From the Ground Up

Evening Blues

 Not that I had the blues.. but there were some blues in the sky,.. so you know..  Blues..... :) 

meh

 It's not going to win any awards.. but this is what I have to share for now :) 

Mother Earth's Veins

A Break in the Darkness for Something Colorful

I was seeing a whole page full of Black & White images from my last few posts, so I thought it would be agreeably bipolar to post something extra-colorful, now.

This is another Disney Do-Over.  The original shot, in 2011, I show at ISO 6400.   It was uber-grainy, so here's a clearer re-do!

Into the black

Another kinda moody shot from after the Eastern Shore Camera Club Meeting the other night in Fairhope.   Wasn't feeling particularly moody just playing with some night-time scenes. :)

Darker Motives

 As a suspicious person, I can't help but question motives.    

Sometimes, that serves me well.   Like, the craigslist ad respondent who wants to paypal me the money up front.  See, he's buying for his son in Russia and will arrange to have a mover come pick up the item in the future.

I click Delete and move on.  If I'm feeling froggy sometimes I reply from my special Gmail account that looks like an official person. 

But, what of less nefarious, more subtle hidden motives?

The guy that friends you on facebook because he wants a job and feels you can make that happen.    The NRA robo-calls.   The seemingly helpful semi-famous photographers on social media who happen to offer training, ebooks, prints, iphone apps, camera accessories and cardboard stand ups of themselves for sale on their sites.

Look, I get it.  People gotta eat.  I don't hate commerce and I sell stuff too..     It is when that line between "content' that "commercial" get blurry is where my consumer spidey-senses begin to tingle.  I attended a webinar recently on photography as an art form.   It was a good webinar.  It was a paid webinar.  I enjoyed it, I got something out of it.  I like the person who put it on, I think he's honest and sincere, despite relative fame.
 
They had stuff to sell.  I bought some.   Everything was "above-board" and open.  I like that!

Then, I'm listening to talk radio the other day. Commercials start to take on the format of a "news desk".   "Hey, this is Art Artinson here from the Institute on Made-up made-upness.    This just in, there has never been a better time to invest your savings in a company that sells and processes information related to the acquisition of the details necessary to begin investing in Gold!!  Gold is at a 2,000/year high.  Not sense Cleopatra has gold been valued and as those evil democrats continue to kill our country, it will only go higher!!!!"

(I'm not a democrat or a republican)

..and the ads don't stop there.   "Food Insurance, Hero Tabs, e-Cigarettes"... and all manner of nearly-scam-seeming items for sale.    The ones that really get me are the in-midst-of-the-content ads.    "Let me take just a minute to tell you about (blah).  I use it, love it.   I keeps me (happy) and makes life better.   Go to (blahblahblahDOTCom) and use referral code (TalkingHead) for a .01% discount".

I kinda shudder to imagine the closed-minded demo-republicrat hanging onto every word with their check card in hand.   That's probably not the economic stimulus we needed.

I had a guy, awhile back, friend me on G+ to push on me the merits of Islam.  I think it is great when people are excited about their beliefs and this guy was a well-meaning soul.   But what was his motive?  To follow my photography and programming exploits? Nope.  Every day, I'd get these notes on how in Islam you can astral-project to some other time or location or the immense sense of peace it brought to his life.   The guy was a living breathing brochure.

Hey, cool man. 

I'm happy with my vacuum cleaner, I can pray for myself and I'm not looking for magazine subscriptions no matter how badly you deserve to go to college.  I'm happy with my Tupperware and I know where to buy soap.  

The sad part is.  When my virtual doorbell rings and the person standing there is simply inviting me over for coffee, I will miss at least the first 5 minutes of our conversation while I size them up for potential commercial dangers... 

One Night, by the Bay...

He sat in the sand, his knees pulled up to his chest and listened. 

In the distance, the waves crashed on the seawall.  The low growl of the wind was broken by the din of metal on metal as the chains and clasps of the swing crashed into frame.    At a nearby city marina, the masts of sailboats danced silently like ballerinas to a tune heard only by nature.

Behind him, the ascending and descending doppler pitch of a jogger's shoes as they pass by.  He doesn't turn to look. In the sky above, the clouds wisp by as if they were the spirits embraced by the first inhabitants of these lands. Motorists in the distance, a lightning crash on the north shore of the bay.

His cellphone is off.

Right now, he isn't a programmer or technician, bag boy or night stocker.  He isn't a cashier or a clerk, a photographer or mechanic.  He isn't a lawyer or janitor, isn't a pastor or Rabi.  He isn't a salesman or youth coach, isn't a writer or electrician. Not right now.

No desk phones, no pagers, no cellphones, no doorbells.   No lines, no credit checks, no grass to cut and no kids banging on the bathroom door. No emails, no text messages, no overdue bills, no checkbook to balance.   No utility bills, no double dates, no performance reviews and no coworkers or friends..

Just a human soul, brain rebooting, waiting to do it all again tomorrow.

On the Bayou

Last one for today.. Kind of a different sort of shot for me.  I went for a drive and found this along the way.   Was able to grab a couple shots and leave before angry camo-clad shotgun wielding people appeared to shoo me off.

The Coming Camerapocalypse

I feel as if we are on the edge of something.    It is as if, just under the horizon, the low rumblings of a societal change are starting grow in and amplify to something that will one day be deafening.

It is 2012 and almost everyone is a photographer.

You can’t hear my tone, so I should explain that is “everyone is a photographer!” with a tinge of nervous excitement not: “everyone is a photograper.” in the embittered tone of a  grizzled old photographer, resistant to change.

At first I thought it was my own transformation back to photographer from something else that was more cerebral and skeptical.  Someone less art-aware.
Finding inspiring images from others that have undergone a similar profession reassignment, from something to technical to something artful, I somehow went to bed one evening ignorant of art and woke the next morning seeing art in my cheerios.

Was it an awakening or a phase?  I’ll let you know in 33 years.

Around me within my non-photography related social circles I’m witnessing friends, colleagues and acquaintances taking the leap, “I’m now a photographer.”

It is as if I could flip through my Facebook contact list and safely put “Studios” or “Photography” after anyone’s name and not mislabel them.   The co-owner of the company I work for’s daughter, the lady at the deli I like to eat at, new friends, old friends.   Everyone’s a photographer.

...and the damn of it is... they are all good!   Many of them great and Most of them better than I.

I can’t help but be distracted by the endless stream of compelling photos, sometimes of visual wonders and other times of the mundane that are photographed with real, natural talent by the people around me.   

I love it.  I think.

I am really really good at derived repetition and I LOVE taking pictures of things.   As I get inundated with this ever overflowing stream of awesome imagery, I can’t help but absorb ideas that I apply in my own modest craft.

Which leads me to... where are we going?  What will the future be like with everyone and their brother carrying a camera and using them prolifically?   

I don’t know, for sure, but I know it will be well documented!

Extremes

I was following Trey Ratcliff's Art of Photography webinar, following The Verge's Paul Miller's Offline Experiment, working on an Android app, reading about Sharepoint and enjoying a decent craft beer last night while I processed this image. 

During the webinar, they talked about how your mood and experiences come through in the post processing of an image.   So true!  

Sometimes I sit down and think to myself "I want to see a monochrome image..  let's make one."
othertimes it is more subtle.   

After a rather "extreme" day yesterday, I felt like creating this... something a bit more extreme and whimsical.

Straight into Dusk

Simplicity

Over my career in IT, I've been continually amazed at how many of my IT brethren and (uhh.. sistren?) get bogged down in making things more complicated than need be.    I tend to expect that one day, I'll be in the position to see the need to overcomplicate things and that I'll look back and realize that "they were right all along."

 or... maybe they aren't.  Maybe the KISS principle is a sound philosophy.

I've worked with many bright (much smarter than me) developers who, when tasked to add a feature, decide to "rewrite it" because ...it.... wasn't in their coding style.   I've met many (most) system engineers that build out systems in complicated and convoluted manners in order to scale to future needs.

The future needs are important to take into factor, I agree.

But, how much is too much complexity?

Our social systems tend to have a gravity towards complexity.   Small groups turn into departments which in turn give birth to committees.   Before you know it, project champions and subcommittees are making decisions that are so far left or right of common sense that they border on the stupid.   

Then, there's the sin of complexity through protectionism.

A "network guy" that I've worked with repetitively sins in this direction.   He and his group wield all of the keys to access to all sides of the network (as they should).

The problem is that they are not benevolent gatekeepers.   Instead, he and his bunch are suspicious and paranoid, untrusting and uncommunicative.

"Hey look, the CTO says we need to make this thing happen ASAP.  Can we  work together on this, can you get me the systems resources I need?"

"Nope."

Where I come from, when your boss tells you to do something.  You do it.    If that something can cause harm, you add a carefully worded warning but you still do it.

One of these system guys once told me this story, the justification behind their madness.

A nefarious and evil software engineer (like me) built and packaged an update to a 911 calling system for them to deploy.   (Because.. ya know… developers cannot deploy their own code..   the result of that.. would be.. like the Keymaster and Gatekeeper making whoopy ala Ghostbusters' end times prophecies…) 

The code, when deployed to the production system, failed during the late night upgrade.   When the poor, pitiful sysadmin tried to contact that developer, their manager, nay : anyone, they were not able to.  The result was the Escambia County 911 computer system being down needlessly for hours until the necessary parties got to work the next day.

I was standing over his shoulder, asking to get my hands, temporarily, on the public-facing web server for the backend of an iPhone app that was not-yet-live and THIS was the reason I was not able to have such access.   Because someone else, year's ago, stranded him amidst a project and that person's job function matched mine.  The result?  To create a virtual machine copy of the production system, to move it to another V-Lan and to email me hours later when I could get into this sandbox to test the environment differences that caused the application to work incorrectly.

Fast forward a year and six months later.    A CTO came to me and asked, "hey, set up this software for us to try."   We needed a Virtual Machine to test with.   The request goes to IT and the response? -- "We don't have time."

It's funny..  they could make time to spin up Virtual Machine's in order to fulfill a protectionist agenda but when the Virtual Machine was needed for a project they didn't agree was important, suddenly delivering a Virtual Machine was an arduous task.

When I interviewed developers, I'd often look for those developers who have grown past the adolescent need to needless over-architect solutions for infinite scalability, to those who simply try to make the most pragmatic use of their time and can reasonably accept that the requirements of their project will change over time.

When I interviewed system administrators, I'd look for those individuals willing to work with software engineers towards a common goal.  Someone who could research and implement the necessary systems to drive the organizations' goals and still protect uptime and implement safe security practices.

Odds are, the companies you deal with on a day-to-day basis have IT Departments that do not work together with this degree of harmony.   This is the reason when you call a business, an automated system asks you for some information and the representative asks for the same information 5 minutes later.   Someone, in that company -- isn't working together and most likely aren't keeping it simple…

"He's not coming."

When I'm out trying to photograph interesting things, I normally do not pay attention to people around me.   People distract me.   Each individual provides a puzzle for me to solve.     The look on a persons' face, the way they walk and carry themselves and the "energy" they project.   A crowded room puts me in a daze, like a mouse in a maze with too much cheese.  While I'm busy trying to solve the marital problems of the couple across the street (problems I've completely invented in my head based on their body language towards one-another) - a fireworks factory could explode behind me and I would get not one good fireworks burst on my sd card.. :)

Any small amount of creativity that exists within me is so deeply buried within my psyche that I have to almost step out of the world to take in my surroundings with the sense of a person on hallucinogens.  (minus the 'shrooms, Sorry HR.)   

When I do find that trance, I can typically hear and see things around me with a disconnected-but-heightened sense that I hope can help me come up with something unique.    It is this reason that I typically do not do photo outings with other people.   It is difficult or impossible for me to juggle this zombie state with the necessary cognitive presence to give a friend or colleague the attention and respect they deserve. (I'm working to get better at that, though!)

This particular area on Mobile Bay, tends to keep me on my two feet and aware of the people around me.  This park and I have a history, of sorts, that makes me a little more people-aware than usual.

This evening as a trotted clumsily down the pier, my headphones blared with "Somebody that I used to know" from Gotye/Kimbra and this early 20's girl turned and looked at me from the end of the pier.   As I approached, she at first looked at me expectedly and then with ultimate disappointment and turned away. (I get that alot. ) :) 

I kept my headphones in, grabbed a couple shots from the end of the pier and started back down the pier..  as I walked, the song on my iPod and recent network sitcom TV were instantly shaken in the mixer of my mind to form the mental martini of her story. 

"How I Met Your Mother" is a sitcom my wife and I watch together and usually enjoy.   For the unfamiliar, it is a flashback sitcom, where Bob Saget tells the story to his teenage children of how he and their mother became acquainted, along with season after season of his mid-to-late 20's antics as a single, decent looking guy in Manhattan.   It is "Friends" without Ross and Rachel.

Neil Patrick Harris plays a close friend to the narrator's younger self.   A highly paid, somehow hilariously pathological womanizer playboy whose character is somehow further made hilarious seeing that Neil is openly gay off-screen.   He's a great actor and one of our favorite characters in the sitcom.   In a recent episode, they highlighted the details of his "Playbook" -- a leather bound, multi chapter outline of named scams and schemes that he uses to pick up women at bars.   One such play, referred to as "He's not coming" plays out as he spends hours atop the empire state building observation deck waiting, observing -- looking for women that are by themselves, seemingly waiting to meet someone.   Neil's character would approach them with the line "….He's not coming….".   Depending on the reaction, he would walk away or stay to provide consolation to the newly grief-stricken and vulnerable woman with his own plans to land a one-night-stand.

To the sad-faced found woman at the Daphne bayside pier, Thanks for providing subject matter for this shot, I hope whoever you were waiting on - eventually arrived.  

After all, life's moments are more enjoyable when shared with good company.  Unless, of course those moments are zombie-mode photo outings; those are pretty awesome in solitude.  oo, I think I hear my tea pot whistling. Maybe my mushroom tea is finally ready.  

Eat Mor Chikin

"ppsst.   Hey Kid.   Look,  eat mor chikin."

-A Cow

Getting Ready for a Wedding

Not me.   I found the one woman on Earth willing to tolerate me.

These folks, and their professional photographer-types made a neat backdrop for some sunset photo-grabbing in Fairhope.  

This shot makes me glad that I'm not a professinal, work-a-day photographer.

If I'm somewhere at sunset, it is because I chose to be not because I have to be.  You photographers out there pawing and clawing to become pros, be careful what you wish for! :)

My first career in photography didn't last because it ceased being fun.  When you have to do it, it can be a drag.  Thank God for my programming day,.ermm..night.. job.

Day 60 Without Home Internet: A Revelation

Some of you may have seen my previous post, concerning multiple hassles of trying to get high speed internet at my home.   That post is here:

http://goo.gl/COiQJ

 I write to you today from beautiful Spanish Fort, Alabama via my only lifeline to the internet: Verizon LTE Tethering via iPad.   It was 60 days ago that I moved into the house, starry-eyed and hopeful of the promise of new surroundings.    Sure, both Air Conditioners were broke when we moved in but we would not be put off given the promise before us.   Surely this new, less - rural professionally-targeted neighborhood would provide opportunities such as u-Verse or FioS.   Data opportunities galore!!

or... not.

Since my last post, Mediacom continues to fail to provide me status updates.   They did lay a new piece of cable and managed to cut my neighbor's gas line in the process.     When I call 1-855-MEDIACOM looking for status updates, they have me renew my contract (4 x now) and send out an installer, 8 of them to date. The niinth contractor-installer is scheduled for Friday.   That new cable remains, unterminated, portruding from the ground as if to taunt me.  I had a slight breakthrough in that I discovered the unlisted number for the local engineering office through some searching.    I get to annoy a person every other day or so, which is mildly rewarding.

The other provider in my 'hood is At&t.    They invested boo-koodles of cash to put some fiber down the main thoroughfare with intention to provide u-Verse goodness to the 'hood in 2011.   The City of Spanish Fort, evidently denied At&t a Video franchise.  

No u-Verse for me.

What of DSL?  The word from At&t was "No free Ports".    Word from inside At&t is that there are in fact, actual ports but the location is "capped." Some policy within At&t so the system nazis can do whatever it is they do, to the back hauls.  

I've been pushing really hard, pulling every possible trick I can think of to try to get that loop uncapped or to get my address force-qualified.     

Today, we had a revelation.

A Veteran's Memorial Cemetery is being built down the road from my home.   They ran into a similar situation and At&t refused to "uncap" the DSL in order to provide their offices internet service, leading them to the installation of a $60k fiber line.

Thanks At&t, for letting policy stand in way of doing the right thing for the VA's Memorial Cemetery.   If you do get me a port -- give it to them.

Clearer Days..

 I love the cold, winter clarity of winter time beach shots.   

I suppose I'm sorta backwards that way.  I'm at the beach way more in the winter than the summer. :)

Night Train -- The end of a trip..

It was our last day at the Disney Parks & our second trip during this stay to The Magic Kingdom.   

Sometime around 11pm, Dina was doing some shopping I watched a really impressive show, where they project a photo-slideshow of the park's day onto the castle.  

The kids were asleep in the stroller, we finally managed to wear them out :)  As of the second day of the trip, I was about ready to head home.   I'd lost a good deal of productivity@Work and knew we had a ton of work waiting on us when we got back.  It was hot, it rained alot. It was crowded.   

How I miss the freedom of going to Disney during the off-season.   I'm an "off-season" kinda guy.

Apparently if you take your kids out, the school system can publicly execute you or something.  

All hail our public education overlords.

An unscheduled-as-far-as-I-know, night parade started and proved to be a fun opportunity to practice some hand-held night-time photography.   It was a really fun and mostly uncrowded way to end our trip!

Photo Walks & Outings this Year

I'm working to try to formulate some plans regarding Photo walks and outings in case anyone wants to come hang out..

The Scott Kelby WorldWide Photo Walk, locally will be represnted by a mid-morning walk in Fairhope, Alabama and a Late Afternoon photo walk in Orange Beach.    I'm planning to attend both.

Fairhope's Walk:

http://worldwidephotowalk.com/walk/fairhope-al-united-states-corner-of-fairhope-ave-section-st/

Orange Beach's Walk:

http://worldwidephotowalk.com/walk/orange-beach-al-united-states/

The Eastern Shore Camera Club does a Holiday-Season photo walk in the December timeframe.   The details aren't out yet but count me in on that one, when it get announced..

http://www.escamera.org/  for more details

In the interim..  I was thinking of putting together a couple "small group" outings towards the end of summer and possibly in that period of fall between the Kelby photowalk and the holiday season.   

If anyone has any locations or suggestions, I'm wide-opened to hear them.  If I don't get any suggestions this week, we'll let the ol' magic of random choose for us!