Cool Class, Photographer On Fire

Our Wake Tech digital photo class is going to be a sideshow at the NC State fair. It always happens.

Take a dozen beautiful and smart people, cameras in hand and tripods in tow and it is a scene. That is the case even before the tuna and pineapple cans come out.

People will wonder if this is the papparazzi that knows something they don't. Some will stop and look at what is the main subject.

Others will just remain bewildered as they are over fried Coke, roasted corn and the sow that had given birth to a dozen or more pink little piggies. They'll look and think that we are just a club or cult, but certainly not “normal”.

We are used to it. It's hard not to go public when you're trying to get a photo image of the “feel” of the fair.

Monday's class was busy and covered multiple and timed exposures and even writing with light onto media.

Then, too soon, class was over and I packed my little rolling cart.

I approached the exit, managed to get the door open despite my burden and stepped outside.

Just then another sense kicked into gear. I wondered just who would burn a tire and why. I didn't see a fire and the smell turned from rubber to electronics.

THEN, I felt sharp pain in my right thigh and saw a jet of flame push through my twice-worn slacks, a rare pair – not black. I liked those pants.

I was the source of the fire.

During the class I had taken my WT ID badge off and it made its way to the coin and key slot in the pockets – very handy and cool, normally.

Now though, there were 2 bright pennies making contact with a very healthy power cord attached to a 12 volt battery pack I forgot I was wearing.

Volts don't hurt, amps do and I was just ground enough to juice the amps, burn the cable and ruin the new pants after doing a number of my thumb and index finger – the chain, pennies and battery were HOT.

I got a personal charge from the discharge and won't repeat that trip-saving action.

Rarely do I make an ALWAYS or NEVER rule. In this case I can quickly say that if you are putting conductive material in your pocket, don't place a hot power supply on top of it.

I am not smarter now, though it does smart and I have 3 blisters from the chain on my thumb, but I am a tiny bit wiser. And I will miss those pants.

© tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com

Thank you Steve, you made it fun!

There are already many tributes to the genius and sweetness of the recently deceased Steve Jobs. This is as it should be.

His work (and play) in bringing into the world the Apple Computer brand is worthy of note.

Over the years I owned and used a parade of Apple products and learned to dance with their strengths and deal with their quirks.

IBM and primitive diskware (160K, 5.25 floppies that were written on both sides and were really flipped to get work done) was my first exposure to Personal computing. That was 1982 and about $5000 for the 8086 processor and a handful of 4K Ram chips. It would remember what I wrote, hammer out ink from the 9-pin IBM printer and later on a cool and noisy daisy-wheel.

The IBM was efficient, effective and expensive. I later zoomed into another level of power with an ITT 386 (running Lotus 1, 2, 3 & Wordperfect) that had a true (sad, but true) color monitor.

The business computer was everything except personal.

Then, the Apple rolled onto the scene. (There was a knockoff Orange, but you had to be there to really laugh about that with me.)

My first was a IIe and then a Mac and later, for pictures and publishing a PowerPC with SyQuest and Zip drives. These things were more approachable and fun that the other PCs.

I also bought a Unix-based machine that did a lot of work, was fast and powerful, but had no bell, whistle or gong. Compuserve connected me to a raw idea called internet and databases and email. (Appreciating Unix and Linux, I now tip my cap to Red Hat, a corporation that has gotten things right. Professional support for Open-Source ...Yes!)

The Apple co-founders were idealists and kept refining their machines and building relationships with software vendors. There were corporate battles and separations and periods of making up.

Adobe loved Apple and tolerated Intel/AMD powered machines. Corel was there for EVERYONE.

Today we can have in our hands more computing power and resources than was available to NASA, while putting humans on the moon.

A dear friend knew I liked significant history and made a gift to me of something that today is a rarity.

I OWN a screen-print image of an ITT 4116 chip design. This chip was big and hot and could handle 4 whole K of info. K's turned into megs and megs into gigs and gigs into terabytes. (Time To Revisit the PP "Power Of Ten" presentation.)

Every sermon I ever preached can reside with every lesson I ever taught and each of the books and magazines I created on a single flash drive.

Apple forced business computers to turn toward a GUI and that made the hardware more fun and less expensive.

However, remember that user-friendly does not mean user-effective.

WYSIWYG is, for many a dream because what people create may not approach what they have imagined.

Steve Jobs saw what he saw as practical, profitable and fun. His WYG is really what WE got.

He forced our thinking out of any boxes, coloring outside of any lines and merging tech with life.

Humans discover fire – ouch. Humans learn to use fire constructively – OK. Computers move beyond the realm of business applications – Yes.

Humans adapt computers to their uses and computers light the path to a smarter, better, more connected and more tolerant humanity … we pray.

Thanks, Steve, for the work and the laughs. © Tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com