Hong Kong from The Peak on a Summer Night

Photo by Stuck in Customs.

Hong Kong from The Peak on a Summer Night

The blog ‘Stuck in Customs’ has some of the most incredible photography I have ever seen; this picture is an HDR of Hong Kong. The colours are simply amazing.

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/

My favourite tree, again…

Here is another HDR of my favourite tree providing a nice sunlit contrast to the sunset picture I took the other evening. I’m not sure why the bark seems to come alive with a warm glow but I love the effect.

ISO 200, f/10, 20mm

A Walk in the Park

One of my all time favourite blogs is Bev Wigney’s ‘Burning Silo‘, a self proclaimed virtual space where nature meets photography and this sounds like a marvelous idea to me. One of the amazing things about Burning Silo is how Bev manages to come up with incredible macros day after day, after a tromp about the farm she emerges with marvelous things to show us.

I managed to get out and about with my little boy today; everyone has been down with some pretty nasty flu so we’re all suffering from advanced stages of cabin fever and in danger of getting out the kitchen knives. There is a nice park and dam quite close to where I live and so the two of us headed out for a little nature infusion this afternoon. I took my camera along in the hopes of shooting some Bev-like pictures but it seems all the critters are hidden away from the winter cold and I had to content myself with a few nice pictures of the park and some rather fat and well fed ducks; not really up to par I’m afraid.

The walk however was divine; a highveld combination of warm sun, chilly air and the most unbelievably blue sky. A few stragglers were braving the cold and were sprawled out on the lawns with picnic attire; children zoot past you on scooters or plastic push bikes followed by bemused looking parents and the briskness of the air added bounce to the steps of many of the excited and slobbery pooches.

The walk has a sad moment to it though. On the way round the dam we happened upon two children and their carers. These little boys had survived being burned alive and their skin looked like run candle wax. Most of their features has been melted away and they still had bandages on parts of their body. They were most likely survivors of the winter fires that rampage through the informal settlements (a nice name for squatter camps) that abound throughout South Africa. Often a spilled paraffin lamp is the start of these blazes that can eat through an entire camp in a night taking many victims along the way. Despite the overwhelming odds that face these two little kids in life they were managing to enjoy a little nature and some sunlight and stood together by the waters edge, as kids do everywhere, throwing pebbles into the water.

I will keep trying to find those elusive many-legged critters in the interim and content myself with some of the wonderful macro photography on Flickr; I am looking to get myself a macro lens in the near future so that will help my cause greatly – the salesman assures me it will make an eyebrow look like a broomstick.

I’d like to close by sharing a wonderful quote I found today:

“The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.”
- Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984)

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Nature, Photography, Photo, Scenery

The Facebook Friend Collectors

Facebook is the topic of much controversy and web chatter of late. The evening TV news expounds the evils of employees under the whip of timesheet and productivity measuring regimens (determined by a greedy and slightly insane consulting culture) wasting valuable company time by chatting to a friend or checking out the latest poke app.

Facebook though has some really great things going for it. It has put me back in touch with friends and distant relatives who mean something in my life but who were slowly slipping away due to the busyness of our respective lives. It has a wealth of applications mostly annoying but some very useful or just plain fun and it is a central point, a hub if you will, of many online activities that make up a large chunk of things I enjoy – In my case it is a place where I can share my love of writing and photography. There are other things I could certainly live without, the poke app is one of them; It is an annoyance I would class in the same mental bucket as genital fleas and Jar-Jar Binks. Another irritation is this initial deluge of people who you vaguely knew decades ago (and some your really didn’t like too much) and who are now on a quest to collect as many “friends” as they can for they are of the belief that a Facebook stuffed with the pinned faces of distant acquaintances makes for an obviously cooler person. I personally prefer a small subset of people who I choose to interact with on an (almost) daily basis.

Facebook can also be the source of concerns regarding privacy and is the breeding ground for all sorts of colourful conspiracies to fill many a season of the X Files.

A recent article presented a fascinating read entitled ‘American class divisions through Facebook and Myspace‘ gives a little more insight to the popular view that Facebook is populated by suave, educated and elegant people while Myspace has all the graphically challenged and colour blind kiddies and paedophiles and is not a nice place to visit if at all possible. There have been overtures to Facebook’s link to the CIA and how it is a nice little place for shadowy and bespectacled uber-nerds working in the shiny chrome dungeons of the pentagon tracking your every movement down to the last topping on your pizza or dodgy subscription to Penthouse.

Tonight an article over at Download Squad made me stop and consider briefly whether sharing too much personal information online is such a good idea. It is a sad truth that anywhere society congregates one finds degenerates lurking to take advantage and in a technology abundant society identity fraud is a real problem. Are we just making it easier for cyber-criminals (and not the ones riding Tron bikes) to browse through our online profiles and complete a very accurate picture of who we are?

I don’t like to give in to the quivering neurosis of the conspiracy theorists but I’ve just made my Facebook information that little bit harder to find from the outside. Will it mean I won’t be inundated with buddy requests from the ‘friend collectors’?, probably - but it’s a risk I am happy to take.

Back after a hiatus

Well I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus of late, getting all the disconnected threads of my life neatly back in order. I took a jaunt back to blogger and did a whole lot of tech stuff which was fun but ultimately not very satisfying (and the community there are just not as cool and interactive as the wordpress lot).

The main problem I had with my blog was that the content was too disparate, too much stuff about too many topics to satisfy the need for a blog-theme. So I’m starting again and keeping it simple, concentrating on the things that really interest me: atheism and belief, photography and general life musings.If that’s what gets your wheels turning in the morning then perhaps we have something. It’s a new day and I’m pleased to be writing again.

The picture above is a 3 exposure HDR taken of my favourite tree in my garden, an African acacia that towers over our house and is able to grab the last rays of sunlight. Taken with a Nikon D80, f/10 1/50s ISO 200 autobracketing, exposures 2ev apart.