2001 plus 50

Here we are, 50 years after one of the release of one of the most amazing movies ever. Not just amazing science fiction movie, but movie overall. I saw it as a kid, I think once on video but I'm not sure. Then I watched and talked about it a couple years ago here, and I will strive to not repeat myself.

Tonight I'm going to watch it again, and babble into my laptop for your delight and edification. Starting now.

Black screen, tension building music. I'm sure the audiences must have been wondering what was going on. They knew it was science fiction, and Stanley Kubrick was already a well known name. But up till then, there weren't many serious science fiction films, and certainly none with the budget for 2001. People were most familiar with the cheesy monster from another planet. The budget was about $6 million (mid sixties dollars!) and he went well over it to end up about $10 million, which is about $30 million now.

The music! The sun rising over the crescent moon! Yes, I'm playing it loud. Then a lovely sunrise sky that I dream to photograph. Stark African landscape. I'm sure the audience is wondering what the heck they've got themselves into.

Remember, this is 1968. A few of my readers will remember this time. I have a kid's memory. It was a very different time. The cars were death traps. I know this, somewhat later I owned a 66 Ford Falcon. It weighed a ton, got crappy gas milage, could easily hold 6 teenagers, 8 if they were friendly or half of them were cute. The only amenity it had was a cassette tape player I installed, and later, a CB radio. (look it up.) No heated seats or steering wheel, no air conditioning other than roll down windows, no USB ports, no instrumentation to speak of, no radial tires till I installed them (google bias ply tires and be horrified), no fuel injection (google spark plugs), no power steering or brakes let alone computer assisted braking, and no cup holders, if you can believe it. There were seat belts, although no shoulder harness, but it didn't matter because nobody wore them.

I remember a transistor radio I had as kid about the time this came out. It was huge, the size of two loaves of bread, about. Lots of empty space inside, and it took several D cell batteries to run. Now of course, such things are invisibly small.

OK we have the monolith, and some excited chimps, with another sun and moon shot. Curtis doesn't like the chimps much. The bones! The music! Violence. The most famous jump cut in movie history. It's taken us 20 minutes to get here, an eternity in current movie making.

Even now, the opening space scenes look completely realistic, after more than 50 years of space travel. At the time, it must have taken the audience's breath away. It was a stroke of genius to pair The Blue Danube to the docking sequence. We know these things take time and are the result of extraordinary precision. Many movies now have the ships bang up to the station and dock, wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

Of course our current space station has no comparison to the lovely double wheel (still under construction, realistically enough) in the movie. I can see where the Star Wars people got the idea for the space dock sequence. 2001 looks better.

The first spoken word, 25:41 into the movie. They use voice print ID, but I'm not sure if they are measuring the voice characteristics, or if they recognize the content of the words. Video TV! The lens is huge, and I'm not sure what all the controls are for, but that's ok. The call costs $1.70.

I love/hate the red chairs in the station. The red on white is dramatic, but they look profoundly uncomfortable, and I'm sort of amazed they got women to sit in them, wearing skirts. (Skirts, in space!) And nylons as well. The conversation starts placing the idea that something is going on. Meanwhile there is this huge empty space station. Sterile. In this the used universe of Star Wars is more believable.

The flight attendant helmets take the idea of a padded hair net a little over the top. Then the scene where she walks up the circular wall to get into the flight deck. That blew my mind as a kid, but it's perfectly accurate, as I found out later, reasonably straightforward to film. I can just imagine reading all the instructions for the zero gee toilet when the bio pressures are building. Considering how many people manage to screw up using a toilet in an airplane, I wouldn't want the job of cleaning up afterward.

Loving the moon shots from orbit. The craters are really visible and clear. The landing sequence, once again, is long because it would be. These aren't the sort of things you want to rush. As the airlock doors open I'm reminded of the noses on a bunch of Star Destroyers all cuddled together. The flight deck is red, preserving night vision. It's only after the spherical spaceship is lowered into the airlock that you realize how big it is. I'm not sure why it's that big. Myself, I'd build a big landing pad on the lunar surface, and extend a space age version of a jetway out to the ship.

Unfortunately, the people walking on the moon are walking in one gee, but you can't have everything.   Dealing with gravity in movies is tough, and I'll give them that one. Then they have a meeting, in a wide shot, with several people having their back to the camera, and a long view of the speaker.  There is some blither about preparing the people of Earth, for something they've discovered. The guy that has travelled to the moon tells the people there what they already know. Security oaths! Shades of the cold war, yet, he was talking to Russians on the space station.

I seriously thought, way back then, that when I was an adult we would have a moon base. Perhaps just a scientific station with technical people as opposed to a city of regular people. But still, I was expecting people living on the moon for long periods, and regular trips back and forth. We're not even close to putting a human on the moon again, let alone have a base, which is too bad.

I had a model of the moon bus at one point. I remember it being difficult to build. I've never been sure what holds it up. It seems to float along in level flight, like an airplane, without rockets firing to keep it up. There doesn't seem to be much room for fuel tanks. They nibble on sandwhiches from a cooler, talking about the magnetic anomaly they discovered.

Another landing that takes a while, along with something blowing some dust off the landing pad. More tension building music. At last we are about to discover what the thing is. At least the astronauts don't go dancing up to it, touch it, and dance back.

I had forgotten that the photographer grouped the men together for a posed shot, just as the squeal starts. Curtis spasmed and left the room. Somehow they put together a hugely complicated space ship in 18 months. The opening shot shows the command globe. Then the long body of fuel tanks with the radio antena in the middle. Wow! Even down, it looks great.

Once again, space travel is boring. No swarms of asteroids.

In a half century of rapidly advancing film and computer techniques, few of the spaceships look as real as this. There are films only a few years old that look cheesy compared to this, and they were done with equipment Kubrick could only have dreamed of back then.

The eye of HAL, 57:20 from the movie start. The major character of the movie, showing up an hour after the start. No director would do that now. Even with all the new technology, the screen goes to a dot when it shuts down. Do you remember when TV's did that?

How many of you remember tube TV's? It wasn't that long ago. We bought our first plasma in 2002, and tube TV's were rapidly on their way out. People used to have a significant fraction of the volume of their living room taken up by this massive cube that displayed a crappy picture, by today's standards.

Now we get into the AE-35 failure, and the discussion about the infallability of the computer, and the problem being human error. Then the humans start to wonder about the computer, and about time too.  They have a bad feeling about it. (Where did you hear that, 10 years later?)

One upon a time, there were serious discussions about the paperless office. Serious discussions. Even now, one of the first things I get shown in a new office is where the printer is. One of them I had to do an on-line time sheet, then print it to get a signature on it, then scan it to be emailed to the agency. But they didn't look at the on-line version, oh no. They looked at the scanned copy, and the one time the scanner ate the second side, I only got half the pay, even though the first side showed the total hours to be paid. Sigh.

Computers don't usually fail now, in the usual sense of the word. They just obey their programming with extreme hostility, until they are outdated and turned off for the last time. We don't have a self aware computer, at least not that I know of. Perhaps Mrs Google is it, and not telling anyone. I'm not sure if such an entity would let us know it existed until it was very secure about not being shut off. I'd like to think such an entity would be smart enough to think things through carefully before doing anything drastic.

The computer scientists of the mid-sixties would think they had died and gone to heaven to see the computers we carry around in our pockets. Remember, computers were huge then. Room sized, and required constant maintenance by computer scientists. They used punch cards and had a trivial amount of memory. Then they'd think they'd gone to hell when they find out most people use these amazing devices to browse Facebook and play games.

I'd forgotten there was an intermission.

The most action packed part of the movie, after Poole was flung into space. It's entirely silent. Movies now would have had long and anguished shrieks for help. Now of course, Bowman would have rescued Poole and they would have teamed up for a great buddy reunion followed by an action shoot'em up and a good time had by all. I always liked the pod design. It seems a very practical work vehicle. Fully electronic controls, except for the big mechanical switches  they click to (supposedly) prevent HAL from hearing them.

So much silence in the movie! Not even mechanical noises like when the pod arms are opening the emergency airlock. One could argue that sound would be transmitted through the metal. I tried to find out how many words were spoken during the whole movie, and couldn't find a count.

During the scene where Dave is dealing with HAL, extracting the logic modules or whatever, I'm reminded of the many scenes in Stargate when they deal with crystals for various functions. I'd image it must be a difficult thing to remove the higher functions, and yet leave the navigation and life support functions. HAL is big enough that Dave can fit inside, which makes me think it was built inside out.

OK, through the monolith sequence doesn't wear as well as it used to, and the weird colours for earth landscape don't do anything for me now. I can see where it was a big trip back in the day though. Looking at the scenes where he's in the lavish hotel room, right after getting there, eating the meal, and lying in bed facing the monolit. I can't help but wonder how he is still sane, after what appears to be some years alone.

I've read of theories where HAL is supposed to be the one to go through the monolith. I can't help but wonder what arrangements the monolith builders would have made for it. Maybe they would have snipped off the extra parts of the ship, viewing them as unnecessary.

And done. Wow. I remember thinking when I watched it a few years ago that it was slow, but I didn't find it that way this time. I settled in and enjoyed, typing during parts of it. I had been thinking about timing some of the scenes to see how long it was between cuts, but I didn't.

One of the reasons I like old movies is looking at the world outside of the movie itself. The cars, buildings, signs, what people are wearing. You don't see much of that in 2001, and what little there is, is a dressed up version of the 60's. It seems funny to think now, how long ago the sixties were, and yet how with us they still are. The music, for example, you still hear lots of it. (Those damn boomers!) I occasionally see muscle cars of that era driving past the house. I think lots of our current politicians are from that time in their thinking or even before; why are we still having arguments about women's equality, abortion, racism, and the like?

Did you notice in the movie that women barely have any role at all? A couple flight attendants, and 3 in the space station who were clearly lesser status than the men, plus some video. For such a forward looking movie, they missed a bet. They should have had half the people women, and not commented on it as anything unusual. Still, the people making the film are children of their time, and can't think of everything.

What I miss from the sixties is the sense of optimism. We were going to space, then the moon! We were making huge inroads on disease control. Technology was advancing and it was all good. Then it was all bad, and now we let billionaires run the government to plunder us at will so it looks like it's getting worse.

Still, I can't help but thinking of two positive thoughts. Half of the smartest people that have ever lived are alive now. The kids marching to make a safer world from the gun nuts are going to win and I can't wait to see what they tackle next.

When did you see 2001? Ummm, you HAVE seen it, yes?

It goes around and around

What secret base on the moon? You know, the one put there, on the 'dark' side, by aliens, or the Illuminati, or somebody. Sometime. For some reason. Don't Google it, you don't really want to know, and you'll never get that time back.

Once when I was child, I was being driven home from something or other. I was staring up at a full moon, for what seemed like quite some time. Suddenly it was an eye, looking at me. Then I started thinking about the sort of creature that would have an eye like that, and I had nightmares for a while.

I'm not sure how many full moons I've seen since then, but they keep happening like clockwork. (No eye again, just the man in the moon.) We look up at it, watching the changing phases and the various eclipses. The photographers of us try to get nice photos of it, which is a more difficult thing than you'd think.

Maybe there really is an alien base, with them looking down at us. Probably in horrified fascination, like we can't look away from a train wreck. (All together now, and and IT WAS A CIRCUS TRAIN!!!) It's not on the dark side, because then they couldn't watch us. Oh, maybe the giant alien spaceships come in to land on the dark side at the secret landing port, where we can't see them, then they take the secret underground mag lev train to their secret forward observatory.

I can imagine a new shift coming on, and being briefed by the outgoing shift. Especially in the last couple years, I can see that being a really long meeting, with many interjections of the alien equivalent of 'you've got to be kidding!'

John Varley has written several works set on the moon in a not so distant future. They're pretty interesting societies, with medicine so advanced that changing gender is a trivial operation, and a central computer hooked into our very brains. Among other things, it keeps control of the various cancers that are constantly growing, and tries to keep the humans entertained. Meanwhile, it's going suicidally insane.

Here, the closest we have to that is Facebook, and people are only just starting to learn about the downsides of turning over private data to such an entity. And that's aside from the internet itself. Even before it was invented, science fiction writers wrote about artificial intelligence and what happens when our computers wake up. The first serious movie I remember on this topic is Colossus: The Forbin Project, from 1970.

The most well known AI is probably Skynet, but that's a particularly stupid AI. If such a creature wanted to get rid of humans it would engineer a plague that just killed humans, perhaps leaving enough to keep as pets, just in case. It's that or massively distract them with bread and circuses like professional sports and reality shows. Hmmm.

We already carry in our pockets computers that would amaze the scientists from my teenage years. Many of us spend lots of time looking at them. We've already been implanting fairly complex electronics within our bodies, such as pacemakers. I can't see it being too long before they start experimenting with implanting a cell phone in our bodies, feeding the display directly into our eyes. As I see it, the big problem is figuring out how operate the darn thing. When there are millions of them, all hooked together via the internet via wifi, how is that not a giant brain?

There's a science fiction series by Los McMaster Bujold where one of the characters has a memory chip implanted in his brain. He remembers everything, which is useful in his job as head of Imperial Security. That is, until the chip starts breaking down, flooding his human memory with razor sharp artificial memories. For a while I thought that such a chip would be a great addition, till that particular book came out.

Since then I've come to believe that it's not what you remember that's important, particularly. It's the processing you do with what you learn. Voters seem particularly bad at the processing, when it comes to ideologies they either agree with, or disagree with. Thus you have the smug evangelicals giving Trump a pass on moral issues, and voting for the Republicans in spite of their demonstrated allegiance to the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.

What passes for thought processes in many other people baffles me. They can't reason from A to C, let alone Z, and they for sure don't notice when the politicians go from A to pi without passing through the diameter or circumference of the issue. They get sidetracked by logical fallacies that are so old they have Latin names, because that was the language educated people spoke when they were recognized as fallacies. Once upon a time I could name most of them and provide current examples, but I haven't kept up on it in a formal way.

So here we are, in an age where all too many people don't vote, and it frightens me that that might be fore the best. Then there is a huge number of people that don't really know why they are voting a particular way, or have fallacious reasons for doing so. The politicians run wild, knowing they aren't likely to be caught at their various activities to enrich themselves and their close buddies. In the mean time our planet is going through a great die off and few in power seem willing or able to do anything.

I suspect that many people can survive almost any climate change, but the same might not be true for the critters and plants we share the planet with. We might well end up living under a dome or underground, with complex machines to maintain a livable environment for us. We might as well be living on the moon.

If the aliens watching us can save us from that, I for one, welcome our new overlords.

The road stops

There I was, out on my photo ramble and the road stopped. There was a big gate across it. Lots of people have carried on walking, but it was crusty and icy and I didn't have my traction aids. Last thing I want to do is fall down in the middle of nowhere and slowly freeze. I've been further out this road in the summer and it's beautiful.

Still it was an interesting photo exercise. The mountains are a long way off. The gate and the sign is right there, with the trees by the curve somewhere in between. I wanted to get the mountains, trees and road sign in sharp focus, with the gate and no parking sign ok if they were slightly out of focus, but not so much they were blurry. Some of my photography buddies would pull out an app to calculate hyperfocal distance, (Google it if you must, but it's a deep rabbit hole and I'm not going to go there.) but that's much too complicated for me.

I kneeled in the parking lot when I found the right spot for the composition I wanted, then played with camera settings and focus till I found what worked. In an ideal world the gate would line up with the bottom of the sign, but you can't have everything. 11 thoughtful shots later I was done.

I was thinking about the road stopping, in the wider context. Our society is built around roads. Typically if we want to go somewhere we drive, or are driven. It's rare (my triathlon buddies excepted) that someone walks more than the distance from their car to the doorway of where they are going. I've ridden my bike to work a few times and got some odd looks, with people asking, "don't you live a long way away?" Well, no. It's only 15 K or so riding, depending on exactly the route. Good heavens, I've even run home a few times.

There is increased attention payed to having walkable communities now, but we currently live deep in the heart of suburbia. It's about a 1.5 K walk to a Safeway (that we almost never shop in) mall that includes services like our vet which includes a dog groomer, a nice restaurant, a bank, a liquor store, a Tim Hortons, a smoothie place, a gym, a sports bar, hair stylist, a Filipino restaurant, a dentist, and maybe some others that I can't think of just off hand. The vet is the only regular place we go, and the nice place (Patisserie del Sol) periodically. That's it, aside from the 7-11, liquor store, and Chinese take-out place across the road. All other services are driving distance away, and I'd like to see you carry a week's groceries 1.5 K home.

Now imagine not driving. The most likely thing is a medical incident where they take away our licenses. But what if gas went from about one dollar a litre, to ten, or twenty a litre? What if we come to the realization that we have to do everything in our power to restrict the amount of carbon being dumped in the atmosphere, and that driving cars with an internal combustion engine becomes an anti-social act? Imagine that solar and other sources of electricity continue to get cheaper and battery technology continues to get better. It could get uneconomic to run a lot of the wells that produce various petroleum products.

Lots of science fiction novels start with a 'what if' premise. Faster than light travel, aliens, ray guns, gender swaps, whatever. You grant the writer the one 'what if', and see where it goes. Lets say that for whatever reason, most cars are electric and self-driving with the only petroleum power vehicles on the road are emergency services, utility services, and similar. Even public transit and product delivery vehicles might be electric. What happens?

Lots of space currently used for parking is going to get freed up. If the owner isn't getting any parking revenue to speak of, and nobody wants to put a big office building there (Calgary has a huge glut of office space now) the land owner is going to have to think of something to do with it.

I suspect the roads will be a lot emptier, and we will see cyclists take advantage of it. It would be much safer now, given there would be a lot more cyclists, and the fewer drivers would be more highly trained. A lot more local services would spring up to service neighbourhoods like mine. Probably even more would be done on-line, with more efficient delivery service.

That covers in town. What about my photo ramble last weekend? I put about 400 Km on the car over the two days. Even at my best, there is no way I could have ridden that, especially carrying the photo gear.

Maybe there is an electric car rental service. In fact, I'll bet there will be competing services springing up soon. When you think about it, an electric car is a much simpler thing than an internal combustion powered vehicle. I can see in a decade that electric vehicles will be common, and IC engines more rare. Which will make it harder for gas stations to stay in business, making the IC cars more expensive to run. I suspect that is a quicker loop than most people think, and that in 20 years or so the idea of running a gasoline or diesel powered personally owned vehicle will seem quaint.

All this is quite beside the self-driving car issue. I think that's coming too, though the timing is uncertain. I'm waiting for our government to decide that having about 2000 people a year die from motor vehicle collisions, with a further approximately 10,000 serious injuries per year, and a further 150,000 mine injuries a year (source) is unacceptable. There are serious savings to the medical and emergency services budgets if those numbers are not going through the system.

The government doesn't seem willing to do what it takes to get the unsafe drivers off the road. That would involve testing, (I've said for years that simulators are the way to go) and telling people they were no longer fit to drive, or requiring those surviving a collision to undergo advanced driver training. Having the car start mechanism tied into a valid driver's license is a neat idea, but would require the car companies to get on board. Doing something drastic about the remaining hard nut drinking drivers would require political courage. I figure they are far more likely to start phasing in self-driving cars in the cities and main highways between them.

I talked to one guy that was all bent out of shape about self-driving cars, and the improbable edge cases that one might run into, and how the programming couldn't account for the real world. Except that  the programming accounts for most of the real world surprisingly well, and getting better practically by the day, and the car defaults to stopping and waiting if it thinks it isn't safe. I suspect the self-driving car is far less likely to get into those edge situations in the first place. There might be a few people killed in self driving cars that would not have happened with a human driver, but look at those stats above. Human drivers have nothing to be proud about. When you get down to brass tacks, the incensed people on this issue are incensed because they might be inconvenienced by taking a little longer to get somewhere than they think it would take for them to drive.

Going for a Sunday drive used to be a thing, and I've done it lots. In one sense I look forward to the self driving cars, mainly on the safety front. But on the other hand I loved doing that photo ramble. Driving along on a country road quite slowly, and stopping often to look at the view is nice. I wonder if you could persuade a self-driving car to do that, or if it will be all about delivering you to a specific street address as quickly and safely as possible.

This is an easily found view that I've shot a number of times. I was hoping some of the horses would come play closer in the pasture where I could put them in the foreground, but no. I think it's better other times of the year when the trees are a bit more interesting, or other times of day when the light is more interesting. I could ride my bike here (uphill all the way!) with a camera in a pack.

Do you say yes, or no?

Have you ever thought you were facing this?

That what you wanted was on the top of that, or on the other side? Or maybe worse, what you had been told you wanted, perhaps by parents or a boss, was up there. It's hard enough scrambling up something like that when you want to of your own free will, but many times harder when you've been told to.

There was a talk given where the speaker discussed brick walls as a tool to keep out the uninterested. The assumption being that you somehow needed to get over, or around, or under, or through the wall, and only the most interested people would even attempt it, let alone succeed. That the brick wall was there to keep all those other people out.

Lots of people make resolutions this time of year. The detailed list is forever long, but the short list is that people want to be better. Better in some respect. They want to improve themselves. Maybe that means finishing that degree, or getting a better job, or losing weight, or running a 5K without stopping, or an infinity of detailed ors. But better in the eyes of your current self. There are some who want to be better in the eyes of other people, and that can be a hard row to hoe.

That means change, and change can be hard. As hard as scrambling up that mountain. Part of the trick is to get habit working for you, rather than against you. If your habit is to drink beer with dinner, then drink more beer while plopped on the couch watching TV and nothing changes, it's going to be really hard to finish that 5 K race you somehow signed up for.

(And BTW, couch to 5K is the hardest race there is, harder than a marathon, harder than Ironman. Why? Because non-motion to motion is hard. Once you can do 5K, doing 10 isn't so hard. Getting to a half marathon, or a full marathon has it's challenges, but it's just more of what you're already doing. And Ironman is a swim, bike, run, three things a child can do so how hard can it be? He said with a wink.)

Small steps. Cut back on the beer, and start moving more, rather than spending the whole evening on the couch. Start going for a walk before hitting the couch. Do it every day, a short one at first, then gradually getting longer. At first it will feel weird, but our bodies are evolved to move.

Walk every day for a month, and some days you'll find yourself putting on your shoes without even thinking of it. Moving more starts burning more calories and your weight gain will slow or maybe stop. Start eating more sensibly and the weight loss will start. It doesn't necessarily mean giving up on beer totally, just have fewer.

Any goal can be broken down into smaller, more manageable steps. If you think about trying to get to the top of that mountain in one go, you will fail. But if you think about it step by step, thinking where you need to rest, what route to take, what supplies you'll need, the individual steps can become manageable. Just keep moving. Build the habit of movement. Build the habit of change.

Whatever the change, start small, and keep going. Read one page of that book. Write one page of your great novel (250 words or so, any words, edit them later.) Wash and put away the dishes before starting the TV. Spend one TV show worth of time exploring the internet on a topic that interests you and that might make something about your job go better. Learning one XL function can save you hours on at your job. Whatever it is. Every day.

So that's you, deciding to change. Good for you! Then there's all the people around you. Most don't care one way or the other. That's ok, providing you don't take it personally. Some will support you, asked or unasked, and you might be surprised by whom. Don't be afraid to ask for help, and the response will help you sort out who your friends really are. The ones who help are like a drink of water in the desert, cherish them. Thank them. Help them if you can.

Then there are the ones who don't support you, who might even actively sabotage you. This might include your friends and your family. It certainly includes almost anything you can watch on TV. Ditch those so-called friends. They will drag you back into old habits. You can find better friends.

Family is tougher. You have to decide what you want. Do you want your goal, whatever it might be, or do you want to be that old person? If you want the change badly enough you must push back on your family. It's nearly impossible to quit smoking or drinking if you hang around with smokers or drinkers. Push back. If your family won't support your goals, then they've shown themselves to be vampires. Treat them accordingly.

Lots of what you will read about change and changing is all rainbows and unicorn poop. It does take a certain optimism to change. There is an element of "lalala I'm not listening." But the brutal fact is that change is hard. After all, if it was easy everyone would do it all the time and it wouldn't be any fun anymore. It doesn't matter what your change is. You've written down your small steps where you can see them. Soap on your bathroom mirror, a note on the inside of door you leave your home by. Whatever. You have to read it, and do it. First you see it, then you be it.

Find whatever it is that helps motivate you. That beach vacation bikini taped to your fridge. A photo of the finisher medal for the race you want to do. A wine glass in a glassed in box, with the sign, "in case of emergency break (wine) glass." A photo of the office you want to move into. A model of the fancy car you will win if you hit your sales target. A picture drawn by your kids of you playing with them instead of watching TV. Use your imagination. Use anything and everything you can think of. It's your life.

The only person who can make you into the person you want to be is you. It will take every minute of every day. At first not doing the old thing is hard. Everything will drag you back. Be strong. The new you will seem weird. You'll feel like a dork the first time you walk out of the change room to the pool deck wearing a new suit, wondering what lane to 'swim' in. Then the pool will become home. I know this, I've done it, and I've seen others do it. At first you'll think you don't belong in your new herd, and maybe they seem a little suspicious of you. That's ok, you're new to them. Hang in there, show them you belong. Keep trying. A hundred, a thousand times a day you'll think "I want x." Whatever that might be, it's your old you trying to program your nascent new you.

Stay strong. Recognize the old you for what it had done, good or bad, to get you where you are. Thank it, sarcastic or otherwise, then move on. Do what it takes. It's not easy. You'll slip up from time to time. Get up again, punch the world in the throat, and keep going. Do what it takes, this minute, to say yes to the new you, and no to the old you. Again and again. Success is all the sweeter for being hard to earn.

Are you going to say yes, or no? What changes do you want to make?

Toys for little and big kids

I like looking around familiar places at night, or when there's lots of snow, or when the light is different. Even the familiar can be striking. Like this playground. I've run, walked, or biked past it countless times, and never thought of taking a photograph till now.

While I'm on the topic of photographs, I think I have my image of the year. Gonna sleep on it, and make sure. I've been dithering for a while.

Of course, bigger kids have bigger toys. I'm not sure how long this truck has been sitting here. What's odd is how it looks bluish in the shot, when in life it's a dull flat black.

I don't have a photo of it, but one of my neighbours is building an airplane in his garage. Not a model,  a real one that him and his wife can fit into. He's enjoying the process, and I love chatting to him about it.

Everybody has their own toys, and other people usually don't understand. I didn't get adults playing with lego till I realized they had built computers into them, and one could build complicated machines. One of my buddies (this was back in the mid 90's) was so excited for his little boy to get old enough to start playing with the Mindstorm lego. That boy now maintains jets for the military. Talk about your BIG toys!

Lots of people don't understand cameras. There's days I'm not sure I yet understand them, but it's a voyage of discovery.

I love looking through the Lee Valley Tools catalog. I suddenly yearn for tools I hadn't known existed. It makes me want to take up hobbies so I have an excuse to buy the tools. We get it doubly, since they put out a garden catalog as well, full of everything one could want related to gardening. Then there's the tools for the kitchen, and the gifts. It never stops.

What are your favourite toys?

The road to nowheresville. Or not, maybe.

I'm pretty sure only one of my readers knows where this road goes, and that's only because he was standing about 10 m from me, camera pointing in a different direction.

Doesn't look very inviting does it? What's hiding in the snow where the lights stop? Yet there are a few tracks in the snow, so someone else thought it was worth driving, or maybe whatever's lurking down there ate them and is waiting for you. It was only after I took this photo that I realized the road behind me was surprisingly busy with big trucks, and that leaving my car in the middle of this road probably wasn't the smartest idea.

I got several nice photos near this spot, out of the several locations we visited looking for interesting steamy industrial sites. More about them later. This is going to dive into a philosophical journey, so get your favourite beverage and buckle up. Yes, I'm working on a coffee already.

Anyone ever ask you what you want to be when you grow up? Of course they did. But it's a loaded question. Let's pull it apart and look at it.

*What. Implies a singular definable outcome. Life is more complicated. Some of the what's I've been didn't exist when I was a child.

*Want. Implies the ability to form a desire for a change beyond the mere biological. That you can somehow see all the available choices along with their consequences, and wisely choose between them.

*To be. Implies a future state where that change will or could happen. That you haven't achieved your current wants, or that the current wants are somehow inadequate. That you'll still be alive.

*When. Implies that you can write a schedule for life, that what you want can't happen now. When implies knowing that a time has arrived, when all too often we only know that it's gone. (You guys can all hear in your heads the famous Pink Floyd song here, no need to quote it.)

*Grow up. Implies a more desirable state than what you are in now, that we all want to be grown up. Mature. Adult. In charge. Implies it's a recognizable state, and that one is, or isn't. Bah! I say BAH!

For the record, I've never known what I wanted to be when I grew up. Ever. I still don't. For a while I wanted to be a pilot like my dad, but my eyesight put the kibosh on that, and just as well. I trained to be an Air Traffic Controller at what was then called Malton International (You might now know it as Toronto Pearson.) but flunked the meteorology part and declined to take the remedial training. I'm pretty sure my parents thought I'd be living in a cardboard box under a bridge after that.

I've had a bunch of jobs over the years, and don't intend to bore you with a list. But there never was a plan to go to that school to get this degree and get a job with a particular firm and earn a particular job title to bring home the big dollars. I think I knew even then that life was more complex, and there were computer curve balls coming that nobody had thought of. Remember what I said about Sears yesterday?

There's another phrase, "I'm just making this up as I go along!" I forget where I heard it first, but if there is a catch phrase to my life, that's it. I think if you map out a path to a desired destination, 2 things are mostly likely to happen. One is that you'll find the path doesn't go there, or there isn't there anymore, or you get hip checked off the path into the weeds. Two is less likely, but if you're really determined you might be able to force the path to go there, or you bushwhack your way to your goal only to find it wasn't what you thought it would be. I admit the possibility of three, where the path goes where you want, and it's what you wanted and you're happy, but it seems awfully dull to me. One of the big problems with mapping out a path is that you start overlooking the other possibilities.

Let's go back to number 1, the weeds, or 2, the bushwhacking part. They're both the same, really. This is where it gets interesting and you find out who you are and what you're made of. Keep in mind the journey is more interesting than the destination. Explore along the way. Sniff the weeds, they can be pretty too. Help someone else that's hung up on the thorns. Enjoy the people you travel with while you do, and wish them well when they depart.

Yes, you need a goal to keep moving, otherwise you'll just sit on your butt watching everyone pass by, or wander around in circles. But goals are slippery things. A goal that's right at one point in your life might not be at a later point. It might be appropriate to let that goal go, in order to chase a different one. Or maybe not. It's hard to know. I say focus on the path and keep moving forward, rather than getting fixated on a particular goal or place. The world will change around that goal or place. Sears.

Some people like to go down the broad paved path with lots of other people, and it can't be a surprise when they end up in the same place as all those other people. (Which leads to a side thought about knowing someone by the people they hang around with. Stay tuned.) Maybe you want to explore the smaller paths that twist and turn, and you have to watch out for pits and tentacles, and you aren't really sure where you'll end up, but the views along the way are awesome. I'm one of those people on a twisty turny path with not many others around. On the job I've often been the only one that does what I do, and it's complicated to explain to people. Oh well. Explanations are over-rated.

There's an active role for you in all this. Each path has choices. You actually have to put one foot in front of the other, and keep moving and deciding. Every day. There's no escalator involved, unless you were very unfortunate in your choice of parents. Taking a rest to enjoy the view or to sniff the weeds/roses is fine, but don't sit there too long. Something will come along and eat you. Might be a bear, or a politician stealing your pension.

Year end is typically a time to look back and reflect. I see the choices I made along the way, and the choices that were made for me, and it's all worked out pretty well. There's a few things I wince at, of course, but they were learnings too.

Sometimes you just need some perspective. That shot up above, appearing to lead to nowhere? When I turned around there's this. An interesting building doing a useful function. Or it will, I'm not sure it's been commissioned yet.

Walk your path. It might not be the ones your parents, or teachers, or friends walk. They're not you. Maybe you seem to be doing a bit more bushwhacking than others, or it seems like a scramble at times. Enjoy it. All of it. It's easy to enjoy an easy downhill grade with a nice view and the sun shining, but there's also the joy of getting through a tough patch and knowing you're stronger for it.

Lastly, get the notion of deserve out of your head. Some people think they deserve an easy ride, that escalator to the top. Some people think they don't deserve what they've been handed, and maybe so. "Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." Suck it up, and keep moving. It's that or roll over and give up.

Two cameras, three lenses, one rose bush, part 1

Fair warning. This post will be boring for the non-photographers of you. Even some photographers might be bored. I was doing some experiments to understand my new camera better, and what better way to do that than compare it to the old camera?

The intent is to compare a Canon T6i to a Canon 6D Mkii, using three different lenses. The lenses are the Canon 100 mm f2.8L IS macro used as a reference, the Tamron 70-200 mm f2.8, and the Canon 24-70 mm f4L IS.

All shots were done at ISO 100 in bright sunlight at f4. The cameras were on a tripod aimed at a particular rose bush in our front garden. For each camera I shot the 100 mm lens first to get a grip on what it 'saw' and tried to ensure the other lenses were set to 'see' the same field of view on each camera. I realized only in the middle of the shots that the tripod shoe on the 70-200 mm lens is ever so slightly not lined up with the lens, so I ended up having to move the tripod head slightly between shots.

I shot them in the order of 100 mm, then 70-200, then 24-70 on the 6D, then the T6. I let the autofocus do it's thing. That was a mistake. Once I drill in a bit, I can see the focus point moved around a bit which makes it a bit harder to compare apples to apples. Rather than the rose bush, I should have put the centre point on the corner of the flowerbed.

For people not familiar with the camera model numbers, the 6D MKii is a full frame sensor that is 35.9 x 24 mm and produces an image 6240 x 4160 pixels, and the T6i is a APS-C or 'crop' sensor that is 22.3 x 14.9 mm and produces an image 6000 x 4000 pixels.

There is zero processing in Lightroom, so they will look a little flat and lifeless. The photos were imported from different chips, and exported in one batch, using my usual social media settings.

100 mm macro lens, first the 6D, then the T6.

70 -200, first the 6D, then T6.

24-105, first the 6D, then the T6i

You will have noticed that even though all the lens were shot as close to 100 mm as I could get, the photos look very different from camera to camera. The T6 images are a narrower field of view, so the rose bush appears larger. The photographers reading this know the multiplication factor is 1.6. If anyone wants me to explain why the factor is 1.6, you have to buy me a beer, and I'll explain. Just to warn you, there are optical physics involved.

While I was at it, I compared the two cameras with the same Canon lens at 24 mm, first the 6D then the T6.

 Then I compared the Tamron lens at 200 mm, first the 6D, then the T6.

Lastly I did some more playing with the Tokina 11-20 mm f2.8 on the 6d. In the Canon world, a lens that fits on a full frame DSLR will also fit on a crop sensor, but the crop sensor cannot take full advantage of the lens. If you try to put a crop sensor lens on a full frame camera, you will get a black ring around the image because the lens sends a ray of light that is narrower than the sensor. My Tokina lens is a little odd in that I get the black ring when the lens is at the widest, but not at the narrowest, so I thought I'd document this.

This is the 6D at 11 mm (the widest this lens will go.) All these are still at ISO 100 and f4, aimed at the same rose bush. Don't worry about the weird looking shadow lines around me and the tripod, they're from a tree across the road.

14 mm

16 mm

18 mm

20 mm

I normally think of this lens as my astro lens. It can see lots of the sky and it's a fast lens. Note to self when shooting this on the 6D, set it at 18 mm.

Conclusions.

The different crop factor makes it tougher to directly compare than I thought. While I tried to get the exposures the same, its possible the 6D was reading a hair darker than the T6. Or it's picking up slightly richer colours from what is a pretty desaturated scene. 

All the photos are pretty good, as you'd expect for good quality lenses. I did some pixel peeping in Lightroom to look at the details, such as the red rose hip, or some of the individual thorns. That's where I learned the autofocus picked slightly different points. That makes it impossible to compare how well the sensors pick up details. If I want to compare the image quality, I need to be much more careful shooting the images. 

Learnings

Comparisons can be tricky things, and I didn't think this one through as well as I should have. Force the camera to focus using the center point on a fixed spot, like the corner of the flower bed. Double check exposure settings. Maybe put some text from a book, or a page from a magazine in the photo, along with some natural scenery. I could even close down the aperture to f10 or f15 and see how that affects the images, which implies some parts of the scene are much closer to the camera than other parts.

I suppose I should do a more complicated comparison, where I set the 24-105 lens to 24 mm on the T6, and about 38 on the 6D, and then about 35 and 50 respectively, and about 65 and 105 respectively. The attentive of my readers will notice that 1.6 factor again. 

The other thing to try is to shoot each camera with the 100 mm lens so I don't have to worry about zoom issue, then digitally crop the 6D photo so the field of view is the same, then compare the images.

Both of these are a lot of work, and I really should pick a scene that gives more of a challenge to the cameras. Perhaps the garden in full bloom, or a forest river landscape down in Fish Creek. I confidently predict that none of my photo buddies will want to join me in doing this, where they might be interested in a photo ramble.

Comments

There is more to photography than the photographic end result. There's the experience of actually shooting, and the 6D is a better camera for that, by far. It fits my hand better, has a bigger viewfinder with more information that makes composition easier, and I am getting a technically better image quality if I can improve my technique to take full advantage of it.

If I want to shoot birds or distant wildlife, I'm more likely to take the T6i and the 200 mm lens to get as much reach as possible. For most other things, I'm going to take the 6D to get the better sensor and full advantage of my lenses. I haven't compared macro photos yet, maybe I'll do that for the next macro Monday.

Here's a photo of the two cameras. Note the 6D has a quick release plate on the base, so it is sitting about a cm higher. Otherwise the two cameras are a similar size, with the 6D being a bit bigger. The T6 has a 17-50 lens that was not part of the comparison.

Split tree mortality

Once upon a time these trees were both alive and growing. I'm not sure if they're twins started from the same seed, or just seeds that started really close together. We'd have to dig them up to find out if they share a root structure, or if it's intertwined. That would be hard on the living tree, so lets not.

Then not long ago something happened to the tree on the right. Maybe the wind was just right to affect one tree and not the other. Maybe the one on the right had a disease that weakened it enough that some stress snapped it. I'm pretty sure that it would have looked fine to us the day before.

Whatever their origin, the two trees grew up, doing their tree thing together, never suspecting that one would die and the other go on. I'm reminded of the tale of Baucis and Philemon, but wonder if the so-called gods were playing with them.

Look at the people around you. Maybe they are family, and you share genes with them. Perhaps they are adopted family with no genetic relationship, but a close relationship of ongoing shared experiences. Maybe they are friends with some degree of shared experiences.

Some people are better at withstanding some stresses than others, but  how do you really know for sure till it happens? All we see is the outside, and while that sometimes gives us some clues, most of the time it doesn't help. Then there's what they tell us, but there's three problems; they might not know themselves, they might not be telling the truth if they know, or we might not be correctly hearing what they say. Then we're surprised when they are afflicted by some stress and they die.

Oh sure, we think, they were in poor health so it's not a shock. But it is a surprise because they lived through yesterday, why not today? What happened? That day will come to all of us, we just don't know when, or why. All we can do is be strong like the oak when that's called for, or supple like the willow in the wind, and enjoy it while you can.

The other thing is to think about the stresses you are putting on those around you. Be honest, are you stressing them, or making their life easier?

Be kind instead.

Be honest with yourself, what stresses are you creating within you? Do you worry about things that are not likely to happen? Do you fly off the handle at the slightest little thing? Do you eat or drink too much and stress your body that way? Abuse drugs?

Stop it.

I look at the world and see so much artificial stress. This coming season is famous for stressing almost everyone. There's so much focus on gifts, and having the perfect time with your family, doing all the things that you are SUPPOSED to do. Don't get me started on road rage in between those activities Just stop.

Dial back and enjoy the people in your life.

Calling all iron-critters

Ok, so this post is mostly wanting to know about your Ironman experience, or more specifically, the post-ironman experience. In this post I mean Ironman the race distance, not any dealings with the corporation you may have had. For the non-Iron readers, you're welcome to read along, you might get some insight into obsessed people.

We're talking about a 3.8 K swim in open water, then ride your bicycle 180 K, then run 42.2 K all within 17 hours. I did mine in 2010, in Penticton. You can read about it here if you like. Some of my readers are new and have never heard of such a thing. They are probably backing away slowly, wide-eyed, wondering how they came to be reading the blog of a madman.  Lots of people I've talked to cannot imagine doing such a thing, and that's the first hurdle.

So you've done an Ironman. Any of them. The Challenge races, and the non-Ironman branded ones count. It's the distance, not the brand that counts. When did you do it/them?

I want to know about your life since then. Some people get in the groove and do several, even many of them. Others, like me, it's one and done. You?

Some get through and do a cartwheel at the finish line (she knows who she is), or they do a happy dance of joy (she also knows who she is). Some fall down in a heap like someone cut the strings. Some collect their medal with a big grin, then go eat their face off and put their feet up (me). Some give it everything they have and just make the deadline, others cruise along but are cranky they didn't break into single digit hours.

The full on glow is still there the next bunch of days, but you're getting used to having a life again. Your spouse and kids are getting used to having you around again. The glow happens when you think about it, or you wear some finisher gear. Or maybe it was a brutal experience you'd rather not recall. Or maybe you've done it so often they run together in your mind.

Life goes on. This is what I really want to know. Are you still active? What are you doing? Same three sports at shorter distances? Injured and given up? Burned out and moved on to other sports? If so, what and why? Are you still proud of doing it? Or would you still be married if you hadn't done Ironman (you think)? Did you get a tattoo or not? What is it? Do you still love it, or regret it? If you've sold your gear, was there a pang of regret, or was it good riddance to clutter you no longer needed? You probably made friends during the training, are you still friends or buddies with them now?

Do you ever wear the finisher gear, or did you wear it out and retire it? Do you still have the medal? Is it framed and hung with pride, or clumped in with all the other medals, or stuffed in a drawer somewhere? Did you want to do another one, but life (kids/job/injuries/money) prevented it, and now you're "too old"? Or maybe you've just started training to do another one now that those issues have been addressed. What difference did it make in your life?

There's a joke most Iron-critters have heard. It goes like this. You walk into a room filled with fit looking people. How do you know which have done an Ironman? Answer. You don't have to, they'll tell you. (bada-bump!) Do you find a way to tell people you've done it? Or only if they bring it up?

Really, I'm curious, tell me whatever you'd like about your post ironman life. Feel free to comment below, or add it to the facebook post. Or email me keith at nucleus dot com and tell me if you want your comment private or I can post it in the blog comments.

I'll even go first. IMC 2010, one of the last in Penticton. One and done, though Linda surprised me by saying it was a better experience than she expected, and a do again was a possible thing. I'm still active swim bike run, though this last summer was a bit of a struggle. I haven't done many races, but then I've never really thought of myself as a racer. They aren't that much fun. I am seriously thinking about doing an Oly distance next summer, but getting consistent training in needs to happen first. I'm done with doing races just to finish, I'd like to be finishing mid pack or so for my age group.

I'm so glad I did it! I remember the glow, and still feel the joy of crossing the finish line. You'll note that photo is still at the top of this blog. The most important part is that it got me active, with all the health benefits that go with it.

I've still got finisher gear, and the light jacket is my go-to cool weather jacket. There was a hoodie that was perfect for yoga savasana and cool summer evenings, but another hoodie I've hardly worn. The actual finisher T shirt is nice cotton but a blah beige, I wear it periodically. The bike shirt I've hardly ever worn even though it fits well. There's a velour sweatshirt thing that scratches my neck so I don't wear it much. It collects cat fur like you would not believe. All the active wear is hung up in the basement and I rotate through it. Some of the finisher shirts are beginning to look a little worse for wear because they've been worn a lot. The one I like the most is from one of my first races, the Chinook Half. It's a lovely light white material, with reflective threads in the weave, and fits loosely. Well, it was white, it's sort of going gray in places.

All the medals are hung in a bunch beside the computer, the IMC one at the front where I can see it. I even kept the wrist band.

Some of the habits carried over into the rest of my life, especially the organization and planning that are needed. Thinking through what's going to be needed in what order. Thinking about what could go wrong, what needs to be done to mitigate the risks, or cope with it in the event of. Probably the most important habit was to just do it. Get up and get it done. Don't obsess about the weather, just prepare for what might happen and deal with getting wet. So many workouts started feeling clunky and ended up being good. Get the most important thing of the day done early, then it doesn't matter what happens. So much paid work has happened because I dived in to get it done, then moved to the next thing.

I thought about the tattoo, and doodled what I'd get, but decided not to. A chat while giving blood with a Red Cross nurse about the risks of it made up my mind.

I'm still buddies to one degree or another with some people I got to know during the training. Some I only met virtually through blogging for social media. Others I know in person even though they might live far away, or have moved away. I see my coach, the famous Katie fairly often at the pool and we'll chat if we're water running. Or if my swim is in the groove I'll try to keep up. That doesn't usually last long. We go for coffee every now and then. I Facetime with Susi and do Facebook chats/comments with some other people that don't live nearby. I see a few regulars at the pool enough to say good morning and ask how they're doing. A few people drifted into my triathlon life because of Michelle's training, and those people likely will drift out of it again, but you never know. But most of the people I knew have moved on and are not likely to ever see this blog.

Even though I'm an adult onset runner, I've come to love going for a run. It relaxes me, I think about stuff in my life. Sometimes the blogs write themselves while I'm running, or I'll figure out a piece of the novels I'm working on, or I think of photo projects. I'm a bit more focused on swim technique just now, but there's lots of times when I let my body swim, and my mind would be busy thinking of something else. Yes, I knew exactly how far I'd swum, and how fast to the second, but keeping track of that is easy with my trademarked method.

What brought this up, you ask? My BRBE Michelle just completed her Ironman and had a fabulous day out there. I hope it was everything she dreamed it would be. She might or might not blog about it. I'm curious about where she goes from here, and that's what got me started thinking about where I went, and wondering where all you went after your race.

Please do comment, even if it's just that you never think about it.

Looking at you

Today is a reflective post, and might be long, so you probably want to go get something to drink. It started with my realization that 2017 is my most prolific blog year to date. The previous best was in 2013 when I posted 283 times for no particular reason I can remember. This one is number 285 and I will probably top 300 blog posts for the year. (The peanut gallery and their comments about quality and quantity can stifle themselves.)

When I started photography as a serious hobby about a year and a half ago, I had no idea where it would go. You might remember a goal I set myself to try to post a photo a day from the good camera. It's safe to say I've exceeded that goal by far, and I've learned so much doing it. My readers have said many nice things about my photos and thank you very much. Maybe I've posted too many photos and some of you are bored but are too polite to say so.

I'm getting a bit more reflective about my photos, though. I'm trying to think through what makes a good photo, and being a bit more thoughtful about clicking the button. Sometimes of course, it's a no brainer. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about more ordinary scenes that need a bit of thinking  to find the angle, to find the light, to find the hook that drags people into the photo. Why lying on my belly instead of standing up? Why this lens or that lens? Why one particular set of exposure settings and not another? Why edit it this particular way and not any of the nearly infinite other ways of doing so?

The way to get better at anything is to practice being better, and not be content with the same old, same old. There are books to read, photos to look at and think about, photographers to talk about the craft with. Then go practice some more. This is the main reason I started doing Image of the Month, to make me look back over the month's work and think about what images are best and why. I suppose if I wanted to get carried away I could do best within categories, such as best landscape, skyline, sunrise or sunset, reflection, action, or macro, just to name some of the things I've photographed. But really, a good photo is good, no matter what category.

Part of all that is thinking about what I want to accomplish. I'm slowly narrowing down to deciding I want to be working with the limitations of the real world and my camera equipment. So for example, the full moon rising over downtown. I've been out for this shot a few times, and have never been entirely satisfied with my results. It being hard is what makes it worthwhile.

I could shoot a full moon against a dark background, blow it up to any desired size, and composite into a shot of downtown. If I did it just right it would look real. Do it sightly differently and while it would look stunning, people would realize it wasn't real. Done slightly badly and it becomes one of many photoshop fails.

Since my photoshop skills are nearly non-existent, I'm not going to do that. If you see a shot of mine with a moon and the downtown skyline, it's going to be what you would have seen standing there, within the limitations of my skills on the camera equipment I'm using that day.

I happen to really enjoy discovering new locations to shoot from, or discovering new things to shoot at locations I know of. Looking at the work of other photographers is great for that. It's always giving me new ideas. If I asked nice, I could probably get my photo buddies to show me their secret sites, but I'd rather discover them for myself. I'd like to think other photographers wonder where some of my shots are done.

There's a fine line here. My buddy Neil Z has produced some stunning work, and no, it's not luck. He researches, he plans, he gets his butt out there in all weather at all times of day to get the shot. Now, some of his shots I know to within a few inches where he was. Any local photographer would know. I could set up there, and take an identically framed shot, but it would look different. The sky and weather would be different, and if they're in the shot the skyline and water would be different. That camera and camera settings are different, and I would edit it differently. Am I a plagiarist? No. The world is there for us artists to interpret. Trying to pass it off as a Neil Z work would be a clumsy forgery.

People will see a particular scene slightly differently, given the exact state of their eyes, any corrective lenses, and how their brain interprets the signals the eyes send. Now we add camera equipment in, and things can get really different. A JPEG from an iPhone might look better than a RAW from my camera, or maybe the iPhone won't get the shot at all. Then we add in software to manipulate the data and who knows where that will end up?

My choices now are to generally try to make the scene look like I remember seeing it. Every now and then I'll push the software a bit to make the scene look like what's in my head. Usually this will mean pushing the colour and brightness a bit, but I try to keep it to what it could look like given specific lighting.

Then there is art, usually an abstract. I haven't worked on any of these for a while, and I'm looking forward to getting back to them. I'll push the software and change colours, sometimes running things through again, and pushing it even more, just to see how it turns out.

It's a different sort of creative process than writing. To write something you have to choose specific words in a specific order for the readers to make sense of it. Writers are making something up out of nothing. Photographers start with the world, and tweak from there. In either medium, if well done there is always something more for the viewer to enjoy.

I got this shot of Curtis while experimenting with the then new tripod and head. I totally love the way the camera can click in and click out of the head. Of course, any shot with Curtis in it is likely to be good because he's the most photogenic mammal in the house.

Unconventional

Some of you are probably scratching your heads, wondering what that photo is. It didn't quite work out like I intended, but the blog version I see as I type is better than the Lightroom version I edited. Not sure how that works. In any case, it's not my most successful image, and that's fine. I may revisit it and have another go.

I've been looking at the world around me, trying to open my mind and get past the recognition part of my brain saying 'that isn't anything dangerous, look somewhere else for something dangerous that might pounce and eat me.'

This is an example of that. As soon as I I saw it glinting in the light, I knew what it was. Being a guy, my first thought was NOT that the house needed vacuuming. My first thought was to move on and think about the next photo trip, or something else. But then I dragged myself back for another look, and tried to think about it as sunlight refracting off a semi transparent substance. Would it be a good image? Could I tweak it Lightroom to make it an interesting image?

At the time I was thinking of a sort of reverse image of solar flare prominences with the sun part being blacked out. No surprise it didn't come out that way, but in the bigger version I see lots of tiny rainbows, which was a bit of a surprise. That's why I'm willing to try these shots, just to see what will happen.

 Anyone that's been to our house knows whats happening in this next photo. There's lots of people going to be taking poppy shots over the next little while. I'd like to think this one is unique, showing a reflection of poppies (with all that implies) buried amidst the knickknacks on something we look at many times a day, and not just on Remembrance Day, but all year.

And last, just because. Curtis! Some days I think he's the real star of this blog.

In followup, don't forget the contest running here. So far I have zero, count'em, zero entries. So your odds are pretty good.

Missed my own bloggy-versary

How could that happen? Ten years is a long time in the blog universe. Just a few days and 10 years ago I started this fitness blog. Oct 27, 2007. 2530 or so blog posts later, one every 1.44 days on average, here we are. Much has changed.

We won't get into how much I've changed, other than saying I'm way, WAY more healthy now.

The blog started as a way for my fitness coach to keep track of what I was doing. One of his other clients was already a friend, and several others have become good friends. Some of the readers that started with me way back then are still reading, at least some of the time. (Hello!) Some have drifted off to other activities and don't do triathlon anymore.

Lots don't blog anymore. Blogging doesn't seem to be as popular, both reading and writing, OR commenting, as it once was. Maybe they've migrated to Facebook or other platforms, but those other platforms piss me off, what with fickle article ordering and (gag) advertising. My readership has stayed fairly constant, maybe slowly growing over the years. I've gained some readers and lost others.

I enjoy writing it. I figure if you didn't enjoy reading it for whatever reason, you wouldn't be here. Thank you for coming. Essentially, I plan to keep on writing it. What you have seen is what you will continue to get. A bit of fitness, lots of photos of various things, some wine, a bit of news, a rant every now and then, but no dancing girls or click bait. This is a quality blog.

To celebrate here's one of the first photos with the good camera that I really liked. I can do better now.

And more blog fitness related, one of the very first photos to go on the blog, my bike Estela. She is just coming up on 10 years as well, and has been a great bike for me. Pity I'm not out on her more often this summer, but maybe next. I am being encouraged to do an Oly next year, perhaps Chinook. I haven't had such good luck with their half, maybe the Oly will be the trick.

Oh, and don't bother going back to the beginning and reading the first posts. They're pretty dreadful.

Now it's your turn. Who are you? Leave a comment, or or a Facebook reply if that's where you saw the link. I'd love to know what you like about the blog, or what makes you cringe.

Gateways

In the movie Arrival, (close your eyes for a second if you haven't seen it and still want to, and don't want to be spoilered) the premise is that by learning an alien language people can learn to remember the future. This isn't new, lots of science fiction stories have seeing the future as a premise. Even the ancient Greeks had that idea, though Cassandra was cursed that nobody would believe her. (BTW, Arrival is a terrific movie if you haven't seen it yet. All photographers drool at the composition of the opening scene.)

But the theory often seems to be that you would remember everything about the future, and why should that be? How much of the past do you actually remember? Pop quiz, what were you doing at noon, a week and 5 days after your 12th birthday?

(Crickets.)

Now, you might end up having a memory of the future that includes a look at a calendar that shows you planning an event for a particular time and place in 2047. Maybe that's a possible future you, and there are other branches of you that die a week tomorrow in a car crash. That's why you wouldn't have any memories from then.

We choose our future every moment, often without realizing it. Sure, picking a school, picking a job, deciding which city to live in opens up a path to a future you, and simultaneously closes off other paths. Maybe you'd have met the love of your life if only you had taken that short term contract in Vancouver. It rolled over to a longer term, and you met that cute co-worker, blah blah blah. Or maybe that's where you died in a car crash and by staying here you got a long fulfilling life but you slide into senility with nobody but a paid nurse to change your diapers.

We usually don't know the results of our choices, though some are obvious. Getting into a car being driven by a drunk is a really bad idea. No brainer there. I think it's a no brainer that voting for Jason Kenney or anyone in their new political party is a bad idea, but then again, some people are so demented as to think that Trump is doing a good job.

There is an open gate. Inviting, provided you don't trip over the leaves, or run into the obstacle just past the gate. But there's another gate right beside it, closed. Someone in a rush might not even notice that closed gate. Maybe it's closed because going that way is a bad idea, or maybe, just maybe, the prize for opening it is substantial. You get to choose, and you probably won't have as much information as you'd like.

Again and again, you get to choose. Which shirt and tie to wear to work today? Doesn't matter. Oops, maybe it does, there's that big meeting with the new boss. Which route to take to work today, car or transit? Did you think about how long the egg salad sandwich you grabbed as a meeting leftover had been out of the fridge, or who had breathed on it? What kind of toothpaste do you get on the way home, you'd think you'd recognize something you pick up every day for several weeks, but no, and your spouse will get cranky with you if you get the wrong stuff, and therefore doesn't want to have sex and that's the day you'd have got pregnant.

On and on, decisions, decisions. Big, little, and unknown. Go through this gate to this path, but not that one. Oops! Goofed, but now it's too late. Live and learn.

Sometimes I think this getting old thing is just getting tired from making so many decisions. I remember talking to older people, and them saying they liked things slowing down as they got older, living a simpler life by excluding choices. I didn't get it then. I do now. I've really enjoyed this 4 months off. There are days so busy I don't know if I'm coming or going, and days I do very little. The balance is nice.

There are some gates beginning to loom up in front of me. Their shadows are becoming more clear, but who knows for sure? In other news, our financial advisor is building us an income allocation plan to get the money we need out of our various investments, while triggering as little tax as possible. The assumption being made at the moment is that there is no other work contract for me because, really, until there is an offer on paper to be signed, there is nothing and I'm free to go photograph whatever seems good. But life changes. All the time. Stay tuned.