Happy Birthday, Mr. Collins!

I met Dave Collins a year ago or so. We immediately fell into "like". He doesn't talk much. I don't talk much. He thinks he's funny. I KNOW I'm funny. There has always been one point of our friendship though that has never meshed. It's the point-of-view aspect of life.

Dave is a straight-ahead kind of guy. He wants things straight, level. My photos bother him. For awhile there he thought something was wrong with my camera--the fact that the photos never were straight, that there was no horizontal line. Then he realized that the problem was me. That I don't see life straight across. That I view everything through a particular angle.

We have clashed on many a photo. He likes to post comments on Facebook that he thinks are particularly witty regarding the angle of my shots. I try my hardest to ignore him. I have other Facebook friends who comment on his comments and think he's funny. I plead with them to ignore him, not to encourage his bad humor. It's not working...

Well, today is Dave Collins' birthday and my birthday gift to him is an attempt on my part to see the world through his eyes. Now Dave is a great mastering engineer with some amazing credits. You can check out his web site at www.collinsaudio.com. But I'm not sure if I agree with his view of life.

It's straight. It's level. But the perspective is all wrong. Look at things straight on and you can lose the flow and movement of the architecture or the road. You would think drive-by shooting with a level camera would be easy. Just sticking my arm out the window, holding the camera level and shooting. It wasn't so easy. For each shot I had to tilt everything--my head, my arm, my camera. It was a strange experience. This straight-on, non-angle that Dave Collins likes so much.

Here's the thing, though. Dave's view of the world may seem askew to me. But he's honest and funny (but don't let him know I think that), and nice and kind. And sometimes some of the best friendships are those based on different perspectives. So Happy Birthday, Dave Collins. I hope you have a wonderful day! And please enjoy these level photos while you can, because it's not going to happen again...