June was all about settling back into our normal lives after our great vacation in May. Writing 4 long posts about our trip to Arizona and California took up a lot of time at the end of May and early June:
- The Arizona Part of Our Vacation
- 2022 California Vacation Part 1
- 2022 California Vacation Part 2
- 2022 California Vacation Part 3
It was the longest vacation I have ever taken and was among the best. “Settling back into our normal lives” has been difficult.
Other than going to my brother’s to grill the weekend after Memorial Day, we didn’t do much during June. The weather has been inconsistent meaning there were a few nice days interspersed with a few hot ones. We made the best of it with outings to Second District Brewing and Tria Café.
Photography
A lot of my photography work the first half of the month involved continuing editing vacation photos. I ended up with 602 photos and 10 videos. I posted a lot of those photos in my vacation posts, but there are a lot I didn’t post. All of them are available in my Arizona and California Trip 2022 Flickr album.
Back in May, I posted about the roll of Lomography Color 800 I shot on vacation with my Olympus XA. I more recently posted about a roll of Ilford Delta 100 I started in the XA while on vacation and finished after we returned home.
I started a roll of Kodak Pro Image in my Canon AE-1 but have yet to finish it.
Other than the ton of photos I took on vacation, 2022 has been a slow photography year. I haven’t shot nearly as much this year as the past 2. Not sure why. Weather hasn’t always been a friend this year. I think I’m also feeling a bit uninspired trying to take pictures while wandering around our usual places in Philadelphia. I would like to think I’ll pick up the pace at some point but probably not soon since July and August tend to be too steamy for me.
Drawing
I worked through another Skillshare drawing tutorial: Learn To Draw: A Beginner’s Guide To Sketching Anything! It was short, but I found it helpful. The tutorial provided some reference photos for practice, and a couple of my attempts at those turned out OK. As the title indicates, the tutorial focused on sketching, but I decided to add color to one of them with my Tombow Duel Brush pens and my water brushes.
Reading
Books
While we were on vacation, Holly and I stopped in Pilgrim’s Way Books where I picked up a copy of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I wanted to read something set in the area we were visiting. East of Eden is set in Salinas which is just about 20 miles away from where we were staying. It’s a long novel so although I started it in mid-May, I didn’t finish it until early June. I had read it before, at least 20 years ago, and recalled liking it but didn’t remember any specifics.
I wasn’t expecting it to be so melodramatic. Murders. Lies. Suicide. Blackmail. Quite the page-turner. Famously, it’s a retelling of the Cain and Abel story, but it’s also a bit of an autobiographical story as one of the two main families is loosely based on Steinbeck’s family. The Cain and Abel allegory can be a little heavy-handed at times, but it is overall effective.
I read one other book in June: Tessa Hadley’s Free Love. I’ve read and liked a few of her short stories in The New Yorker so I was curious to read one of her novels. I enjoyed Free Love but found it a bit slight. The characters are not all that well-developed which was a little disappointing since her characters were a strength of her short stories. The novel centered on Phyllis Fischer, a housewife in the 1960’s who starts an affair with a younger man. Before the affair, Phyllis lived a sheltered middle class life. Her lover, Nicholas, is an intellectual beatnik. Despite the somewhat predictable characters, Free Love was an entertaining read with some surprising and tawdry turns. Not what I expected, but I enjoyed it.
Books Read in 2022
So far in 2022, I’ve read 18 books:
- The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
- Book, They Might Be Giants, Paul Sahre, Brian Karlsson
- All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business, Mel Brooks (Kindle book)
- The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski
- Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead (Kindle book)
- Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart
- My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
- Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
- South of Somewhere, Robert V. Camuto
- The Promise, Damon Galgut (Kindle book)
- A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
- After New Formalism, Annie Finch, ed. (Library book)
- The Candy House, Jennifer Egan
- The New Woman Behind the Camera, various authors
- Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
- Joan is Okay, Weike Wang (Kindle book)
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
- Free Love, Tessa Hadley (Kindle book)
This Creative Midlife Posts in 2022
- December 2021 Update
- Canon AE-1 with Ilford Delta 3200
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Kodak Color Plus
- Christmas Light Box Photos
- January 2022 Update
- Minolta Autopak 450Ex with Lomography Lobster
- New Nikon Z fc!
- Schuylkill River Trail Outing with my Nikon Z fc
- E.M. Cioran on Aging
- February 2022 Update
- Long Birthday Weekend 2022
- Year Two of Pandemic Life
- First Film Photos of 2022
- March 2022 Update
- 2022 Camera Inventory
- Minolta Hi-Matic 11 with Ilford Delta 100
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Lomography Color 800
- Planning a Vacation
- April 2022 Update
- Minolta XE with Lomochrome Purple
- Olympus XA in Carmel California
- May 2022 Update
- The Arizona Part of Our Vacation
- 2022 California Vacation Part 1
- 2022 California Vacation Part 2
- 2022 California Vacation Part 3
- Did My Olympus XA Survive Vacation?
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