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Another instance of seeing a friend wear something cool (like sweet glasses) and informing them that we needed to do a shoot!
For the Strobist...
Flashed synced to the camera with remote radio slave.
Behind her to the left is a 10 by 5 foot (vertical) chimera bank with two flash heads in it, set to half power. Another of the same bank, is behind her on the right. A small beauty dish set to a 4th power mounted to the ceiling just a little behind her. Also a big octobank in front of her slightly off to the right, set to half power.
poem_
Puddles on tarmac
3D world reflected on a 2D surface
Mirrors my current mood
A new year with my life on track
But I’m hungry for food
Feed my body with sustenance
And my brain will create in an instance
With both purpose and substance
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fictional story_
Cars pass the anonymous stranger
Oblivious to the fact it is an off-world visitor
But it’s British rush hour
We’re to busy to give a lift to a being an infinite power
Stood up on the first encounter
This greater intelligence is miserable in the bitter cold weather
Will, it f••k off in a spaceship flipping a middle finger? or order an Uber?
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description_
Rush hour moving
Predictably slowly
Birmingham raining
As it always is, Usually
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Date: 28/11/2018
Location: Alcester Road South, Kings Heath, Birmingham, UK
Camera: Sony ILCE-6000
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Project: Journey to Family Home
Collection: PHOTO WALKS
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Comments/Interpretations?
- What story do you see?
- What do you want to see from me next?
- What does it remind you of?
-What’s your Interpretation?
-What do you think?
-Do you Love it, Hate it?
-How does it make you feel?
ᴄᴏɴsᴛʀᴜᴄᴛɪᴠᴇ ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴇɴᴛs ᴡᴇʟᴄᴏᴍᴇ
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The clouds once again were gorgeous, at times, today. There were instances when they were broken up and sweeping by nicely, but then there would a huge patch of endless clouds as well..
Just when I thought I would catch some nice broken clouds, I went out.. luckily, it was almost lunch hour at work, so it worked out in my favor.. but then, as I got by the rail tracks, those broken clouds disappeared and those endless clouds took over.. still did a long SP shot, not knowing how it had turned out..
Then, went out again in the evening just when I saw those broken clouds appear again.. only to see that when I got to the spot, the sky had turned almost clear.. how that happened, I don't know.. this is Michigan..! but, I was able to catch a couple of stray clouds passing through.
So, I got two shots and after a bit of editing, I happened to like both of them. Hence, posting both..
I should be mowing the lawn, but instead I am playing with pictures I took yesterday while really paying attention to all the spring buds and flowers. It was delightful and fragrant, but spring also makes the grass grow really fast....so 'bye for now! Thanks for all your visits, but you should be outside, with your cameras, taking a stroll though spring too. It's too good to ignore! (Like, for instance, the bug in this picture)!
"And if you think of Brick, for instance,
and you say to Brick,
"What do you want Brick?"
And Brick says to you
"I like an Arch."
And if you say to Brick
"Look, arches are expensive,
and I can use a concrete lentil over you.
What do you think of that?"
"Brick?"
Brick says:
"... I like an Arch"
LOUIS KAHN
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"...At heart, I am a Byzantine..."
CARLO SCARPA
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.
.
photo:
byzantine masonry
St. Nicholas Church at Curtea de Arges, Romania
Biserica Sf. Nicolae Domnesc (Curtea Domnească )
Curtea de Arges
1340-1376
[built probably by master builders from Constantinople,
for the Princely Court of Basarab I of Wallachia]
www.monumenteromania.ro/index.php/monumente/detalii/en/Bi...
ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biserica_Domneasc%C4%83_Sf._Nicolae...
UNESCO World Heritage list submission:
whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/545/
other images of this church
www.flickr.com/photos/fusion_of_horizons/tags/bisericasfn...
Taken under an overcast sky, in this shot, Sanders MCV Evora bodied Volvo B8RLE type number 519 - BV21 OOB “Norfolk Rambler” is captured passing Newgate Green at Cley-next-the-Sea while working the above diverted Wells-next-the-Sea bound Coasthopper service CH1 journey.
The new build to the right rear of 519 as we look, has been described as an eyesore by many locals. It also seems that there have been some planning irregularities especially in respect of what was passed and what was actually built. In the latest developments, NNDC are seeking demolition of all the buildings and whatever your views the property, known as Arcady, has certainly divided opinions in this quiet corner of North Norfolk.
Scheduled to last for three days, from Monday 25th April, UK Power Networks related roadworks see The Street (A149) closed to through traffic at Weybourne. As a result all Coasthopper service CH1 journeys are diverting in both directions over the Cley to Sheringham section by way of Holt Road, Newgate, Cley Road, Holt Town Centre, A148, High Kelling, Bodham and the A1082. The diversion means that the timing points at Cley Visitor Centre, Salthouse, Kelling Cross, Weynor Gardens and Weybourne are not being served as, in this instance, there is no viable alternative route along the coast. The closure also affected Sheringham High School/Kelling Primary schoolday only service 405.
It's not clear which truck model this is. I didn't find any emblems on the cabin.
But VehicleSpotter3373 explained me it's a Tigrotto.
The Fiat NC-series was based on the OM truck series with animal names. For instance the medium-light truck was the Tigrotto 50/55/65. It was introduced in 1957.
In 1962 the Tigrotto range received a new full-windshield cab, and was updated in 1965 (with a long written emblem in full length on the grille) and 1967.
Other models were called Orsetto 15, Cerbiatto 20, Lupetto 25 and 30, Leoncino 34, and Daino 40 and 45.
This truck range gained a lot of popularity in Italy.
The OM Tigrotto was replaced by the OM 80/90/100 in 1968.
Officine Meccaniche OM became part of the Fiat Group in 1933. In 1967 the bands with Fiat Veicoli Industriali were tighter, and finally in 1972 OM was definitely unified with Fiat V.I.
After Fiat and OM merged with Unic and Magirus-Deutz into Iveco in 1975, the brand name OM disappeared gradually in the early 1980s.
Production OM Leoncino series: 1950-1968.
Production OM Tigrotto series: 1957-1968.
Production OM Tigre series: 1958-1968.
Production OM Lupetto series: 1959-1968.
Production OM Cerbiatto series: 1963-1968/1972.
Production OM Daino series: 1965-1968/1972.
Production OM Orsetto series: 1966-1968/1972.
Old Italian reg. number (type 1951-1985, Firenze).
Number seen: 1.
Scan from analog photo.
Film roll: 00-24.
Fiesole (It), July 23, 2000.
© 2000 Sander Toonen Amsterdam/Halfweg | All Rights Reserved.
© Ben Heine || Facebook || Twitter || www.benheine.com
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A scenery I recently captured from Santorini island, in Greece.
The above photo has been shot with the Samsung NX10
Santorini also known as Thera is a volcanic island located in the southern Aegean Sea, about 200 km (120 mi) southeast from Greece's mainland. It is the largest island of a small, circular archipelago which bears the same name. It forms the southernmost member of the Cyclades group of islands, with an area of approximately 73 km2 (28 sq mi) and a 2001 census population of 13,670. It is composed of the Municipality of Thira (pop. 12,440) and the Community of Oía (pop. 1,230). These have a total land area of 90.623 km2 (34.990 sq mi), which also includes the uninhabited islands of Nea Kameni, Palaia Kameni, Aspronisi, and Christiana (all part of the Municipality of Thira).
Santorini is essentially what remains of an enormous volcanic explosion, destroying the earliest settlements on what was formerly a single island, and leading to the creation of the current geological caldera.
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For more information about my art: info@benheine.com
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Just a Dream
A poem by Peter S. Quinn
Just a dream in the far-off glow
Drifting in time's infinity
Gleaming mist in horizon slow
Everything comes there to be
Weaving the ocean on and on
Dreams of its being in trance
Till those hours forever are gone
On to the color verve blanch
Daydreams of the evening sky
Playfully giving and waking
Reaching to dusk Greek lullaby
And to memories forever making
Breathing and torching leaving day
As it goes on to the night
In every shade and feelings play
That for a moment has flight
Like love boat on oceans past
Traveling on to the evermore
Times on the hillsides are lost
Thru its wandering on to shore
Billows that play in the deep
Giving and taking of their feel
Some instances is ours to keep
Before they again become unreal
Certain things can be difficult to tell when looking at others' images. Scale, for instance, or brightness. I headed to Portland Bill to find out for myself what impact the lighthouse would have on the otherwise vivid night sky.
Having shot through the night the fingers of light which, if I'm honest, proved a little frustrating in the absolute darkness went on to provide a defining feature in this early dawn shot.
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» LongExposures website and blog
This is a repost of an image I initially posted in February of 2014. I edited this instance by simply rotating it 90º to make it work as the new banner. Let's see how it looks!
Here's an image from my 2014 archives!
This stretch lace minidress does let me show off my legs quite well! I hope you like the view!
I'm sometimes a little modest with what I wear but I do like to tease you too! This stretch lace minidress gives both you and me the best of both!
This black stretch lace minidress is from a new vendor I've discovered, sinsofskin.com! They have the type of minidresses that I like, their prices aren't too high and their selections is pretty varied too!
I've matched my new minidress up with my nude Bodywrappers Under Wraps Microfiber Camisole leotard from nydancewear.com, super shiny Platino Luxe 40 denier pantyhose from shapings.oom over Hanes Alive Barely There pantyhose from onehanesplace.com and finished off with my black open toe T-strap platform pumps from venus.com
To see more pix of me in other tight, sexy and revealing outfits click this link:www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157623668202157/
To see more pix of me wearing other sheer & see through clothing click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157622319095237/
To see more pix of me showing off my legs click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157623668202157/
To see more pix of me in my Little Black Dresses click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157615355440906/
To see more pix of me wearing super shiny Platino pantyhose click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157633156315924
DSC_1321-1-1
The Ion Mystic Forms - Geometric Symbolism Part II - The Symbolic Duality Of The Circle by Daniel Arrhakis (2022)
The circle represents limitless things, among them eternity, unity, God, sanctity, infinity, and wholeness.
Unity – In some cultures, when people want to come together and support one another, they form a circle.
Monotheism (God) – Several cultures view the circle as a symbol of the existence of the one and only God they subscribe to. For instance, Christians refer to God as the alpha and omega, which means the beginning and the end. In this case, God is seen as a complete circle. In Islam, Monotheism is represented by a circle with God at the center.
Infinity – The circle is a representation of infinity because it has no end. It symbolizes universal energy and the continuity of the soul. The ancient Egyptians chose the ring worn on the finger as a way to symbolize the eternal union between a couple, a practice we still carry on to this day.
Sanctity – This symbolic meaning is seen in Judeo-Christianity, where deities and people considered holy are presented with haloes around the heads.
Heavens – This meaning comes from Chinese symbology, which uses the circle as a representation of heaven.
Containment – With the aspect of protection also comes containment. A circle is a representation of keeping contained what is inside. A good example of this is a ring; whether it is a wedding ring, religious or cultic, the ring stands for a pledge of fidelity.
With the powerful symbolism associated with the circle, it’s no wonder there exist numerous symbols and artifacts resembling circles and shapes. Some of these symbols include: The Enso, The Ouroboros, The Flower Of Life, The Mandela, The Yin And Yang, etc.
In the Mystical World of Ion The Circle and or the Sphere have a symbolic duality: Creation and Destruction.
The circle is often symbolized in the Mystic World of Ion by the shell of a nautilus and represents infinity, eternity, the notion of God as a universal spirit, the beginning and end of timeless cycles that renew themselves in infinite realities, the circle of generations, the light that illuminates the darkness, the universal knowledge of all things unattainable and immeasurable.
The prevailing scientific theory on the origins of the universe posits that everything began with a Big Bang.
In the moment after, a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons were swimming around in a dark, invisible primordial soup.
In the beginning there was no light. ”The free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds,” according to NASA. But over thousands of years, as the temperature cooled, the free electrons joined nuclei and created neutral atoms. This process eventually allowed light to shine through about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
In other words, in the beginning, everything was dark for a long, long time. Then there was light, this sounds pretty similar to what’s written in the Bible !
All of existence started with an explosion from one point that is continually multiplying, according to Jewish mysticism.
we can see a strong relationship between the contemporary Big Bang theory and the Kabbalistic notion that the universe burst forth from a single point, which in mystical terms is the limitless light of the divine, or Infinite, known as the “Ein Sof" (“no end”).
So the divine, or god, is just another word for infinity.
The notion of darkness containing light described in mysticism also illuminates black holes, places in space where gravity’s pull is so strong that even light can’t escape. As NASA explains, the gravity in a black hole has such a forceful pull because matter is compressed into a tiny space.
Scientists believe that when the universe began, small black holes also formed. We can’t see black holes with the naked eye, but we know they exist because of the effect they exert on the stars orbiting near them. Black holes bend light toward them.
In Kabbalah, a hole is called “rah,” meaning “evil” in Hebrew. Holes are portals from the domain of good to that of evil that suck up matter, energy, and knowledge from the universe.
In some cosmological models that black holes could be wormholes—portals to parallel universes, which is similar to the kabbalistic concept of holes as an entryway to “the other side.”
The Mystical World of Ion has cosmological or universal pantheistic vision, God or the Universal Spirit is present in all things, whether animate or inanimate.
In this view God is not the absolute creator but a universal spirituality that can be found throughout the cosmos, in every physical and chemical manifestation, in every element of nature and is everywhere, for he is the whole, universal and infinite. So he is creation itself.
In Ion's Mystical World Conception the notion of the Devil does not exist, he is a creation of man to try to justify his own misfortunes.
However, there is the notion of Primordial Chaos, the Infinite Void as well as Absolute Darkness often materialized in ignorance as a powerful force against organization, knowledge and light.
If God has an infinite and universal dimension, then so does absolute darkness, having been by this order of ideas earlier, older and omnipotent to a certain point - at least until the Light appears!
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As Formas Místicas de Ion - Simbolismo Geométrico Parte II - A Dualidade Simbólica do Círculo por Daniel Arrhakis (2022)
O círculo representa coisas ilimitadas, entre elas eternidade, unidade, Deus, santidade, infinidade e totalidade.
Unidade – Em algumas culturas, quando as pessoas querem se unir e se apoiar umas às outras, elas formam um círculo.
Monoteísmo (Deus) – Várias culturas veem o círculo como um símbolo da existência do único Deus que elas subscrevem. Por exemplo, os cristãos se referem a Deus como o alfa e o ômega, que significa o começo e o fim. Neste caso, Deus é visto como um círculo completo. No Islão, o monoteísmo é representado por um círculo com Deus no centro.
Infinito – O círculo é uma representação do infinito porque não tem fim. Simboliza a energia universal e a continuidade da alma. Os antigos egípcios escolheram o anel usado no dedo como forma de simbolizar a união eterna entre um casal, prática que continuamos até hoje.
Santidade – Este significado simbólico é visto no judaísmo-cristianismo, onde divindades e pessoas consideradas sagradas são apresentadas com auréolas em redor da cabeça.
Céus – Esse significado vem da simbologia chinesa, que usa o círculo como representação do céu.
Contenção – Com o aspeto de proteção também vem a contenção. Um círculo é uma representação de manter contido o que está dentro. Um bom exemplo disso é um anel; seja um anel de casamento, religioso ou cultual, o anel representa uma promessa de fidelidade mas também de proteção e segurança.
Com o poderoso simbolismo associado ao círculo, não é de admirar que existam inúmeros símbolos e artefactos semelhantes a círculos e formas. Alguns desses símbolos incluem: O Enso( Ensō (円相) é uma palavra japonesa que significa “círculo” e é um conceito fortemente associado com o Zen Budismo), O Ouroboros (um símbolo místico que representa o conceito da eternidade, através da figura de uma serpente ou dragão que morde a própria cauda), A Flor da Vida, A Mandala, O Yin E Yang, etc.
No Mundo Místico de Íon O Círculo e ou a Esfera têm uma dualidade simbólica: Criação e Destruição.
O círculo é muitas vezes também simbolizado no Mundo Místico de Ion pela concha de um náutilo e representa o infinito, a eternidade, a noção de Deus como um espírito universal, o início e o fim de ciclos intemporais que se renovam em realidades infinitas, o círculo das gerações , a luz que ilumina as trevas, o conhecimento universal de todas as coisas inatingíveis e imensuráveis.
A teoria científica predominante sobre as origens do universo postula que tudo começou com um Big Bang.
No momento seguinte, uma vasta gama de partículas fundamentais, como neutrões, eletrões e protões, nadavam em uma sopa primordial escura e invisível.
No início não havia luz. “Os eletrões livres teriam causado a dispersão da luz (fotões) da mesma forma que a luz solar se espalha nas gotículas de água nas nuvens”, segundo a NASA. Mas ao longo de milhares de anos, à medida que a temperatura esfriou, os eletrões livres juntaram-se aos núcleos e criaram átomos neutros. Esse processo acabou permitindo que a luz brilhasse cerca de 380.000 anos após o Big Bang.
Em outras palavras, no começo, tudo era escuridão por muito, muito tempo. Então houve luz, isso soa-nos bem parecido com o que está escrito na Bíblia!
Toda a existência começou com uma explosão de um ponto que se foi multiplicando continuamente, de acordo com o misticismo judaico.
Podemos ver uma forte relação entre a teoria contemporânea do Big Bang e a noção cabalística de que o universo irrompeu de um único ponto, que em termos místicos é a luz ilimitada do divino, ou Infinito, conhecido como “Ein Sof” (“ sem fim”).
Assim, o divino, ou Deus, é apenas outra palavra para infinito.
A noção de escuridão contendo luz descrita no misticismo, também ilumina buracos negros, lugares no espaço onde a força da gravidade é tão forte que nem a luz pode escapar. Como a NASA explica, a gravidade num buraco negro tem uma força muito forte porque a matéria é comprimida num espaço minúsculo.
Os cientistas acreditam que quando o universo começou, pequenos buracos negros também se formaram. Não podemos ver buracos negros a olho nu, mas sabemos que eles existem por causa do efeito que exercem nas estrelas que orbitam perto deles. Buracos negros desviam a luz em direção a eles.
Na Cabala, um buraco é chamado de “rah”, que significa “mal” em hebraico. Buracos são portais do domínio do bem ao do mal que sugam matéria, energia e conhecimento do universo.
Em alguns modelos cosmológicos, os buracos negros podem ser buracos de minhoca (wormholes) – portais para universos paralelos, o que é semelhante ao conceito cabalístico de buracos como uma porta de entrada para “o outro lado”.
O Mundo Místico de Ion tem uma visão cosmológica ou panteísta universal, Deus ou o Espírito Universal está presente em todas as coisas, sejam animadas ou inanimadas.
Nessa visão, Deus não é o criador absoluto, mas uma espiritualidade universal que pode ser encontrada em todo o cosmos, em cada manifestação física e química, em cada elemento da natureza e está em toda parte, pois ele é o todo, universal e infinito. Então ele é a própria criação.
Na Conceção do Mundo Místico de Íon a noção do Diabo não existe, ele é uma criação do homem para tentar justificar seus próprios infortúnios.
No entanto, existe a noção de Caos Primordial, o Vazio Infinito, bem como a Escuridão Absoluta, muitas vezes materializada na ignorância como uma força poderosa contra a organização, o conhecimento e a luz.
Se Deus tem uma dimensão infinita e universal, então a escuridão absoluta também tem, o que pela ordem das ideias explicadas anteriormente, é assim mais antiga e omnipotente até certo ponto - pelo menos até que a Luz apareceu!
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Background landscape made with AI Art Generator Using NightCafe Studio's Online and light textures made with Amberlight 2.
Elements from stock images and images of mine.
In some instances, a world spiraling out of control can be a beautiful thing. I made this capture of a magnificent spiral stairway at a local winery by lying on my back and shooting up 3 stories into the dome of the silo. A very wide-angle lens was required to get all of the subject into the composition, as the space was very high and considerably constricted width-
wise. This abstract rendering was what I came up with. It will have to do until next time, when I may pull another lie-down treatment out of the bag.
There was still a family party of six Willow Tits at my local reservoir yesterday and I still don't know whether it comprised 4 youngsters and 2 adults, or five young and one parent. I know this picture is horribly cluttered but I thought it was worth recording how the parents fed them in this instance. The young were constantly begging for food by giving special calls and shivering their wings with their beaks open. As the party moved through the undergrowth, the parent(s) would find insects, usually caterpillars, and feed one of the youngsters. How they ensured each one got its share I do not know as it seemed rather chaotic. Here the parent bird swung trapeze-like on the bramble branch below its chick so was hanging upside-down while it fed its upright fledgling. This was a split second after feeding when the adult bird turned its head for the camera. Incidentally, the word fledging is a verb that describes the time that young birds leave the nest. But add an l and you get a noun fledgling that describes a young bird that has recently fledged.
Across most of their Eurasian ranges the Marsh Tit and Willow Tit are easy to separate as Willow Tit is a cold, frosty grey, whereas Marsh Tit is a warmer buff colour. But in Britain the kleinschmidti race of Willow Tit is warmer with buffy flanks, just like Marsh Tit. Marsh Tit usually has a pale spot at the base of its dark bill and Willow Tit usually has a pale wing panel, though my understanding is that no single feature is 100% reliable for separating them apart from call. Though the adult Willow Tit here has an astonishingly bright wing panel, but confusingly has a tiny pale spot on its bill like Marsh Tit. Marsh Tit was described new to science in 1758, but it was 69 years later before Willow Tit was described in 1827. But it was an incredible 70 years later (1897) before people realised Willow Tits occurred in Britain. Willow Tits have declined massively in Britain but still occur in West and South Yorkshire where Marsh Tits usually do not occur. Willow Tits are the most rapidly declining resident bird in the UK. The British population fell by 91% between 1967 and 2010. Research on reasons for the decline is ongoing, but we know they prefer scrub to woodland, and also need standing dead wood as they excavate their own nest holes. The endemic British race kleinschmidti is the smallest and darkest of numerous races. The latest population estimate of the British kleinschmidti is 3400 pairs, but it continues to decline.
"Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
I just thought the quote was appropriate for that "stubborn" shadow. :)
I am trying to make my way through your streams my friends. I eventually will get the hang of moving around well enough again, some time soon. I hope. Have a great day!
Copyright © GeDelaCruzPhotography. All Rights Reserved.
I see this lady walk past my front door every day, with the same smile on her face.
For the past 83 years, and despite of a hard life in the fields, her happiness is written in her wrinkles. I have rarely met someone as happy and at peace with oneself.
A true inspiration...
This year, the weather in our globe is very un-predictable. One instance it is spring.
On another day is winter back again. With the weather changing dramatically, it is very easy for people to get sick & feel low on the emotional cycle.
I have been observing the plants' flower's boomming & their cycle of becoming fruit's. I found out that plant's are very much affected by the hot & cold ; especially it change between a single day of more than 20-40 degree F.
The Bees' are dying as well for the reason of too much disturbances from the cell phones frequencies according to some bio-scientists. I would like to comment that the dramatically change of the day & night temperature would have cause the death of the bees.
Thus, it would be more difficult for plants' to harvest fruits.
With these in mind. We have to think seriously about the effect of Global warming & to take action & rectified the situation now; before it is too late.
So Go Green...
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This image was taken with wind speed 15mph.
Camera is setted on tripod.
Sun light from the back of the subject.
A white paper tower is held on the left hand to bounce more light.
Post processing:
Sharpen
Clarify
Straighten
Saturation
Glow
Fill Lights
Color Correction
Save.
In all these instances, the Hebrew word for “mercy” is hesed, which has the connotation of undeserved kindness or grace. In Exodus 34, the word for “merciful” is rachom, derived from rechem (“ womb”), and implies caring for another in the way that a woman cares for the child in her womb. The pervasive sense that Scripture gives of God’s maternal compassion makes the fifth Beatitude a summons to imitate it.
-Evolving humanity and biblical wisdom : reading scripture through the lens of Teilhard de Chardin, Marie Noonan Sabin.
Photo captured via Minolta MD Zoom Rokkor-X 24-50mm F/4 lens. At the Cedar Creek Cabin's private loop trail near the Bogachiel River. Coastal Uplands section within the Coast Range. Olympic Peninsula. Near the Clallam County line. Jefferson County, Washington. Early April 2018.
Exposure Time: 1/4 sec. * ISO Speed: ISO-100 * Aperture: F/11 * Bracketing: None * Color Temperature: 4813 K * Film Plug-In: Fuji Provia 100F * Elevation: 260 feet above sea-level
For Instance: For the devil in you...wicked pink - When you are too angelic...textured off-whites - Hunting instinct up? Helanca stretch leotards - When you go all little-girl...stockings in very young blue.
Chemstrand Nylon
yet another instance where it's hard to compete with the pros, but I'm happy I got to take a shot at it
I went into today anticipating 1/4000s shutter speeds and ended up with sub 1/100s for most of my shots because of the heavy cloud cover.
Fortunately by combining multiple images I was able to blur out the clouds and get a clearer view of the sun.
I'm starting to get behind enough on posting images that I'm forgetting important details. For instance, I believe this pinhole image was shot on infrared film, but I'm not 100% sure. I do know, of course, that it's an image of Lower Kentucky Falls, found near Mapleton, Oregon.
Not much else to say about this... and I need to get back to editing pictures. Hope you're all having a great weekend.
We were both in our cars. Parked outside a local supermarket. She must have sensed my lens, peering at her and the light of her mobile phone. She turned her head, just for an instance...
The Coopers Rock lookout near Morgantown WV. Most times when standing on the lookout one would tend to look the other direction across the valley that overlooks the Cheat River, but in this instance turning around with my back to the valley gave us beautiful morning light cresting over the mountain.
My inspiration song for this pictur:
SCHAMANISCHES Tribal Drum Journey
Message for you:
Even when the wolf sometimes disappears deep into the forest, he always finds his way back home. May the power animal Wolf guide and lead you because in the last instance we will always follow the call of our soul.
Together we go our Soul Path the Queen of Swords and the Wolf as companions you will meet again and again and strengthen each other's backs because that is the deal and the goal.
Botschaft für dich:
Auch wenn der Wolf manchmal tief im Wald verschwindet findet er immer wieder den Weg nach Hause zurück. Möge das Krafttier Wolf dich leiten und führen, denn in letzter Instanz werden wir immer dem Ruf unserer Seele folgen.
Gemeinsam gehen wir unseren Seelenweg, die Königin der Schwerter und der Wolf als Gefährten werden sie sich immer wieder begegnen und sich gegenseitig den Rücken stärken denn das ist der Deal und das Ziel.
How we see echother:
Ich und Du - Anna Depenbusch & Mark Forster
Egzod & Maestro Chives - Royalty
Sam Tinnesz - Leading The Pack
Valley Of Wolves - Take It All
Soul Mates enter your life some stay for just one page others for a whole chapter and then there are those who are there for the whole story.♥
Since we have met each other I have always seen us as very polarizing and as strong personalities, two alphas who respect each other even if we sometimes snarl at each other.
Like the Bremerstadt musicians we couldn't be more different but we are connected from cradle to grave by a strong bond.
We are there for each other come what may and YES come what may.
We are never alone on the path we each take. I was allowed to grow on and with you and that is incredibly valuable to me. ♥
We know each other for what feels like an eternity now and I am incredibly grateful that you are a part of my life. You make my life more colorful and even more worth living.♥
Thank you for being exactly the way you are because in my eyes you shine in all your facets and it is pure joy to be able to experience this. Friends like us are very rare and I appreciate this gift very much.♥ Together we accompany each other on our way and Yes I am proud to have a friend like you at my side!
I am glad that you wash my head from time to time ^^ and still let me be who I am. ♥
You strengthen me and give me the courage to handle everything because you simply believe in me, thank you for that. ♥♥♥♥♥
Thank you for all the emotional and wonderful moments I was able to experience with you, whether good or bad, both are part of it. ♥
I have found my best friend in you because you are friend and girlfriend in one what could I wish for more ^^
Love you my BBF Friends for Ever SL & RL ♥
Seelen Gefährten treten in dein Leben einige bleiben für nur eine Seite andere für ein ganzes Kapitel und dann gibt es noch die die während der ganzen Geschichte dabei sind.♥
Seit wir uns getroffen haben, habe ich uns immer als sehr polarisierende und starke Persönlichkeiten gesehen zwei Alphas die sich gegenseitig respektieren, auch wenn wir uns manchmal anknurren.
Wie die Bremerstadtmusikannten könnten wir unterschielicher nicht sein und dennoch verbindet uns ein starkes Band denn von der Wiege bis zur Bare sind wir alle miteinander verbunden.
Wir sind für einander da komme was wolle und JA wolle was da komme.
Überwegs auf dem jeweiligen Weg den jeder einschlägt sind wir nie alleine. Ich durfte an und mit dir wachsen und das ist mir wahnsinnig viel wert.♥
Wir kennen uns nun schon eine gefühlte Ewichkeit und ich bin unglaublich dankbar das du ein Teil meines Lebens bist. Du machst mein Leben bunter und noch lebenswerter.♥
Danke das du genau so bist wie du bist den den in meinen Augen strahlst du in all deinen Facetten und es ist die Pure Freude das miterleben zu dürfen. Freunde wie wir es sind sind sehr selten und ich weiss dieses Geschenk sehr zu schätzen.♥ Gemeinsam begleiten wir uns auf unserem Weg und Yes ich bin stoltz einen Freund wie dich an meiner Siete zu haben!
Ich bin froh das du mir ab und an den Kopf wäschst ^^ und mich dennoch so sein lässt wie ich bin. ♥
Du stärkst mich und gibst mir den Mut alles in Agriff zu nehmen weil du einfach an mich Glaubst danke dafür. ♥♥♥♥♥
Danke für all die Emotionalen und wundervollen Momente die ich mit dir erleben durfte ob nun gut oder schlecht beides gehört dazu. ♥
Ich habe in dir meinen besten Freund gefunden denn du bist Freund und Freundin in einem was will man mehr ^^
Love you mein Bester Friends for Ever SL & RL ♥
I guess in this instance, the white tulip overshadowed his brighter buddies. Ah, their all beautiful.
There are several instances when long hood forward locomotives are the better choice, and this is one of them. Not because the 4619, a first gen GP9, was set up to run LHF, not for dramatic effect, either, but because the other short hood end is really ugly. This old veteran was originally a Grand Trunk Western GP9 and wore the old olive and gold. It also served time on the Central Vermont, then came back home. I don't know who or when the lobotomy was done, but it wasn't the best work the loco doctors had ever done. It came out with a nice streak of unpainted rust around the top of the chopped nose and was never painted over or repaired. So be happy you don't have to look at that end. The crew aboard the 4619, the Griffith local, may not have been happy, but then they're inside the beast and not outside having to look at it...
Industrieverband Fahrzeugbau was a conglomerate created in the Dessauer Demokratische Republik as a coordinating instance to manage vehicle construction. Although some of the manufacturers have had their independence restored, IFA still builds trucks and general utility vehicles, mainly for the military.
Initially, IFA produced licensed copies of Kimmerian and Petrakardian vehicles, like the famous and ubiquitous Rotagild 420. This particular model was known as the Geländewagen 1, or GW 1. Development and the need for a more modern model resulted in the GW 2, which is in widespread use in the Volksarmee, and has almost entirely replaced the GW 1/Rotagild 420.
In its civilian guise, the GW 2 is offered as the 24-series of vehicles. It can be equipped with three different engines, a 4x2 and 4x4 drivetrain, and a variety of body styles, ranging from square to square, although you have a limited selection of door and roof types to pick from.
It is of course the preferred method of transport for the WacDonald’s delivery drivers in the Volksrepublik, thanks to its reliability and ruggedness.
27/52 By some unspoken rule, the "special needs" boarding cats - for instance geriatric or diabetic cats - have become my responsibility (under the doctors' supervision) on the shifts I work. Many cats don't eat for a day or two when they first come to board because they are too nervous. I feel bad they are so nervous but I know they'll be OK. However, diabetic cats MUST eat. As you may be able to tell from this picture, Magic spent his first 24 hours under his towel - NOT eating. I tried every variety of prescription diabetic food we have - wet and dry, pate and "savory selects" in gravy and nothing. I tried tasty junk food and nothing again. I tried slipping his food under his towel with him and still nothing. We were getting to the point where we were going to have to test his blood glucose level to determine if, or how much, insulin to give him. I was just about to walk out the door at the end of my shift and have him be someone else's responsibility when I saw him peek outside his towel and eat some of his Purina DM Savory Selects wet food for about 45 seconds and something huge inside me lightened up. I was so thrilled to see him eating that I, of course, didn't want to open his cage door to get a better picture of him. Any cat who eats while boarding is a happy, little thing.
By the way, if you ever have to board your cat and the vet asks for your permission to give an appetite stimulant if needed - please say yes. For those who feel reluctant to give their cats medication, know that the appetite stimulants used are very safe and the risk of the medication is so much less than the risk to your cat of not eating - especially if it is overweight or diabetic. Often one dose is enough to get a cat to eat and that first meal is all it takes to jump-start their appetite and no further doses are needed.
It's difficult photographing works under glass. But in this instance I decided to go full reflective mode and incorporate myself into the photograph. I saw the pattern of light and dark in the original photograph created an interesting abstract effect with my reflection on the glass. It also plays with the idea of a photograph within a photograph.
The original photograph by is by John Kauffmann from 1920 and entitled The National Bank. Comparing this to his 1914 overtly Pictorialist photograph I showed you in the previous collage, it marks a shift to a Modernist approach in photography that was being popularised in America by Paul Strand (1890-1976).
Hi Flickr!
I know it's been a while since last time. A lot has happened in my life. I've for instance taken a year off school. August has been an amazing month for me. I've kayaked on the waves in Lofoten where I saw the most beautiful scenery Nature has to offer..
I then went to Svendborg/Denmark as a travel leader for something called "Emax", a entrepreneurship conference that brings young entrepreneurs together from Scandinavia. As well as known and successful entrepreneurs that hold lectures to always inspire us.
After 4 days in Svendborg I went to Copenhagen and met a magnificent and heart lifting facebook friend called Cecilie. She'd been to India several times and it had changed her life completely. Some months ago I sent her a facebook mail and told her about my life and misery. She then told me to go and visit her and I did.
We did Yoga in the morning and had smoothies for breakfast. She had breath taking apartment with tall windows and a great positive atmosphere. We walked and talked. About Life so to speak. About how everything happens for a reason. About happiness, and how everything that happends to you - is eventually for you to get on the right path in your life. The one that makes you happy.
But what is happiness?
Is it a new car? A new television? Food? Desserts? Cakes? Having a boyfriend? Watching a movie? Shopping? Getting plastic surgery or a new camera and lens? Having a bed to sleep in? Having pets? Nice phones and computer? Being tall and skinny? Smoking?
I figured that for me personally all of these things are just temporarily - temporarily happiness to make me forget about the most important thing. - Happiness Within.
Happiness, true Happiness I’ve come to find after a lot of hard work and a million tears and bad episodes is not to find outside the body. But rather Inside. You can have all the money and external joy and that will still not make you happy. This is a well-known fact. Even though it's sometimes hard to realize.
So after being with Cecilie the visit India seemed so much closer. And I also realized how much I wanted to BELIEVE in something more than molecules and Darwin’s theory.
About how everything that happens for you is for a reason. About how I shouldn't identify myself 100% with my body. Because in the end; My "body" has it all; A bed with a million blankets, All the food I can dream of, Clothes (I recently gave away my own bodyweight in clothing to charity!!!!!! CRAZY), Shoes, Friends, School, A job, Income, A family, +++ and I STILL don't feel happy with myself. I'm on the quite opposite field. Wondering what the heck I'm doing here. And why I have to wake up to these days which are all the same. I WAS anyway.
There's so much "Magic" in the world. There's so much we cannot touch or see but is still there. Like our thoughts and feelings for instance. And there's so many tiny creatures that have a life that we cannot see. That scientists are yet to discover. Or maybe never will discover. However they live with us as fellow members on this earth.
There is so much astonishing in this world. Like how a seed can have all the "ingredients" and wisdom to become a solid tree fifty meters of the ground.
Humans should show more respect to our fellow members of this earth.
We destroy the woods and we kill the animals so we can eat their meat.
Surely if the slaughter houses where made of glass we would stop killing millions of animals every year. Surely we would use our energy to feed the humans that are starving on the other side of the planet.
I'm not saying that everyone should become a vegetarian. My theory is that I should eat what I can kill. Therefore I've stopped eating pigs, cows, sheep’s, birds, simply because I know in my heart that if I had a choice of eating a melon or killing that innocent lamb standing next to me I would with NO doubt choose that melon.
It's so easy to STOP thinking when it comes to food. You have everything cut in small pieces and files in the stores. It's hard to think about what you eat. It's too easy to think about it. In the end every human being has to find their own way. But if you're up for some changes please see this video: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6361872964130308142#
I’m not even saying that “Happiness” isn’t to find on the outside for somebody. I’m not saying that my way will work for everybody. I’m not saying that no body has done this before me. I’m not saying that everybody should go to India. However, what I’m saying is #BE HAPPY – regardless of the costs. Fight for happiness like you would fight for your life. Never be satisfied with crying and being depressed year after year. And if happiness has come to you, I smile from ear to ear and hope you simply enjoy it to the fullest every single day!
Anyway, here comes the most important point in this text, and as I’ve written so much I’ll caps look it! I’VE QUIT SCHOOL AND AM BUYING MYSELF A TICKET TO AUSTRALIA, INDIA, NEPAL TO GO ON THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. TO SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS AND HEALTHINESS. I’M GOING ALONE. I’M SCARED. BUT STILL I’M SO HAPPY. I’M LEAVING NORWAY WITHIN TWO MONTHS.
There. I’ve said it.
And I’ll be poor.
And I’ll be alone.
My mind and Me.
And I’ll practice all that I’ve written in this text.
And I’ll throw away all my university books.
And I’ll have no job.
But to find myself. To try to understand life and appreciate it.
Go back to the beginning.
Following the road with bad balance and cerebral palsy.
It won't be easy!
Wish me luck!
Get Into Shape, exclusive shapes for Lelutka Lilly.
Bonus shot using same shape and skin, with alternative eye and hair color, makeup and in some instances, eyebrows if appropriate, to see her in her full beauty!
The Saddest Poem
by Pablo Neruda
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
www.flickr.com/groups/flickrrivers/discuss/72157631862672... Front page pic
Converted in DxO Filmpack 5. One of those rare instances where I simply clicked on a preset. Well, not quite. I lowered the exposure by 0.1.
Sony A7RII Fine Art Zion National Park Autumn Winter Subway Hike! Dr. Elliot McGucken Fine Art Landscape Photography!
An important thing to remember is that even though pixel sizes keep getting smaller and smaller, the technology is advancing, so the smaller pixels are more efficient at collecting light. For instance, the Sony A7rII is back-illuminated which allows more photons to hit the sensor. Semiconductor technology is always advancing, so the brilliant engineers are always improving the signal/noise ratio. Far higher pixel counts, as well as better dynamic ranger, are thus not only possible, but the future!
Yes I have a Ph.D. in physics! I worked on phototranistors and photodiodes as well as an artificial retina for the blind. :)
You can read more about my own physics theory (dx4/dt=ic) here: herosodysseyphysics.wordpress.com/
And follow me on instagram! @45surf
Facebook!
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Dr. Elliot McGucken Fine Art Photography!
I love shooting fine art landscapes and fine art nature photography! :) I live for it!
45surf fine art!
Feel free to ask me any questions! Always love sharing tech talk and insights! :)
And all the best on Your Epic Hero's Odyssey!
The new Lightroom rocks!
Beautiful magnificent clouds!
View your artistic mission into photography as an epic odyssey of heroic poetry! Take it from Homer in Homer's Odyssey: "Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them. " --Samuel Butler Translation of Homer's Odyssey
All the best on your Epic Hero's Odyssey from Johnny Ranger McCoy!
Sony A7RII Fine Art Zion National Park Autumn Winter Subway Hike! Dr. Elliot McGucken Fine Art Landscape Photography! Sony A7R2 & Sony 16-35mm Vario-Tessar T FE F4 ZA OSS E-Mount Lens!
fine art landscape photography,fine art photography, fine art photographer, elliot mcgucken photography, landscapes, fine art landscape, landscape, landscape photography
Intimated Instance is from 0 to 1.5 ft.
Public Distance is 12 ft or more.
P.S. Change begins at the end of comfort zone!
Sky100 天際100
Suretta Lisker
INTJ, 63, Professional Extrovert, ASD, ADHD MentorAuthor has 14.9K answers and 28M answer views9y
Originally Answered: Do you agree with the statement that "what you see in other people is a reflection of yourself"? Why and why not?
I was brought up with that adage, but it was not correctly explained to me.
I was told that, "What you see wrong with others, is wrong about yourself." That's not entirely true, and it created a great deal of distress, because I wondered how bad I was since I saw other people as bad.
What the statement really means, is that there is a reason you see or feel things in others. For instance, if you see someone as unsafe, it means you know the difference between safety and danger. <-- that's the reflection.
If you see someone as insincere, it means the reflection is that you can sense insincerity because you are, in fact, sincere.
Had I understood this growing up, I would not have developed the paranoia I have now. I thought that the reason I didn't trust people was because I was untrustworthy, not because I knew the difference between the truth and a lie.
Research indicates a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others
Diana Yates, University of Illinois News Bureau
August 9, 2023
What is selfish behavior? Selfishness is defined as the tendency to act in one's own interests without regard for the impact on others. New research shows that a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others during brief, zero-sum-game competitions.
Generous people tend to reward generous behavior and selfish individuals often punish generosity and reward selfishness – even when it costs them personally. The study found that an individual’s own generous or selfish deeds carry more weight than the attitudes and behaviors of others.
The findings are reported in the journal Cognitive Science.
Previous research into this arena of human behavior suggested that social norms are the primary factor guiding a person’s decision-making in competitive scenarios, said Paul Bogdan, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology with U. of I. psychology professors Florin Dolcos and Sanda Dolcos.
“The prevailing view before this study was that individuals form expectations based on what they view as typical. If everyone around me is selfish, then I’m going to learn to accept selfishness and behave accordingly,” Bogdan said. “But we show that your judgments of other people’s behavior really depend on how you behave yourself.”
To test the factors that guide expectations and drive behavior, the researchers conducted a series of experiments involving the Ultimatum Game, which captures how an individual responds to offers from another player proposing to split a pot of money with them. The game requires the proposer to suggest how much each person receives of a $10 pot. The receiver must decide whether to agree to that split or reject it. If the offer is rejected, neither participant receives any money. Rejection can be seen as a form of punishment, even though it costs both players, the researchers said.
Some people tend to be generous – or at least fair – when offering another person a portion of a $10 reward. Others try to take as much of the money as they can, offering lopsided splits that benefit themselves at the expense of their competitors.
When on the receiving end of an offer, generous people tend to accept only generous offers, while selfish people are happy with selfish offers – even though the other player’s selfishness hurts them financially, the researchers found. Having the players switch between receiving and proposing offers allowed the team to explore the relationship between a player’s selfish or generous behavior and their evaluation of other players’ offers.
Further experiments showed that generous and selfish individuals tend to trust others who behave as they themselves do, regardless of the economic outcome.
Sanda Dolcos, Florin Dolcos, Paul Bodgan
In a new study, psychology professors Sanda Dolcos, left, and Florin Dolcos and PhD candidate Paul Bogdan, right, tracked how a person’s own behavior guides their expectations of others’ generosity or selfishness. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer
“Participants will gain more money with a generous person. But a selfish person will prefer to play with someone who behaves as they do,” Bogdan said. “People really like others who are similar to themselves – to a shocking degree.”
The team also evaluated data from a previous cross-cultural study that found that individuals sometimes punish others for their selfishness or for their generosity in a collaborative game involving resource sharing. They found that, when deciding whether and how much to punish others, participants were guided primarily by their own behavior and less by the pressure to conform. People who behaved generously tended to punish selfishness and people who put their own welfare first were much more likely to punish generosity – even in situations where one approach was more common than the other.
Cultural norms toward self-interest or generosity do influence people, as other studies have found, Florin Dolcos said. “But we are not only observers. This study is showing that we filter information about the world through our own view.”
Those individuals whose behavior switched from generous to selfish over time were more likely to punish generosity and reward selfishness – but only after their own behavior changed, the team found.
This helps explain the phenomenon of social alignment, for better and for worse, Florin Dolcos said.
“You may have groups of selfish people who are more accepting of other selfish people, and in order to be part of that group, newcomers might display the same behavior,” he said.
Ultimately, the study finds that a person’s own generous or selfish nature drives their behavior in many arenas of life, Sanda Dolcos said.
“This is not just about decision-making,” she said. “It has practical relevance to many types of social interactions and social evaluations.”
The paper “Social expectations are primarily rooted in reciprocity: An investigation of fairness, cooperation and trustworthiness” is available online. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13326
las.illinois.edu/news/2023-08-09/study-finds-people-expec...
Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others begins by introducing three characters. There’s Allison, one of the stars of the MTV reality show My Super Sweet 16. (For her birthday parade, she had an entire block of Atlanta shut down, right in front of a hospital: “They can just go around,” she said.) Next is Tucker Max, the celebrity whose books and blog posts about “getting wasted and sportfucking” made him a hero among pickup artists and men’s rights activists. And then there’s Anders Breivik, who in 2011 killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo, Norway. After that he proceeded to a summer camp, where he shot and killed 69 more. He would later claim that the massacres were a publicity stunt to promote his 1,500-page manifesto deriding women and Muslims, and featuring pictures of him smiling in Knights Templar costumes.
If Breivik seems like an outlier—if the comparison with two relatively harmless figures strikes you as inappropriate—this is intentional. The millennial girl, the bad boyfriend and the murderer: these examples show the range of our obsession with narcissism, a condition we hear more and more about these days. As I write this, half the country is still reeling from the election of a self-absorbed millionaire (or billionaire, if you believe his boasts) whom numerous psychologists have publicly diagnosed as a narcissist, while an online petition calling for the Republican Party to #DiagnoseTrump has been signed by more than thirty-four thousand people.
●
Dombek begins her own discussion on more personal ground, in the depths of what she calls the “narcisphere.” This is her name for the metastasizing cluster of blogs, vlogs, quizzes and support communities where self-described victims gather to vent and to discuss the behaviors of their personal “narcs.” One website, the Web of Narcissism, quotes Dracula and employs gothic castle imagery; its members, who call themselves “keyboard faeries,” trade recommendations for media about sociopaths and vampires, enacting narc victimhood as a kind of underground subculture. There are many gurus and experts to choose from in the narcisphere, but their advice converges on one remedy. If you find yourself in a relationship with a narcissist—and you’ll know because they withhold care and attention, or do not seem to love you with the exclusivity you deserve—then the only solution is to cut your losses and get out. The narcissist can’t love you, and trying to change them is hopeless.
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What’s tempting about this “narciscript,” as Dombek calls it, is that it reduces a complicated situation (e.g. the average relationship) to a heavily weighted binary: Do I continue to extend an imprudent empathy, or do I go cold, the way the other person already has, in the interest of self-preservation? Clearly the latter course is the more “reasonable” one, but the moment I take it—go cold, withdraw, run—is the moment I can no longer safely distinguish my own behavior from the narcissist’s. “The script confirms itself,” Dombek writes, “and the diagnosis and the treatment confound the evidence, until it gets harder and harder” to tell whether the word “narcissism” describes anything at all. This is why, although The Selfishness of Others seems to promise an investigation of whether the “narcissism epidemic” (as it’s been called) is real, the book’s main interest derives from Dombek’s posing of another question, which may shed new light on our urge to #DiagnoseTrump: What’s at stake for us in believing it’s real?
Dombek spent the first part of her life in Philadelphia, where she was homeschooled by her parents, affable-sounding Jesus freaks she has described as “long-haired, corduroy-bell-bottom-wearing, antiauthoritarian biblical literalists.” When she was nine her father became sick with a host of terminal illnesses and the family relocated to a farm in Indiana, where they lived with a lot of animals: according to one (maybe exaggerated) list there were “not only about twenty cats and a dog but a half-dozen roving demented geese and two ornery pebble-shit-spewing goats and a couple dozen hysterical hens and a tyrannical rooster named Sam.” After high school Dombek attended Calvin College, a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She struggled to fit in with her classmates, who had all grown up in suburban neighborhoods.
As a freshman, Dombek became politically active in the fight against abortion—a practice she firmly believed, along with her parents and many of her friends, was not only murder but “a first step toward state-run infanticide and euthanasia.” At church, she and her friends watched films of months-old fetuses writhing in pain as machines snapped them apart piece by piece. Dombek would describe the anguish of those images in “The Two Cultures of Life,” her first article for n+1. The essay, which questions the left-right polarization of the abortion issue, contains many of the hallmarks of Dombek’s later work, including her attempt to bypass either-or distinctions by staging an argument on the page, and her insistence on directing empathy toward those viewed as incapable of returning it: the fetus, the animal, the murderer.
The year after she participated in an anti-abortion march in Washington, Dombek picked up smoking, started wearing flannel shirts and declared herself a Marxist. But her belief in the importance of empathizing across ideological and (sometimes) ontological boundaries seems to have persisted, along with her certainty that, as she writes in “Two Cultures,” “if it looks like violence, it is.” Studying literature at NYU after college, she emphasized persuading secular people to be “more empathetic toward fundamentalists, even those who conduct or support great atrocities.”
Her dissertation, “Shopping for the End of the World,” drew on the ideas of the French philosopher and literary theorist René Girard, who was interested in the ways that violence emerged within social groups. We tend to believe that violence happens when people don’t understand or empathize with one another, but Girard argued, first in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) and later in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), that violence springs just as much from our similarities. We think we desire things and people for their particular qualities but, according to Girard, this is an illusion; all desire is in fact an anticipatory mirroring of the desires of those closest to us. When two people reach for the same thing at once, as they inevitably will, not only are they hurled into conflict over that thing; they are also each confronted with disturbing evidence that their deepest self is little more than a bundle of imitations. Desperate to destroy the bearer of such news, they lash out. And because violence, too, is mimetic, it spreads through the community in a destructive, destabilizing feedback loop.
According to Girard, archaic societies developed a stopgap solution to these epidemics of violence: ritual sacrifice. (All archaic societies, apparently: Girard, who based his theory of sacrifice on readings of ancient myth rather than direct anthropological research, had a tendency to overgeneralize.) The group would select a scapegoat, and the selection itself was a significant decision. Ideally, this being—whether human or some other animal—would be enough like the sacrificers themselves that destroying or exiling it would satisfy the sacrificer’s need to banish what they hated. At the same time, the scapegoat needed to seem, or be made to seem, inhuman enough that everyone could safely assume its suffering didn’t count. This is how Dombek’s interest in empathy led her to the narcissist—the being our society often claims is too inhuman to truly suffer.
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The first people labeled as narcissists, writes Dombek, were almost exclusively homosexuals and women—and for Freud, who popularized the label, almost all homosexuals and women were narcissists. Beautiful women, whom Freud compared to children and “certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us,” seemed to him particularly resistant to therapeutic practice. To his mind, the abnormal resistance of these women to transference—love, basically—appeared to be a form of regression. Normal, healthy people start their lives in a similar state of selfish inaccessibility, he reasoned, but eventually they develop the capacity for empathy and love. The narcissist, for Freud, was the person who maintained or returned to this self-sufficiency.
Dombek’s criticism of the Freudian interpretation of narcissism draws from another work by Girard. In “Narcissism: The Freudian Myth Demystified by Proust,” Girard compared famous passages from Proust about desire with Freud’s vaguely moralistic theorizing about his desirable patients. The similarities he found were remarkable. Both writers ascribed to their subjects an inhuman autonomy, compared them with children and animals (specifically birds: large birds of prey in Freud’s case, seagulls in Proust’s) and marveled at their indifference to those around them. The difference was that Proust didn’t present his descriptions as true. “There is no such thing as a ‘real,’ objective narcissism for Proust,” Girard writes. It’s just less painful, when someone doesn’t feel about us like we feel about them, to believe that they’re incapable of feeling. What looks to us like someone else’s arrogance, according to this line of thinking, is actually our own inverted neediness.
Are these insights about scapegoating and the “narcissistic illusion” (as Girard called it) helpful for understanding today’s “narcissism epidemic”? The claims that narcissism is becoming pathological on the level of the whole culture go back to at least the late Seventies, when Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade” (1976) made the cover of New York and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) became a national best seller. Despite Lasch’s scattershot approach—sections of The Culture of Narcissism are devoted to confessional writing, radical feminism and the use of AstroTurf in sports stadiums—his account of “the new narcissist” remained firmly rooted in psychoanalytic theory: specifically, Dombek notes, that of the analyst Otto Kernberg, who modified Freud’s theory by positing that the narcissist’s performance of self-sufficiency was part of a compensatory attempt to fill a vacuum of self-esteem.
Just as Lasch’s book was published, however, scientists began laying the tracks for the more clinical conception of the condition that prevails today. In 1979, two social psychologists developed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), a diagnostic tool that reduced Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) (enshrined in the DSM as a mental illness the next year) to a set of eight traits. The NPI is a forced-choice questionnaire, which means it tests NPD by asking subjects to select from a pair of statements—for example, “Sometimes I tell good stories” or “Everybody likes to hear my stories”—which it then correlates with clinical traits. The resulting numerical score tells you next to nothing about the individual test-taker, not even whether that person is a narcissist (as the test’s creators readily admitted). But it makes it much easier to generalize across large sample sizes.
In The Narcissism Epidemic (2009), for instance, social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell reported that because millennials scored 30 percent higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory than ever before, they were likely the most self-involved generation in history. But according to Dombek, the study the book was based on actually only revealed that a “slight majority of students in 2006 answered, on average, one or two more questions in the narcissistic direction than did those in 1986.” Another caveat is that the people surveyed in Twenge and Campbell’s study were not just American college students, but specifically freshman psychology students, participating for course credit—an extremely common form of institutional bias which leads Dombek to wonder how much of popularly reported psychology research “would actually be more accurately framed as an understanding of what young psychology students think about themselves.”
The problem is not just that studies using this paradigm mask an absence of real knowledge, although this is a problem. More importantly, by presenting narcissism as a diagnosis with a firm empirical basis, journalists quoting social psychologists often make it seem like a condition someone—or a whole group of someones—just has. For researchers, this sort of shorthand isn’t unusual—it’s more or less how most sciences operate. But such research isn’t usually being cited to support sweeping claims about entire generations, nor to explain the behavior of our bad boyfriends, murderers and politicians.
The fact that, with narcissism in particular, such labeling has become so common, speaks in favor of Dombek’s suggestion that the narcissist occupies a special place in our social imagination. For Twenge and Campbell, millennials play the role of arch-villains in a story about our culture’s refusal to grow up. More recently, many of us have focused our attention on a villain who looks very different from a millennial, though we call him the same name we call them. Which makes one wonder what, in this case, is the underlying sameness that we’re hoping to purge.
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It’s likely no coincidence that one of the terms commentators often used to describe the political divides of the 2016 presidential campaign—“echo chamber”—brings us back to the Narcissus myth. In the classic version told by Ovid, Echo is a girl who, cursed by Hera, can only speak by repeating what others say. In the forest she falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful Narcissus, but when she tries to embrace him he reacts fearfully, with angry words that she can only whisper back to him; then he abandons her in favor of his own reflection in a dark pool. In our modern rendition, the term “chamber” is supposed to suggest a technological component to the problem, but the basic story is the same. In it, the other side of whatever divide—political, ideological, demographic—is imagined as being trapped in the echo chamber of “fake news” and bias-confirming feeds, while “we” play the role of Echo. We want to communicate, but the only way our voices can carry across the divide is if we repeat exactly what the other side already believes.
Although the echo chamber presents itself as a tragic picture, Dombek can help us recognize its flattering features. We, the ones who bemoan being stuck in our chamber, desire earnestly to reach out to the other side. They, the narcissistic ones, refuse to leave their chamber and meet us halfway. Scapegoating has always been an effective political tactic, and it is one Trump used ably, if offensively, during his campaign. But if Dombek and Girard are right that narcissism functions today largely as a scapegoating technique—a way of justifying coldness, maybe even violence, toward the one we label the narcissist—then it is Trump himself who emerges as the ultimate scapegoat, precisely because of his refusal to even pretend to care what his adversaries think.
Other presidents, after they win, at least make a show of reaching out; our narcissist-in-chief just keeps insulting us. Apparently he’s seeing other people, or maybe he really does just look into his reflection on TV all day. In any case, a better pretext for our own unapologetic anger and hatred could hardly be imagined. Which is a relief, in a way: all that empathizing can be exhausting.
The problem is only that, as Girard believed, scapegoating could never truly end violence or hatred, because, in misidentifying its source, it leads us to think we’re outside the dynamics responsible for it. “The moment you begin to find that the other lacks empathy—when you find him inhuman,” Dombek writes, “is a moment when you can’t feel empathy, either.” We say, this is how things are, fair or not. Either they burn, or we do.
This is a REAL instance of ice even without vaccines and it's not the Trump ICE lockup and covid super-spreader site for migrants and kids in Denver. A while back, I grabbed more Clover Basin ditch shots down at Willow Farm when I hauled my D700 back down even though the sky was blank blue. I therefore had no choice but to point the camera downward for captures and keep the sky from the shots. Just like today and tomorrow and tomorrow! I decided that I needed some better originals to edit! I liked this view as well as the other. I got few real duds in my "action" takes of the ditch but I do have several NORMAL shots of the ditch now (they call it Willow Brook) but I call it a ditch. It's not much of one either. Let's face it, most of the St. Vrain stream and ditch flows have been ripped by the towns and cities to water blue grass instead of agriculture.
I can't figure why anyone would cut a ditch this darn squirrely. Drunk diggers, probably, though Longmont was a temperate colony at the time. Not so now When I first saw it, It was nearly impossible to follow the reasoning for this ditch but it does seem that the floods scoured this ditch somewhat. I think I noticed the colors of the reflections and contrasts and decided to take advantage. They seemed to oversaturate in this case but that's about everything posted on Flickr. The water course was a bit torn up but there must have been no serious flooding here.
We hit the end of autumn then and the chills came through but we hit the 60s after Christmas - so no coat. I won't go down to shoot ice today - it hit the 67 degrees in early December and await the 80s later in the week. No Coats in the 60s, no Clarks either. I've still got a lot of captures in the temp directory in today's stretch of no skies. I found Willow Farm on Google maps when searching for a barn I glimpsed and made some trips down there and added some more weird captures to temp stash. This is a shot of Willow Creek, another ditch, IMHO. I went back down with my D700 to see if I could capture some shot of the barn. I may go out soon if we can retrieve some skies and clouds at all.
Here is a normal, if not fairly slow hand held exposure. I already posted other shots that were "action" shots and they were the better shots. I grabbed a couple of slices in Lightroom and dropped them into Photoshop to see what might appear.
You can simply take a peek at the refrigerator door. . . and, in some instances, what's on top.
BTW, have I ever mentioned that felines aren't allowed on counters in our kitchen? It's hard to reach the top of the fridge without making use of the counter. And somehow we keep getting paw prints on the stovetop. . . hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
[SOOC, f/5.6, ISO 2000, shutter speed 1/60, -2/3 EV]
Sometimes I get inspiration from the strangest things. Take for instance the inspiration for this shot, which came from the fact that Canada Post is on strike which meant that I had to wait another day for my new lens to get here. I started to think about the history of how we send messages and then I remembered that the Item Collaboration theme today is bottles and it all made sense!
I had to put this photo on pause in the midst of setting it up as a group of ducks decided to stand and quack at me for about 10 minutes.
Instance.
After many failed attempts, tonight I managed to create an image I've had in my head for an age.
It needs a bit of tidying up but I've got plenty of time to do that.
I wanted to create a kind of black hole sucking a stream of matter into its core.
Cheers to Chris T for the final piece of the jigsaw.
Three lenses, two tripod positions, pin pricked card, blue lp brushes filter attachment el wire, breath and my mobile phone.
Single long exposure black hole exploration.
In this instance, RML stands for Leyland-engined RM. One of the prototypes for the classic London bus visited the Isle of Wight Beer & Buses Weekend this year. Seen in between trips to Ryde sitting at Newport Quay alongside a former London chum, DMS550.
Not really much competition for Swan Lake. As fascinating as Herons are, they also have an absolutely wonderful knack for inelegance. Limbering up after a foggy night, for instance. He went back to motionless after this. Maybe he was "tired"? Happy Silly Saturday.
Not sure if you've had enough of these kites, but the light was so good the day I went to Nant yr Arian I can't help posting another one! There were nearly always two or more birds coming down for meat on the water which made for untidy pictures, but in this instance I thought it worked in the composition as well as showing the behaviour.
I read a review of the 7D MkII the other day, written by Andy Rouse, and in it I learnt something useful that I hadn't known before and which applies to all Canon (and maybe other) cameras. I'll mention it here in case its useful to anyone: The default Picture Style is Standard, and I've always left it on that with all the cameras I've had, but he points out that this style sharpens the whole picture slightly even when you're shooting raw. If you choose the Faithful Picture Style it won't do that. Its useful because you will probably want to selectively sharpen your images rather than sharpen across the board, so you can leave the background nice and smooth…. I've immediately changed my settings, but I haven't taken any pictures yet, since changing it!!
Because there is some doubt about what I've said above about Picture Styles, this is the quote from the Andy Rouse article:
"Now a little about the processing. It was shot with a "Faithful" picture style which applies 0 sharpening. This is a really really important point and you need to understand its significance. If you set the style as " Standard" then sharpening is applied to the whole image. If you leave this untouched then the RAW converter, Canon's DPP in this case, will sharpen the RAW during processing to the same degree and you will get a TIFF that has been sharpened across the whole image. This means all the noisy bits have been sharpened too!!! Myself, and many pros like me, never ever ever do this. We sharpen only the bits of the image that need sharpening, i.e. the deer here. This means that I switch off all sharpening, by using "Faithful" and ensure that the RAW converter does the same at processing time. Then, when I am finished my colour correction in Photoshop I sharpen only the deer using Nik Sharpen on a layer. That way I avoid any background noise being sharpened. I have done this with every single camera I have ever used and I have applied it here to the 7D2 as well."
There have been a couple of instances lately that a pile of feathers have been left on the grass. Today I saw this fellow as I looked through the window. Thoughtfully he waited while I went to get my camera. I don`t know whether he got his meal or not as I ran out of time waiting. Certainly not a bird today. Possibly a field mouse or vole or even left hungry?
I usually try to have something close in the background to prevent blackouts from the flash but in some instances I either can't help it or it works for the shot. Think it works here.
Still getting to grips with the MP-E 65mm as had little time using it due to weather mainly.
Steady hands, strong arms and lots of patience very much required!
Gear: Canon EOS 40D (F13, 1/250, ISO 100) + Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo (@2x) + B+W 81A MRC Warming Filter + a diffused Canon MT-24EX (-2/3 FEC)