Regular readers know of my love of cellphone pics. (To see cellphone pics from previous months, click here.) The gallery below has 60 photos from my phone taken during June and July.

Alas, I have sad tidings: around the beginning of July, I dropped my phone (again). Suddenly, the camera could only see life from a psychedelic perspective. Now my cellphone photos look like this:

No, they don’t all look like photos of Caffe Pergolesi on a Saturday night. But they do look like the strangest dream I’ve ever had about ordinary, everyday stuff. They show what the world might look like if my soul was suddenly trapped in the body of some other species- possibly a species nobody knows about because it’s invisible. Sure, these photos are kind of interesting, but after just a few I find myself feeling queasy and uncertain about my grip on reality. And I simply cannot lose my grip on reality, not during WEDDING SEASON.

You can see a few more of these trippy photos at the end of the show below.

The bright side of all this is that I now have one more reason to buy the phone Patrick uses, the one he described in this post. But first there are a few lenses I want to acquire. As soon as I can fully justify a new phone purchase, cellphone pics posts will begin anew! Until then, what you see here will have to suffice.

So long, Samsung t439 camera, you fragile beauty…

CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE IMAGE BELOW TO GET STARTED.

Because I had the chance to do lots of photographing with real cameras during March and April, I kind of forgot about the camera on my phone. But when I Bluetoothed photos from my phone to my computer today, I realized there were enough for a post. Heck yeah!

For those of you who are new to our blog: I post pictures taken with my cellphone every month (or two), and every now and then Patrick posts a few of his own cellphone pics (taken with a much fancier cellphone). Click here to see previous cellphone pic posts (opens in a new window). No claim is being made here that these cellphone pics are of high quality, nor is any attempt made to tone down their junky weirdness. Nor are we implying, as Patrick mentioned in a previous post, that we would ever take your wedding pictures with our cellphone cameras. Unless you wanted us to, of course.

So, back to March and April: I can hardly wait to show you more photos taken with real cameras, but what with one thing and another it’s taking a long time to get those done. The cellphone pics, on the other hand, take almost no time at all to import and process. I pick random presets from my Develop Presets folder in Lightroom and just slap ‘em on and that’s all there is to it. Makes me feel like being a photographer is easy, for a few minutes anyway.

TO SEE THIS MONTH’S EXCITING SELECTIONS PLEASE CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PHOTO BELOW.

Norah Vincent has gone undercover twice in order to gather material to write a book: once as a man, in the investigative project that generated her book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man, and once as a mental health care facility patient, as part of the research for her book Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin. Therefore, it seemed entirely appropriate that I was going undercover as a reader of her books, in order to take her picture at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

I’m glad I didn’t read Norah Vincent’s books first, because this event had an emotional resonance that it wouldn’t have had if I’d already formed opinions about her. I can’t tell you yet what I think of her writing until I finish Self-Made Man, but I can say a few things about her presence. Norah Vincent was kind, gentle, and respectful of her audience. She faced us with a direct, serious gaze only broken occasionally by a grin. She was humble and likeable.

She told us that the intense passage she’d chosen to read from her book was not one she’d feel comfortable reading to just any audience, a remark that was sure to please the Santa Cruzans who’d gathered to hear her speak, definitely a group that considers itself open-minded. But it was when she started weaving together strands of philosophy with spiritual ideas, and relating them to her own thoughts and experiences, that she made friends of us all. I don’t know how to describe the effect she had, other than to say Norah Vincent was very much our cup of tea, and we would’ve gone on for hours listening to her and asking her questions if there had been time. And this was almost entirely due to her presence, her energy. Here in Santa Cruz, we really respond to good energy.

Last week I attended a powerful and very crowded reading by Wally Lamb at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Wally Lamb publisher folks, please know that the kind staff at Bookshop asked me to stop taking photos right after I got this one. They truly wanted to comply with your no-photos-before-book-signing-time rule.

After the reading, my friend Peter and I wandered down the street looking into festively decorated shop windows and walls and rooftops.

Like this bicycle store window, I want to wish everyone a very Merry this & that. And have a Happy the other while you’re at it.