Yesterday when I was leaving my studio for lunch, I had donned my backpack, secured my camera, fastened my coronavirus mask, grabbed my keys and was almost out the door. Then I noticed in the corner of an eye, a photograph of my father at age 16, sitting at the top of an open box of papers and, almost without interrupting my stride, yanked my camera from its carrying clip and captured the scene. (I often use my full-frame DSLR — much like many people use their cellphones — as a quick note taking device because it is almost always right at hand.) This act was to serve as a reminder that I might want to look at old family photographs in a new light, incorporating them directly into new work.
So I didn’t think about that image again until today when I uploaded it to my computer, and decided to add some annotations that might help me in further processing of the thing when the time came. The easiest way to do that, as the image was now residing in a Lightroom library, was to export it into Photoshop to apply notes as one or more text layers.
I hate Photoshop. In all fairness, it’s really because I barely know how to use it. I see it as one of those software efforts in early computing history that was idiosyncratically programmed back when computing standards and conventions (i.e., what would become known as “intuitive”) were not well-established or well-known. So I suspect that Photoshop was basically a unique vision of one person but when Adobe realized its importance, it was too late to re-engineer and re-think its user interface and usability factors, so the complexity just was propounded over the years by adding features to the original oddity of it all. Today, in my haste to add my annotations so that I could quickly move on to other more pressing matters, I lost access to all menus and almost all controls, including access to native OS controls. I had done something like that before and found that I could quickly recover by finding the right items in the View menu and/or right-clicking in particular areas. But not today. Almost everything but the base imported image had become invisible. Furthermore, jumping onto the Wild Expanse of the Interwebz, I found this issue to be a common one with many purported answers. But none worked for me, and I eventually found a way to blindly shut Photoshop down entirely but by first being led to a file-saving set of dialogs. Embarrassing.
Anyway, enough of the rant. Here is an annotated image, apparently the only one that I was able to save from my fiasco. But it is enough to provide a starting point for working with this branch of my current stream of projects.
My Later Father at Age 16: Some Raw Material For Some New Projects