Choice

Music | Acute Motelitis by Roswell Rude and Archie Shepp

As another year ends, there is a sense of melancholy that buries itself just below the surface of being. Maybe it is because we are all judging our past... another year has gone by and we want to quantify the changes that we hoped to have accomplished, but often do not. I'm not much to slant to the positive side and know I am more pessimistic in nature.

I often feel sad also in the way our lives are being steered. I remember being younger and yearned to discover things in nature that were profound. I wanted to learn about and feel. Internet, cell phones, and generally, technology and its constant push to feed us more and more useless information is steering us to be idiots. We click on stupid memes and more useless facts about if we were a car, what car would we be, or what celebrity got the worst face or body alterations... We are viewing more photos than ever in the history of photography, most of which is quite horrible, but yet we click on the like button just to solidify someone else's horrible vision. Technology, which has made more accessible to do bad, what we once had to hire a true artist or technician to do has made things in general, to take a few steps back as opposed to moving forward.

More and more information - visual, auditory, uninteresting facts... It comes at us getting shoved down our throats and we have become accustomed to try and keep up, rather than stop. Just yesterday, I was flipping thru the hundreds of channels on the TV and I stopped at a movie that I have seen at least 5 times. Yes, I knew it was somewhat entertaining, but I found myself looking for something else when a commercial popped up. I landed on an Australian independent movie that I knew was going to move slow, tell a story and knew deep in my heart was going to be so much more fulfilling. Yet, I had a big conflict to switch back to something I was familiar with and knew every twist and turn. I had to tell myself to hold on and let the secondary movie to grasp me and fortunately it did. I missed some of the beginning but fell into a much more interesting experience and one that made me enlightened on things that interested me and other things that I could relate to...

So it seems I have defined a few that bothers me and affects me in negative ways. The struggle now is to act upon the issue and not be sucked into the vacuum of the useless...

Why I Love What I Do

Music | Soon it Will Be Cold Enough to Build Fires by Emancipator

Canon is coming out with a new camera this year that is based on a dslr that shoots video as well. Thought that isn't big news these days, this camera, the Canon D1 C enables the user to pull images out of the video rendering you with a high quality high resolution file. So while you are shooting video of an event, you can pull a single frame out and print a nice 16x20 inch print. No longer will you need to worry about timing of the smile, or capturing the pinnacle moment of a kiss during a wedding. Technology has reached a point where serendipity will no longer be serendipitous... The challenge just became 95% easier...

My appreciation of what I do has become more acute after hearing about what this new technology can do. Almost 5 years ago, when I decided that digital photography was not where my heart was, I must have had an inkling that taking pictures would come to this. We had joked that taking photos off video would relinquish the need for still photography.

It appears that the appreciation for photography has taken another big hit. However, I do wonder where this turn of events will take us. I remember hearing about how the computer was supposed to make our lives easier and much more efficient. I know for me, it has turned into a time hog. Seems like my watch, maybe a date book / address book suited me very well. Instead of simplicity, I think things are way more complicated...