Time at a Standstill With Brother Cyriac Haden C.S.C.
Sunday, February 01, 2026
 | | I February 2026 | Linear Time
Reloj according to the RAE (Real Academia Española : Del
cat. ant. relotge, este del lat. horologĭum 'reloj de arena’, ‘reloj de sol’, ‘clepsidra', y este del gr. ὡρολόγιον hōrológion.
I have
written many times about my relationship with time. Here (above) is one of the blogs.
And I have also written in repeated time how Jorge Luís Borges wrote that all
first times are infinitely repeated as first times.
Today I thought
I might add a bit about time and me as I was looking at my watch. In Spanish
there are no two individual words watch and clock. Both are reloj (plural
relojes) and my wrist watch is a reloj de pulsera. My watch is a Timex (made in
the Philippines that I purchased for $50.00 at the Bay in 1986. Since then all
I have done to keep it going is to change the battery every two years. I never
take it off either when I swim or when I am in my hot tub bath.
The watch
today made me remember Brother Cyriac Haden, C.S.C. who taught me algebra and
chemistry in the late 50 at St. Edward’s High School in Austin. He had
discipline problems so we made his classes probably unhappy for him. In one of
his classes it was the one before lunch. I would stare at the large clock
behind him and it seemed that time stood still. Such was our treatment of him
that when I returned years later to a class reunion I went to the campus
Assumption Cemetery and apologized at his grave.  | | Brother Cyriac Haden, C.S.C. |
Now in this
century I wake up early to fed my two cats and to make my breakfast-in-bed on a
tray. I do stuff during the day (nothing important) and before I know it I am
turning off the light to sleep. I am wondering if I can change this or if I
want to change this speeding of time.
Brother
Cyriac might have some ideas.
Never to Be Seen
Saturday, January 31, 2026
 | | Rosemary and Niña after she died December 2020 |
When my Rosemary died on 9 December 2020 we were
waiting for the funeral people to turn up. It was then when I decided that I
was compelled to take the most difficult photograph of my life because I was a
photographer. I went upstairs. Rosemary was dead on our bed with our female cat Niña on her chest. I told myself that nobody was ever going to see that photograph.
Today 31 January, 2026 I thought that perhaps I should
look at the photograph. I went to my Family files and I did not find it.
Perhaps it is in our Cats - All our Cats file. It was not there. There were many
photographs of Rosemary’s hands once she had died but not the one I was looking
for.
When I place my Fuji X-E3 photographs into my files
they have a Fuji number. Once I open the photograph, size it and then name it
then I can use my search tool to find it. That was the case. I looked for the unnamed
files and found that I had taken two photographs. I size and fixed one of them
which then matched the image I had seen before I pressed my camera’s shutter.
I have found the photograph and the extra one. Will
anybody ever see it besides me?
Fading into Oblivion
Thursday, January 29, 2026
 | | 29 January 2026 |
Pleasure in Failure Today 29
January 2026 I managed to inform the Telus people by talking to a pleasant man
from Guatemala that I had a new credit card to replace the one that is
inspiring February 1st. I managed to pay (in person) my house insurance. After
that I came home and settled on the bed with my two cats. I stared at the
ceiling and did some thinking.
That
thinking involves my inability to accept after Rosemary’s death on 9 December
2020 that she is not with me occupying her side of the bed. Everything in the
house, the dishware, the pictures on the wall, what we bought when we were in
Mexico all associate my thoughts with her. When Niña and Niña stare at me I
immediately remember how she cuddled them. They connect me to her.
It would
seem that my association and grief is not going to fade. This is why I decided
to scan these hosta leaves on which I had placed a b+w transparency of Rosemary
with Alexandra between glass and exposed it all to summer sun for 4 hours. I
learned this from my friend Ralph Rinke. He did warn me that the result of UV
light reacting with chlorophyll was not a permanent. I immediately scanned the
results, printed them and then framed them with UV protection glass.
I saw these
faded hosta leaves. The action of scanning them and seeing them as they are I
believe prepares me for my eventual (soon perhaps) fading from this world where
I will then join Rosemary in oblivion. Both she and I knew we would never see
each other again.
Patterson and Murphy Shine
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Inanimate
objects do not have free will. Only humans and animals have it. I don’t quite
agree. A few months ago in a shoot in my piano room my Fuji X-E3 refused to
take pictures. It would not click. I then read a notice that said, “Need to
pair with your phone.” To me that proves that these inanimate objects (many are
my cameras) go their own way because they can.
Where does
the weird free-will come from? The major reason is that the people that design
these digital cameras, computers, scanners, etc never have to use them.
When I have
problems opening bottles or packages I often think, “The chap that designed this
should be subjected to opening them for a whole day.”
In my past
life as a magazine photographer I was aware of Patterson’s Law. Patterson said
that Murphy was an optimist. This meant that for all my assignments I took two
of everything.
This past few
weeks I had three film cameras with film. One of them was loaded with colour
negative film. When I had the rolls processed by The Lab one of the rolls of Kodak
Plus-X which was exposed to X-ray when I went to Mexico City on this past
December had a strip of odd pictures. One of them is the one you see here. I
have no idea what it is or when I shot it.
But I like
it. Perhaps Patterson and Murphy combined forces to make me smile.
Two Centuries Combined
Monday, January 26, 2026
 | | Hannah Parkhouse -25 January 2025 |
Even though
I am a man of the 20th century I am aware of some of the many pleasant
surprises of this century. One of them involves combining the photographic
technology of that past century with this one.
I shoot film
and do digital with my Fuji X-E1 and X-E3 cameras. I have a very good Epson
P700 inkjet printer and an excellent Epson V700 scanner. This means that I can
scan the negatives and slides of that other century (and the ones I shoot now)
with that scanner. One of my techniques is what I call “Scanner negative
sandwiches without mayonnaise”. I place one negative over the other (best when
from the same session) and the results mimic (better in my opinion) what some
photographers do with Photoshop Layers. I like the mechanical method of mine.
A recent
experiment involves me scanning colour negatives with b+w negatives together.
The main photograph in this blog involves a further variation. I scanned the
colour negative and b+w negative of Sarah Parkhouse (took the pictures this
past Sunday) as positives. Once scanned, I reversed them in my 22 year-old
Photoshop 8. The other pictures here are
of treating the sandwiches as the negatives that they are.
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