Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Words of love, so soft and tenderWon’t win a girls heart anymore—John Edmund Andrew Phillips
As some of you may know, there are several reasons why I’m not on Facebook anymore. If you’re interested in what I’m up to beyond what you might read on this blog, you can follow me on Instagram. My wife Mary is on Facebook—some may say, addicted to it— and showed me a world jumble of apparently random letters with the concept being that the first three words that you see in the mix of letters describes what a person can expect from the year. And since this virtual Magic Eight-Ball test was on Facebook, you know it has to be the truth, right? When taking this test, here are the first three words that I saw:
coffee, blessed and strength.
What’s my take on this? Here goes:
Coffee: If you didn’t already know it, I don’t drink coffee. If you enjoy today’s post and would like to buy me a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. But back to the subject at hand, here’s what I think it could mean:
I will be attending more Cars & Coffee events this year and next. And to tell the truth Mary has dragged me to several different Cars & Coffee events this year other than my local. You can see a post about one of them here. Hopefully this will allow me to write more #wheelswednesday posts as well as provide an opportunity to meet some owners of interesting cars as I did in that aforementioned post.
I hope that this means that sometime during 2024 I can restart my series of Coffee and Cameras meet-ups. Maybe this year?
Blessed: I am not a deeply religious person but do believe in a higher power and know that I have been blessed with the career that I’ve had making photographs of people, places and things (cars) and being able to write books, magazine articles and blog posts about those experiences. I am also blessed by having a few sponsors who have helped keep this blog and my car photography website, afloat for all these years. A big thank you goes out to LensPen for all of their support during this time.
Strength: Mary really has all of the muscles in the family and even as she recovers from her recent hip joint replacement surgery she’s started attending (upper body) exercise classes this week. But I think and hope that this word refers to my inner strength. In the past I have been challenged by several life threatening health problems starting when I was a young man and diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I wasn’t alone during those challenging times but I think it was some form of inner strength along with a little luck and maybe more than a few blessings, that I survived. During the health challenges I’ve faced since then I’ve been blessed with having Mary’s strength and encouragement to help me get me through those difficult times. I am blessed to have Mary by my side.
How I Made this Photograph: In looking through some of my film-based photographs that had been digitized with Kodak’s Photo CD process, I can across the image of a racing Jaguar that I’d photographed at the Donnington Park Circuit in Leicestershire, England. It was made with a Contax G1 and 45mm f/2 Zeiss lens with Kodak color negative film. Exposure and film type unrecorded. I am hoping to purchase (re-purchase) this camera sometime this year. Let’s see what the Magic Eight Ball says…
So are coffee, blessed and strength just some buzzwords that come from social media? Do they mean anything? Or as Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” I dunno. Do you?
One of my favorite books—and maybe the best one on the subject—about photographing cars is James Mann’s How to Photograph Cars. It’s available on Amazon for just $22.95 with used copies starting around fourteen bucks.