View allAll Photos Tagged gratification
I had just finished a roll of film when I took this shot. Can't wait till I can send some rolls off for developing. I just needed a bit of "instant gratification".. Nothing compares to the look of FILM!
From a trip to the Dollar Store in February - last night's sky was useless.
April 9th, 2017: was back here taking pictures, but on film with my new (to me) Mamiya C22 and a roll of Portra 400, so delayed gratification is in effect.
A few ideas to carry on with after I've sorted my collection and moved into my new place.
I've always had a fascination with the way Gundam Mecha looked. I've also never been able to shake off my inability to see things through. I always get far with any undertaking, but never far enough. I suppose it's because I always know how to satisfy my "instant gratification monkey". This has led to pretty much all MOCs in my room being in a WIP state. Maybe it's because my collection isn't sorted? Maybe it's because I get bored easily? Maybe I have some undiagnosed form of ADHD?
But lately I've been wanting to turn things around and finally finish something off completely. And hopefully my Destiny Hunter MOC, My Twilight Valkyrie, and my Naval Commander, will be finished by late August.
Have you guys ever experienced my problem? If so, have you been able to combat it and make it a thing of the past? Curious to know what you guys think!
A beautiful sunny winter day and my first time visiting Foster Beach. The ice formations were amazing! I have more photos to sort from both cameras, but here are some quick ones from the iPhone for instant gratification.
I think I got sunburned - I didn't even think of it ahead of time but of course I should have put sunblock on my face
Lisbona (Portogallo): sudore, fatica, stanchezza e gratificazione. componenti fondamentali per la riuscita in qualsiasi sport.
LIsbon (Portugal): sweating, fatigue, tiredness and gratification. fundamental components for success in any sport.
Polaroid peel apart blue film, Hasselblad 501c/m camera. Tettegouche state park, Minnesota, June 2018
soft gentle breeze on the curve of her lips
distant race in her somber eyes
a giggle hidden within her mind
she rest firmly in morpheus' carnival
morning muse and heart siren
may only the sun and the moon reach her soul
I'm beginning to pull my hair out in frustration with my scanner software. I recently traded my photo printer for and all in one - HP Photosmart C6180. I love the hardware, the software on the other hand is something else. The documentation is terrible. The image, once scanned, is littered with lost pixels.
I looked around for software for a Mac and haven't had much luck. Does anyone have any ideas?
That ^^^ means no flashy logos or daft graphics please!!
OK, shot number one from Ella. There's more to come...
Ella's new to modeling. I shot her over two days thanks to a friend getting in touch with her, and they were her first and second shoot. Doesn't show does it really? She's bright, young, smart as a tack, and too damned attractive for her own good. Simple as that really...
Except it isn't. What Ella did was bowl me over with how well she took to the whole modeling thing and having a big hairy ape photographing her. It helps that she's trying to get into it, and is approaching it from the right frame of mind of course, but she still made it very easy. I saw stuff that made her blissfully ignorant to hard and fast ways of doing shoots, and that's such a good thing. I genuinely think as she carries on, she'll not just become good, she'll become amazing.
I want to shoot her again.
And maybe kidnap her to shoot forever, along with Cat Rennie and a couple of others I've met. Yeah, that sounds good, I'll be in photo heaven forever! :-D
The thing that strikes me though, about shooting with beginners (and I do it a lot) is that although there's this lack of 'professionalism' (whatever the hell that is!?) and it's sometimes difficult to drop straight into poses as such, whereas an experienced model is just on the ball and it all works straight away, there's so many plus sides to it. Fresh ideas, no pre-conceptions, no agendas, not got to the stage where the whole 'get me, I know I'm gorgeous as all the world says so' attitude that sometimes happens. Just blissful innocence. And a purity in the photograph, that for me at least, makes achieving what I'm after much easier.
The downside? Well, it seems that frankly, a shit load of beginners go to some shady doors at times. Some dude gets his name in the Yellow Pages or something listing himself as a photographer, charging out low $'s for a portfolio shoot, and all that actually happens is some totally shit glamour-tastic vomit inducing crap in his garage (hey I can't knock that, I don't even have my own studio anymore! *cries*) which is a thinly disguised attempt to get some young lady out of her clothes for his gratification. And man, that pains me... I've lost count of the amount of times I've heard it, and it pains me even more to realise I hear it here in NZ more than the UK by a large amount. Seems there's a lot of cheap, untalented, sleazy buggers shooting in NZ today. And a lot of beginners get that.
There are few times I'll ever stand up and say 'get me, I'm fantastic I am' as I struggle to ever get that egotistical, but here's one. I take huge pride in the fact every model I've ever shot that was doubting her 'career' as such in modeling has carried on, and has loved what we did. There are a large amount of portfolios out there now going from strength to strength after I shot them, and got other decent photographers to notice how cool the model was. And many, many of the people I've shot are like friends now, not industry contacts. I take pride in that, not being 'that guy' from above, and being something more.
It helps make pictures like this. Real, honest, not shady. :-)
*steps down off soapbox and feels embarassed*
It's quite appalling seeing certain behaviors on the internet towards our former PM recently.
I don't think there's a need to curse, to troll, to say mean things. Do you really get that much gratification by posting on the internet about an old man, who is also someone else's son, someone else's father? That shows alot about your character.
I don't wanna sound like a fanboy (I am not), but I think this man just deserves the basic respect everyone of us, humans, are entitled to.
Napoli Series
Scanned Pola.
Fujifilm 210 instax
Pedamentina S. Martino
Featured in Instant Gratification - Interview for The Idea List Mag
por Warhol -
Keith Haring (Reading, 4 de maio de 1958 – Nova Iorque, 16 de fevereiro de 1990) foi um artista gráfico e activista estadunidense. Seu trabalho reflecte a cultura nova-iorquina dos anos 1980.
Nascido no estado de Pensilvânia, cedo mostrou interesse pelas artes plásticas. De 1976 até 1978 estudou design gráfico numa escola de arte em Pittsburgh. Antes de acabar o curso, transfere-se para Nova Iorque, onde seria grandemente influenciado pelos graffitis, inscrevendo-se na School of Visual Arts. Homossexual assumido, o seu trabalho reflecte também um conjunto de temas homo-eróticos.
Keith Haring começou a ganhar notoriedade ao desenhar a giz nas estações de metro de Nova Iorque. As suas primeiras exposições formam,michelleis acontele era gayecem a partir de 1980 no Club 57, que se torna um ponto de encontro da elite vanguardista.
Na mesma década, participou em diversas bienais e pintou diversos murais pelo mundo - de Sydney a Amsterdão e mesmo no Muro de Berlim. Amigo pessoal de Grace Jones, foi ele quem lhe pintou o corpo para o videoclip "I'm Not Perfect".
Em 1988, abre um Pop Shop em Tóquio. Na ocasião, afirma:
"Em minha vida fiz muitas coisa, ganhei muito dinheiro e me diverti muito. Mas também vivi em Nova Iorque nos anos do ápice da promiscuidade sexual. Se eu não pegar AIDS, ninguém mais pegará."
Meses depois declara em entrevista à revista Rolling Stone que tem o vírus HIV. Em seguida, cria a Keith Haring Foundation, em favor das crianças vítimas da AIDS.
Em 1989, perto da igreja de Sant'Antonio Abate, em Pisa, Itália, executa a sua última obra pública - o grande mural intitulado Tuttomondo[1], dedicado à paz universal.
Haring morreu aos 31 anos de idade, vítima de complicações de saúde relacionadas a AIDS, tendo sido um forte activista contra a doença, que abordou mais que uma vez em suas pinturas.
...
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
David Galloway
As curator of the Keith Haring retrospective mounted by New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, Elisabeth Sussman composed a thoughtful catalogue text in which she tidily divided the artist's career into three "chapters." In the first of these, Sussmann suggested, Haring synthesized a street and club style into a bold form of overall decoration that often employed elements of kitsch. In the middle phase, lasting from approximately 1984 to 1988, when he developed the first symptoms of AIDS, Haring produced paintings that were essentially Pop versions of Neo-Expressionism. In these years he also used his cartoon-like graphic line to execute murals, many of them for (and even together with) children. "Finally," Sussman observed, "in the last years of his life, major works not only summed up his painting ambitions but were socially active and angry responses to his imminent death."1
There can be no doubt that the artist's battle with AIDS had a profound effect on his artistic vision. "To live with a fatal disease," he confided to his biographer John Gruen shortly before his death, "gives you a whole new perspective on life."2 The resulting pain and anguish are eloquently expressed in Haring's two collaborations with William Burroughs: Apocalypse (1988) and The Valley (1989). Sussmann's categories are nonetheless too neat and too emphatic, concealing both the humor that frequently enlivens the late works and the dark side that shadows even the earliest, cartoon-like compositions. And the artist was a social activist from the beginning of his career. At a demonstration in Central Park in 1982, he distributed 20,000 antinuclear posters. His "Anti-Litterpig" campaign was launched in 1984, the famous Crack is Wack mural painted in 1986. The true "horror of AIDS had come to light"3 for Haring in 1985, and he had for some time regarded himself as a prime AIDS "candidate" - even before discovering the first Karposi sarcoma on his leg during a trip to Japan in 1988. Not only numerous intimate acquaintances, including his ex-lover Juan Dubose, had already succumbed to the disease. Rumors of Haring's own infection were rife long before he himself learned that he was HIV-positive. More than a year before the diagnosis, Newsweek had tracked the artist down in Europe to ask if his protracted stay there was a cover-up for his affliction with AIDS.
Yet for all the traumatic implications of the onset of the disease itself, it is a mistake to overemphasize the event as a kind of watershed, as a moment in which the oeuvre itself underwent some seismic change. Such an oversimplification is tempting but ultimately misleading. And it is not unlike that simplistic approach to the work of Andy Warhol which suggests a fundamental shift in theme and point of view following the assassination attempt by Valerie Solanis. In fact, Warhol's own fascination with "Death and Disaster" was well established before the deranged feminist entered the Factory in 1969 with revolver blazing. 129 Die in Jet, the first of the works associated with violent death, dates to 1962. And it was soon followed by garishly tinted studies of suicides, car crashes, race riots and electric chairs.
Keith Haring, too, had explored a darker side of experience long before the dread diagnosis. The earliest works produced in his characteristic graphic style include serpents and monsters, nuclear radiation and falling angels, cannibals, omnivorous worms, bloody daggers and skeletons. The devil himself makes occasional appearances, as does the multi-headed beast of the Apocalypse. One can make out a sinister form that may well represent a virus, and an androgynous figure which wheels a sword-like crucifix over the heads of children, while scissors and chains are employed in sadomasochistic practices which often end in castration. In a Saint Sebastian, produced in 1984 and one of the few titled works by Haring, the martyr's body is pierced not by arrows but by airplanes - one of the numerous examples of the artist's critical view of technology, but also testimony to his deeply felt pacifism.
The figure of a hanged man, perhaps influenced by William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, makes it debut in 1981. So, too, do human figures writhing in the clutch of a nest of serpents. In 1982 a serpent pierces (and thereby joins like so many beads on a string) a row of human figures with holes in their abdomens. Indeed, human figures with holes gouged in their middles are a recurrent pictogram - one inspired, according to the artist himself, by the assassination of John Lennon in December of 1980. Yet even before that event, Haring was sounding the themes of violence and death in the cut-up headlines he posted around New York City, inspired both by his friend Jenny Holzer and by William Burroughs. In typical tabloid fashion, the headlines trumpeted such sensationalist assertions as "POPE KILLED FOR FREED HOSTAGE." "RONALD REAGAN ACCUSED OF TV STAR SEX DEATH; KillED AND ATE lOVER." and "REAGAN'S DEATH COPS HUNT POPE."
When Keith Haring undertook his first cross-country trip in 1977 with his girlfriend Susan, he financed the journey by silkscreening T-shirts and selling them along the way. One model showed Richard Nixon sniffing a kilo of marijuana; the other featured the logo of the Grateful Dead: a skull - the penultimate memento mori that also fascinated Warhol - split by a lightning bolt. One of Haring's early subway drawings includes a skeleton wearing wire-rimmed glasses as an encoded self-portrait. In a diary entry for March 18, 1982, the artist reflected on the significance of "Being born in1958, the first generation of the Space Age, born into a world of television technology and instant gratification, a child of the atomic age. Raised in American during the sixties and learning about war from Life magazines on Viet Nam. Watching riots on television..."4 Like the Beat poets he admired, the young artist was intensely aware of the dangers of nuclear war and the precedent his country had set in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was equally aware of the dangers inherent in "peacetime" uses of nuclear energy. The notorious near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 occurred a short distance from the Haring home in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Spaceships projecting rays onto earthlings often hover over his works, and his famous "radiant" baby may suggest radioactive contamination as well as spiritual glow.
In short, the first "chapter" in Haring's career was neither so innocent nor so giddily affirmative as it is sometimes made out to be. His media-savvy generation, exposed at an early age to "sex, drugs and rock-'n'-roll," was quickly disabused of childhood's illusions. At the age of 19, he confided to his diary, "Through all the shit shines the small ray of hope that lives in the common sense of the few. The music, dance, theater, and the visual arts: the forms of expression, the arts of hope. This is where I think I fit in."5 Even amid the "shit," there was an element of hope, and the coexistence of these two entities defines the Haring universe. What one witnesses is literally The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to cite the title of a Roland Petit choreography for the Ballet National de Marseilles, for which Haring created a huge front curtain in 1985. Whether Haring was familiar with William Blake's ironic poem of the same title is uncertain, though the English poet was a favorite of the psychedelic set to which Haring belonged for a time. Furthermore, there are occasional parallels between Haring's graphic style and the illustrations Blake prepared for his own works. The implications of a linked pair of Blake titles - Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience - have clear relevance for Haring's oeuvre, as well.
The key to Haring's work is not to be found in "chapters" or in oppositions, but precisely in the mingling, the marriage of innocence and experience, good and evil, heaven and hell. This inherent but essential ambiguity is reinforced by an image he created in June of 1989, less than a year before his death. (He was in Paris at the time, executing a monumental painting intended to decorate a dirigible to be flown over the city in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.) The starting point was a photograph of the artist sitting on a chair from the Vitra Collection, part of a series of celebrity portraits made for the German furniture company. With a felt pen, Haring fitted himself out with wings, floated a halo over his head, bound his feet with shackles and coiled a rope-like or snakelike form around his torso. (In fact, in other works the rope which binds a victim often turns into a snake in the hands of his tormentor). Haring remarked on his own creation: "Whoever understands this photograph understands what my work is all about."6 The essential theme sounded here - man bound into a "mortal coil," anchored to the earth, while his spirit strives to soar into the heavens - is as old as religion itself)
In his journal Haring described the events of June 16th as follows: Friday I had a "press lunch" with the airship people (boring and trivial). Then went to Futura's exhibit and bought a nice new painting. Met David Galloway there. He came to Paris to interview me for the book Hans Mayer is doing on my sculptures. Went with David to see the airship painting again and do photos. We talked a lot and by the same time we got to the hotel the conversation got deeper and continually off the "subject."
Did some photos for a German spaghetti book. (Portrait of me with a drawing made out of spaghetti we ordered from room service.) I talked with David till it was time for dinner at Marcel Fleiss's house with Yoko and Sam. Nice quiet dinner and then returned to hotel with David to talk till 1 :30.7
The "deeper" talk that quickly veered from the topic of sculpture and continued into the early hours of the morning ultimately found its focus in the fat roll of galley proofs resting on the mantelpiece of Haring's suite at the Ritz Hotel. This was the interview by David Scheff that would appear in Rolling Stone on August 10th, and in which Haring talked with painful frankness about his own illness. As a politically engaged artist who helped to organize the first" Art Against AIDS" exhibition and produced several AIDS-related posters, including more than one with the motto "Silence = Death," he felt morally obliged to speak out about his illness. (Later in the year, he would march in protest against New York City's "racist" policy with respect to the disease, which allegedly only afflicted perverts, junkies and Afro-Americans.) Nonetheless, when the time came to approve Sheff's uncompromising interview, the activist experienced a moment of hesitation. Quite simply, he feared he might not be permitted to work with children again, and this was one of his most cherished activities. Despite such misgivings, on June 17 he sent his approval of the text to the editors of Rolling Stone, and when it appeared the artist experienced an immense, deeply gratifying wave of sympathy. The sole sour note was a protest against his having been commissioned (by Princess Caroline) to execute a mural for the maternity ward of the Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco - allegedly a potential danger for future generations.
In transforming a photographic portrait into a self-portrait with a few brisk strokes, Haring made an emphatic statement about his artistic intentions. At the same time, he revealed the depth of his own religious sentiment. Though not a practicing Christian in the last years of his life, the artist had a profound sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, and he devoted a considerable part of his energy to social causes. Attending Sunday School and church had been a regular part of the Harings' family life, and in summer Keith attended the camp run by the United Church of Christ. As a teenager he joined the Jesus Saves movement, read the Bible voraciously and developed "an obsession with the concept of the Second Coming..."8 Above all, Haring was influenced by "Revelation," which later offered him a veritable storehouse of trenchant visual imagery. Even at the age of 12, according to Haring's mother, "he began making drawings in which there were Jesus symbols and other types of symbols, like a loop with two dots."9 Haring's phase as a "Jesus Freak" was short-lived, and the impact of religion (above all, of organized religion) on his work can be overestimated. Indeed, the artist once complained to his journal that "Most religions are so hopelessly outdated, and suited to fit the particular problems of earlier times, that they have no power to provide liberation and freedom, and no power to give 'meaning' beyond an empty metaphor or moral code."10
When he finally decided, while dancing at New York's Paradise Garage, to depict the Ten Commandments within the arches of Bordeaux's Musee d'Art Contemporain for his show there in 1985, Haring was at a loss to remember all the commandments: "So the minute I get to Bordeaux, I ask for a bible!"11 Yet for all the vagueness surrounding Haring's grasp of biblical fundamentals and his distrust of the church as a moral authority, Christian mythology clearly had a profound impact on his use of angels and devils and madonnas, bleeding hearts and crucifixions and transubstantiations. (Painting an angel along with a mother and child on the coffin of his friend Yves Arman, who died in a car crash, transcended mere decoration to become a ritual act of healing.) Haring's fundamental religiosity, on the other hand, was also influenced by his interest in so-called "primitive" cultures, their myths and rituals and totemic objects - interests that inform the artist's pseudo-African masks, for example. And the Michael Rockefeller Collection of Primitive Art at New York's Metropolitan Museum was one of his favorite haunts.
Haring's use of traditional Christian imagery is particularly explicit in Apocalypse (1988), his first collaboration with William Burroughs. Each composition is a reprise on a collaged image taken from advertising, art history or Catholic theology. In addition to a Christ with a bleeding heart, the series includes an advertisement from the 1950s (significantly, the period of Haring's own infancy) in which a mother tenderly - and, by implication, Madonna-like - leans over her baby to offer him a milk-bottle. The explicitly Catholic allusions continue in Haring's next collaboration with Burroughs - the suite of etchings entitled The Valley. Here the imagery includes the torso of a male figure inserting a knife beneath his ribs to duplicate one of Christ's stigmata. This belated "embrace" of Catholic symbology aligns Haring even more closely with other prominent creative rebels: with Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol and Haring's street-wise friend and sometime-collaborator Madonna. For those three taboo-breaking artists the Catholic religion offered an especially fertile field for rebellion.
There is a kind of poetic logic in the fact that Haring's collaborations with Burroughs mark the end of his career, since it began with the mock New York Post headlines inspired by the cut-up technique Burroughs employed in Naked Lunch. The artist, furthermore, seems to have felt an intuitive sympathy for a surrealistic juxtaposition of images - partly inspired by his own use of hallucinogenic drugs, but also by his acquaintance with the works of Burroughs and the Beat-generation poets. A sentence from Burroughs' Soft Machine, published in 1962, might almost describe a composition by Haring: "Carl walked a long row of living penis urns whose penis has absorbed the body with vestigial arms and legs breathing through purple fungoid gills..."12 Haring had known Burroughs' work long before the two first met in 1983. In 1986, the artist told an interviewer that the author was "very into a lot of the world I've depicted, especially in the recent things - sex, mutations, weird science fiction situations."13 Erotic grotesquerie mixed with Christian symbolism characterized the works of both men. Timothy Leary, self-proclaimed guru of the acid age, remarked of the first Haring-Burroughs collaboration, Apocalypse, that it was "like Dante and Titian getting together."14 Dante and Hieronymous Bosch, whom Haring greatly admired, might seem the more appropriate parallel for works redolent with a sense of doom.
On March 20, 1987, Haring made the following remark in his journal: "I always knew, since I was young, that I would die young. But I thought it would be fast (an accident, not a disease). In fact, a man-made disease like AIDS. Time will tell that I am not scared. I live everyday as if it were the last. I love life."15 That affirmative note is sounded throughout the artist's work, the numerous interviews he gave, the social activities he sponsored, the texts he composed. Yet in the same journal entry which included the vigorous assertion of his love for life, Haring composed the following reaction to the news that the policemen accused of killing Michael Stewart had all been acquitted:
I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them in a small dirty cage up near the ceiling while all day she cooks bloody sausages and the blood spatters their cage and the frying fat burns their matted feathers and they can never escape the horrible fumes of her burnt meat. One day the cage will fall to the ground and a big fat ugly cat will kick them about, play with them like a toy, and slowly kill them and leave their remains to be accidentally stepped on by the big fat pink lady who can't see her own feet because of her huge sagging tits. An eye for an eye... 16
Like a Bosch-Burroughs vision, the passage indicates the rage Haring could experience when confronted with social and political injustice. For an understanding of the artist's oeuvre as a whole, however, it is important to observe that in the journal entry for a single day, remarks of a tender, Christian-like nature - "I'm sure when I die, I won't really die, because I live in many people,"17 - are followed by fulminations of Old Testament rage. Yet this dichotomy in no sense represents a contradiction; far more, it is symptomatic of the complexity of the artist's vision. It is an underlying duality which make the early works more than naive cartoons, the late ones more than angry odes to man's mortality. Fitted out with the wings necessary to ascend into heaven and the shackles drawing him down into the fire and brimstone of hell, Keith Haring demonstrated an astonishingly precocious grasp of the inherent ambiguities of his generation, of his age. He was the loving, lusting, break-dancing, quintessential American boy, but also an untiring, uncompromising social critic, and he was doomed to die young of a disease that decimated his generation. "Nothing lasts forever," as he noted in one of his final journal entries. "And nobody can escape death."18
The main arterial thoroughfares of London are sparkling and modernised mostly, but you can still fine connecting alleys where nothing seems to have changed since before the war. Surrey Street, between the Embankment and the Strand is one that I chanced upon on Sunday.
This is the now disused entrance to the Aldwych Station on the Piccadilly Line, which closed in 1994
I was giving my Minolta Autocord a trip out and as I have said before film is the ideal medium for "boring" shots. I would never take this picture with a whizzy digital camera but film gives you to medium and space to appreciate small pleasures mediated through delayed gratification
Minolta Autocord
Ilford Delta 100
Rodinal 1+19 for 9 mins
The Supreme Lord examines us
The realm of the Supreme Lord is naturally full of love and there is never any force. Here also, we are never forced to love, but this world is a place where the Supreme Lord examines us. Do we want only Him, or do we still want something of this world? The Lord will fulfill our desire, as much as we desire, not more than that. According to what we desire in life, we will get an appropriate guru or spiritual teacher. If we want transcendental vision, we can only get it by the special mercy of great devotees who see and perceive the Lord at all times and in all places. Only by their mercy will we excel in the examination, be able to recognize our true selves and begin to hanker for the only thing that will satisfy us – pure bhakti.
Guru is a Sanskrit word and its original and intended meanings are explained in the Vedic literatures. Gu means ‘ignorance’ and ru means ‘dispeller’, so a real guru is someone who is in a disciplic succession of gurus that dispells our ignorance. Those in a material conception of life will teach others that they can and will become happy here, thus increasing their ignorance and boosting their false ego of bodily identification. A real guru, on the other hand, gives eternal results by initiating us on the path that activates and reveals our true spiritual identity. He mercifully gives instructions, convincing us of the many perfect philosophical conclusions of bhakti. Serving him and submissively hearing from him frees us from the ignorance that has been ingrained within our hearts since time without beginning. It gradually but firmly establishes within us a deep love for Šri Šri Radha-Krsna, the divine Youthful Couple and the soul’s function fully awakens. This is what a guru should give – our pristine intrinsic nature, our eternal dharma. That’s what our Šrila Gurudeva, the deliverer of the fallen, is giving to us.
Our eternal natural function, or dharma, is bhakti or devotional service. As one cannot separate heat from fire, so similarly, the service nature of the living entities cannot be taken away from them. We have to serve someone or something.
All religions propagated in the world are either steps leading to bhakti or else distortions of it. This being a fact, we should focus on our own cultivation of devotion and not worry or criticize what others are doing. We should be favourable towards the followers of other religions and have no animosity towards them. All of us advance according to the time that is ripe for us. Any religion should be respected according to its proportionate degree of purity.
"After many, many births and deaths one achieves the rare human form of life, which, although temporary, affords one the opportunity to attain the highest perfection. Thus a sober human being should quickly endeavor for the ultimate perfection of life as long as his body, which is always subject to death, has not fallen down and died. After all, sense gratification is available even in the most abominable species of life, whereas Krsna consciousness is possible only for a human being"
(Srimad Bhagavatam 11.9.29).
"O pragnieniu moim odnawiającym się jak księżyc"
(Eng. Of My Desire Renewing Itself Like the Moon)
self-portrait
(May 30, 2017)
Battiest, Oklahoma, U.S.
inspired by the poetry of H. Poświatowska
English translation by Marek Lugowski
---
nie wiem co kocham bardziej
ciebie czy tęsknotę za tobą
czy pocałunki czy pragnienie pocałunków
pewne zaspokojenia
myślałam że już nigdy nie będę pisać wierszy
a teraz serce moje wezbrało miłością jak rzeka
i wystąpiło z brzegów-- jak rzeka
i bystry potok porywa słowa
unosi słowa
i wszystkie mówią o mojej miłości
o mojej tęsknocie
o pragnieniu moim odnawiającym się jak księżyc
gasnącym w słońcu twojego spojrzenia
---
I don't know what I love more
you or the longing after you
the kisses or the desire of kisses
certain gratifications
I thought that I would never again write poems
and now my body has swelled up like a river
and stepped out of its banks -- like a river
and a quick stream snatches away the words
carries off the words
and they all speak of my love
of my longing
of my desire renewing itself like the moon
dimming in the sun of your glance
---
My artwork may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted or uploaded in any way without my permission.
© All rights reserved
The main arterial thoroughfares of London are sparkling and modernised mostly, but you can still find connecting alleys where nothing seems to have changed since before the war. Surrey Street, between the Embankment and the Strand is one that I chanced upon on Sunday.
This building describes itself in the stone as the Norfolk Hotel but I bet it hasn't been a hotel since 1937 and hasn't had a lick of paint or even an internal dusting since then. I liked the wrought ironwork and the decorative stone
I was giving my Minolta Autocord a trip out and as I have said before film is the ideal medium for "boring" shots. I would never take this picture with a whizzy digital camera but film gives you to medium and space to appreciate small pleasures mediated through delayed gratification
Minolta Autocord
Ilford Delta 100
Rodinal 1+19 for nine minutes
Such gratification people seem to have when either mailing a letter or picking up a package at their local Post Office.
Wet cyano exposed for around 90 min in the afternoon (June 10, 2023).
One part sensitizer (homemade Ware).
Oxalic acid, water, turmeric and cling film.
Developed in water and citric acid. H2O2 for instant gratification.
Season of Touit - picture 20
Week 42, Saturday
Stop the press!! Today's post was originally supposed to be the last post of Season of Touit before I start my last season. I had already wrote a part of it, when I got an unexpected e-mail which might change my plans. It could be the best thing ever happened in my story or it might not lead to anything, I don't know yet. Right now my project is now in its liminal state (between two stages in plain language) and before I can continue to the next level – that is the last season of Year of the Alpha – I have to wait and see what happens. But this is also good news, because I can continue the Season of Touit at least for a week (might be even more if the e-mail leads to something) and tell you about some things that I haven't touched yet. So, sit tight as I continue to share my experiences with the Zeiss Touits.
One of those things that I haven't discussed about yet, is the Touit 2.8/12's great functionality in small spaces. It's usual that many people associate ultrawide-angle lenses to landscape photography and such, but another area where they really excel are small spaces and interiors in general. As many standard zooms start normally around equivalence of 24mm (which is quite wide) I've still found it surprisingly often insufficient. With the Touit 2.8/12 it's different and it leads me in spaces that I wouldn't have even tried with 24mm lens. While the Touit 2.8/12 extends my possibilities regarding small spaces it also draws them differently which is part of its charm. The exaggeration of perspective makes spaces often look bigger and gives the viewer a sense of "being there" in the middle of the image. I've come to love this character when I get it right and I think the image above exemplifies it nicely: the escalator descent right in front of you making image a somewhat prominent to look at. In the end, this sort image is really a new element in my personal repertoire of visual motifs which would have not happened if I had not started to photograph with the Touit 2.8/12. Just like a telephoto portrait with beautiful background bokeh, it requires a certain kind of lens to be achieved. While many people are investing for nice telephoto lenses, I don't see similar enthusiasm towards ultrawide-lenses. I guess it relates to a fact that portrait with bokeh background is much more well known and used visual motif than things you get from ultrawide lenses. I would recommend to explore the not so well known visual motifs because they can put some personality in your photography. Developing new visual motifs really is the gratification of putting yourself outside of your standard focal lengths.
Year of the Alpha – 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: www.yearofthealpha.com
day 300
1. I can't believe I've taken 300 pictures for this project.
2. I can't believe I only have 65 photos to go.
3. I can't believe there's only 65 days left in the year.
My friend asked me today if I was going to do another 365 project next year. In 2010 I did the 365 on a whim and it completely changed my life. In 2011 I did a 52 week project because I was scared I would stop doing photography if I didn't do a project. And this year I did it to document senior year and college. That's three years in a row of doing a year-long project. So I don't think I'm going to do another project for a while. But as I told my friend, I have so many photo ideas that I'm sure won't make it into the 365 that I'll still have a lot of things that I want to photograph. Plus, I want to broaden my client work and I love the creative process and photography itself that I'll never be able to stop. And I don't want to anyways. I love writing and art, but photography (and especially digital) has an instant gratification that not many things has. It will never cease to blow my mind how emotional and cinematic photos can be and how powerful they are. I have been thinking a lot about what my purpose in life is, and while I love doing a lot of artistic things, writing and photography are definitely my two passions. I feel bad for the writing side as that was my first love and my first calling, and I hardly ever do it (save for this blog) and I hardly ever talk about it. Once the 365 is over I definitely want to incorporate my writing into my photography, because I don't want to be neglectful of one and focus solely on the other.
"You hear strange whisperings among the tree tops, as if the giants were taking counsel together. One after another, nodding and swaying, calling and replying, spreads the news, until all with one accord break forth into glorious song, welcoming the first grand snowstorm of the year...."
--- John Muir
This image told me to post it, quite without any warning, so I am a bit at a loss for anything much to add in terms of wordage. I was browsing through one of my folders, looking at thumbnails, seeing what was what, making sure everybody was behaving themselves and this one jumped at me. I have three (or so I thought) good shots in this series, two of which I have posted so far, and this one now makes four. Honestly I forgot I ever even took such a photo. Looking at it now, I recognize it as one I took and remember when and where, but this is a shot that never stuck with me. Good thing I at least scanned it in, otherwise I may or may not have ever found it and brought it to the light of day. I tell fellow photographers this quite a bit, to constantly at decent intervals go spelunking back through your old photos, see where you have been and what you have done. You will no doubt find some forgotten gems. See, usually we like to look at our photos right away. The need for instant gratification and to relive those places we just were is often too much to resist. This is also an area where digital photography can be a bit dangerous, but more on that in a moment. Anyway, we tend to look at our photos if not the same day or the next, at least within the week. The anticipation, the excitement, we just have to. Yippee, new photos. At the same time though, when we look at photos while we have the memories of those places and moments so fresh, we judge those photos with a different set of criteria and sometimes this causes otherwise great photos to be sifted through because they do not have what we were looking for at that moment. This happens to me a great deal. I shoot, play with my favorites, move on and shoot more. Every six months or so I go back and look through old prints and sure enough suddenly I have a new appreciation for photos I previously had passed up. Sometimes I even end up liking them better than others from the same roll that made the initial cut.
I warn about digital here, because it is so easy to delete photos. Usually a couple of button presses and that file is gone forever. And which photos get deleted? Well of course the ones we don't like.... at that time. But what about later? How many of those photos that get wiped away to nothing may have proven of worth at some later point in time in some currently unimaginable way. For me this is one advantage of working in a photo lab, because everything gets printed, every roll, every negative. And I keep all those prints. Sure they stack up, but that is what closets are for, right? Hehe ahem hmmm... Even the digital images I shoot though, I keep everything. Even the blurry or out of focus shots, sometimes I like those the best. You just never know when your aesthetics might shift, or a building is demolished and that previously mundane shot you took of it has new meaning, or a relative passes away and that slightly underexposed shot of them eating turkey at Thanksgiving becomes an irreplaceable image. Keep everything, delete and throw away nothing, and brush the dust off of those old prints now and then and go back through your photographs. They do after all represent moments you have lived and breathed, and hopefully good ones at that. Remind yourself, you never know what you will find.
Ok, so maybe I did think of something to say... ;-) I just have to say, I love the curve of the hill from left to right in this photo.
The Shining
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Hauntingly beautiful view on summit night at M.B.C.
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__________________________
She glowed under the silver touch of her lover.
A strange sensation to be held so gently and yet so fiercely.
Little tensed today, as she was under siege by
few selfish humans wanting to invade her privacy, all here to quench their thirst for glory which she knew they will soon understand is a momentary gratification.
They are addicted like she is to his touch. Always seeking out gratification even if for a few moments because this is how it has been since she rose from sea. He had waited through centuries for her and will be there for ages, feeling her with his silver touch all through the cloudless nights.
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This was day 5th of our expedition.
Subject- Kitchen Tent, The shining white peak on top-right was our goal.
PC- Yours Truly
Date- 11th July 2019
time: 22:39 P.M.
Altitude: Somewhere above 5000m
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#greenmassif #greenexpeditions #everest2021
#SummitNight #darkseries
More practice with the hand quilting... This is about all I can handle, this takes forever, and I am all about instant gratification with quilting!
Waiting In The Paris Cafe.
Tranquillement connaissances plaisir de gratification Monsieur s'il vous plaît,
introducendo sentimenti cordialmente locali pubblici versato,
bláthanna ceoil soothing canadh thug mian súile,
craffter boddhad dyfeisgar mesur llifo aer luminous,
fantásticas esplendorosas projetos concepções imensos,
Соответствующие грезы голые картины высокого,
összejövetel körülmények megfigyelt swarthiness pincérek sugallja,
kommunikasjon ulike multiplisere særegne mistanker sittende,
fandění kapající brýle objevily intenzivní oteplování ruce,
gefährliche Schiffe Anblick unfathomed wirbelt grün,
glödande färska lyktor glöd sällskap ter journeying drunknings bränder,
dýran þungur klukkustundir ljós hazy kveldi raddir dregur,
ψιθυρίζοντας τελειώνει γλυκά ευνοείται με αχνά γράμματα ακούγεται κάτω,
すべての栄光のパリ高貴天を展開想像力.
Steve.D.Hammond.
The Burlington Arcade is a covered shopping arcade in London that runs behind Bond Street from Piccadilly through to Burlington Gardens. It is one of the precursors of the mid-19th-century European shopping gallery and the modern shopping centre. The Burlington Arcade was built "for the sale of jewellery and fancy articles of fashionable demand, for the gratification of the public".
The arcade was built to the order of Lord George Cavendish, younger brother of the 5th Duke of Devonshire, who had inherited the adjacent Burlington House, on what had been the side garden of the house and was reputedly to prevent passers-by throwing oyster shells and other rubbish over the wall of his home. The Arcade opened in 1819. It consisted of a single straight top-lit walkway lined with seventy-two small two storey units.
This image is part of a series I am working on to show the extreme wealth of this part of London.
Last day in California, and of course chose to spend it at the beach.
Moving to Ohio tomorrow....
When I was little, I wasn't allowed to use my parents' Polaroid.... I begged and begged. And it was the way rad Land Camera One Step, you know- the one with the RAINBOW. Well now I'm a big girl and have my own Polaroid.. except I won't be able to use it for much longer. SAVE POLAROID!!!
Our Northern Lights expedition to Norway was delayed two years by the pandemic. The KP-7 explosive displays over Alta on our last night above the Arctic Circle epitomize "delayed gratification."
Tech Stuff: Fuji X-100S with wide teleconverter at 19mm; iso 3200 2.5 seconds at f/2.0. Processed with PixInsight and ACDSee Gemstone 12
hope y'all don't mind but time has been tight for personal gratification and photography..so Ive gone back into the archives for this..this was from the Valentine shoot I did with Arianna..so many wonderful images it would be hard to choose just one...love this dreamy amazing lens and what it can do..wishing one and all a glorious week..
A beautiful sunny winter day and my first time visiting Foster Beach. The ice formations were amazing! I have more photos to sort from both cameras, but here are some quick ones from the iPhone for instant gratification.
I think I got sunburned - I didn't even think of it ahead of time but of course I should have put sunblock on my face
macy's has the tokidoki bags online, and since i'm all about instant gratification, i stopped by herald square and took this home* with me. now if someone wants to give me these toys for christmas (cough, cough), i'll be a very happy girl and your bff! haha
* using my 20% off coupon!
about tokidoki:
tokidoki started as the online portfolio of italian artist simone legno. tokidoki means "sometimes" in japanese. simone chose "sometimes," because everyone waits for moments tat change one's destiny.
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
Peter Drucker
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tchwsQ7egco
Webster’s defines the word “Pleasure” as “A state of gratification” being able to work with Nos is quite gratifying.
I’ve said it before but I’d encourage everyone to check out Nos’s flicker page. While I don’t voice it often as I should I do enjoy seeing new works. Nos’s ideas always help expand my character depth even at some of the most basic levels.
Please enjoy and stop by Nos’s Flicker page.