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The other day I saw my first instance of the CoronaVirus litter. This discarded face mask was found at the edge of the lake walk. The city provides garbage containers every 50 yards, so there was really no excuse for the litter. Given the purpose of the mask, I left it for a city worker with a picker-grabber rather than pick it up by hand myself.
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!
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.
There are many instances in Stanley Park Vancouver BC where new growth has flourished in decaying tree stumps left from the 1860's on logging. Looks like this one may have met death by saw.
The Stanley Park of today, while still managed, is cared for in a far less invasive manner than in years past. Trees are removed on occasion for safety reasons or to suppress fires. Dead and dying trees in certain portions of the park are often felled and left to decompose, providing nutrients for other plants in the ecosystem. Gone are the pest and predator elimination programs of the past (between the 1910s and the 1960s, the Vancouver Gun Club was licensed to shoot crows on Sundays).
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
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]
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.
●
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.
●
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.
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.
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.
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He is one of the best street singers in the world. That old and talented man is playing almost everyday in the centre of Brussels. He has become a living monument in the city, everybody loves him!
Please, also have a look at THIS VIDEO showing him playing 2 of his favourite songs (I recorded them yesterday!).
The above photo has been shot with the Samsung NX10, which has been provided to me by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
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For more information about my art: info@benheine.com
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Your Songs
A poem by Peter S. Quinn
Your songs are so beautiful
Like roses and gardens sapphire
With their moments never dull
As days come clearly in desire
The sweetness of your singing
In pomp and circumstance
With every street front bringing
In days of embrace and trance
Like love-song of the minions
In silences and tone bend
For the street daughters and sons
That colors mix and blend
In every footstep going
Where everyone once is for all
In the songs and words knowing
That comes in their daily call
Your voice rises from sleep
Onto the banquet of its time
For the days onward to keep
From guitar’s strumming rhyme
O love songs of the streets
Among the folks there walking
Of pure instances stepping feet’s
And in all its audibly talking
Many town loves have been torn
Inside endless dispute and flow
And each their sound newborn
In beginnings of daybreak's glow
When feelings are low and blending
During endless time and space
And on to the futures commanding
Within your tone blend and grace
Like love-song of the minions
In silences and tone bend
For the street daughters and sons
That colors mix and blend
In every footstep going
Where everyone once is for all
In the songs and words knowing
That comes in their daily call
To the Zion Narrows and Wall Street! Sony A7RII Fine Art Zion National Park Autumn Winter 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!
www.facebook.com/elliot.mcgucken
Dr. Elliot McGucken Fine Art Photography!
I love shooting fine art landscapes and fine art nature photography! :) I live for it!
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!
In one of those divine instances that a family so graciously welcomed me into their home, I was able to marvel at her up-close. This beautiful piece of sculpture, with [by my personal preference] the unmatched visage of a grieving mother -with the right age, unlike very youthful looking Dolorosas- is a gem of Philippine Ecclesiastical Art.
She is enshrined in her urna, assembled on a separate bust, wearing her pre-war faded cobalt blue ensemble -the sequins made of actual pressed metal plates, not synthetic...
Le plus intéressant... | Ma carte | Mes classeurs | Mes albums
Façade du Tribunal de Grande Instance.
Arras | Pas-de-Calais (62) | Hauts-de-France | France
The Heavy lift vessel is holding a Three legged 2 Bay Turbine Jacket with Suction piles while adjusting its GPS positioning to lower the jacket directly onto it's prepared location in the correct orientation ie North South East West etc.
The Jacket is the Steel Frame that is located on the sea bed (in this instance by Suction Piles) and it is this, on which the Turbine sits via a bolted flange and Mast or Tower.
100 DPI watermarked upload, original High Resolution File available on request, contact Terry Eve Photography through Flickr mail in the first instance. Thank you.
93/100 insects; 8/10 beetles
Flickr Lounge: animals alive
Usually one is supposed to avoid having the subject right in the center, but in this instance, "straight down the middle" seems the right pose.
I got photos of more than sixty insects the second day of July, and I decided to see how many species I could get in the first few days. Eventually I decided to make it the first ten days. Usually insect season doesn't really hit its peak until the second half of July, but this year July 2 and July 8 both brought dozens of species, and the whole ten-day period brought several interesting species (like this one) and several I'd never seen before, hadn't seen in years, or hadn't managed to photograph well. I haven't tabulated the totals yet, but I think I managed more than 200 species (and of course I did have several more that refused to stay still long enough for me to get any sort of shot).
Ever since I became a Flickr member I've enjoyed the gorgeous Bald Eagle pictures of, for instance Imtoootall, Doug LLoyd, Nikographer, Fella-1 and Garnite (to name a few...).
I long to go to the places they live/visit, see the eagles with my own eyes, but it seems that my wishlist of 'must see before I die'-places only grows longer since I'm on Flickr and the time left only becomes shorter.. :-)
But.... there are vague plans to go to Vancouver Island in autumn. I've heard from a friend that there seem to be a lot of these flying beauties around there.....
Meanwhile, last sunday I went with friends and their kids to Beekse Bergen in Holland. Apart from it being a lovely day which really lifted the spirits of us sunstarved people in the Netherlands (:-), they had a wonderful show with birds of prey.
So here was my chance to practice a little! You might call it a small miracle that I haven't hit anyone on the head with the camera and lens but I was só eager to get at least one shot right!
Ok, it might not (yet) be the real stuff, and it doesn't come near the quality of the above mentioned gentlemen's shots, but still I've enjoyed seeing this wonderful eagle fly enormously. (and at least it felt real !!! :-) )
Jan. 30, 2012
"This is one of those rare instances where my presence indirectly became a part of this reaction from those pictured in the photograph. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just accidentally dropped all of her briefing papers onto the Oval Office rug and she, the President and Vice President all reacted in a way that indicated that surely I wouldn't get a photo of that to embarrass her." (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.
On June 5, 2012, Hinode captured these stunning views of the transit of Venus -- the last instance of this rare phenomenon until 2117. Hinode is a joint JAXA/NASA mission to study the connections of the sun's surface magnetism, primarily in and around sunspots. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Hinode science operations and oversaw development of the scientific instrumentation provided for the mission by NASA, and industry. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., is the lead U.S. investigator for the X-ray Telescope.
Image credit: JAXA/NASA/Lockheed Martin
Original images: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/venus_transit_hinode.html
Read more about Hinode:
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/index.html
p.s. You can see all of our Hinode photos in the Hinode Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/sets/72157606297030945/
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These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
From an idea by Daniel Nimmervoll, whose Kindle book I nought and studied to learn to do droplet photography. This is a somewhat clumsy and quick-n-dirty photoshop montage from a series of photographs in this album.
A word for y'all aspirant liquid artists about experts and authors who report via books, articles, youtube vlogs or blogs on this type of photography. It's quite useful what they tell you but I find they spend a lot of time telling you about things you already know, for instance, what backgrounds to use, and how to position your flashes to create this infinite effect and subject colours (thru usage of colourful gels) we often see in product photography. It's all right to have that knowledge, but droplet photography is not about this in the first place. It is about practical things like what should the height of the nozzle from the surface the drop hits should eventually be, how it impacts the forms it creates, how to calculate the time from drop exit from the nozzle to the impact with water for Tats and what follows next analytically. Quite a few people try to explain how they did certain shot, but they will never tell you that whatever they did was 10% by design and 90% by accident. This is an important element of this type of photography. Given a drop, and the best calculated parameters for certain planned outcome, the photographer was the first to be surprised by those outcomes. The photographer's creative work starts after God, nature and its laws, and chaos theory had finished their toil. That post processing consists simply of a selection of the best shots, the healing out of stray drops that defocus the viewer from the main subject, and adjusting the shot's colours via controls that packages like LR CC, Luminar and above all Photoshop have to offer. Of course, the photographer also designs the background and lighting, but that's not the hard part of such a project. It's the easiest in fact.
A method about Tats should preferably start by explaining the steps in the drop 'lifecycle', that is from the moment it impacts the surface and what happens next. Very few people will tell you that in a detailed and comprehensive manner. They do tell you about bits and pieces of the lifecycle but they all select and pick what they want to tell you about it, and you are left wondering. You need to google and read many sources to make sense of it. I should say, you start with Youtube as there are good clips about the phenomenon that people videoed with high speed video cameras and they show droplet lifecycles really as nature decided them to be. Even so, they only cover a few use cases and none of what I saw told me anything about how to reach a tall Worthington jet, just to mention something rather important... And you have to make some assumptions yourself, now that you have the whole thing deploying in front of your eyes, and calculate the distance in millisec from impact to say the jet formation and its highest point. So, I reckoned that the total duration between impact and collision with the following drop is in the range of 120 to 160 millisec. My own empirical experiments later confirmed that assumption. In another Flickr post about it, I gave a simple method to calculate the time needed for a drop to hit the surface after its nozzle exit. This helps a lot because, at least it gives you a first parameter to work with in your drop lifecycle controller, what it is, Pluto, Miops, etc... I was able in most cases that I tested to fall within the smallest unit of my system, one millisec that is, in my prediction of the touch down as I called it. Actually the only unknown scientifically that is impossible to calculate is the air resistance that for heights between 60 and 40 cm it turned out to be between 20 and 25 millisec. The good thing is that it is linear, so if you figure out the amount of resistance for 42 cm it's a simply analogy to calculate the corresponding resistance for say, 56 cm. I have designed shots based on this formula that I could capture drops barely touching the surface in their last few millisec before impact. Provided you are so close to the start of the process, and if you have a reasonable knowledge of what it takes in millisec to go to the following stage, then you are reasonably in control of what happens when. This will save you time, stress and battery life (your speed-lights that is) in your quest to reach the moment of creation.
Suppose you are trying to figure out in how many millisec after impact your system will generate a Worthington jet. And at which point does this jet reach its maximum height. As an example, I spent in one session more than three hours trying to figure out, at the given configuration I was trying, with only one drop coming out of the nozzle, as during all this time all my shots for millisec after millisec came out with a short Worthington of a few cm never reaching a descent height to have it collide with drop number two, and all the shots came out with the seven dwarfs but no Snowhite, if you know what I mean. It took me sometime to realise that what makes Worthingtons shoot high is more the liquid composition of both the basin and the falling drops than a part in the lifecycle that I was chasing for hours, as I was convinced that in my combination of liquids, parameters and heights from the basin there ought to be a descent jet hidden somewhere. Also the size of the surface and volume of the basin should play a role, although one celebrity artist wrote that this is irrelevant as the cavity a falling drop creates will only go as deep as a couple of cm. Dream on dude. In Ship Building (from which I graduated as a PhD some 40 years ago) we had a whole chapter of manoeuvrability in shallow waters. It's an entirely different world. I strongly believe the size of the basin and the depth of the water mass plays a certain role in the magnitude of the jet. Can't mathematically prove it, but this is something my shipbuilder's intuition tells me. The jet is created by the falling drop that creates a cavity, and it is the hydrostatic pressure that pushes water back to the cavity and creates the jet. In a super shallow basin you'll never be able to create a jet. Also a small basin with very little water in it, like a glass of water. I don't know, but they don't tell you these things. So you keep trying and wasting battery life, until, if you are lucky enough and get to the ultimate creative moment, where nature feels sorry about you and starts creating its beauties for you to admire and share in Flickr. Unfortunately, real science has very little to tell us about the phenomenon itself, therefore we are left out in the cold to figure out by ourselves what makes jets shoot high and what mostly causes them to remain shorties! Like I said, no expert is sharing his/her experiences to that level, and you are left guessing, and even worse, you are left admiring those wonderful boyz 'n gals for their abilities... (luck I should better say).
A surprise and a gamble
I’m not usually an “assortment” person. For instance, I know I only want the licorice jelly beans, so why would I buy a bag with multiple flavors. Although, I must admit, my preference works in my favor because licorice is usually all that’s left after a bowl of jelly beans has been sitting a few days.
I ordered a four-pack of novelty suspender tights in February and lost the nerve to wear them. In the meantime, I forgot what they looked like. This is the second pair I’ve tried in recent weeks (the ootd pics with the first pair were too scandalous to publish) and I like the surprise of discovering the pattern as I put them on. I’m wearing this pair backwards from the model’s picture, but I think I’ve got it right and she’s got it turned around. So far, this assortment has been a big hit at tango. (Especially the unpublished outfit. I know. I’m a tease.)
Dress, H&M (thrifted). Tights, TGD. Earrings, Green Tree Jewelry.
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So this Bill guy. He's from this alternate reality. He's from Aim. Aim sucks. Hydra rules! Hail Hydra! Anyways, he totally sucks! Like he is the complete opposite of me. For instance.
"Yo, what's your favorite rock band?"
"Rock? I like rap, man."
Rap? Really? Rock is where it's at, Bill. Such an idiot.
"What's your favorite tv show?"
"Tv is for morons."
"You're for morons."
"My point proven."
"Favorite movie?"
"The Twilight films."
Are you freaking kidding me? This dude, man! He's so stupid. Honestly I wouldn't mind if he died. I wouldn't mind killing him either. Like seriously.
"Favorite superhero?"
"BIrdman."
"Dude, Pinkman could kick his butt anytime."
"Birdman!"
"Pinkman!"
"Bird!"
"Pink!"
"B(ee)!"
"P(ee)!"
"B(uh)!"
"P(uh)!
I'm gonna kill 'im!
"Hey, there's that Grasshopper dude."
Bill elbows me in the stomach and begins a full on sprint towards the Grasshopper. What the heck man? I catch my breath and begin chasing down Bill and the Grasshopper. With the Grasshopper's mechanical prosthetic's he is able to jump over obstacles much quicker then Bill or I can. With this advantage he was able to jump over a security fence. Bill stops in his tracks and doesn't make an effort to even try to jump over the fence.
"What the heck man? You were right behind him! You could've jumped that fence and caught him!"
"I'm sorry, the dude's a no-class villain. He'll end up getting caught by the cops."
"How do you know?"
"Trust me, on my world, he always does."
"Just because on your world he does, doesn't mean he does here. You're just being freaking lazy."
"Dude calm down. It's just the Grasshopper."
I rear back and punch him straight in the nose. He quickly grabs his nose to stop the blood from flowing out.
"The heck dude?"
"Next time I won't stop there."
"Whatever dude. Let's go find Lady Deadpool and Deadpool."
One of those instances where the practise turns out far better than the shot you actually camp for (Trident 472). Oh well, this means I have a shot of the 486 at least.
E243 motors down the Millennium Busway, with a 161, 108 and 132(?) in the background.
063::100 100 Possibilities of the Bottle.
I was going through my archives with the intent to thin out some old shots and I found myself constantly sidetracked with ideas for processing shots that never made it out of RAW format before. I came across this one for instance, as well as a few others, of "the bottle" and decided to work on some to see if I can make a dent in what is left of that project. This one is from February but I think I have some from even further back than that. Over the next while, I HOPE to get some of them off my harddrive and onto to Flickr. :)
There is a great deal of jockeying for dominance amongst elephants that is revealed only by close observation. For whatever reason, elephants are constantly pairing off against one another to establish dominance. If there are a hundred elephants in a herd, I'm sure there would be an "argument" between the weakest two as to who was # 99 and who was # 100. The most dominant elephant is the one that gets the first dibs at the watering hole, for instance.
Here, at first sight, it simply looks like a couple of elephant calves engaged in small talk en route to the watering hole. But take a closer look – the calf closer to the camera is slightly older, perhaps by a couple of months. It is a bit taller and bigger, notwithstanding the camera perspective. Its body language is more aggressive, with its ears flared out, which is a way elephants posture to look bigger than they are.
The other calf has a meeker posture, with its ears folded to its side. Though they are walking side by side, the smaller calf will let the bigger calf dip into the water first at the water hole, finding another spot for itself that keeps a respectable distance from the older calf.
Tsavo National Park, Kenya.
D01-0242-5DS04300
Another instance in which I reflect on certain shots that I wished that I caught in monochrome. So I dig 'em up and edit like so.
In a rare instance, NS Croxton local K75 performs a daylight switch at A. Zerega's Sons Pasta off NJ Transit's Bergen County Line in Fair Lawn, NJ. This is the site of the infamous 1982 wreck where a group of local teenagers threw the mainline switch in front of an eastbound Conrail commuter train, sending it into the pasta factory and killing its engineer.
Folded instance:
www.flickr.com/photos/133041586@N06/25183215026/in/shares...
The horns are hard to make out of it without help in the crease pattern so I thought I would show you guys which flap I point splitted to obtain the long ones, and with it, the rest of the mayor limbs.
In one instance I like this and in the other I absolutely don't. Was not sure if I should put this up here but then I thought......let' s see what people have to say :) Opinions please!
Definitely an instance where I would've done well to adjust my exposure for a passive subject.
Bird was originally found by Kim Kozella.
Lake Monticello--Marina
WOW...Sometimes you really have to get off the road and take in the history and nature of someplace...
Take Nyack, Ca. for instance...I've zoomed by this place literally hundreds of times, the first that I can remember was in 1960 on our way to visit Squaw Valley after the Olympic Games had pulled outta town...many times followed including driving past in the middle of the night behind the wheel of an Osh-Kosh snowplow...
...but today, after hiding out in the wonders of Snowflower RV park for several weeks, we decided to pull in and get an ice cream cone after breaking camp at 6100'...Nyack sits at 5280' and I was blown away to discover that the original Nyack Lodge, built in the 40's along what was Highway 40, sat on the site of the current rest stop on WB Interstate 80, just a few miles away...the same site where numerous Flickerites such as Patrick Dirden and joe chan have taken pictures of the trains rumbling along...portions of it were dismantled and trucked to it's current site which now houses a small museum with some of the original gas pumps and room numbers...
Next trip up, we're going to drop in at night to see this beauty lit up...
this is a pretty cool video of the area in the winter of 1951-51:
This is an instance where photographic evidence supports the feeling that things aren't as cool as they used to be. I discovered recently that I have a more recent shot of this church in Brownsville twenty years ago. Now it has no ivy, the slate on the roof is replaced with asphalt and most of the stained glass is gone. Oh well.
I work with some pretty creative people. One of them, for instance, has recently took it upon himself to figure out how to color process old C-22 film. For those unfamiliar with C-22, it was the precursor to the modern C-41 process which is used to develop present day color negative film. C-22 was discontinued as a process between 1972-1973. Unfortunately you cannot process all that leftover C-22 film in today's C-41 chemistry as bad things will happen to both the film and the machine that is developing it (take my word for it, don't try it). There are ways to work around this though and people have done it. There are a couple of labs out there that offer C-22 color processing as a service but you can count them on one hand.
Well, one of my co-workers has made the case for bigger hands I guess. He is our darkroom tech at work (one of them at least) and he has been putting a lot of effort in these past couple of years specializing a developer for old b&w films to help minimize base fogging caused by age. He has carried that over now to old color films. Then during a recent attic cleanout at work we found this bag of Kodak Ektacolor Type S film in 220. Who knows when this stuff expired, sometime between 1960 and the early 70s. Plus it has been stored in Blue Moon's non-air conditioned attic for years. Seems like a great candidate for some test film, so I took a roll out and shot through it. The film was originally ISO 80, so I rated it at ISO 4 (roughly a stop per decade expired) and had at it then handed it over to our dark wizard to see what he could do with it. I wasn't expecting much so it is safe to say what he produced really blew me away. I wish I had a picture of the negatives because they actually look close to a healthy orange color in the film base. The images themselves have some pretty stupendous color shifts (this is slightly corrected, mind you). But wow, there is a color image off film over 40 years old. I was and am impressed.
And now he has amassed the chemicals to actually fully recreate the C-22 process along with a few other goodies he plans to throw in. I can sort of follow along chemically with what he is doing but certainly not all the way and it is fun to see him make leaps of deduction into areas that are dark to me.
There is a lot that goes on at my job in terms of the behind-the-scenes effort and investment. I am lucky to work with such a passionate and creative crew. I am sure that not everyone can say the same, so I try to appreciate how fortunate I am in that regard. I think it is also noteworthy that I have been with Blue Moon for almost 16 years now and I can still see stuff that blows my mind and widens my scope of the world of photography.
Yashica Mat-124 G
Kodak Ektacolor Type S
My two cents to the B.M. (The Big Mess).
Yahoo´s behavior on important issues such as the free speech debate in China and what´s happening here in Flickr right now are very sad stories.
I´m not sure if Yahoo and Flickr are really blocking content due to local legal restrictions (nude content is not forbidden in Germany, for instance) or if they are just taking [bad] management decisions.
Filtering mature content is a parenthood and family issue. The existing filters are already useful for this kind of situation.
Blocking content is not a serious solution. Which is the next country?
Mathieu Struck
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Flickr sperrt uns aus! Und auch dich!
Seit gestern werden für deutsche Nutzer keine Bilder mehr angezeigt, die als 'moderate' oder 'restricted' markiert sind! Es gibt keine Moeglichkeit das umzustellen - das ist eine grobe Unverschämtheit und Frechheit von flickr!
We are the users - don't forget that flickr!
Deswegen treten wir gemeinsam in Aktion und zeigen allen, das uns das nicht gefällt was flickr mit uns macht! Füge das Bild zu deinen Favoriten hinzu und poste es!
In English:
If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea, you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service, and therefore won’t be able to turn off SafeSearch.
In other words, german users can't access photos on flickr that are not flaged "safe" ... only flowers and landscapes for the germans ...
We won't let this happen! Copy and upload this picture to your account - show flickr who we are.
Espanol:
No sé cuando, pero muy recientemente a las cuentas de Alemania, Hong Kong, Corea y Singapur les han prohibido ver las fotos que están en el Safe Search, las mismas en las que a nosotros nos dan la opcíón de ver o no ver. A ellos simplemente se lo prohiben. Chale no?
Francais:
Si votre compte Yahoo! est basé à Singapour, à Hong Kong, en Corée ou en Allemagne, vous ne pourrez voir que les photos qui n'ont pas été marquées comme ayant un contenu qui peut choquer. Toutes les autres ne vous seront pas accessibles. Vous serez donc condamnés à ne voir que des paysages et des fleurs. Il ne faut pas laisser faire ça. Envoyez cette photo sur votre compte pour montrer à Flickr que nous savons nous mobiliser contre la censure !
繁體中文
如果妳/你的Yahoo!個人帳號隸屬於新加坡 德國 香港 或是韓國, 那麼依據各自所屬的當地使用者條款限制下, 妳/你將只能在瀏覽觀看Flickr網站上標示有安全註記的照片與內容. 所以也無法將安全搜尋的功能關閉. 換句話說, 德國的使用者除了花卉與風景外, 是完全無法在Flickr網站上觀看未被標示安全的相關內容.
我們不期望註冊使用者的權益有任何不平等待遇, 歡迎自行複製文宣圖片轉貼聲援.
Spread the image!
Lade dieses Bild runter und poste es in deinem Account! Lass uns das Bild überall auf flickr verteilen und es in 'Interestingness' heben!! So geht es nicht!
Original Version: farm2.static.flickr.com/1299/543864623_7aadef1e69_o.jpg
Link to the original Thread here: flickr.com/photos/atomtigerzoo/543864623/
Weitere Infos:
- www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/91085
- www.flickr.com/groups/404938@N23/discuss/72157600347681500/
- www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/42597/
Wer einen Blog besitzt oder Kontakte zu den Medien hat: Weiterleiten!
Das Bild und der Text kann einfach kopiert werden, genutzt, veraendert - macht damit was ihr wollt - hauptsache es traegt zur Sache bei, das diese Unsinnigkeit aufhoert! :) Das Bild ist von mir für alle! :) Yay!
The font used in this picture is Yanone Kaffeesatz. You can find it here: www.yanone.de/typedesign/kaffeesatz/
Media reporting::
- www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/91085
- English Version of heise article: www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/91160
- We made the frontpage of explore with this image! Yarr!
- We made the Fontblog!
- www.infoweek.ch/news/NW_single.cfm?news_ID=16033&sid=0
- If you wanna pack your bags and leave: flickr Down - Download ALL your photos with ease
- www.computerwoche.de/nachrichten/594399/
- www.focus.de/digital/internet/flickr_aid_63330.html
- www.pc-magazin.de/common/nws/einemeldung.php?id=52687
- neuerdings.com/2007/06/13/flickr-mag-keine-deutschen/
- www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,488542,00.html
- donoevil.netscape.com/story/2007/06/14/flickr-censors-ger...
- www.generatorx.no/20070610/found-on-flickr-1/
- www.golem.de/0706/52871.html
- www.mela.de/archives/725-Flickr-zensiert-...-und-schweigt...
- We even made the news in Chile!
- www.flickr.com/groups/_flickr-fotografen-_deutschland_/di...
- www.spreeblick.com/2007/06/14/filtr/
- www.fontblog.de/flickr-user-gehen-auf-die-barrikaden
- www.boingboing.net/2007/06/14/flickr_users_in_germ.html
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The story of Stockholm Central Station starts in 1867 when the construction of the original building designed in Italian Renaissance style by the state’s railway chief architect, Adolf Edelsvärd, started. The station, opened in 1871, had impressive dimensions for the time and it is said that when completed, it was the next-to-largest building in Stockholm only second to the all-mighty Royal Palace with over 600 rooms.
Despite this significant change to the appearance of the building in the mid-20th century, the railway station can still be considered one of the best preserved public buildings in Stockholm from the 1850s and 1860s.
The last large reconstruction of Stockholm Central Stationtook place between 2008 and 2014 and according to formal requirements for its execution, its main objective was to fulfil the full potential of the station as the meeting point for people from the entire world. The architects managed to make the interior of the station appear lighter and more spacious for instance thanks to the open boutiques in the main hall which are located only about a metre from where the passengers pass.
One from the archives which I edited by never posted. One of those instances when you go out to capture one thing and you end up capturing another.
Another instance where I think the Redfield plug-in worked out pretty well. This started out as a photo of an ice storm last winter and now it's laying on a bed of striped carrots.
THE DRUNKEN MUSE
The story "Drunken Muse" was audio recorded on a hidden voice recorder during the conversations about two decades ago. The story-teller didn't know or consent to the recording.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_recorder
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette
The audio tapes on compact cassettes were never used. The records were partially damaged and lost.
Herewith the unedited transcript version.
medium.com/paul-jaisini-paints-invisible-paintings/paul-j...
I am so pumped to get back to painting as I return to the second year of the art school after a full year suspension. As always it is like time-travel culturally speaking, like walking right into the middle ages going through the antique building’s portal.
Art studios are the huge L-shaped lofts with super tall ceilings 20 feet no less with the wall to wall windows so that sunlight illuminates the space from south and east side designed for the purpose so that one could paint there from morning till sunset.
In a studio there are classical gypsum sculptures, expensive copies of Venus de Milo, David, Laocoön and the others. In the art studio there stood the noses, eyes, lips, feet, and palms on the wood shelves.
Sketching the gypsum body parts helps you to build the classic academic base on which stands the whole modern and contempo art. This sort of teaching is specific for the art schools that preserve the traditions they had been founded on. There is only few art schools like this and of this caliber left now. Could be that this is the only legendary school that continues to function as if nothing had changed in the world. In the rest of the world with billions of some art classes nobody knows what does the old tradition of art school is for, its totally unfashionable.
Studying classic art (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art) here is the foundation for creativity in any of the art styles.
The smell of art is what defines the studio but not from human presence, something like an aroma reminiscent of the eastern market where smoke from hookaahs mix with the oil vapors, exotic fragrance from candles and spices. The Art Studios were never renovated since the times they were built over 150 years ago. The wood floors are saturated with art oils as if the floor is waxed with the organic oils from nuts, linen ( linseed oil, poppy seed oil, and so forth.) Adding to the mix the varnishes used by painters (pine wood varnish, Dammar varnish and others) It makes this ART SMELL to be the most intoxicating and ever-lasting musk.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_painting
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_painting - Ingredients
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio - Art_studio
The instance you enter the studio space you feel the belonging to a knighthood and the whole art history. You are the undivided part of those people who left their creation imprints.
Super pumped up after the long break up with the arts after my full year of non-stop party marathons I had returned to the bohemian life style.
Actually my other life style wasn't any different from the bohemian.
The only difference is that there is some meaning in the bohemian life style, something to create, to shape. Not just spend time doing sports and girls but something on a whole 'nother level only with the same sub text and by far more emotionally connected.
The bohemian I think is much more my thing, that fits me as a person. Maybe because my old man is the greatest sculptor.
He is color blind so apparently I took up the torch, I have a very special sense for color.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculpture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
There could be an inborn human predicament or inborn genius.
I returned into the world to kiss its ground. I like everything about it, the babeville and its fashion circus.
The art students are known to come up with endless varieties of how to be stylish.
Take me for example, I am chilling in a suit jacket. It was professionally hand-tailored out of a denim Pajamas with stripes and starry silk underlining.
This “look” is completed by my python leather jeans. And over that an authentic LONG military Germany Waffen Elite Officer black Leather Coat from the WWII, only it is without a Swastika.
I never part with my large portfolio and a Field Easel.
EASEL
About 700 students attend the studies. The art school accepts only the best of best with few exception such as the kids of celebrity artists, writers and musicians and people who had real power in the city.
I wasn't enrolled for money or the A-lister parents, but for my talents. The Art specialty (painting, drawing, sculpture) teachers here are the world-wide recognized contemporary artists.
In a matter of my working ethics these important artists would point at me as the example of how fast I work, how well I sketch in color, how I always choose the most unexpected and unusual angle for my composition and so on...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_(visual_arts)
name banner gif
Optical illusion geometric gif
(portraiture, still-life, and landscape)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_life
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_painting
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_drawing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_painting
I never work on an académie (live drawing of a model, live painting of a model) the given eighty -- ninety hours. My whole process is about six -- nine hours to fully complete the work so I get out of the studio for some action and fun.
I’m probably the strongest in the class. My art professors know I don’t need to be there to distract the others.
When I’ve got nothing to do I start banging the head against the wall. Still I am criticized SUPER harshly for cutting the classes.
At this point I am not aware of the inner workings of “THE SYSTEM”.
I call suitcase with a secret compartment.
At the grade shows I only see the bad grades on my best artworks.
There is another side of the coin. It revealed in the future when I got to befriend a secretary at the Dean’s office. It was about the time of my graduating year.
The art teachers actually always considered me to be the leading artist among all students. They would grade all my artworks high on my personal record I knew nothing about.
That was how the art school’s system pushed the talented students to go further to open up their potential. Pushing to the limits of impossible.
I am harshly criticized for cutting a lot of classes.
There is another side of the coin. It will be revealed in the future when I got to befriend a secretary at the Dean's office. It was about the time of my graduating year.
The art teachers actually always considered me to be the leading artist among all students. They would grade all my artworks high on my personal record I knew nothing about.
That was how the art school's system pushed the talented students to go further to open up their potential. Pushing to the limits of impossible.
Willing or not but the doubts get in my head. I was thinking (rather frantically) that maybe I’m all just misguided. I will work to beef up my skills unable to accept that I am not really a “genius” artist. The bad grades were corrupting my vision.
Totally clueless that these bad grades in my case were used as "disciplinary measures" for my behavior of anarchy. These grades had nothing to do with my artworks.
And yet my best drawings and paintings are graded the lowest. At the same time the art professors are taking my works home. I always find empty walls where my works were displayed for the semester shows.
Sooner or later the missing artworks got me enraged. My classmates tell me the back story on what REALLY had happened.
All the art professors usually go the painting major's finals. So they just took my artworks right off the wall.
Ever since I heard this back story I flaunt how IDGAF to even pick up my works with the bad grades after the finals end.
Like a bunch of some doomsday looters in sight of an electronic store the art students same as the teachers vultured my artworks. Later some of my paintings and drawings were seen at the school's museum, especially the paintings.
The story of the artworks snatched off my exhibit wall developed further.
In the art school the art teachers are the privileged kind who exhibit regularly. All are the accomplished artists with big names.
Another thing about my artworks (no longer mine and in someone else's possession) is the story that involves someone with the top art rep being the art dynasty. Even so it happed that the leading art professor nicknamed Molly (for her annoying facial mole) used my art stuff to have her son who studied same years as me, just never expelled, to apply to an art academy with the highest qualification requirements. Molly's son portfolio sucked. To get him qualified to apply she gave her son all of my artworks she collected.
The juice was given to me by the reliable sources. The story was concurred by the eye--witnesses the students who were applying to the same academy together with Molly's son. Some of these students knew my work by the style, special color palette and the brushwork.
They all knew that Molly's son was using my artworks. He only had to forge his signature and remove mine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_(art)
My drawings, sketches, paintings, watercolors are in "wide" use by others.
I tell that to describe the routine of my life.
It could explain why I was expelled three times for the chronic absence, for sabotaging the lectures -- getting my classmates to leave the studio and go to the movies or to the beach.
Fast forward to that event of the breaking point when I started to work systematically.
I was sucked into work as if a drug addiction. I was penetrating deeper to the very core of creativity. Reading books, going to the museums, working in the field, working in the museums to copy masters. I completely forgot all about life around me.
Practically I was devoured and digested with my nails and hair by that devil called the academic art. It sucked out the leftovers of my soul.
I stayed in the studio after the classes to work. There were only few students like this, spiritually close to me. To them it was their life style since the day they had entered the art school unlike me. Whenever I'd get bored with art I'd quit working and just leave without asking permission.
Now as if something had hit me hard and I started to really work. Most art students here typically come from such backgrounds when they did their baby steps and studied in the children's (secondary) art school from an early age and tutored by art teachers at home
I had a tendency to take on a higher complexity unprepared without the experience of any art school training (the eight years on a daily basic with teachers and methodical practice.)
As long as I remember myself I was drawing, during my school years, on the notebooks, with chalk on the asphalt, with stick on the sand. I did it subconsciously, not knowing what I was doing.
IDK, could be due to the several bad bike accidents when my head ended up hitting the brick...
Why did my brain moved into the direction of noticing those things that normal people should not be noticing? That the leaves on the trees are not at all green, but violet.
The falling shadows from the street lights are not at all outlined by black, the contours are the absolute blue.
The trees look like people.
There are so much more shades of colors that language could articulate.
Stuff like this filled up my head so that there was no place left for just a thought about girls, more so even the thoughts to manipulate my body functions. For instance using the
bathroom. I almost peed my pants. Truthfully I was on the edge of madness.
I remember how I hallucinated during my work imagining that someone had come into my studio and I spoke to "the guest." My brain was ill, there was no escape from that hell.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color)
Once I was walking on a street without any awareness. My mind was no longer in command of anything accept the obsession with my painting. As I was pushing the limits of what was humanly possible in a matter of progress from the previous stage when I could draw and paint with intuitive results now I considered as totally armature waste of art materials. My condition would be hard to describe since I could hardly remember what was it like during that madly intense period. I know that I was working non--stop and did make some major break through. It worked but at the same time the progress turned its evil side, I wasn't able to stop even for a brief moment. Something happened to my otherwise incorruptible memory that I could only remember few things from that period. And one of those things was my death walk through the city streets on a day I was supposed to disappear.
When I realized that I was walking automatically, blind and incredibly
avoiding the cars, for the first time I felt the fear of madness that can easily take my life. It wasn't something I would fear if I was in my other life when loosing it would be quite an ordinary thing and not due to my lost mind.
Whatever it was I survived with no chances to stay alive that day. I had more chances to live on when I was shot at execution style, when I was drowning in bad storm, climbing on a building like a cat, and on many others such occasions.
Some guardian angel was looking over me as I came to the final moment of certain death, blind, deaf, disoriented and delusional.
As we finished with draperies, still life, gypsum figures we moved on to the nude. To draw and paint from the live sitter, male or female model.
There comes an old fat hag to be posed before the artists. She will be POSING even during the breaks. She sits professionally without a slight move of her flab folds for us to draw her “forms”. ‘assume it was done for the boys not to get distracted with the female anatomy.
The models with “rounded” forms were chosen so we would study the reflects and double reflects on a “sphere-like” and “cylinder-like” forms.
There would be plenty of the cast shadow (a type of shadow that is created on a form), and a drop shadow ( below the image).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_positions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_study
The working objective was to concentrate on the drawing’s construction.
When we’d get a young female model, she’d be so skeletal that we studied the skeleton. This type of models was as unattractive as the fat ones.
The art students without an eye for a drawing and technique produced their works of caricature quality. With the lost proportions the models looked like animals, skinny chickens or fat frogs.
For me it was a serious job, body didn’t exist. I x-rayed the flubs of fat to see the bones to connect them to muscles, to build a form.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricature
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeleton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skeleton
The illness I call the overdose had progressed and my end was near.
Homies who knew me used to say that I was cracked.
When I moved from the classicism to modern (I refused to see any modern or contemporary art, never wanted to see it, or ever saw it) I entered the Modern art on my own, as my foot stepped into the forth dimension.
I entered the world of mad pressure. Good I stepped in it one foot yet.
I was sleeping in the studio right on the floor near my work and placed an electric heater near by.
It was impossible to heat up whole place where fifty heavy-duty easels only took a quarter of the studio space.
In the center there was a huge round stage made from a special hard wood to hold any number of models when needed for the multiple human-figure compositions.
The place was full of easels, portable and the large for the field. The chairs, tables, palettes, boxes with paint, cases with paper and lots of other art stuff piled up into mountains.
The parquet floor was always covered in fresh oil paints even though the teachers tried in vein to prove a fact that working neatly was by far more productive.
We had a dormitory built same year as the art school which was 150 something years ago.
If you stayed late in the studio that was forbidden, you couldn't get to the dorm.
A guard at the main door was a real watch dog, he faithfully guarded the pathway knowing every student's face.
The dorm was occupied by those who couldn't pay for a room or the apartment in the city.
Ten beds were squeezed in a dorm room.
This part of the antique building was never renovated probably b/c it was planned to be turned into more art studios.
But since there were out of town students who had no place to live they were given a place in this dorm.
The beds were of a good prison-like quality so the survival was possible. Another thing is what was happening in the dorm.
On a typical day nobody there had any money left after the expensive art materials. Not a penny to get high. Alcoholic liquid (40-60%) was soaked into the bread.
From one bite of that bread you could instantly drop dead as if your legs got cut off by a train.
The receptors inside the nose absorb the fumes to hit right into the brain, this way the booze doesn't ever enter the digestive system and blood.
It kills or makes one go bonkers.
Some pissheads in desperation poured vodka into a wine bottle cap to inhale it like coke. After one cap screw it was a total alchoholocaust.
There were many ways of economizing: to use a medical thin rubber tube to suck the drink very slowly, one bottle would
serve four alkies.
It was the usual schizophrenic day for me. I had my dose of coffee and ate on a way to the studio.
Those days I didn't miss a class afraid to get expelled for the last and final time.
I couldn't understand this thing about my artworks. Why did my classmates literally begged on their knees to have the C-graded artworks I was never satisfied with.
It became my trade mark to give away all of my stuff left and right. I didn't know why I let go of my drawings and paintings so easy. Now I regret that. It would be interesting to see the growth.
Once I happened to tell a guy from my class who worked very hard on his drawing (he wasn't a good draftsman): "Oh Wow! you are doing a lot of progress, buddy, congrats!" I looked at his portfolio and pointed at a piece: "This drawing here is really mature and quite interesting, you achieved volume and air in just a linear drawing."
The guy suddenly goes red, stares at me wide-eyed with anger or confusion I couldn't quite understand...
"Am I saying something wrong?" I asked.
"You're fucking dissing me!" He answered.
"Why?" I wondered.
"This is YOUR drawing," Was the answer: "I took it, that is when I asked you and you gave it to me, don't you remember?"
I didn't recognize, didn't see my signature, as it was overlapping the drawing.
The guy was holding a grudge for this but it didn't turn him into one of my enemies.
At some point I am thankful to the teachers for their sneaky methods and experience on how to tame the most unruly and bring them into the art's stable. On the other hand these people were like sadistic fascists who used their special gases on me experimenting, would I survive it and live on.
The bohemian hyped up life only started after the classes at about seven in the evening. This part of the artist's life was full of sex, booze, and drugs, more sex booze drugs and orgies. The art youth was progressive, the sex - communal with the conveniently shared girlfriends and boyfriends.
Strangely the good times didn't concern me anymore now.
There was a small group of idiots who followed their criteria of achievement: to draw and paint a vase with flowers so that it comes to life, right out of the canvas to the carrying hands of the one who painted it. The flowers turned alive would be given to the girl/boyfriend.
The madness of the 4th dimension.
The art group was lead by me and another guy soon (one month later) to disappear forever for the reasons unknown.
After the classes me and few others searched for a studio. Found it. Not my studio. Any studio with the door unlocked.
As usual I would set a still life. Take off my nazi coat.
Set my next canvas on the easel to start quick sketching.
Out of nowhere shows up some dude who was a new student, he was much older, about twenty three, somewhere from Texas and just plain untalented.
He wanted to hang around with "the power-group" to learn.
There were few girls with the ambition to reach the level of a manly hand in creation.
We all usually worked in grave silence and even a slight noise would be extremely annoying.
If a brush would fall it seemed the atomic bomb had exploded somewhere near. We would exchange vicious cursing at the jittery creaking sneezing noise maker.
When you are focusing intensely and can't quite catch the brush stroke to complete the shaping of a form so that the image would turn real and come out of the flat surface the nerves are high strung to the limit.
The last months I just never left the studio, didn't even come outside. Slept on my German coat in the corner. It was veiled with the drapery. I'd wake up in the morning. The doorman was already used to give me the keys knowing that I sleep and work there. It came with a warning that if I am discovered I must tell any story and solemnly kept the secret.
The memories from those years distract me from telling what I want. It's about the event that had closed for me the entry into the forth dimension.
That day I was getting upset over some stupid teases: "What had happened to you!"
Whether the bros wanted to elevate my mental state, or they needed to get my works it had really caused me distraction. I was focusing on my work. Suddenly I hear the sounds of music in the studio. It jumped me: “Are you out of your fucking minds? That asshole doorman will come here."
"No he ain’t gonna."
"Why?"
"He is passed out, we had to carry him away." Was the answer.
"What is going down?" I worried.
"Not much, nothing is going down, we just want some fun. The way it is on here is so buzz-killing."
Was it some holiday, I didn’t know. Holidays passed by me, I didn’t smoke or drink and only worked. What they were saying didn’t reach me.
“Shut down the music. You’re gone but I must sleep here."
"Why must you sleep here?" Asked Lorenzo (nick-named after his personal preferences of the Benzos)
"Hmm, I guess there will be no way of working today?" I asked.
"Working, way working, you gonna make me some home works," Assured me the dude nicknamed Kuz. "For that I will make your sculpture complete."
As interesting as it was to play with the real forms in sculpting I disliked dealing with the clay. Those times I believed the painting to be so much more in gradations, possibilities and complexity. Now I changed my mind to consider any art media possess the unlimited possibilities.
I agreed. Suddenly the guys were fixing to leave and I had to ask: "So? Who will finish building up the sculpture if you're leaving?"
"No worries, will build it up, brb just a quick run for some booze before the stores closed up."
"What booze? Get out of here go to another studio. I work, don’t mess me up."
"No biggie, son, you can rest for once."
It was pointless to argue, they'd already been drunk and I was only getting nervous. My work wasn’t going good at all. I have changed the lighting set up many ways in vein.
Suddenly, out of nowhere Muse appears. A young, very-very attractive girl about eighteen. The returned gang introduced her to me:
"J-Sin, meet her... lets say Nicky."
"Eh, hello Nicky, who and what are you?" were my greetings.
She smiled to everyone and answered: "I will be posing for you today."
"We agreed about everything, will pay the price,” –explained Lorenzo barely moving his tongue, "She is gonna be happy!"
His bag full of bottles made loud clanking noise.
When the drunks got them out I counted six.
“Yes, this is going to be a wild night.” I was thinking what to do now. I approached the model, took off her coat and hanged it, removed her blouse and explained that she can go behind the curtain.
"Hey, hey! What curtain son, what’s with you? She is from the med school, our people!"
I heard the Kuz's inebriated voice. "She is THE model!"
"What -- nude?" I wondered.
"And what did you think, she'd sit covered up in here?" They burst into laughter.
Suddenly I feel elated with the anticipation of the new and amazing subject for the work. I was fed up with the poor set up and the struggle to "find" the good lighting for the gypsum head. How wonderful it turned out that I could make some picturesque oil sketches.
When the model took off her bra, her young breasts, her nipples instantly distract my attention from work.
Shit, I couldn’t focus. Since we hadn’t a glimpse at such models it was too interesting. Could be that something about this evening or the environment was different. First time in a long while the music was playing, the glasses jingled and filled up with wine.
As she posed we were all doing the quick sketching. She removed everything except her panties.
The drunken assholes wouldn’t let me focus.
"Let me finally have a chance to work." I yelled getting distracted.
They seemed to try bargaining: "We brought you the model, hey girl turn around!" Kuz pulled up her skirt and slapped her buddy. "Look at these buns, you've got to do another
drawing for the semester show."
"Boys, you are so bad!" She giggled to Kuz. "I will spank you for being soooo bad!" And she was laughing in most contagious sexy trills of her childish capricious voice.
I didn’t understand what these die--hard drunks were doing at the art school, without any talent or interest in art. My former palls in another life that was long forgotten. Today the serious artists who always worked together with me had left the moment this bad company swam by.
Now I was looking at their watery eyes winking at the model. They caressed her things as she reclined on the wooden stage to rest. I wanted to figure out why did they distract me even more now?
I was the same age as the model. I didn’t see her body, to me now it was the model for painting.
It was getting late when the cold winds penetrate the place from the drafty wall size windows. I put on my sweater in the starting freezer. The one meter or the three feet and 33/8 inch walls are like the thermos to absorb and hold the cool temperature. I looked at the laughing bunch who labored on my sculpture.
One was drawing a huge flying dick with wings with a charcoal right on a white wall.
I had finished sketching the figure. I came up to the stage to set up the heater. I asked the model if she could sit some more taking breaks whenever she needs to move.
When she looked at me she was constantly smiling.
"Sure she’ll sit! And she'll lay, right, sweet buns?"
I held my breath working imagining how awesome would be to have such a model every day. With a shaky hand I was working fast as a machine expecting any minute now she would say that she is too cold to sit another minute and she leaves, its all over. I will have to kill her and sit her lifeless body on a chair to complete my work.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!"
The heater I placed caused the red reflexes on the body. I was painting and had to get the color right. So I removed the heater. The model immediately complained about the cold. Kuz brought her a glass of wine asking me why did I remove the heater.
From wine her face flushed red. I tried to adjust the color scale, laying brushstrokes over the whole figure.
Meanwhile the music turned up it was getting real loud.
The model took her break.
I walked after her studying her forms.
"Is something wrong?" She asked.
"Its all right, could you turn this way."
"Oh, I see. Same in our med school, the nut cases," She openly declared to the others when I was on a floor looking from a lower viewpoint.
"Who is this?" She asked: "What kind of a mental is he?"
"Its a disease, but it will pass" – was the answer for her. "Sometimes it is terminal. Not his tho, his will pass, he loves the young girls very much…"
Something from the stupid jokes had reached me.
"Hon, now he needs the medical attention. You are the medic? We are forever in debt to yous for allowing us come to the mortuary and for helping with the dead bodies... What we have here is a zombie. You are the goddess who saves the body as your calling."
What I heard was polluting my pure artistic brain with that life I refused. Now I was paying attention not to the mammary glands but to her breasts. Her back muscles are slightly weak. As I looked over the skeleton the muscles slowly disappeared. No matter how hard I tried to focus my x-rays were weakened. Maybe the electricity turned off inside my head.
"Pour me some," I asked.
Six months of my immaculate virginity and celibacy was broken by a wine glass. The red wine like the blood of innocents was running in my throat filling up the brain that shortly was boiling with vigor. So I said:
"Could you please remove your panties?"
"It wasn’t the deal," protested the model with her eyes glowing like honey.
Lorenzo interrupted her:
"For god’s sake, take of your panties, what is it to you, aren't you a medic?"
"I thought someone here was shy, as for me" She lustfully licked her lips. "Well, of course its nothing."
"Who is shy?" Asked someone.
"Him the weirdo!" She giggled in a very cute bubbly little voice.
"Are you shy?"
"It seems it was me who asked her to remove the panties." I explained.
She just jumped right out of her panties not without pleasure it seemed.
I imagined how to position her, what pose should she take.
"Hey!" I asked Kuz to pour me another glass. He was cheering me on yet reminding that I should first finish the drawing.
"Later," I mumbled turning to the model: "Would you please sit on a chair and spread your pretty legs a little, as much as you wish."
"Hey, Alex, so he is normal?" She asked.
I was far away from normality. A actual girl weaved from the reality. But the process was a transformation with splitting dimensions.
She was turning more real when I touched her to show how to position her legs.
I glimpsed at the red pubic hair seeing the pink flesh of her vaginal lips.
I couldn't focus on my work. Could the “female anatomy” destroy the temple of magic I was erecting for the eight months?
I returned to my easel and continued working. She was fidgeting changing poses uncomfortable this something hurting that... But it was only natural, she was sitting naked on a plain hard wooden chair. She was sliding from one side of the chair to another. I was buzzed from wine and couldn’t work, but I tried to complete my work just to annoy these assholes who screwed up my day. First work was washed off with turpentine and I wiped up the canvas dry with a rag.
I was sketching now not with a charcoal but brushing in umber. It resulted in an interesting tonality and I was captured again. The model squirming on her hard chair complained.
"Yo, why don’t you lay her down, what is she suffering for?" Asked Alex, "Lay her the fuck down, why not."
Right! I thought a little and told her to lay on the stage. Underneath her I spread some drapery.
After few wine glasses I took off my sweater, my cheeks were on fire. Hers too. I unbuttoned my shirt, my blood was boiling, the body was washed with the warmth.
The heater was moved away.
"So true that wine warms you up," she said to Alex.
"Jay, so tell me how to lay her down there. Sit, sit, you poor thingy, I'll assist you" And he jumped on the stage. "Do you want her legs spread this way?" he asked opening
up her legs so that her whole anatomy was showing.
"Is this ok for you?" He winked at me: "Is it good?"
"Oh no, can’t show it like this at the mid-semester show." Thinking some I added: " Let it be, lift her leg a little higher, like this. Turn her head down."
"Like this?" He kissed her on the lips.
"Alex, the fuck you're doing, I don’t have any time."
"Work, keep drawing, go on!" he said. "We won’t disturb you."
I was outraged after I just washed everything off my canvas ready to work, but this wasn't going anywhere. I kept asking Alex what did he mean by not disturbing me when he messed everything up. I heard the girls laughing trills. "For real, he is ill!"
"The sick can be cured." Insisted Alex. "Will hill him." He slurred.
Of course, I own them my very life. If it weren't for them –- that’s it, finito.
Kissing her on the lips and winking at me Alex continued bugging me: “Is this right?”
For like ten minutes I was staring in the infinity in the emptiness… Then I yelled: "Why are you sucking her? Get away from her, let her lay there quietly."
Only to hear some nonsensical mumbling.
"But I want you to work on the position, is this position right?"
"Right, just fuck off of her."
Meanwhile Kuz, I noticed, was taking off his pants. He said: “Let him go fuck himself. Motherfucker is gonna fuck us up today, if he doesn’t want it, so fuck it.”
Now I thought I knew what they wanted from me.
I saw Alex’s naked butt as he laid on the stage, banging the girl and his ass wiggled.
I started sketching their nude asses.
My consciousness was still in the process of transforming.
I thought of how interesting were their poses.
Lorenzo came up to me and took the brushes from my hands placing all in my field easel he closed up.
"Listen, J-man, you’re being a fucking buzzkill. Go draw some vases, fuck off to another studio. You don’t want it. For free?"
I didn't understand him what did he mean. He explained:
"What do you see Alex is doing right now?"
"He is fucking his girlfriend." I said.
Lorenzo continued:
"Whose girlfriend? What we have here is a
scientist, from the med school who is helping us in our artistic quests, to understand the core of anatomy not only from the outside but from the inside. I recommend you, in order to comprehend, as you must know, you can only know the truth from the inside, experiencing the inside, to understand the outside. That’s why I seize the brushes. Here is another glass of wine. Drink!"
I looked at him as a doctor listening to his drunken bullshit.
"The most important thing for you is to understand from the inside. See, you can’t understand it from the outside, it’s not how things are done."
"Yes knowing the internal anatomy helps, take a muscle, body doesn’t exist without muscles." I agreed.
"Hell yeah, yeah… ha ha…that’s what I am going about. Look how Alex is working how he is learning."
I looked at the bare ass's motions back and forth, at the girl who was lifting her legs and actively moving her hips. Alex jumped off, wiped up his cock with the drapery, he also wiped out the girl. “Who is next?”
Kuz was kissing her from one side, when Lorenzo said:
"He worked very hard today, he must learn from the inside. You see, because he just can’t break through the inside."
When Kuz was mounting her, Lorenzo spanked him loudly:
"You can wait, the man needs the muse, get it? Understanding the Muse comes only from the inside.." They all bust into laughter.
Lorenzo nearly helped my cock inside the girl cheering on: "Just do it, little one, everything is gonna be great. Honey, turn him back into a soldier that we've lost."
"The man is gone, the man known yesterday is not the man you meet, forever, around the corner, in London or in the street..." chanted Nick appearing from nowhere. He continued slurring his poems.
Hearing the noise I didn’t know what’s going on as I kissed her breasts.
"Feel the forms." I heard the racket near by as I was buzzing off the wine and licking the girl's body. On the other side Lorenzo had joined in groping her breasts. To be more at ease I moved her body closer to the stage’s edge. I was on top.
I didn't hear any sounds of music, the entry door was covered with the draperies as the orgy just steamed up for the whole night.
I woke up on the stage from loud knocking.
The art students asked me what happened to the busted still life set.
I exhaled my dragon breath to hear no more questions. Took my coat and left the building. Walking the street I met Alex.
"Your face is not yet blushed, your eyes are a bit foggy, can’t say anything after the sleepless night. Like Cures Like."
He grinned getting money out of his pocket. "Let us get some treatment."
We walked to the known spot for aching heads gathering.
This is another instance of my trying to learn a new kind of lighting using off camera flash. The fact that it involves wine is just a happy coincidence. As I understand it, dark field means that a highly reflective surface, like glass is photographed against a dark background with the subject being wrapped and outlined with the white light from the light source, which is behind the dark background.
Strobist info: For this image, I placed the glass on a piece of dark cloth, with a piece of black foam board directly behind it, leaning against the softbox that contained a YN560 flash in manual mode. This was triggered by a Yongnuo RF-603N transceiver.
On June 5, 2012, Hinode captured these stunning views of the transit of Venus -- the last instance of this rare phenomenon until 2117. Hinode is a joint JAXA/NASA mission to study the connections of the sun's surface magnetism, primarily in and around sunspots. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Hinode science operations and oversaw development of the scientific instrumentation provided for the mission by NASA, and industry. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., is the lead U.S. investigator for the X-ray Telescope.
Image credit: JAXA/NASA/Lockheed Martin
Original images: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/venus_transit_hinode.html
Read more about Hinode:
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/index.html
p.s. You can see all of our Hinode photos in the Hinode Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/sets/72157606297030945/
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These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
another instance of the dramatic difference of open and shut wings . This is a blue morpho-- you can catch just a glimpse of the blue due to a slightly damaged wing. Normally none is visible when the wings are closed.
want to see the full glorious blue of the open wings? That photo is linked here