David Griffin Photography

Images, videos, tips and news from David Griffin Photography
Dave Griffin

Welcome

Welcome! This blog is mostly about images - both still and moving, plus observations surrounding my photographic and multimedia projects... and every once in a while the occasional standing on a soapbox in case anyone might be listening.

You can find me on the Twitter (@davegriffin) and Facebook. My videos will occasionally end up on Vimeo and YouTube.

More information and photographs can be found at dmg-photography.com, or you can check out some of my ongoing projects:

Here we go again – another roaring river week

wpid1815 20103 263 6051 Here we go again   another roaring river week

graph Here we go again   another roaring river week

Another week, another 50-year rain storm…

I’m partly joking, I don’t know the recurrence level of this current storm but it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Here’s the flow gauge of the river for the past 30 days.  We’re in for another fun few days with the current forecast having the river rise potentially 2 feet above where it is right now, but they said the last storm would reach 7 feet as well, and it didn’t quite hit that mark.

On the other hand we’re starting from a significantly higher point.

All this water means that I’ll have a chance to visit a few more of the local streams and capture some, um, “rigorous” flow conditions.

These two events back to back have me hankering to build a time-lapse movie of the river’s rise.   Today it rose rather dramatically and did so during the daylight hours.  The only problem is that it was pouring rain and we had non-trivial winds as well.  I think I’m going to poke around and see if I can build a watertight box with a plexiglas viewport, perhaps lockable so I can chain it to a tree or something if needed.  This would let me set it up for a 12 hour run and try to bring this dynamic event to life.

As evening drew near I decided the 5D needed a bath, so I headed out into the backyard to take a few images.  I nearly froze my hands off in 15 minutes — the rain must be at 33 degrees (F). Here’s a bit of video from this evening:

Technical:

Images and video captured with a well-soaked Canon 5D Mark II, 16-35mm f/2.8L.  Image was at ISO 400, 1.6 seconds, f/5.6.  Video was at ISO 3200, 1/60, f/2.8.  Both were taken from Gitzo sticks and a Manfrotto fluid head.

Image processed with Lightroom, bit of fill and black point, moderate clarity.   Video was transcoded to ProRes LT by MPEG Streamclip, which was an unnecessary step because I then imported it into iMovie to trim, add the titles, and adjusted exposure +35%. Exported directly from iMovie to Quicktime H.264.

Abstract Kayaker Followup

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In the previous post on exploring the power of water I discussed an encounter with a kayaker where I decided to use long exposures rather than try to freeze the action with the intent of having some abstract images.   My brother, Pete, noted that I didn’t include any traditional visual “anchor points” in the images.  This was intentional on my part, but I thought it would be interesting to look at the images that did have some reference to solid ground in them.

If I had planned this encounter I would have taken steps to make the background even more stable – providing a more distinct visual contrast between the trees and ground and the chaos of the water.  The sequence here moves from moderately discernible backgrounds to where the they become almost as fluid and abstract as the water.  Feel free to compare and contrast with the initial set.

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Technical details:

Canon 40D, 100-400mm f/4.5L IS at f/16, ISO 200 with polarizer and 3-stop ND filter.  Shutter speed 0.6 seconds for the first image and 0.8 seconds for the others.  Camera stabilized on a Gitzo tripod and RRS BH-55 ballhead.

Lightroom post-processing: White balance set to 6000K, exposure unchanged, fill 53, black point 33, clarity 80, and vibrance 25.  Default Lightroom sharpening.

Exploring the Power of Water 3

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We had a beautiful sunny day here over the weekend (actually two sunny days, but I was traveling to/from Maine for most of one of them) and I wanted to continue working on a set of river abstracts that I started before the heavens opened up and flooded the river.  The waters are working their way back to normal, but still have a lot of punch.   I was working on long exposures like this:

wpid1785 20103 491 3065 Exploring the Power of Water 3

when I spotted a kayaker playing in the rapids upstream of a nearby bridge.  He (or she) would be passing by within a few minutes so what to do?   I was shooting with the 40D and the 100-400 f/5.6L  because I needed a lot of reach for some subjects.  It would only take a few seconds to reconfigure the camera to shoot action shots (crank the shutter, raise the ISO, and set the lens wide open).  I started to do this and stopped.  I’m shooting abstracts.  Can’t I make the kayaker an abstract subject too (if a fleeting one)?   What the heck…

And so as he shot the rapids and played with the eddys I framed up and fired away at 0.6 and 0.8 seconds.  I really didn’t have much time to see if this would work — the whole encounter only lasted 20 seconds.  The results were interesting and, for me, added another dimension to this exploration of water’s power.  In retrospect I should have varied the shutter a bit more as I think there would be some cool images below 0.5 seconds.

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Technical: Canon 40D, 100-400 f/4.5L  (at focal lengths through the entire range), f/16, ISO 200.  Polarizer and a 3-stop ND filter.  Shot from a Gitzo tripod and a Really Right Stuff RH-55 ballhead for stability.

Lightroom processing: strong fill, blackpoint, and clarity.  Bit of vibrance.  Removed one nasty dust spot.

Stone Mountain LIVE with Bill Kirchen

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Saturday’s Stone Mountain LIVE show was subtitled “The Guitar Gods” show and it was almost more like sitting in on a roots guitar master class than a regular night out on the town.  The Stone Mountain LIVE house band is headed up by Duke Levine and Kevin Barry, two very fine guitar players.  The band is rounded out with Sonny Barbato on keys, Richard Gates on bass, Billy MacGillivray on drums, and Chris Cote on vocals.  Most folks would be happy if they just played all night — but they keep inviting great guests, the most recent being Bill Kirchen.

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Bill Kirchen is often referred to as an “elder statesman” in guitar circles.  He’s a master of the Fender Telecaster and is best known for the song “Hot Rod Lincoln” when he was with Commander Cody back in the 70’s. (I can still remember listening to that on the radio on the Giannetti’s back porch.)  Honky-Tonk and “Dieselbilly” is the corner of roots guitar music that he is the master of and putting him on stage with Duke and the gang was to watch pure genius at work. Bill is also one of the nicest people you could meet — quite the ambassador for Austin, Texas.

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Bill performs his version of “Hot Rod Lincoln” that includes a medley of musical vignettes that is simply jaw-dropping.  He and the band effortlessly recalled the riffs of (in order): Johnny Cash, Duane Eddy, Roy Orbison, Johnny Rivers, Marty Robbins, Buck Owens, Merle Travis, Merle Haggard, Bob Willis, Hank Sugarfoot Garland, Earl Scruggs, Iggy Pop, The Ventures, Bo Diddly, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Alvino Rey, Stevie Ray,  Freddy King, BB King, Albert King, Ben E King, Billy Jean King, Elvis Presley, Cream, Deep Purple, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, and Jimmy Hendrix (and I’m sure I missed a couple of them).

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When I photograph live music performances I try to do two things: 1) capture the emotional power of the performance from the audience’s side, and 2) get a glimpse into the what goes into the performance from the artists’ side – those quick glances between band members, the look of concentration as they work through a song, and the smiles when they just know it is “coming together”.

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For the first half of the show I was taking the audience perspective, but for the second half I shot mostly from just off-stage providing a more intimate set of angles and, for my money, much better lighting (Carol even had a “hair light” now and then!)

I hope you enjoyed seeing some shots of these “guitar gods” in action.   I think Bill is now an honorary Stone Mountain Boy (he should consider moving up to Maine for the summers — it gets hot down there in Texas!)   A gallery of close to 70 images from the performance is available at:

http://smac.dmg-photography.com/SML-Mar-2010

Here are a few more of my favorites shots from the evening:

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My thanks to Carol and Jeff at the Stone Mountain Arts Center, and to Bill Kirchen and all the performers for allowing me to photograph the show.

Why we’re buying an iPad

ipad dmgp Why were buying an iPadWhile I don’t expect to be first in line to buy an Apple iPad, we’re likely to be getting one pretty quickly.  There are a number of reasons for this and I thought it would be fun to write them down.

There are three perspectives at play here:

1) Media consumption in our home;

2) Business portfolio; and

3) Laptop “replacement” for Betsy.

We know we’re not the average household.  We have 2 (rather old) MacBook Pro’s that hang out around the house.  We have an Apple TV hooked up to our HDTV in the living room.  And we already own an “iPad Nano” (I have an iPod Touch) so we’ve already experienced some of the possibilities the iPad promises when it comes to applications such as the Apple TV Remote and the basic apps like email and Safari.

Lets look at each of our planned uses for the “magical” iPad

Media Consumption

We’ve been waiting for this type of device to augment our living room media experience.  We own and heavily use our Apple TV and I’m hoping that it won’t be too long before the two play together (more on this later).  While we have Comcast cable, it’s not like what most people consider cable.  We have the $13/month option that essentially gives us the “over the air” channels plus public access (a whopping 18 channels and only 8 of them are HD).  This is a long-winded way of saying we don’t consume a lot of television. While it only tallies up to maybe an hour a day at best, video podcasts are an increasing part of television time — we prefer to watch EarthTouch and GeekBrief.tv in HD on our television.  There are a fair number of video podcasts I’ve never seen on a computer screen — it wouldn’t even occur to me to try them that way.

I’m looking forward to having an interface that not only provides us with a nice web browser for looking up stuff during shows, but also something that integrates with the Apple TV.   It would be great to have a nice console for browsing the Apple TV podcasts, searching YouTube, finding photos, etc.  and “throwing” them up on the television as a way of sharing them in the room.  (It’s a slight disappointment that the iPad doesn’t have an IR port to turn it into a remote control for the TV itself, but that’s admitted a bit of a kludge at best.)

Having something hanging around on the coffee table that lets us casually check email, twitter, browse the web, and control the Apple TV will be a most welcome addition to the household.  I was slightly surprised that it didn’t have a camera — it would make a great iChat / Skype device — but such improvements are, perhaps, inevitable.  The only downside is we can see is that, unlike the “iPad nano”, hiding it from the grandson will be much, much harder.

Business Portfolio

I maintain a portfolio in my “iPad Nano” (my iPod Touch).  I have both photography and video portfolios along with examples of TurnHere style videos and family photographs. It is fantastic to have a high-quality and interactive portfolio in my pocket at all times. It comes out in a variety of social situations and always impresses people.

But in a planned business situation, calling on a potential customer or sitting with an existing customer, the 2×4 inch iPod/iPhone screen is simply too limiting to display and discuss my work and a laptop isn’t something that you easily can hand back and forth with a client. I fully expect that there will be custom applications for photographers and other media creators that will provide a great portfolio experience for both the photographer and their customers.

While the Safari browser on the iPod Touch and iPhone is pretty impressive, I still find it awkward to use for any type of interactive web sites (e.g., filling out forms, etc.)   I’m expecting the iPad to be at least passable for that type of activity (not sure I’ll be writing long blog articles with it though).  Coupled with the 3G wireless capability I can access forms and book gigs while at a client’s place of business or show them example videos in context of a similar business.  The best way to sell video is with video.

Which brings me to why we’re currently planning to purchase the 3G version of the iPad.   I currently pay Verizon $30/month for my data plan for my Blackberry.  That’s a lot of money for not a lot of value (to me).  While having email delivered to my pocket is handy, its not critical to my day-to-day life.  Most of the time I’m near a Wi-Fi and my iPod Touch has a far better email app than my Blackberry (I should note that my Blackberry is easily 4 years old at this point).  By converting my Verizon phone to just a plain cellphone I can potentially cut my monthly wireless data costs by half if I’m able to stay under the 250MB limit.  Even if I end up with the $30/mo plan it’ll be a wash dollar-wise and I’ll get a significant improvement in its utility to my business.  For those times when I need email on the road I’ll bring along the iPad (assuming I can get ahold of it — see the next section).

I’ll admit that my situation may be unique, but I think its an interesting sign of the times for how wireless providers are being transformed by Apple and Google into service providers not unlike ISPs.  We plug whatever device we want into the wireless network and pay for the bandwidth.  No 2-year contracts.  Dollars for bits.  And with the increasing density of Wi-Fi hotspots in restaurants, libraries, and other public areas the need for 3G access all the time keeps getting nibbled at.

Laptop Replacement

My wife, Betsy, has been waiting for the iPad for about 4 years.  She uses a old hand-me-down 15″ G4 MacBook Pro.  She reads email; plays Solitaire; writes the occasional letter/document; and occasionally surfs the web for shopping or booking a hotel room.  She’s been bugging me for years for the 12″ MacBook Pro.

She also attends a bunch of meetings and having the email and documents in electronic form would be preferable to printing them.  She occasionally takes notes at these meetings.

She hates lugging the laptop around and therefore it rarely leaves the house.  It is way overkill for anything she does day-to-day.  We’re anticipating that the iPad use model, perhaps paired with a Bluetooth keyboard once in a while, will take care of 80%+ of her daily computing needs.

I couldn’t part with my MacBook Pro.  It is an integral part of my photographic workflow.  Lightroom has burned a considerable amount of processor time the past few years and I occasionally use Final Cut Pro there too.  There’s over 100 gigabytes of photos and video on the disk.  I use Dropbox to sync numerous documents and files between my laptop and my office system.

There are millions of people like me.  There are millions of people like Betsy.  The iPad cannot replace a laptop, but there are plenty of people that have a laptop that really don’t need or even want one.  I can’t say at this point whether there’s enough capability in the iPad to make Betsy’s MacBook laptop obsolete, but we’re going to give it a try.

Summary

In 1991 I read an article in Scientific American written by Mark Weiser in which he envisioned what pervasive (or ubiquitous) computing would look like in the 21st century.  It made quite an impression on me.  Weiser and his team at PARC created prototype pads, tabs, and boards — intelligent devices that were tailored to specific uses rather than trying to be general-purpose computing platforms.

We have tabs today in the form of active badges and keyless automobile access. The iPod Touch, if it was a lot cheaper, might be an early example of a something between a high-end tab (an intelligent post-it note) and a pad,  a “scrap computer” that lies around the house ready to be used in a number of ways.  The iPad will inch closer to the capabilities that were envisioned in that article, although there won’t be a bunch of them hanging around the house anytime soon.  Boards exist mostly in corporate settings, but put a multitouch interface on the front of my HDTV and you’ll have a residential version of the PARC boards in the article.  (Microsoft’s “Surface” can likely trace its pedigree to the PARC board prototypes.)

Ever since I read that article I’ve been waiting for that type of computing to become mainstream.  My Palm Tungsten C, with its Wi-Fi capabilities, gave me my first taste of what Weiser’s dream might look like back in 2003.   Sadly Mark Weiser passed away in 1999, a few years before his vision became practical, but now we’re into the second decade of the 21st century and with the iPad we’ll inch a bit closer to true pervasive computing.  We’ll go along for the ride.

March 2010 Wallpaper

1680x1050 mar 2010 1024x640 March 2010 Wallpaper

The image from March was taken yesterday at Danforth Brook in Hudson, Massachusetts.  With a recent deluge of rain the past few days most of the rivers and streams in central and eastern Massachusetts are well above their normal flows.  Amid this turmoil this sculpture of twigs, leaves, evergreens, and ice was hidden away in a quiet corner of the brook behind a small dam of leaves.  This image reminds us that it isn’t Spring yet, but it’s not that far away.

A video of my recent visit to Danforth Brook will be posted in the next few days.  In the meantime, if you like this image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop wallpaper.  A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here.

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Exploring the Power of Water 2

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The Assabet River has crested and now will slowly work its way back to its normal lazy ways, but for now it still is packing a punch.

I did two and a half studies of different exposures of the river, ranging from 1/1000 second to 8 seconds.  The result is a rough guide for matching how the exposure times translate to particular moods that we might want to express from this rapidly churning water.

The first study is of a submerged island with water flowing around trees, starting at 1/1000 second and slowing down 1 stop at a time (essentially doubling the exposure time):

From 1/1000 to 1/60 we see the river abstracted in a “frozen” form.  At 1/30 second the image changes to a different abstraction — one that implies fluidity.  1/15 through 1/2 second really appeal to me as a way of implying rapidly moving, turbulent water.  Starting at 1 second the image of the river’s turbulence is slowly transformed into something that might be considered almost tranquil (as astutely noted in a comment by Rich Rosenbaum in my initial article)

The second study was of a rock in the middle of the river which is creating a very dynamic bit of turbulence.  Because the situation around the rock varies so much, the first sequence shows two images at each exposure time starting at 1/1000 second down to several seconds.  We then zoom into the rock and work our way back to 1/1000 second.

Despite being a very different subject I get more or less the same impressions from the same ranges of exposure times.  So I’m becoming confident that I now have reasonable set of exposure guidelines I can apply to fast moving water to produce certain effects.

All of the images were captured on a Canon 5D Mark 2, 70-200mm f/2.8L lens, and processed with Lightroom.  Some of the images were created using polarizing and neutral density filters. Fairly aggressive contrast tweaks were applied, plus a bit of vibrance, but they are otherwise unchanged.   The videos were created with Lightroom 3 Beta, which has a great new feature that allows exporting slideshows as MPEG-4 movies (although I did have to transcode it to H.264).

The image at the top of the page was captured with a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens (at 16mm) with a polarizing filter. It had the same post-processing as the images in the video, but a localized adjustment was made to increase the exposure on the oak tree trunk.

Exploring the Power of Water 1

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Nature has given me a chance to do a bit of a personal workshop on the power of water.  In case you didn’t hear, we’ve had a bit of rain here in central Massachusetts the past few days (5 inches in 2 days and a bit more coming).

The Assabet River flows through my backyard and we live by the section which has the most intense rapids pretty much for the entire length of the river.  Normally the river is pretty tranquil, but it has been roaring the past 24 hours as it approaches what may be a crest that puts it in the top 10 for the past 50 years or so.

While I think I do a pretty decent job conveying the river’s beauty when it is quiet, I’ve struggled with finding the right combination of exposure and angle when it is flowing briskly.  Translating this:

into a still image that conveys that power and intensity is difficult.

I only had a couple hours today to work out back, but I’ll have a good chunk of the afternoon tomorrow and most of Sunday to do some exhaustive studies on the river when it is close to bursting at the seams.  I’ll be sharing the results here and hope they will be of interest to folks in a similar situation.   I’m also going to be playing with video as well.

Above:

Canon 5D Mark 2, ISO 100, 70-200mm f/2.8L at 200mm, polarizing filter.

First exposure is 2 seconds at f/14.  Second exposure is 15 seconds at f/14 (additional 3-stop ND filter).

Video: Canon 5D Mark 2 (exposure unrecorded).  No post-processing (other than resizing for blog).

Processed with Lightroom: strong contrast, fair amount of clarity and vibrance.  Creative tweak: fill light and black point both around 45.  A rather cool effect.

Ira Glass, Crap, Creativity and Serendipity

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I haven’t done a lot of nature photography this winter.  Lots of excuses, none of them particularly good.  I’m doing a lot of other work, so it’s not like I’m getting rusty or anything, but standing by a river with a camera recharges my soul in a way that other subjects just don’t do (though, fortunately, many come close).

We’ve been finally catching up on a large backlog of podcasts here and we spent a day or two listening to “This American Life“, which along with “Radiolab” is perhaps some of the best radio ever made.  After listening to the master storytelling in these two programs I rewatched a set of YouTube videos where Ira Glass talks about storytelling and the message in the second video just whacked me over the head.  His words were about radio and video production but they apply equally to photography and really just about any creative pursuit.  These are not new ideas, but somehow hearing someone like Ira, who is at the top of his game, talk about this process was extremely visceral.  Here’s Ira’s wisdom on photography (even though he doesn’t say it explicitly):

All photography is trying to be crap.

I encourage you to watch this:

If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it's missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe.

Shortly after watching this on my Apple TV I happened to visit a Flickr stream of a good friend of mine, Bob Travis, who regularly posts his photos online.  Bob is a true amateur photographer – he shoots for the love of the craft and it is integrated into his day-to-day life.   I got a big dose of envy looking at the past month or so of his images: jazz musicians, outdoor scenes, his cat (I assume it’s his cat).  They’re not all masterpieces, but that’s not the point.  They are consistently packing an emotional punch and Bob continually hones his craft.

So I got off my butt at headed outside, intent on photographing something… anything.  It was probably going to be crap but so what.  I needed to get back into a rhythm.  No car.  Damn. So short of a long hike I’d be photographing my tired old backyard.   Blaring afternoon sun with no clouds.  All the classic reasons to not do landscape photography.  Screw it.  Grabbed the 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm, and the tripod and headed down the stairs.

I wanted to push myself a bit.  I decided to stand in one spot and make as many photos as I could for an hour or so, so I plunked myself next to the river, staring into the glaring sun and a landscape I’ve photographed, quite literally, thousands of times.  The river helps because there really is always something different, but after a two decades of being at a single location there is some repetition.  Click.  Crap.  Click. Crap.

Hmmm.. what to do?   A few months ago I purchased an 3-stop ND filter for my video work (shooting video with a HDDSLR like the Canon 5D Mark II requires filters if you want to have control over depth of field since you are rather constrained on shutter speed).  Although I knew there were good photographic reasons to have the filter, I had not really used the filter for still work yet.  Bolted that filter on along with a polarizer.  In the viewfinder the reflections of the blazing sun was reduced to the equivalent of a full moon.

Cool, I’ll make a few long exposures of the river — no need to wait for a cloudy afternoon as I normally would.  There were a couple of clouds popping up so I might get lucky.  Heck, I’m just trying to make the best out of a lousy situation.  I spent a couple of hours working that spot and saw some promising images coming up on the review screen.  Later in the evening when I brought them up in Lightroom I realized I had stumbled into something I didn’t really expect, but what happened that afternoon might turn into a complete exhibit for me by the time I’m done exploring this technique and certainly will provide an image or two for my 2010 theme.

When you typically shoot long exposures of waterfalls or rivers one is seeking the misty or feathery look that is, to be fair, a bit of a cliché.  I was admittedly going for this with the filters and exposure settings, but what came back looked more like a particle collision from the Large Hadron Collider (hey, I’m a geek)…

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Instead of soft light painting the image, the moving water and the strong sun was creating millions of specular highlights that traced through the image.

At a distance the images have a similar feel to the classic long exposures, but there is something different about them.  As you get closer the detailed traces of the individual drops of water and air bubbles all become visible.  Somewhat of a fractal experience in a way.  While I’m very much into documentary photography, I find abstract work to be where I get my biggest kick of endorphins.  I don’t know if others will find these images as beautiful and mesmerizing as I do, but I’m hoping it’ll touch a few others as it did for me.

My original shooting was with a wide-angle (24-70mm) lens and the magic was in the details, so I went out a couple days later with a different lens intent on exploring those details.  The 70-200mm lens was the next experiment and it produced some images that I’m very happy with, but I’ll likely push this even further with the 100-400 — although I start running into depth-of-field issues pretty quickly…  Plus I need to play more with different exposure lengths.  (Further rambling omitted.)  Of course now the weather forecast is for a solid week of overcast skies, so I’m going to have to content working on these images I’ve captured so far — and now I get to see what else I can do with a cloudy sky.

But all that technical stuff really doesn’t matter!

Whether or not these images translate to the large prints I think they’ll do well as, the lesson has been learned: get out and shoot.  Push yourself and be ready to find nothing but crap and toss it out.  But by the act of doing this you might discover something wonderful hiding in plain sight in the unlikeliest of places.

Thanks Ira!

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