I’ve decided we’ve had enough of the B&W for now, so I’m going to switch to color. I’m hoping to keep shooting and posting new stuff but may have to resort to the archives on occasion.
One of our neighbor’s houses has a beautiful display of these orange lilies in front, and I snuck up the driveway before anyone was awake to catch me. 🙂
We awoke this morning to some dense fog, following the passing of the weather system that brought us all the rain over the last few days. I grabbed my camera for a walk and came back with a nice collection. No, I never get tired of shooting those power lines and towers. 🙂
TGIF and Happy Memorial Day Weekend!
“You are what you eat.” Or if you follow nutrition writer Michael Pollan, “You are what you eat eats.”
A quote from a 2011 book titled “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption” by Clay A. Johnson states “Our bodies are wired to love salt, fat and sugar. … Our minds are really wired to be affirmed and be told that we’re right. … Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right? Who wants to be informed when they can be affirmed? What we do is we tell our media that that’s what we want to hear, and our media responds to that by telling us what it is that we want, and sometimes that isn’t what’s best for us.”
A recent conversation got me thinking about our information diets and the many parallels there are with our food diets. If we aren’t careful and mindful about how we eat, we will too easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of product choices in grocery stores and restaurants. The choices we ultimately make are heavily influenced by a number of factors, but not insignificantly we are influenced by marketing. The food industry is a very powerful force in our lives, whether we realize it or not. All the advertising we see is just one of the many visible ways we are influenced. Product placement in stores, packaging and promotion are all marketing. It is up to each of us individually to sift through all those choices to determine what is best for us. It takes work and it isn’t easy. There are a lot of mixed messages out there, and they don’t necessarily point us in the right direction.
It’s no secret that the quality of our food directly influences our physical health. People who eat a lot of processed foods, regardless of source, tend in general to be less healthy than those who eat less processed food. Vegetarians and vegans, by some measures, appear to be more healthy than omnivores. But being an omnivore doesn’t necessarily mean you are unhealthy. There are nutritional needs that can be met by any kind of diet, but meeting those needs takes some figuring out.
However you care to characterize or categorize eating preferences, all of them have positives and negatives. The key, it seems, is to do enough research and gather enough information from sources you trust, to (a) figure out what works for you, and (b) find something that is sustainable and that results in a permanent behavior change that will ultimately provide the result you desire.
How is an “information diet” similar to a food diet? Food companies don’t make money promoting spinach, broccoli and carrots. They make money by promoting high profit items like processed foods and drinks. And they use all kinds of methods to convince us that it’s OK to spend our money on the stuff that makes them the most money. And they know what we want because we tell them. They track sales by all kinds of methods, including those “Frequent Shopper” cards that give us awesome discounts on products and gasoline. And you thought they were just being nice?
Media companies make money by selling us advertising and promoting agendas, which allows them to sell more advertising and promote more agendas. They know what we want because – knowingly or not – we tell them. The “Recommended for You” content we see on Facebook is a result of the stuff we look at and interact with on Facebook, plus what Facebook sees us look at when they follow us around the internet (yes, they do). Google makes their money by tracking the websites we visit, creating a profile of who they think we are and what they think we are interested in, then selling ads and promoting content that their data tells them should appeal to that profile. Television networks get their information from other sources, but still have a very good idea of who their target audience is. Want to know who a television show is aimed at? Pay attention to the advertisements.
Just like large portions of salt, sugar and fat kick up the flavor of food to appeal to diners, loud and confident blowhards in the media (I use ‘media’ to include television, the press and the internet in general) are tailoring their messages to appeal to their audience. Who is that audience? It’s the people who their data tells them will tune in. These media companies and individuals don’t necessarily have to provide factual information as long as they are saying what their audience tells them it wants to hear. Similarly, restaurants don’t necessarily have to be considered “good” just because they give you a lot of food or season their dishes heavily to cover up the fact that there is otherwise no flavor. After a while, people don’t know what real food tastes like because they haven’t tasted it. By the same token, people lose sight of what their own opinions are because their mental taste buds have been dulled by endless loud and confident media tailored to sell them someone else’s opinion or agenda.
We have a hard-enough time making informed decisions at the grocery store. There are way more sources of information available in the media, and the companies that serve up that information have lots of ways to send us to sources they think will appeal to us, even more ways than the food companies do. It’s up to us to determine what sources will suit our needs the best. To figure out what goes into our information diet. And we owe it to ourselves to do the same thing with our information intake that we do for our food intake. As I stated earlier, we need to do enough research and gather enough information from sources we trust, to (a) figure out what works for each of us, and (b) find something that is sustainable and that results in a permanent behavior change that will ultimately provide the result we each desire.
We need to strike a balance between what appeals to us and what is good for us. And while those are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there may sometimes be tough choices to make. Just like our nutritional balance needs to contain the right amount of essential nutrients, I think our informational balance needs to include a healthy connection to reality. We have to determine what balance is right for us. Yes, I suppose it’s possible to get by on carrots and water, at least for a short term. It’s also possible to go completely “off the grid” and eliminate all sources of information. But I don’t think either approach is healthy long-term. I do believe that disconnecting from a lot of media is a healthy start. A second idea would be choosing carefully where our information comes from. The internet and social media can be a cesspool if allowed to get out of hand.
For me personally, Kathy & I haven’t owned a television for years, because at some point we realized that it was running our lives and that we were scheduling things around “our shows.” I have accounts with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but I use them in a way that makes sense for me – primarily as a source of information that I decide I want. I mute or unfollow people who share stuff I’m not interested in. If I want to find out about conditions in a National Park or the status of a particular business, Twitter is often a good place for current information. I only follow a handful of people and organizations, and add or remove them as my needs require. My Instagram account is highly curated in terms of who I follow and who I allow to follow me. I use a browser with appropriate safeguards to keep these people from tracking my search history and to block ads, and use an alternative search engine that doesn’t track my inquiries. I use a VPN that hopefully keeps my internet provider and others from getting too much information about my habits. I’m still using Google for some mail and other functions, but one of my current projects involves looking for a suitable replacement. That is not an easy task! My ways are not perfect, but I’m pretty comfortable with the level of information I receive and it works for me.
This is a long post, but it is important for us all to think about. I’m not an expert by any means, and since this isn’t a term paper I haven’t filled it with all kinds of footnotes and references. But I’m confident that most of what I’ve written is true and accurate, because I’ve taken a lot of time to figure it out in a way that works for me. I look forward to any thoughts you have on the subject, either by comments on this post or an email directly to me.
Interesting times these are. According to Quora, the saying “May You Live in Interesting Times” is misattributed to Confucius. It was first used by Sir Austen Chamberlain in 1936, and later popularized through a speech by Robert F Kennedy in 1966. The phrase “live in interesting times” dates at least to the late 19th century. The “Chinese curse” element was likely added by Sir Chamberlain as an (effective) embellishment. There is no evidence of a Chinese origin.
When we’re not traveling, I’m usually content to be a homebody. Why is it then, when I’m told not to go out, I want to go out? When we saw Monday’s announcement that people should stop eating in restaurants, almost immediately followed by an announcement from our favorite fine dining establishment that they would be closing immediately, Kathy & I did the sensible thing and dashed out to our favorite Italian restaurant for pizza! That’s essential travel, right? 🙂
When I walked this morning, it was business as usual at our local Micky D’s and Eat Mo Chikn, but now we’re getting word that the governor has ordered all restaurants to close their dining rooms after 5:00 today – take out and drive through only. So it’s a good thing we brought home extra pizza! And a good thing we like to eat our own cooking!
The grocery stores should still be open, although there’s no telling what the shelves will look like. Kathy & I are well stocked with vittles to get through, although we’ll continue to shop as long as we’re able to get to the store.
The whole thing seems like a ridiculous overreaction from here at this point, but I know that we see a very small sliver of the world, and I know that we are – for the moment – mostly out of the epicenter of the exposure to this nasty bug. Hopefully we can keep it that way. A reminder like this video from people in Italy helps keep the perspective.
So we’re good for now. We’ve got food & wine, music, internet, LOTS of photography books to look through, and several thousand photos to process if I choose to. So I think as long as our neighbors don’t try to sing we’ll be able to get by just fine! I told Kathy earlier that, since the economy (and our retirement fund) has gone to sh1t, we might as well do our best to stay healthy and keep ourselves occupied while it has a chance to recover.
The links are from friend and photographer Jeff Curto’s blog. He and his wife are “stuck” in Italy (by choice – read the blog) and he has been posting about his time there. Because Italy is a few weeks ahead of us in terms of the virus, they are experiencing what we might have to endure if things progress in this country.
We’re also tracking the progress of some friends who have been on a world cruise. When the cruise line decided to shut down operations and send everyone home, they started looking for a place to dock. They are currently in the Pacific Ocean somewhere, headed to Australia, but Australia might not take them. The good thing is that they have been sailing since early January and no one on board has been exposed, so hopefully they will be able to land somewhere!
The photos are ones I’ve recently rediscovered from a macro workshop in 2009. I’d forgotten about them and am having a blast with the processing, especially using software technology that didn’t exist back then. Looking at these photos reminds me to get my macro lens back out! (And yes, a few of them have some nasty fringing from the closeup diopter I was using at the time. Others really do have pink edges!)
Panning with moving objects to convey a sense of speed and motion. I need to do more of this, although people can be weird about a guy standing on a street corner with a camera. Maybe now that I’m older they’ll just think I’m eccentric but harmless. 😉
I’ve been spending some time looking back through some of my earlier work with intentional blur. This is one from 2007.
We didn’t set out to book three cruises, honest! It just sorta…happened. 🙂
We had previously booked two weeks on Royal Caribbean’s (RCCL) Freedom of the Seas out of San Juan in January. The ship was scheduled to go to drydock for extended renovations the week after we were due to get off. But due to lots of reasons irrelevant to my post, Royal Caribbean needed to move the drydock back one week and cancelled the second of the two weeks. We didn’t want to travel all the way to Puerto Rico for just a week (our preference – lots of people do it), so we decided to cancel the first week, too. We re-used the plane tickets to go to San Juan this past November instead.
Because of the cancellation of the first week, we ended up with a credit that needed to be used by February, so we found a 5-night cruise on Brilliance of the Seas, another RCCL ship sailing out of Tampa. We had never sailed out of Tampa before, and figured with our credit that this would be an inexpensive way to take a short cruise and check out Tampa.
Meanwhile, friends of ours had booked a Carnival cruise out of Port Canaveral for the following week and “suggested” that we might want to go along. It doesn’t take much “suggestion” to get us interested in a cruise! So, we booked a cruise on that ship for the next week.
Our son Kevin likes to cruise also, and he has been sailing with Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL). He mentioned that he wanted to take a cruise in February and suggested (there’s that word again!) that it might be fun if we went together. So we checked around and found a cruise on Norwegian Dawn out of Tampa. But the catch was that there was a week’s gap between the two cruises, so we would need to find something to do for a week. In Florida, in February? Not hard to do.
We have been working on visiting different National Parks, and had never been to The Everglades. So we decided to find a place to stay in South Florida for a week, where we visited Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park and drove through some of the Florida Keys. More on those later. Then we drove back to Tampa to meet our son and take the third cruise. When it was all done we had logged about 3,000 car miles, who knows how many cruise miles, and about 4,000 photos!
A few thoughts:
– People ask us about the different cruise lines, and although it sounds like a cop-out, they are all good. Different lines tend to cater to slightly different demographics, but things like ship size, home port and cruise length tend to make a bigger difference than the name of the cruise line.
– We tend to prefer smaller ships and this was borne out on these cruises. The RCCL and NCL ships were each about the same size – approximately 2,000 passengers, while the Carnival ship was about 4,000 passengers.
– We’ve always assumed that shorter cruises would attract more of a party crowd, but the 5-night RCCL cruise was one of the most laid-back we’ve done, and seemed to have a very high number of repeat cruisers. The Diamond Club, a lounge for passengers with a certain level of cruises with the line, had so many people that it overflowed into an adjacent lounge. The Carnival and Norwegian cruises each had a high number of first-timers – a very interesting contrast.
– Cruise line food is very good regardless of the line. Dining choices are either fixed, with the same table and waiter at the same time each night, or flexible, where you eat where ever you want each night, but with a different waiter and different table each time. We have always preferred fixed seating, as we like to establish a relationship with our waiter. But one of the disadvantages of fixed seating is that a lot of the food has to be prepared at once and can sometimes be overdone. Flexible seating tends to be more cook-to-order, so the food is often fresher, hotter and usually properly done. This is especially important with fish!
– We really liked cruising out of Tampa and did it twice. The city is nice – much like Charlotte in terms of age and size, but on the water. The port is very easy to get in and out of, and parking is a snap.
I’m sure that’s more than anyone wants to read about my vacation, so I’ll leave it at that for now!
When Kathy & I were looking over information about the Everglades, we had noticed several references to a Nike Missile base located within the park. There wasn’t a lot information online, but once we got there we saw signs directing us toward the location and indicating that there were “open house” hours daily. So we decided to check it out.
As it turns out, there had been three Nike sites located within the Everglades as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the close-the-barn-door approach that was taken after the fact. There are several abandoned bunkers that are inaccessible due to asbestos contamination, an unused hanger and one that houses an actual but de-fused Nike missile.
It was an interesting side trip on an otherwise nature-oriented visit, but it was something unexpected in an otherwise natural habitat.
Kathy & I returned to home base this past Monday, and I’m currently halfway through the nearly 4,000 photos from our month-long adventure. I’ll be posting galleries to my Adobe Portfolio site (keep checking for updates!) and expect to have some more stories to tell here on the blog in the near future. Hang in there – I’m working on it! 😉
I’ve been going back through old image folders looking for unprocessed photos that are worth spending time with. I recently came across some photos from a visit to Chincoteague, Virginia in 2010.
The ocean was particularly angry one morning, and I remember standing on the beach shooting the surf while trying to keep myself and the camera dry from the salt spray. In order to slow the shutter speed down enough to show the motion, I had stopped my lens down to – according to the metadata – f40. I didn’t remember having a lens that stopped down that much, but sho-nuff the old Canon 100-400 did!
Of course, at f40 every dust spot on the sensor is going to be visible, and on some of these photos there were dozens, perhaps a hundred or more. It’s a pretty safe guess that the reason these photos hadn’t been processed was because of all the spots. I’ve never been meticulous about cleaning my sensor, and it shows. But one of the advances in Lightroom that I am now able to take advantage of is the Spot Removal tool. The technology has improved dramatically over the last 10 years, to the point where I was able to salvage this photos. It involved a lot of clicking and a certain amount of adjusting, but a lot less futzing than I would have had to do back then!
