TOUGH GUY COMPETITION

Tough Guy claims to be the world’s most demanding one day survival ordeal.

The original, held in Perton near Wolverhampton, is organised in England by former British Army Officer Billy Wilson (Mr Mouse), who claims nobody has ever finished all the course according to his extremely demanding rules. Taking place at the end of January, Tough Guy consists of an eight country mile run including an assault course. Running the course involves risking barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, hypothermia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones. Before running the course you must sign a “death warrant”, this states that you accept the risks and run the course of your own choice and can not claim in the case of injury. Due to the risks first aid is provided by St. John Ambulance.

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Doncs això, el meu germà Pep, Pintor, que fa una exposició a Manresa i convida a tot-hom a la inauguració.

My brother Pep, Painter , will be exhibing his latest works in Manresa, opening Saturday April 29th.

Sometimes everything.   Being a nature photographer, sometimes I question whether it is better to be literal about the subject matter in labeling an image, or try to be a bit more creative and give it a unique ‘figurative’ name.   Especially with my rock abstracts, I wonder if a figurative name would impose too much interpretation upon a viewer, instead of just letting them form their own vision.   Especially because many of these abstracts are simply a combination of graphical elements that attracted my eye - and sometimes nothing much deeper than that.   Other times I do actually see something within these patterns, and it gives more meaning to an image to label it as such.

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Listening to Brooks Jensen’s podcast (LW0412 - Which ruler should we use?) brought to mind all sorts of concepts that I think about often when evaluating images.   He brings forth the question of how we measure the quality of photographs.  Is it against the historical masters or perhaps the pictures we see in a magazine or book?   While Brooks questions which ruler to use, I often wonder just how many we need to have to carry around.   After all, in the world of measurements, we have metric rulers, standard ‘english’ units rulers, rulers with finer increments than others, some certified for accuracy.   This question can come up every time we press the shutter.   The rulers for an image may entirely depend on the context of their intended use and how we wish to evaluate our own images.

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“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” - Dorothea Lange 

 

This is one of my favorite quotes because it pretty much sums up the impact photography has had upon me.   I have kept it on my index welcome page for that very reason.   I have noticed though, however, that once you start to ’see’ like a photographer - it is hard to stop doing so.   Perhaps this is a bit detrimental to being just a normal person.  :-)    You appreciate things for very different reasons than some others.   Your mind ends up processing everything in terms of light quality, shape, forms, and textures, along with all the relationships between them.   A rock is no longer just a rock.

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I am so very ready for winter to be over with.  Even though I have accumulated some unique images during the winter months,  this year in particular I just haven’t much of the motivation to get out.    Michigan has been through a roller-coaster ride this season - with frequent snow storms followed by spring like days then plunging again below freezing.  Crazy stuff.   We are yearning for some consistency here.     I don’t even want to get into how pitiful the roads have become with new record potholes being found every day.   Oddly other states, other countries with the same freeze / thaw conditions have pristine roads, yet our climate is always the excuse for why they are so bad.

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Happy Leap Day everyone.   Unfortunately, something that will not be returning in 4 years is Polaroid film.   It has only been a couple of weeks since the company announced they would no longer be making it.   I listened to another story about it today on NPR.   Not only is that huge Polaroid camera amazing, but I also found some of the comments interesting in the story.

“Dorfman says the “seduction” of the digital camera — the ability to take picture after picture until snapping a good one — does not mean it’s actually a better process.

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Getting a new computer can be a great source of fun, as well as a lot of work in migrating all of your software and data over.  Adding a new computer with a new type of operating system… you would think it compounds the work.  But actually it has been much easier than I expected.  A lot of people worry about software expenses in such a move from PC to Mac.   They can add up depending on the applications you use most.   My most heavily used applications are from Adobe;  Photoshop, Lightroom, and Dreamweaver, and are probably the most costly to buy outright.

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Some of the samples I have been photographing are nothing short of amazing in so many ways. I have added a couple more Pietersite pictures and a new one, Rose Plume Agate photos. To contemplate how nature formed something so absolutely fascinating to look at, the fact that these patterns probably formed millions of years ago, and here I am today portraying them is just mind boggling. One of the best parts is that I am only scratching the surface on the possibilities with these pieces of stone and probably earning a junior geologist ranger badge. How do they look under different types of lighting? What if I apply even more magnification? How do the patterns react to different filters? I have really only started.

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Wow, my first post from a MacPro… I am kinda teary eyed.  :)   I am still in the process of migrating data and files from my PC and am quite happy with my decision thus far.   There are some statements from Mac users on various things where it ultimately comes down to “It just works.”   I have to say I have had a few of those experiences so far.   It is pretty obvious that a lot of attention has been given to the entire experience by Apple.    The first time you turn the computer on you are presented with a little video show saying “welcome” in about 20 different languages in front of a little light show.   It’s not a big deal, but that small human touch that is nice to see.   Those small touches are everywhere, and I am seeing that they all add up to the complete experience. Networking :  Home networks can always be a somewhat tempermental beast to deal with (or at least what I am used to).   But I hooked my Mac up and was quite pleased to see it was automatically seeing the shared folders and drives I had been using with my PC.   No special settings, no configuring or fiddling - I plugged in the cable and it worked.  It made it easy to start copying some files over through the network.Dell Printer!  I have a Dell Color laser printer that is also on the network, and the Mac didn’t see this right away.   Dell actually makes a Mac driver for this particular printer (!) - so all it took was to download it, figure out how to “unStuff” a “StuffIt” file, and it installed complete with a icon that is a graphic of the actual printer, not a generic one. Adobe Lightroom :  I have Adobe Lightroom up and running, and my image catalog already transferred.  That also was quite easy.   One nice thing about Lightroom is that it already has cross-platform licensing.  So I simply downloaded the Mac trial version, and entered my previous serial number from my “PC version.”   Sweet!   I was also able to copy my database over and all my presets.   I did encounter one problem with the PC folder names for the previews - they transferred over as a single file to the Mac instead of a folder.  Have to figure that one out yet.Email  :  This one had me a bit nervous on transferring my old email over.  It was a combination of old email from Outlook Express, imported into Thunderbird, the program I have been using for the past few years.   Well, Thunderbird has a Mac version, and I noticed the Mac Mail application has a menu item for Import from Thunderbird.   Sweet again!   I copied my Thunderbird profile folders over to my Mac, ran Thunderbird for Mac just to see if it imported - it did!  Then a run of Mail - and it imported all the Thunderbird email no problem.   So I will probably end up ditching Thunderbird and using the Mac Mail app since it seems to be integrated with a few other programs within OS X. Don’t shut me down, only sleep :  One of the more dramatic differences are startup/shutdown times versus what I am used to on PCs.   Everything I have read state it is a rare occasion to actually need to reboot a Mac.  Most of the time it just sleeps.   This means it is nearly instant on / instant off.   I grew fond of that real quick.   

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