I’m back from a week long digital printmaking workshop by Barry Haynes held at The Mono Inn in Lee Vining, California. I flew down to Reno, drove several hours south on one of the great, spectacular roads of the world, Rt. 395 down the backside of the Sierras, to Mono Lake, one of the weirder places on the planet. The tufa towers (calcified spring outlets) on Mono Lake’s shore edge look like the petrified home of some prehistoric, underwater giant worm.
I was confined to a darkened, too small room for 5 days with 6 other students. I had to become bilingual in a hurry, as we were on Macs. This is going to generate some hate mail, but a week on a Mac has only confirmed my low opinion of the format. The directory structure is arcane and confusing, and a mouse with no buttons is a huge dumbing down of a primary interface (my PC mouse has 5). A click in the wrong place can send you spiraling out of your program into desktop purgatory. You can’t hot-swap a USB flash drive without getting all sorts of OS reprimands, and what’s with this Trash Basket as the means to spit out a CD? Anything no longer attached to a Mac is garbage?
I was the most experienced Photoshop user in the group, not a position I like to occupy in a workshop. I like to be surrounded by expertise that I don’t yet have. Barry gave me a great new conceptual approach to Photoshop editing, but techniques and tips came a little too slowly for my preference. I like the firehose mode—soak me with more than I can absorb. This was more lawn sprinkler mode. But perhaps the best for integrating technique and allowing a lot of room for practice.
Mornings and evenings I had the chance to hike and bird (my trip list is 58 species), and we had some group photography trips. I was cut off from wireless access, so my daily photo blog suffered an upload delay. And I spent a week without reading a newspaper, a nearly unprecedented event. There are no newspapers delivered to Lee Vining. It’s too remote.
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