Michael’s grumpy world commentary weblog.
I’m bahaaack!
Click on the image to see me a few minutes ago, taking a picture of myself. Lit with a single studio strobe on camera left, fired into an umbrella; the strobe was fired by a set of pocketwizards; camera on manual,metered at 100iso at 1/125th at f/5.6.
And I took this with a 17-40 4L lens set to 30mm. On a full frame camera: who says you need a 100mm lens for portraits?
I just travelled from the UK to the Netherlands, and found that Heathrow was a more unpleasant experience than ever - but with a ray of hope.
As seen above, the early morning queue for security stretched throughout the terminal. And when half an hour later I got to the security hall, I was turned back: I had two small cases (one with PC, one with photo equipment), and only one piece of luggage is accepted. There are no exceptions whatsoever to this rule. After some surrealistic conversation about how my two thin PC bags would be one if I Velcro’d them together tightly enough, I was turned back (just try to buy Velcro at an airport at 5:30am).
The ray of hope was that check-in staff at British Midland then took pity on me. They tell me that security at Heathrow is “ridiculous” and that “those guys have an “a-ittude problem”. So one of the BD staff took me back past the queue and had a quiet word with an acquaintance at the staff-only security point, who let me through.
The irony is that both these kind people who helped me bend the rules of security, the BD staff member and his security friend, were Muslim and greeted each other with “Salam Aleikum/Waleikum Salam”.
Of course there was a second security point where everything had to be x-rayed again, but I will spare you the details. Stay away at all cost from Heathrow.
Weather in England this morning was, well, English:
Weather in Holland today is Dutch: like English, but with less rain.
I am at Toronto Pearson airport, on my way to London, where I arrive at 6am and my meeting starts at 8am. The plane is a new 777, so we will see if I am impressed.
This evening I spent 5 hours shooting a Lacrosse team.
I was one of three photographers shooting kid after kid.
Recipe:
Perhaps surprisingly, I found this a lot of fun. Interacting with kids from trusting four-year olds to cynical 14-year olds and getting them to pose and to smile was a buzz, and doing it quickly (10-20 seconds per kid, one shot each) was a fun challenge. Of course girls smiled and posed while the cynical boys acted tough, and 4-9 year olds were cooperative while 10-14 year olds wanted to be tough. But tell a boy that he looks two year older than he is, and he smiles. Guaranteed.
It must be frustrating when musicians write a hit for a commercial, without actually releasing the record or making any money off it. That happened here - many people (me included) trying to find out what song that was. And it’s just a 30-second written-for-this-commercial tune… here the original on youtube.
In today’s national Post, commentators and letter writers reacted to an article by an atheist.
Barbara Kay wrote that she “[knows] many atheists who are passionate advocates for social justice. In every case they grew up in the morality and ideals of Judaism and Christianity”. What a condescending thing to say, that one needs to be a believing Jew or Christian to be moral! Many passionate advocates for social justice are of course neither. Bertrand Russell (atheist), Gandhi (Hindu) and the Buddha (Buddhist, one supposes) come to mind. The opposites are also easy to find: Stalin and Hitler both grew up in Judeo-Christian homes - Stalin even went to Church school.
In the same issue of that paper, letter writers talk about past societies “red with blood”, where “an atheist has nothing more than personal opinion by which to say that is wrong” and where doing good is left to “nothing more than personal choice”. Leaving aside for a moment all the misery and bloodshed caused by religious people over the millennia, surely there IS nothing more than personal choice and opinion.
Religion is entirely based on such opinion - unsupported and untested opinion, since there is no more evidence for a God than for “invisible fire-breathing dragons in my garage”, as Carl Sagan put it. These letter writers confuse their wish for a God with the existence of one. They then fail to see that moral choices made from personal conviction are much more powerful than moral choices made because someone (God, preacher or Ms Kay) tells you how to think.
Everything is based on personal opinion, even the existence of a God, and dogma of the sort espoused by those contributors today is a medieval anachronism, and is not helpful in creating a better society. Ms Kay is entitled to her personal opinion, of course, but I am entitled to mine: which is that superstitious religious belief has caused more misery, injustice and death over the centuries than any other evil - except perhaps nationalism.
In Chicago, you have the right to refuse to tip, but only if all the conditions are not met:
Nice. I especially love the one-way respect and courtesy. Wonder what politics gave rise to that little list.
Chicago O’Hare is like something out of a horror Sci-Fi movie, all those thousands of people shuffling pas each other without speaking; United Airlines staff behave like camp guards, and their 737s are ancient. Nevertheless, I still had a good trip yesterday.
One advantage of Economy is that people talk.
I sat next to a Christian-Lebanese American Real Estate agent from Orange County and an Asian-Canadian model who was returning from six months in Singapore. The agent was chatty as any good seller should be. The model was not just young and gorgeous, but she was smiley and chatty too. She told us that she had just been strip-searched while transiting in the USA.
She thought the thing quite amusing, but forgive me for thinking that young and gorgeous models probably get strip-searched more often than grannies, and forgive me for mistrusting the motivation.
Anyway, it is always good to talk to people and in Economy, you talk more than in business class.
Long exposure, zoomed while shooting; click for large imae:
The BBC published one of my photos last year as a weekly perspective on the world image, here (it is the second one):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4950024.stm
The funny thing is how I found it. A link called Google Image Ripper, here [link]. A very inconsistent search (searching my name finds about 5 totally random pictures of mine and many that have nothing to do with me), but it appears to find things that Google image search itself does not find. Using some kind of formal or informal API, I imagine.
