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If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake
Morton Arboretum in Spring of 1998
Shot on Fujichrome Astia 100 Slide Film with a Pentax K1000. Scanned with adjustments made in Photoshop.
Isn't she a beauty? No, not the photo, this red-backed spider, Latrodectus hasselti. The photo is rubbish. What? Did you expect something better when I was lying on my back and peering up into a control box filled with valves, pipes, filters, wires, solenoids and three messy red-backed spiders. Think yourself lucky that I did this well!
We are all born lucky. The odds against our conception, birth, and survival to adulthood are astronomical. But we did, so let's get on with it.
How many times have I heard: "But you live so far away…couldn't you come here"? Yes, but it's just as far for me, and if you're whining like that, what motivation are you offering? Then there's the "Oh, no you have so many 'poisonous' things out to kill me". The latter might have a grain of truth. Could it be your whining that's motivating that emotion? I don't condone such thoughts, by the way, and we can explore that, if you like.
We have sharks: great white, tiger, bull. All can give you a nasty nip. Consider this: they are cosmopolitan species, not unique to this Great South Land. Could it be the habit of popping into the sparkling warm waters on golden sandy beaches that puts bite-sized temptation in their fishy way more frequently that if the water is murky, brown and frigid? No one will force you to come here and enjoy yourself. That's up to you.
Besides, horses, bees, domestic dogs and lightning kill more people than sharks. It's got something to do with their disinclination to come ashore for a snack. There are no extant predators that fill that role. No wolves, tigers, lions or bears. Okay, there are drop bears. You might get a concussion, a compression fracture of your vertebrae, or a nasty fright. I haven't seen one for a while. You should be safe.
Snakes? Arguably the most dangerous snake in the World is the eastern brown snake. Sea snakes are pretty bad too. But because you've decided to avoid the water, well, stop worrying about them. I've been struck at multiple times by brown snakes. Not once has any of them connected. I wouldn't be writing this if they had; possibly. One bit Bessie outside my door. With a bit of help, she lived. Dangerous? I guess. But you don't see one every day, just occasionally, and usually as they are slithering about on some mission involving a rodent they can swallow. Never has one hunted me for food, or attempted to swallow me. Don't think you can escape by going into the water. They are good swimmers too. Instead, stand still and wait till they go away.
Crocodiles, blue ringed octopus and stingers? See shark, above. Yes you might be stalked by a saltwater crocodile on land, if you are that clumsy that you repeat habitual behaviours, day after day, in the same place, and the salty is hungry. They can wait for you to do something dumb. The slow metabolism that enables that patience also means you just need to go somewhere cooler to avoid them. Oh, and yes, as you are already avoiding water: somewhere cold.
Mass casualty events? There aren't any active volcanoes anywhere you'd know. Ever heard of, err Heard Island? No, I guessed that. If you rank those that have happened, the massacre of our continent's original human inhabitants tops the list; multiple times. Ship wrecks are up there, and hostile foreign aggression, once; other times, not so much. The toll against POW escapees was bigger. Some floods have been deadly, and there's one nasty earthquake that hit a built-up area. That was ugly, and a bridge collapsed when a commuter train hit a bridge stanchion. A family member attended in an official capacity. That left many scars.
Our biggest civilian incident was a deranged individual with a semi-automatic weapon in 1996. Those weapons are banned now. And recently, there was another incident. In between? Nothing on the scale that wears the label mass casualty. Why? You might have to visit to understand that, and take note of the policy and practice which limits the likelihood of these things.
Here's some numbers about mass casualties. You watch the news. You've already seen stuff around the world. Here, we've had two events in 29 years. Every loss was someone, a person of equal value. They worked, paid taxes, studied, had aspirations, were part of the economy and society. We mourn them all. Just in 2025, this tragic year, there has been one event too many in a country of around 27 million lives. One per capita: 1/27,000,000. In a socially comparable country, there has been a mass casualty frequency of 1/875,000 people. Where would you feel safer? Thirty one times safer?
Back with the wildlife, we also have the nastiest venomous spider in the World. This isn't it. The Sydney Funnel-web is endemic to the sandstone country of the Sydney Basin. That's a big area! Yet almost as many people have seen a drop bear as has encountered one of these spiders. They can kill you, as sure as a drop bear can. I'd rather take my chances with the spider. The last verified death by envenomation by a red-backed spider was in 1956. They are so timid, they'll roll up and play dead if you poke them. I poked this one, and the other female here in this control box too. The male ran off somewhere; such is their bravado. I picked both of those girls up and took them away where I could not harm them, and let them go. My greatest discomfort was negotiating the return to vertical after lying supine to get this picture!
Perception and reality can be divergent.
Yes I posted some similar color shots earlier the year but have been on black and white processing this week so...
After chatting with Darren Hopkins. and getting inspired on his amazing new take on the orb.Thought i would have a play with Orbs again. Not sure about them yet. think i need to iron out a few issues.
this is for a project, inspired by The Great Gatsby. I convinced my AP language teacher to make the final project after the AP exam a creative project so I could take photos. so now I'm taking photos about self discovery and actualization.
What do you see? The end of days or just the beginning? Fear or enlightenment?
2012 has just begun. Who knows what this year will bring? Hopefully the good will outweigh the bad in the coming year, but even if it doesn't, those bad experiences are the ones that build our strength, make us value what we have, and provide us with creative fodder.
Maybe I'm getting older and wiser because I'm starting to think that there are no bad experiences; they are just a matter of perception...and action.
(Shot on an iPhone 3GS with the Hipstamatic app: Salvador 84, Ina's 1935)
A Gen4 Toyota pickup from the mid-1980s shows off its own kind of beauty with the natural colors of the surrounding flora.
I took this picture in 2014 in Strasbourg, France. I lived there for a few years. It conveys my perception of things getting old, in the litteral sense and the metaphorical one. Litteral because there can only be new things if there are old things, and so any new thing make other things feel old. Metaphorical because it was time for me to move on. It is the visual representation of a kind of melancholy i felt at the time and wanted to manifest.
What seems so obvious to us, may not be true at all. Life can be what it is not; or what we don't think it is.
Sometimes it isn't that easy to distinguish between flying and reality. Is this how we percieve our own conscience?
Hay veces que no es tan fácil distinguir entre volar y la realidad. ¿Es así como percibimos nuestra propia consciencia?
This is an Elk that lives on as art, after the end of its normal life.
It was in its own room, and it was so bright white, it was difficult to see where the ceiling was. I have edited this to raise the highlights even more so that the walls have disappeared, thus giving the image a heavenly floating mood befitting the end of its life. In doing so, the form of the body has been more defined.
See the following shots for a closer examination.
Kohei Nawa transforms the body of a taxidermic elk by covering it with transparent glass and resin beads, transforming our perception of the original creature.
The surface of the animal is fractured, magnified and distorted through the images captured inside the spheres. Viewed this shell, the elks textures and colours are filtered through, and dissipated into myriad individual surfaces, like the pixels on a computer screen, aiming to destabilise our sense of what is real and what is virtual.
This sculpture is called Pixcell-Elk#2
See below for more images.
Endings and Beginnings Theme