Photographer, Writer, Technologist
Playing with my Insta360 camera.
I’m sitting at my neighborhood pub, drinking a “pickle Schlitz” and eating Zapp’s “Voodoo Heat” potato chips. The Offspring is playing over the sound system and on the TV is some movie where a girl is killing people and chopping them up. She’s taking all the pieces and sewing them together to make a friend.
I avert my eyes. I don’t want to see the rest.
Outside lightning is striking and thunder is making terrific booms. Various phones are making that high pitched keening that warns of severe weather.
Across the well used and seasoned wood, across from my little portable keyboard where I’m typing this into a word processor on my phone, there is a stack of coasters next to two packets of something called “Beer Clean.” Directly across from me is the large metal door to a large walk-in refrigerator where all the beer is, and on the silvery surface are probably 300 odd beer caps. I don’t know if they’re magnetically attached or glued. To the left of them is a collection of stickers. They’re beer related but the light is too dim, and they’re too far away from me, to read what they say — except for one: MONON.
Next to the industrial sized refrigerator door is the line of taps, ten of them, all with different handles. Above them are more stickers, and to each side are eyes. Giant googly eyes.
Hanging from the ceiling above the corner of the beer taps is a plastic human foot, severed, with painted blood and a section of bone projecting from the ankle. It’s affixed to the ceiling by a thick chain with a manacle — it looks like whoever it belonged to chewed off his own foot to get away.
Below that, facing away from me, toward the other section of the L-shaped bar, is a head in a jar. It kind of looks like a Howdy Doody mask and the liquid surrounding it is slightly red, as if blood had eked out of the head and tainted the supposed formaldehyde.
Directly behind me, hanging from the ceiling, is what looks like a full-sized human who’d been caught by a giant spider and wrapped in webbing, like real spiders do to flies. I don’t remember if there’s a giant plastic spider up there or not. I don’t want to turn around to look —
I was just interrupted by a tornado warning. We’ve been told to go into a shelter immediately. No one is doing so. No one cares. No one believes it.
We’re all too used to false alarms. Someone just went outside to check. Another person says there is a tornado by one of the local groceries stores.
I’m going to pay my tab and go home where I have a basement.
20 minutes later, tornado sirens still going off. I have gathered all three cats into the basement with me, and they are freaked out. Except for the oldest and smartest one, who is stoic about it all.
An hour later, and everything supposed to have been over and done with, the tornado sirens keep going off again. I have let the cats back upstairs, but now they want to come back down into the basement because it’s more interesting down here.
When I started this blog post I thought it was going to be a boring one. Strange how things turned out. As far as the storm is concerned, it’s past, and I now have a really nice sunset.
I’ve been a photographer since the late 1970s, and for some reason, I’ve always been oriented toward telephoto lenses. 35mm is the widest I’d ever gone, and that was only recently. It was always 50mm, 70mm, 105mm, or longer. I took lots of pictures of birds and squirrels, used macro zoom to capture objects for work, or portraits with zoom for maximum bokeh.
But then I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 15 Pro Max with that super wide-angle lens and started playing around with that. Then I bought one of those higher-end Insta360 cameras (for work, to get pictures of interiors of structures), and in using these, I realized something:
I have been seriously limiting myself.
I have no idea why I’d never been interested in wide-angle lenses, but I’m glad, really, that I’d avoided them. Why? Because now, after all these years, I have something new to explore: reality.
Our eyes are wide-angle lenses. The world is a wide-angle experience. Telephoto lenses, in a way, are a filter that allows you to focus on a detail — which is fine — but a wide-angle image gives the whole picture. It captures the whole slice of time.
I know, I know. It’s obvious. Duh, Jerry. But my point is, here I am at 63 years old, and now I get to do something new. That is a gift from my earlier self. It saved something new for me to learn and grow.
I’ve started simple, with a 10–20mm Sigma zoom lens for my Nikon that I bought used for (comparatively) next to nothing. This is in contrast to my bazooka-sized 600mm Sigma zoom. My original impetus was that I needed a lens for the Nikon to capture something large in a small space for work. But after work, I took it out and started exploring the rest of reality with it.
I love it. It’s made me an instant wide-angle-phile.
It’s a nice one, and I got a great deal on it because it’s used. I had been thinking seriously about getting a bike for over a year. Then, while I was out taking pictures along one of the local riverwalks, I met a guy who looked younger than me but was significantly older. He was on a bicycle. We talked for a good 45 minutes, and all the while, I was ogling his bike.
His was one of those electric-assist bikes that you have to pedal — it’s not like a moped — but it senses when you’re struggling and gives you some help, especially up hills. What made his bike special was that it didn’t use a chain but instead used a belt, and all the gears were inside the back wheel hub or drum.
I was sold. But after researching the prices and reading horror stories about the cheap ones, I balked. I could make that investment, but only if I knew I’d actually use it. So, I made myself a deal: if I got a regular bike and actually used it for a year, then I’d splurge and get one of the fancy electric ones.
At the local bike shop, I found a bike with the belt instead of the chain, and the gears all internal — everything low maintenance with no derailleur to break and no oiling required. Even better, it was used, so it was half the price of a new one.
I took a test ride, loved it, and bought it. They put a more comfortable seat on it, and I’ve been riding it around enough to become saddle-sore. On a whim, I bought one of those noseless padded seats, hated it, and immediately took it back off. I’ll tough out the saddle soreness. After all, I need to harden my backend anyway.
This is the first time I’ve been bike riding in over a decade. The last time was on rented bikes in a forest in Finland. Before that, we’re looking back over 30 years to when my ex and I would go bike riding with our kids.
My goal is to get in better shape, and this will definitely help with that. My secondary, more nefarious goal is to get to the point where I can bike ride to my neighborhood pub and not have to worry about driving a car home afterward.
You have to go with what motivates you, you know.
I know I announced a new book in January, my science fiction adventure All Things Strange and Dangerous, so having me release yet another new novel in early 2024 makes it seem like I’m amazingly prolific. The truth is, I work on fiction projects in batches and then take a break before doing them again. This will no doubt be my last one for a while.
This magical realism novel features Iris, the Goddess of Rainbows.
She’s a messenger of the creator, the All-Father, the god of gods. She’s coming out of a centuries-long deep depression after having her heart broken by Zephyrus, the god of the west wind. The All-Father has given Iris her first assignment since Shakespeare was a new thing, sending her to an Earth that has changed beyond all recognition.
And then there’s Cody Shane, a lowly agent of an unnamed secret government organization tasked with national security against supernatural threats.
He’s been assigned to track down an enigmatic old woman who’d committed an act of terrorism in San Francisco before disappearing into thin air — literally vanishing, caught on camera — and avoiding capture.
Following up on reports of “unusual rainbow activity,” Cody thinks he’s on yet another wild goose chase until he has a run-in with Iris, and the two realize they’ve been sent out after the same person.
The terroristic incident in question happened in another of my books, Eleven Days on Earth, where an old woman throws running chainsaws off the top of a San Francisco skyscraper. Several characters from that book make cameo appearances in this one.
The stakes are high. It turns out there are multiple ways our world could end, all of them happening at the same time, and there’s only one way to stop them. Iris chooses Cody as her earthly champion, and they team up to do exactly that.
Save the world.
She Comes in Colors is my 11th book of fiction, and with this one, I’m branching out into new formats. Not only is it available as an ebook and in paperback, but you’ll be able to listen to it on Audible as well, and — soon, if not already — it’ll be in hardback too.
Here’s the Amazon link: She Comes in Colors by Jerry J. Davis
I’ve invested in a new type of camera, an Insta360 One RS, which takes 360º images and video. Primarily for use in my day job, I’ve found it not only mind-blowingly amazing in its capabilities but also incredibly fun to use.
Having built-in AI image processing, it erases itself from reflections, and also erases its own selfie-stick and tripod, so that the images appear to have been taken by some sort of floating anti-gravity drone.
You can take one single picture with this camera, and then get a nearly infinite amount of various still images out of it, from just about any angle or direction. If you use it for video (which a lot of Tiktok and YouTube creators are doing) it’s the same, you take that one video and grab multiple shots, and get video shots that are almost impossible from any other type of camera.
Lord help me, I may start vlogging again on YouTube just because this camera is so fun to use.
The GroovyMojo web domain is being pulled away from Substack and I’m building a new website with it for GroovyMojo Media. Besides featuring signed copies of my books — which have been removed from my main website — it will also have custom notebooks, and other fun things. I’ll post another message when that is ready, so you can check it out if you’re curious.
I’ll also feature a backstock of proofs and advanced reader’s copies of my books, which I’ll be practically giving away, as they’re full of typos. They’re all signed and some are marked up from when I was editing. I’m not sure if anyone will actually want these, but I find it hard for me to bring myself to throw them away. I’d rather hand them out to anyone who wants to pay for postage.
In wrapping up, it’s evident that there’s a whirlwind of activity in my world, from the release of another new book to my branching out into new creative endeavors. I’m excited to bring you along for the journey. Keep an eye on your inbox for the release of my new website, and perhaps a peek into my newfound vlogging adventures. Thank you for your unwavering support and curiosity—it fuels my ventures into the unknown and the magical. Here’s to uncovering the extraordinary in the everyday together.