Cleaning house

 

As we come up to our final move to our charming, slightly messed up wee apartment in the big city, I have preversely decided it is the time to organize my photographs.

Every once in awhile I decide it is time to organize my photographs on my computer. It is a big job.

It is too big a job.

Here is the size of the job:

In the backyard of my parents' house in California there was a dirt hill that led down to a chainlink fence and then further down to the backyard of the neighbors below us. At ten years old or so, my friend Todd and I decided to dig, with little hand trowels, into the side of the hill to make an underground fort. We would have tunnels in there, different rooms to explore, maybe even a pool in one quiet, cool, cavernous underground chamber.

After a few weeks we had blisters and a kind of indentation in the hill.

This is the size of the job.

Still, it's interesting. I have about 100 files on my desktop full of various collections of pictures, some sort of specific, but many called something like "July" to denote all the pictures I worked on during some July. I don't know which July, one of them. They come around every 12 months or so. I actually have a similar folder to that now that I call "France Working", but I've been working a lot, so I had to make a new file called "France Working 2". They're both crammed with pictures, some finished, some not, some never to be.

I went through my first file, and that wasn't too bad because it was the file I made from the last time I decided to oragnize all my files. My goal was to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have much of both! These in this first file were already separated and so, presumably, just good, finished pictures.

Me and past me have different opinions! So I separated out the good pictures. And then I moved onto the next folder. This was called "Sources Fall".

There was a lot of neat stuff in there! 

And there was a lot of interesting things I could do with some of these pictures. Like, remember Clerkmanifestoland? I had an image of a little shop tent there that just needed a few corrections. 

Half an hour later, check this out:

The original was nice, but this is much better.

Also, it helped me realize something.

I am never going to be able to dig an underground pool.

Cheese

 

We are coming to the last week of our time in this beach apartment in Theoule Sur Mer. Tomorrow we go to the big city where our real, long term apartment is, for one last overnight prep visit. Then next week we'll close up this wonderful, ramshackle, and slightly abandoned place on the beach for our final move.

I'm a little sad. 

I may have been dragging my feet a little too.

It's not that I'm not excited to begin this new, leisured life in a gloriously beautiful city in the south of France, but this wild transition through Japan and into an uncertain future where anything is possible now becomes... life, anchored in what we chose, in our retiree budget, and in all the months and years going by. Possibility becomes reality. 

I am ready though. As much as I love it here in Theoule it certainly has its limits with its two particular grocery stores, one a chain, and one fancy, and its two closed for the season bakeries. And my inclination to burrow into my little home projects of photo editing, videogames, and general dissolution has begun to fully assert itself in these cold, wild days full of rain and storms. A life settled in the big city may curiously allow for more of the traveller's lifestyle of exploration and adventure that we moved here for. 

And also, it's about time I lived around the corner from a cheese shop.

Documenting my surroundings

 

As ever here on clerkmanifesto I am documenting my surroundings, in one way or another.

Because my surroundings are currently The South of France, lately, you are probably often saying: "Well that's pretty."

Yes, I should probably make a point of going outside more.

Colors of the south of France

 

I have been doing a lot of experimentation with colors, especially here in my photographs of the Cote D'Azur, and though I have liked some of them a lot, I am usually left frustrated with the erratic nature of the AI editors and the sometimes infuriating communication process in trying to get anything like what I want.

I use AI so much in my picture editing I almost forgot I have photoshop.

And I sort of vaguely know how to use it!

So off I went to my Photoshop and...

I only sort of know how to use it. But it's a start: