Exchanging Websites Addresses

My glasses have been a wreck and a tangle for a long time. They fall off if I bend my head down, are scratched and don't work terribly well. I tried to get a new pair this summer when there was a half-price offer, but they hadn't kept my prescription and I kept dragging my feet about making an eye exam appointment, just like I'm stalling about checking out a gym to join that will, in part, make up for the exercise of walking back and forth from the parking lot on the backside of the racetrack, bending over to wash buckets and sometimes lugging one.

So, today was it. After my next-to-last Photo I classes. 

Through friends who recommended this doctor about a hundred years ago, I ended up with a serious person who doesn't just do eye exams and write prescriptions, but operates and diagnoses serious problems. Who also takes photographs. Relatively recently, we have talked about his new prints, the quality of the framed digital color prints that line the hallway back to the exam rooms. And about the photographer he has taken a workshop with so that he can now digitize an image, work on it with Photoshop and produce a perfect transparency that he can then print as black-and-white in a regular darkroom. He spoke so well of this process that I bought the book, which I promptly gave to student who was graduating and moving to California. I never replaced it, having realized that I'd never go to all that trouble.

Today we talked about the website that he and his wife are working on for her paintings. She gained a renewed sense of energy after studying with a painter in Provincetown not that long ago, a man who does large canvases and works with vigor. My eye doctor was very enthusiastic about her work, in general, and especially about her new work, about the beauty of her website which will be up and running in a week or so. It's being designed by a company in New York that specializes in the work of artists. (I wish I'd given him the name of the web designer I found, who I think does remarkable and inventive work....) 

When we were talking about whether he only uses a digital camera now, he got up from his stool to illustrate how much more active he is when he works in the darkroom, taking prints form the dry side to the wet side, and how little he has to move when he's just correcting a digital image to print from the computer, just his hand with the mouse, sitting, sitting.

I remembered that I should take a photograph there. "What are you doing?" he asked and I explained about my blog, and how I take photos at the dentist office. He didn't seem to mind my photographing the equipment. I wish I'd taken a photo of his fine profile as he wrote notes in my chart, the serious, aging. face, his glasses, the shoulder of his broadcloth shirt. 

Because I kept asking him about his work, the color prints he has made at Walgreens by a new process (what is the name?) when he isn't using his good archival Epson printer, about his wife's painting and the interesting group she works with, one question after another, we didn't talk much about my eyes other than that there are no problems. He gave me a new prescription for reading glasses and mentioned, when I asked about whether most aging people get cataracts, that I do have a bit of yellowing inside the eye, common for anyone born in 1939. 

Then we exchanged website addresses.