Nature photography, art, environment
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I happened to come across this website created by Fujifilm that is really quite impressive. It is not only very well designed, educational, and interactive, but carries a great message about in preservation of our forests for 100 and 1000 years to come. I believe for every bit of forest we lose, we give up a part of our souls. Someday we may find there is little left to give, and we will have to live with what we have become. Kudos Fuji.
See you in the woods!
I finally got out shooting today after a bit of a dry spell. I was pleasantly treated to a rather large number of ducks congregating, migrating, partying.. whatever causes so many of them to get together like this. I have often wondered from some birding reports when they report thousands of a species present – how exactly do they count them? Is a certain group guessed to be 100, 1000? How many do you think bump into each other once in awhile? I think large flocks of birds are one of the most intriguing things to watch – just to comtemplate the numbers, the synchonicity they move in, and how they tend to act as a single ‘body’ at times.
From this experience this morning, there were easily millions.
Over the past week I have come across quite a few discussions about Adobe’s announcement of the Photoshop CS3 Beta availability. The actual release will not be until next year sometime, but they are giving everyone a peak pretty early. Afterall, this is Version 10.0 of perhaps one of the most significant advancements in photography in the past few decades aside from the dawn of digital imaging itself.
I started using Photoshop at version 2.5 for Windows – which I still have on the original 3.5 inch floppy disks. I hang on to them just for posterity sake, but who knows – maybe they will sell on Ebay for $600 in 2020 as a collectors item. But given I have seen Commodore 64’s selling for $1 each at some garage sales, I won’t hold my breath on the worth of old technology in the future. I haven’t invested in every single upgrade they have had since then, but I will say every one I have done has been well worth the money. And, depsite using it for so long, I still believe I have only scratched the surface of its capabilities.
Photoshop means a lot of things to different people, both good and bad. Certainly the term of an image being “Photoshopped” has taken on a general perception of negativity. For others, it has perhaps opened doors they never thought possible. And those in the middle view it as simply another tool available to them to bring their vision to life, which is where I tend to be.
What continues to amaze me is the fact for every task you want to accomplish in Photoshop – there are usually about a dozen or more ways of doing it. Of course this then tends to lead to thousands of discussions, arguments, and even business opportunities to prove this way is better than that way. Many software plug-ins are simply this – they automate and simplify the path of perhaps a more complicated or tedious route by native functions within the program.
A new release of Photoshop also tends to mean you are about to test the limits of your current computer hardware. I believe it is pretty common for a surge of RAM sales, even new PCs, to follow a new release of the program. One of the more interesting things to watch for this release will be perhaps a surge in the new MacPro systems that are capable of running both Windows and MacOS. A lot of people are pretty frustrated with the PC/Windows world, including myself – and this definitely gives them an out without worrying about so many cross-functionality issues.
Here is a link to an interesting video of some of the new features in the beta release.
When we hear the words contraband, militias, informants, mafia, and the black market – perhaps the first images that appear in our minds are of drug smugglers and arms dealers.Â. But did you know that the illegal smuggling of wildlife is thought to be only just behind drugs and arms?Â. Â. Did you know that all of these words, and many more violent ones apply to the growing black market around wildlife, including endangered species?Â. Â. How about a shop that will ship a stuffed giant panda over the internet for $408,000 US?Â. And how about poachers that use anti-personnel mines to protect their traps from rangers or even disable their prey?
All of this is going on every single day, and we are fortunate to have organizations like WildAid that help in enforcement, intelligence information, and the ultimate crackdown on the thugs that are profiting in illegal wildlife trading.Â. Â. I am simply in awe of what these folks do, with their field agents putting their own lives on the line several times over to stop such things from happening.
So please, this holiday season, when we are thinking about being generous – perhaps some of our dollars are better spent helping stop such a horrifying market from growing even further.Â. Â. Please also sign the global pledge as a sign of your support and passion towards this cause.Â. Thanks!
Occasionally I tend to wander through my image archives and discover quite a few images actually that I haven’t processed for the website. Just like a bird preening, perhaps there is a grain of sand I haven’t plucked out yet. A friend jokingly said one day – “hey, you post these old pictures and people think you have been to new places?” Well, the picture may be “old” from when the shutter was pressed, but certainly new ‘to the world’ if I have never shown it before. Is it considered somehow uncouth in the photoblogger world to dig into the past?
Western Gull preening, La Jolla, CA Apr 2004
And I have a lot of them! Not necessarily all of them I will show – they can find those when I am dead. Think about it, my online nature photography gallery has 1296 images in it – this one makes 1297. The image catalog number is 8327 – so there are 7,000 images I have cataloged that aren’t shown yet, plus a lot more that are listed as uncataloged. I don’t think I will ever have the time to show them all if I wanted to. It makes you think about the volume of photography out there, not only in our own lives, but multiply that by the billions of people on this planet.
Digital photography certainly has contributed to the volume of images shared, not only taken. Photoblogs, photo sharing sites, online albums and galleries – how could someone possibly see them all? And if you see an image that may be 2 years old or 50 years old – is it any less new to your eyes? And perhaps with so much photography out there, it is easy to become too saturated – and perhaps only the occasional few will actually stick in our heads.
I have mentioned in the past that I have been learning acoustic guitar for about the past 2 years. While I know I have made progress, I can easily see I have such a long way to go to be a good player. It is both a driver of determination at times, as well as a source of discouragement.
But often I do reflect upon and compare my learning stage with my guitar compared to the learning process and the stages I have gone through in my photography. While not a complete list, I often think about these parallels;
If you have similar comparisons, I’d love to read about them..
