Month: January 2011

I’m So Pulling out my Textbooks

Back in 1890, they passed into law this little ol’ thing called the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

From the wiki: “The purpose of the act was to oppose the combination of entities that could potentially harm competition, such as monopolies or cartels.”

Yes, this is a good thing. Boon to a free economy and such.

Well I’m ready to invoke that act on a little institution known as Getty Images.

If you look around the web and you see an image you like, look closer…odds are Getty already owns it. And don’t both trying to “borrow” it, Getty wants their money and they want it bad.

Oh, and they are large enough to bring a whole passel of lawyers along for the ride.

Getty owns most shots from any professional sporting event. Getty owns the photos of most individual players too.

Getty has hoovered up many of the great images on Flickr, too. In many cases, photographers *gladly* gave over rights to their photos in hopes of making a little money or at least getting a little exposure.

Understandable, but I don’t have to like it.

Ever visited iStockPhoto, a place where you can find a lot of for-pay great stock images? Getty.

And now, oh now, my fave royalty free photo site, stock.xchng is under new management.

You guessed it, Getty has booted the original team (ok, they probably received a nice sum for their time and trouble) and is now in charge.

I’ll betcha some cold hard cash that many of these formerly free images will no longer be free. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that stock.xchng will soon be blended entirely into iStockPhoto and s’long high quality royalty free photos.

This make Hulk maaaad.

I’m just a little personal blog. I don’t make big ad bucks. I make no bucks from my blog. I do it for the satisfaction. And oh so sorry, can’t pay for high quality photos with just my sense of satisfaction.

Bah!

Photo below, found by searching “greedy” on stock.xchng.








Photo by Svilen Milev and used royalty free (for the time being) from stock.xchng.


Physics by way of the cable company

From a whipping-up-anxiety article in Time magazine titled “Will the Earth Have Two Suns by 2012?”

Regarding Betelgeuse, a rapidly collapsing red super-giant star:


“It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up,” Carter said. “We’ll have incredible brightness for a brief period of time…and then over the coming months it begins to fade and then eventually it will be very hard to see at all.”

And while the celestial event could take place before the end of 2012, it may not occur for a million years.


Emphasis added by me.

Sooo, it could happen in a year or a million years. Trifle hard to plan provisions for that million year stretch. What’s the half-life on my water container?

It’s only January of 2011 and I’m seriously DONE with the doomsday predictions.

Meanwhile, a star that explodes and lights up the Earth for a few weeks then fades away? That’s pretty damn cool. I kind of hope it happens by 2012.



Source.

Gravity is a Cruel, Cruel Mistress

As I was growing up, my mom, bless her soul, had some pretty strong aspirations for her daughters. Mainly, she wanted both my sister and me to be strong, healthy and graceful girls.

This is an admirable wish.

So to that end, both my sissy and I attended dance classes regularly, learning ballet, tap and jazz (yes, I learned how to make perfect jazz hands).

Blessed from an early age with sturdy thighs and broad German hips, I was what might be called “stocky.” This whole dancing thing was a bit tougher for me than it was for the lithe little girls who also attended the dance classes.

That said, I danced and it was not so bad. I was a damn fine tap dancer in my day, actually. I could shuffle-off-to-buffalo like nobody’s business! (Google it, that’s actually a tap dancing term)

At some point, I don’t know how it came about, but it was agreed that I would start taking gymnastics classes at the local YMCA.

Well, this was quite a step up in the game. Gymnastics! Whoa!

Ok, let’s go back to the sturdy thighs and broad German hips thing…my center of gravity is rather low. This is a good thing for lifting things and staying on the planet.

However, that “staying on the planet” aspect is quite the hindrance to the goal of gymnastics activities which often involve leaving the ground.

In hindsight, I did ok on balance beam. I was actually not that bad on the uneven bars.

But the floor routines were another story entirely.

Cartwheels? Yes!

Backbends. Sure. I’m all over them.

Flips? Er. Not so much.

I’d come thundering down the mat, do the hop, attempt to flip forward and wind up lying on the mat in a tangled mess of limbs and lycra spandex.

Next I’d try to do that big hop and tuck to make a back flip work, and would end up in a similar state.

A back flip on the balance beam? Oh please, I never even tried.

It was kind of hard on the ol’ self esteem back then that all these other girls could flip through the air with the greatest of ease while I stayed firmly grounded.

Over the years I’ve become a bit more circumspect. Gravity is one of those laws that, unless you are an astronaut, you just can’t break. These days I tend to allow all due deference to that bitchy Mistress Gravity. She’s always going to win.






Today’s theme for Theme Thursday is flip.

Photo by Charlie Balch and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


Photo Fun: Fish Eye lens

A couple years ago I invested in a few of those fun plastic Lomography cameras.

I own an Action Sampler multiple lens camera, a Colorsplash with gel films for the flash, and a camera with a built in fish eye lens.

Of the three, the fish eye has been my least favorite. With that big bubble lens skewing the view, it felt damn near impossible to take a good photo with the thing.

Better photographers than I understand the proportions of this extremely wide angle lens, but for me I felt like I was fighting with it.

So I gave up.

Recently, I was cleaning out my gear and I noticed that the fish eye camera had a roll of film loaded, and the counter showed 1. Turns out I hadn’t even used a single frame of the roll.

I tossed the camera in my bag for New Year’s Eve weekend. I knew we’d be staying near Sausalito and there’s plenty of photo opportunities up there.

Well, I forgot I had that fish eye in my bag until the day we were driving home when I had a flash of inspiration. As we drove over the bridge, I held the camera out the window and on the roof of the car, tilted it up slightly, and snapped away.

Sometimes serendipity is the best friend of the photographer.

Other than straightening the horizon, this photo is straight off the camera.

Suddenly I like that fish eye camera a whole lot more.



(click to see a larger size)


An Ode To The Shortest Month

Yesterday, in the midst of the weirdness and woe, there was also something magical to note.

After severe rainstorms and plenty of freezing weather, Monday was this clear, sunny, warm, beautiful day.

It was, I think, a hint of what’s to come: February.

Yes, I said February.

The second month of the year. The shortest month of the year. February is a beautiful month.

In February, winter is not quite over, but spring is not quite here. In February we start to see the brilliant yellow of blooming daffodils against the monochrome hue of stormy skies. Daffodils are the harbinger of warm sunny days to come. They gives the cold body hope.

I believe the daffodils and tulips and the snowfall of Cherry Blossoms in February are meant to keep us going like the carrot at the end of the stick. The “something wonderful just around the bend” that help the human soul stay willing to endure the cold and damp days that are yet to be endured.

In February, Punxsutawney Phil pokes his burrowing animal’s head out of the ground and lets us know the score. The planning can begin.

The ground begins to thaw. Birds start to think about coming back this way. There is hope.

Heck, February is also the birth month of at least three of my favorite people (wait, four! Just thought of another).

I appreciate we’re still a good two weeks away from February, but I’m looking toward the second month of the year with a secret anticipation.

In other words…I’m flat tired of winter.

But it’s more poetic to speak of daffodils and warm days.






**Footnote: I purposefully ignored the “holiday” in February. I’m grateful to celebrate every day with my beloved, I don’t need a certain day set aside.


Photo by Andrea Kratzenberg and used royalty free from stock.xchng.