Stretching a bit

I've been doing a lot of photo work lately (honestly, it feels as if all I've been doing is the day to day of living, and photography).

On the way to Maia's, where I was going to clean the mice (she's on a two week set of trips to Ariz.), I saw a couple sets of flatcars on the rails. I like machines. I like trains. I had my camera with me. What could I do but a little bit of gentle trespass(the rights of way belong to the railroad, despite being open, they aren't public spaces).

I walked around the back end of the string (it was a good 1/3rd of a mile long, one end was enough), shot about a roll of film's worth of images. Since I've been shooting animals and flowers lately, and this was all angles and man-made, it was a different mindset.

Links


I like that one. It was one of the last I shot. Stepping back a bit and trying to show a little more of the human details which are lost in the close-up shots of trucks and wheels, and the like.

I also had a serendipitous mistake. I was doing some other work, for TKP and made a whole bunch of "styles" for my image editor, which meant things were crowded in that toolbar. Since I have a number of them which are no longer needed (they were special purpose, for clients), I purged them. A quirk of the application is that those styles were all applied to the image I was editing, which turned out like this:

Mistake


It's not anything I would have tried to make, but I like it (so I saved it as a style. We'll see how useful it is).

I've uploaded about 60 new pictures, as well as those. A lot of flowers, and a lot of B&W treatments of same. And squirrel is pretty cute.

Forget vanity

Natasha Richardson is dead. It was, probably, preventable.

1:Wear a helmet. Right there, she probably walks away from it. You may think helmets make you look silly. You may think they make you look scared. You may think they make you look less than completely competent.

Who cares? Really, why should you care?

I ride horses. I wear a helmet. I ride a bicycle. I wear a helmet. When I ride in a military vehicle, I wear a helmet. When I do technical climbing on live rock, I wear a helmet. When I rappel, I wear a helmet.

When I've fallen off of horses, and bicycles, and rocks... I've been lucky enough to only need to replace the helmet. It's pretty cruel of me. My friends and family miss out on the chance to visit me in hospital. I don't get to become an activist for those who are paralyzed; going before Congress to argue for more research.

You know what else they miss out on? My early death.

All I do is stimulate the economy by spending the money for another helmet; and providing more data to the manufacturers, so they can improve them (if your helmet maker does a deal, where they sell you a replacement at a reduced rate for returns of damaged helmets, do it. If they don't, send it to them anyway).


The second thing which was done wrong was to refuse medical attention.

Head injuries are deceptive. One can feel fine, and have a depressed fracture. The blood build pressure on the brain until, all of a sudden one falls down and dies. A concussion can be similarly fatal, hours after the injury. If you see stars, think about seeing a doctor. If you were traveling faster than your legs can propel, don't think about it, do it.