Baby, it's...

Cold outside.

I don't know what Blogger has done with the punctuation of the title.

The easy topic first. Yes, it's cold out, but I've done two walks with my camera recently. One with Sean along the Bow near the fish hatchery, and one with snowshoes on Fish Creek near Raven Rocks. 

As it turns out, one of the conversational topics was being able to take good photos and how to go up in the world and take better photos. We had just left the parking lot and discovered a patio overlooking a small pond. On the patio were two blue deck chairs. They became the focus of the conversation, on how there were many ways of taking a banal photo of them, but how (we thought) a good photographer would think about it, or would instantly know how to get a much better shot.

I was kind of fascinated by the chairs, liking the blue against the sky and snow, and prowled around thinking about composition. Sean was interested in the reeds, not my camera tripod. Once I got behind the chairs I saw this shot, and was glad Sean was taking a long time on his shot(s). I suppose if Sean was a paid model, and the intent was to produce THE shot, I'd have removed the tripod. I maybe should have used a wider lens and got all the chairs and then have the choice of a crop. This is 24 mm and I couldn't back up anymore without falling off the patio.

From there we had a lovely wander along the river. My point about the walk was to bring the tripod and ND filter and try some water over the rocks shots. Which I did. But first a serendipity shot from 2017!

And in an anti-serendipity note, this is the very first file 8404 I have ever edited.

There are several reflection shots from the walk, but I'll give those to you in another blog.

There's another meaning to Baby it's cold outside. You all know the old song. She says no. The man pushes her to stay. He doesn't accept the no. The reasons why she says no would now be considered old fashioned, but it doesn't matter why.  

Yes, times change. I'm old enough to remember my parents friends saying "a drink for the road", which is unthinkable now. So the 'what's in this drink' might have been a common saying back in the day, when a young woman might not have a lot of experience drinking booze, but now it's inextricably tied to date rape drugs. That isn't the fault of the lyric writer, but it's part of the song now. 

Another example for you. The word 'gay' has had it's meaning completely changed in my lifetime. Reading old books where the word is used in it's original context is a bit jarring now, since the old meaning has disappeared. 

Some people like things the way they were. Traditional. They don't think of the new meanings or how the world has changed. They think that it was just fine the way it was, and everybody is making a fuss over nothing.

If it was just one song, maybe it wouldn't be a big deal. Radio stations stop playing it, and it's no great loss as it fades away. Eventually it will only be known by historians and fans of old films. But there's an endless number of songs that treat women as the property of men, to be captured, to be his. How the breakup is never his fault. It's part of the background that we grow up with. We can't stop playing all of them, can we? Do we pick out the worst example every decade or so, and delete it from the playlists? 

Change is hard on a personal level. It's hard to not have that dessert, that second glass of wine, that treat you've 'earned', to lose the weight, to stop smoking cigarettes, to kick drugs, or not do any number of other things that we know are bad for us, or to do the things we haven't been doing that we know are good for us. 

On a societal level, change is even harder. Slavery has been outlawed in the USA since 1865, which is more than 150 years ago, and yet, some people still believe it isn't really real. That there's no need to treat people with brown skin as equals. Lots of people still think gay marriage is wrong (at best and some of the words I've heard people use would make a longshoreman blush) and that happened yesterday in comparison. 

Even such a simple thing as treating women as equals. I've seen and heard lots of men lose their shit over the concept. They come completely unglued. Where does that mindset come from? In the very late 70's I briefly worked at a place where they appointed a woman as 'lead hand', managing hour to hour work for a team of maybe a dozen or so people. Holy doodle! One of the guys quit rather than 'work for a woman'. Hint, he was no loss. There was lots of grumbling about it. I left shortly after, not because of that, but because I was moving to Calgary. My first female supervisor was when I started at NOVA in 1992. For the last decade of my so called career, I think I worked exclusively for women. 

A new year is beginning, which always seems like a good time to make a change. I'm thinking that in addition to changing things for ourselves, that we also think about doing something for our society. Treating other people better seems like a good start.

Of the Day

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Peony

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