A Walk to the Lake (and back): It is raining a lot more today than it was last year.

But first things first: I have been wanting to explain why I started using a fifteen year-old digital camera again when I have relatively new tablets and a quite new smartphone.

My first digital camera was a Polaroid which I purchased in a blister pack for seventy-five dollars at the Grand & Toy in Cloverdale Mall sometime in 2005. When I got it back to my mom's place, where my daughter and I were living that year, I discovered much to my chagrin, surprise and altogether mild amusement that it did not have a viewscreen on the back. I would need to connect it to my second-hand G4 iBook in order to see the photos I had taken. In order to record videos - which were actually quite excellent, as were the photos, I purchased and installed a one gigabyte SD card.

I am pictured on the right in this image I photoshopped, holding that Polaroid digital camera. Misun on the left and the rock behind her will give you an idea of the picture quality it was able to deliver.

I began teaching myself photoshop in late 2019 with a free trial I had downloaded. The well-known artist Kent Monkman, whom I had met when I modelled for photos to be used as source images in his painted work, was looking to hire a studio assistant with photoshop skills. I did not even get interviewed for that job but I did have a lot of fun playing around with old images I had on my computer. I realized that the Panasonic Lumix camera I am now using on my walks to the lake and back delivered excellent images for my purposes, and started going out on walks with it to create more, Here is a self-portrait I photoshopped with two images I took that December.