the D50. It does­n’t have the res­o­lu­tion of the D200 and it’s got a plas­tic body instead of the D200’s envi­ron­men­tal­ly-gas­ket­ed met­al body. Its burst mode shoots 2.5 images per sec­ond instead of the 5 that the D200 does. But the D50 is an excel­lent cam­era, com­pa­ra­ble in almost every regard to the D70 that http://courtney_lynne.livejournal.com/ shoots with. (I also con­sid­ered the D70, but chose the low­er point of entry because they are so sim­i­lar but the D50 is in less demand and quite a bit less expensive.)

http://reviews.cnet.com/Nikon_D50_body_only/4505 – 6501_7-31344594 – 2.html?tag=sub

I found a rep­utable store (one that I’ve pur­chased from before) sell­ing a new D50 with a 28 – 80mm lens for $600 includ­ing ship­ping. The reviews I’ve read have indi­cat­ed that the 28 – 80mm lens that got bun­dled with the D50s is not all that great, but it’ll get me up and shooting.

I’m going to have to go back to work pro­gram­ming in order to afford the quad-proces­sor com­put­er I want, and believe me, after work­ing with these 600MB Pho­to­shop files for a while, I’m quite ready to move up from this G4 tower.

I know I’ve gone on at length here so let me fin­ish this up by point­ing to a piece out of an old ver­sion of my portfolio:

http://paroxysm.com/steves/portfolio/splitfiles/sunra_pp_web.pdf

If you can’t (or won’t) view PDF files, the essen­tial part is the Sun Ra quote:

If you can’t involve your spir­it in the cre­ative process, you can’t defeat the destruc­tive ele­ments on earth.

There’s no short­age of destruc­tive ele­ments on earth, so I’d best get in gear.