After supper... with Patrick and Elaine, we talked about photography because Patrick and Michael visited the very house near Tournus, France, where Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826 made a photographic image that is the earliest surviving camera photograph in existence today.  It's a view from the window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes).  I told them I learned last week that Debora Klochko, Executive Director of the Museum of Photograph Arts in San Diego, travels (now on a ship going around the Black that lies between Europe and Asia.) with only her iPhone for photographs.  Deborah knows more about photography than just about anybody else I know.

Some of you who regularly see this BLOG know that occasionally I use my cell phone for my daily picture fix.  Today was like that.  I thought about Niepce and Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre working together to make the pictures that we know today as the earliest photographic images ever made... and pointed my phone at Margaret, then Elaine, then Patrick... I think both Niepce and Daguerre would be delighted by Twenty-First Century photography, but neither of them would be surprised.

Another Frenchman whom I respect and revere, Roland Uberschlag, has published Velo Plaisir, Velo Sufferance, a book of writings and photographs about his travels around the world on a bicycle.  I had the pleasure  (and sufferance) of riding with him from Vancouver, B.C. to San Diego a few years ago.  I received today the copy of his book.  His personal inscription ends with the phrase, Without a touch of dreams; without a touch of madness... Nothing Happens."  Perfect.