Photography Tip #1

Here's a photography tip from me to all my many fans. See this picture? (The blurring is mine to protect the privacy of the innocent.)

Don’t do this shit. Absolutely nothing about this photograph is clever or artful (well, except for my blurring): any 2-year old with a button-mashing finger and a Fisher-Price camera can take this kind of picture.

I don’t know when this “angle” trend in photography got started, or by whom, but I have noticed a lot of it lately. At the place where I work, I actually hired a “professional” photographer to take the pictures at an event we hosted, thinking he would be able to get better pictures than I’d get simply because he was a professional.

Wrong. He got a few better pictures than I would have simply because he was 6’5” and could stand at the back of the room and photograph someone at the front, effortlessly holding his camera up over the heads of the audience. (He had a telephoto lens.) But other than that, he took way, way too many of these kinds of shots. And I had to pay him for all 57 of them.

This kind of photography is showing up all over the university where I work, in its publications and its many Web sites. I’m told by my tech guru that the theory behind it is that the eye finds anything on a diagonal “more interesting” than anything on a straight line. This may be true, but if so, it should be found in the subject of the photograph itself, not by holding the camera crooked or by taking the photo into Photoshop and rotating it.

I repeat: don’t do that shit. If Ansel Adams or Helmut Newton didn’t do it, you probably shouldn’t, either.

No time to blog

This is going well, isn't it?

The Waste Land

Okay, this is harder than I thought it would be. I am out of practice when it comes to writing anything longer than an email, and worse, out of practice when it comes to making myself do anything I really don’t have to do (a pitfall once your children are grown and gone). I think about writing way more than I actually do any writing because I have new rituals for my spare time that don’t include it.

After work today I went to a lecture, came home, made dinner, ate, and took the dog for a walk. It was 8:30 by then. I wasted the next hour and a half doing absolutely nothing but chilling in front of the TV. There wasn’t even anything on I really wanted to watch, but I ended up at GAC listening to new country artists do old George Jones songs and flipping over to HGTV at commercials. I could have watched Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow, but honestly, I have to take a break from the political scene sometime.

Anyway, after wallowing in sad country songs for way too long, I came upstairs, got ready for bed, let the dog in and brushed him, then answered a few work-related emails. Now here I am, too tired to write a clever blog. This is the point in the evening when I play a computer game, then go to bed with a good book and read 5-10 pages before falling asleep.

Only I don’t have a good book. I have a mediocre book. It’s one of Russo’s, and I love Russo, but Mohawk is not one of his best. I have to check tomorrow at B&N on campus to see if maybe they have Stieg Larsson’s second book.

And I have to get some new rituals.

So you think you can blog

Blogging, someone opined recently, is a sign we as a people have become narcissistic. I don't think that's true, at least no truer than it's ever been. America has a pretty long tradition of autobiographical writing, and what could be more indulgent and narcissistic than writing an entire book about yourself? I mean, think about The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Unbridled narcissism. If Franklin were alive today, he'd be all about having a blog.

So I'm in. This is my blog, and it will mostly be all about me, my family and friends, my dog, my cat, my Miata, golf, food, gardening, politics, religion, books, photography, movies, travel—whatever is on my mind.

And it will be indulgent and narcissistic. Oh yes.