I’ve been called out on some blog I had not heard of before for a comment that I never made. The comment was apparently left by someone else named Sean, but the link provided goes to a blogger profile that is not mine. While I didn’t leave the comment, I’m certainly in agreement with it and feel badly that I didn’t think of it first.
I’m not interested in debating the global warming aspects of this post. Either you’re intelligent enough to follow and understand the math presented at climateaudit.org, or you’re not.
What irks me is the following:
Wow a nature photographer who is also anti-environmentalist. What an interesting contrast, I wonder how he reconciles that?
I’m not a nature photographer. I am a fine-art photographer who occasionally includes what could be called nature photographs in my oeuvre. No reconciliation is necessary.
One of the recurring themes in my work is the ephemeral nature of man’s presence on this planet. It doesn’t take too many walks through the prairies where I live to realize just how easily man’s accomplishments are reabsorbed into the earth. Pioneer homesteads collapse and rot. Stone buildings crumble. Metal vehicles and equipment rust into nothingness. Nature will triumph and erase all our works, good and bad, save for the odd trace left to be found by whatever species replaces us long after we’re gone.
So I’m not worried about climate change or any other kind of change. If nature can be described in a single word, that word is “change”. My job is to preserve slices of time in photographic amber, to capture them before the change comes upon them and they’re gone forever. I’m not documenting nature, I’m documenting the present and attempting to hide it away from nature. This is obviously a far cry from nature photography. [spit]
The person who made this judgment evidently didn’t look very hard at my work or make any effort at understanding it.
Um. Holy shit. Nobody dusted here while I was gone? ‘Cuz the damn dust bunnies have gone feral.
Help!
The Urban Refugee is going on hiatus. I won’t say that I’m shutting down the blog because I may come back to it, but it won’t be anytime soon. My interests lie elsewhere, mainly with all matters photographic. It’s what I think about and what I want to talk about.
Some time back, before the layoff and resulting flight from civilization, my wife and some friends and I launched a photography eZine. We only ever published a single (albeit very well received) issue. It’s unfinished business that I need to get back to, and that’s where I’ll be expending my energy in the future.
See you later, alligator.
My daughter reminds me of myself when I was younger.
Unfortunately.
I gave up amphetamines, alcohol, and tobacco simultaneously back in the spring of ‘92. I was told — later on — that I could have gotten a job at Benjamin Moore holding paint cans given how violently I shook for the first month. I sort of remember the shaking. And the DTs. I don’t remember having headaches quite as bad as the ones I’m suffering from right now, however.
The caffeine withdrawal proceeds apace, and all of you can bugger off for another week. Take the goddamn sun with you, please, as it’s sending daggers of light through the back of my skull.
I saw the Coffee Nazi yesterday morning. She says I have to completely cut out caffeine. My heart has bad wiring and stimulants make it twitchy. When it gets twitchy my pacemaker interprets the twitching as the heart beating and it stops pacing me. Except that my heart isn’t really beating so I wind up with practically no pulse. This tends to happen at bad moments like when I’m up on a ladder causing me to wake up a moment later with my feet sticking out of a snow drift.
It certainly doesn’t help that I’m hopelessly caffeine addicted. Calling my regular caffeine intake “excessive” would be charitable. I’d bathe in the stuff if I could afford it. I’d take it intravenously if I wasn’t scared of needles. I love my coffee.
Anyone who doesn’t enjoy having obscenities screamed at them in the dark tongue of Mordor is advised to stay the hell out of my way for the next two weeks until I’m past the worst of the withdrawal symptoms.
So… My daughter did her grade one readiness test in kindergarten and came out with a 97% score. She would have finished even higher, but one of the questions on the test involved the steps from taking a picture to creating a photograph.
Ashlyn is used to my doing portraits of people, so instead of choosing the end product — the picture — she chose the family being posed for the picture. She knew this was the next logical step and even the teacher admitted to my wife that Ashlyn picked the right answer once it was explained. Apparently she does exceptionally well with reading and writing for her age, too.
Me so proud.
This afternoon while my daughter was playing with her create-a-word flip book…
“S. I. N.”
“Ssssss. Sssssiiiiiiii. Sssssssiiiiiiiiiiinnnnn.”
“Sin. SIN!”
“Dad, what does sin mean?”
“A sin is when someone has more fun than they’re supposed to.”
“Oh, I’m a good sinner then!”
I’m so proud of her.
*sniffle*
Today officially makes it 15 years since I put the plug in the jug and quit drinking. I’m going to celebrate by…working. Got no choice on that — it’s finally out of the -20 to -30 range meaning that I can catch up on my backlog of satellite dish installs. Bleh.
Brief update…
The more things change, the more they stay the same, right? I just realized that I put my underwear on inside-out this morning.
Carry on.
