Since life has presented me with the time and, barely the means, to do something, that’s what I’m doing. Getting back to what’s real enables you to think and see more clearly. The covenants of modern American society(daily life and responsibilities), take nearly all of your time and effort. That makes it hard to do anything else.
With time and solar power to run the laptop, I’ve been going through thousands of old photos, movies and videos. Brings back a lot of memories of people and things that have happened. They also show how quickly American society has changed. In the current state of the nation, a lot of the things in the photos are gone or changed beyond recognition.
Anyway, work is proceeding on the first major installment of ronbarbish.com. It is the story of a trip that my traveling companion and I took through Mexico and Central America in 1978. It was an adventure of a lifetime, to put it mildly. I took two 35mm cameras and probably about eight or ten rolls of 35mm film with the intention of doing a surf trip article. I lost my main camera and all but two rolls of film in a major storm in Costa Rica.
The few photos that remained from the trip were all damaged and not until the arrival of computers and image manipulation software could these photos be repaired. Even with advanced computer software, restoring the photos is a time consuming job. The photo below is the before and after shot of Mel.
It took about twenty hours to restore this photo. Usually, I use Adobe Photoshop, but for these photos, I mostly used GIMP, an open source image manipulation program. GIMP is free, takes a bit of effort to learn, but is a full on photo editor that can do just about anything you need.
The photos are restored and ready to go and the final editing and formatting of the text is happening now so it should be appearing on the ronbarbish.com website shortly.
Here’s a couple photos from a recent desert thunderstorm. The first is a funnel cloud that is more like the thunderstorms that turned into tornadoes where I grew up back in Ohio. I’ve never heard of a tornado in the desert, but this funnel cloud was definitely turning in a clockwise direction that can be seen in video footage.
Of course with funnel clouds forming there is going to be a lot of rain. When the thunderstorm passed over, it dumped at least a half inch of rain in about fifteen minutes. The desert can’t handle that kind of volume, the water runs off into gullies and ditches and that’s how you get flash floods.
So, back to work for me and the Mexico-Centro story should be up on the ronbarbish.com website soon. The website is being designed so there may be some formatting or content changes along the way.