I’m a very busy person. I guess everyone is these days, but sometimes I think if Busy Phillips hadn’t taken it first “Busy” would be a good nickname for me because I think I say the words “I’m busy” more than just about any others. Mostly because I talk to my cats a lot and I work from home, and the cats follow me around constantly so when they get in my way I’m always saying, “Cats, I’m BUSY, find something else to do.” (Please don’t think I ignore my cats because really “I’m busy” isn’t the most common thing I say; “I love you” probably is because I’m also constantly telling my cats I love them and that they are beautiful and good and perfect, and they are thoroughly spoiled.) Also friends are sometimes flabbergasted to learn I never saw some ridiculously popular movie or TV show from the past and my response is always, “I was busy”. I WAS busy. I AM busy. I don’t even know why I know who Busy Phillips IS because I’ve never found time to watch a lot of TV – I know very little about pop culture. I’m constantly apologizing to people I haven’t stayed in contact with as much as I should with the lame excuse of “I’ve been really busy.” I’m too busy for a lot of things. “I’m busy busy busy, busy like a bee,” I am forever telling the cats while shoving them off the counter. “You are ALWAYS DOING THINGS,” my husband said to me the other night when half an hour elapsed between me announcing dinner was ready and me actually sitting down to eat. “Yeah, I’M BUSY,” I exclaimed. (Stop and think about the word “busy” for a second now that I’ve used it about a million times: isn’t it a weird word??)
The point of this tangent isn’t really to talk about how busy I am, but I do have to mention that I was even MORE busy than usual for a couple of months there recently, when I worked a ton of overtime, went back to the East Coast for the first time in a year for a work trip, and also visited family for a few whirlwind days while I was at it, and worked at two different wildlife hospitals during the busy season, and hand-raised some orphaned baby opossums in my home for a while until they were large enough to go back to the hospital, and did some non-wildlife-related community training/certification stuff, and basically had no time for hiking or photography. I like to post something here every day (though because I’m really busy I schedule posts in batches ahead of time and I don’t generally babble as much as I have in this post), but I’ve reached a point at the moment where I’m running low on recent nature photos to share. (One of my cats just jumped on my lap and sat on my laptop and I had to tell her, “I’M BUSY!!!”) So today instead of pretty nature photos I am offering you silly, ridiculous pictures taken with a point-and-shoot camera.
A couple of years ago, we went on safari in Tanzania. (It was THE GREATEST thing I have ever done and I can’t wait to go back.) Anyway, after visiting several national parks and having the most amazing time ever, we spend some time relaxing in Zanzibar. I knew I’d be SCUBA diving and snorkeling there so before we left I bought an underwater point-and-shoot camera because I couldn’t afford underwater housing for my DSLR, either from a financial or luggage weight perspective. So in my ever-growing collection of cameras (more on that in an upcoming post), I have an underwater camera that I take whenever I go kayaking (although I am crazy and I also sometimes take my “real” cameras kayaking), however, other than kayaking and swimming, I don’t use it very often and am thus not really familiar with it. Especially since when I DO use it, I’m either IN water or ON water in extremely bright sunlight, making it hard to see what’s going on with the camera settings and such. So my use of this camera is VERY much point, shoot, and blindly hope I’ve recorded a fun memory.
So the underwater camera was with me the other week when my best friend, Fortinbras, was up visiting from LA and he, my husband, Mark, and I went kayaking at Lake Del Valle. For a while, I was taking typical photos of the three of us paddling around, but then we landed the kayaks on a deserted area of the shoreline so we could get in the water and swim for a while.
I’ll sometimes take what I call self-portraits using my DSLR, tripod, and remote, but I never take “selfies” with my phone. I guess because the novelty of swimming with a camera hasn’t entirely worn off, though, I do sometimes take selfies with the underwater camera. So I snapped this picture of myself. It looks normal, right? Or as normal as a photo of me can look.
But then the next photo I took looked like this:
Subsequent photos continued to look WEIRD. The sun was really bright, and I was treading water, so I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on but I kept laughing and exclaiming, “something REALLY WEIRD is going on with this camera!!!” Though it’s an “underwater” camera, I guess it’s not a great one because the sensor or something does sometimes get water on it and there will be big splotches on the photos for a while, so I didn’t know if water had gotten into it or what. But I soon realized whatever it was going was actually kind of cool.
For a while I was wondering if the water was just exceptionally reflective that day, but everything looked like a kaleidoscope.
And now they just get silly. Here are some of Fortinbras that I thought were really funny.
I may know next to nothing about pop culture but even *I* have heard about Pokemon Go. I think Fort might be a Pokemon here.
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