11 Photos of 2011
You can learn a lot about yourself through introspection. You can learn even more through conversation. But retrospection… retrospection is different. It allows you to see the trends in your own behaviour or preferences, free of the constraints of what you should, or think you ought, to prefer.
Retrospection is great for soul-searching and big life decisions, but it works equally well for mundane things; like artistic tastes, or hobby preferences.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been carrying my camera around quite a bit. I’m not a great photographer, but I enjoy it. One of the most important steps in developing as a photographer is to figure out what you like taking pictures of. That understanding can later guide the inevitable expansion of your equipment: lenses, camera, lighting. For that, introspection and conversation are fine, but retrospection is best.
So, this is a slideshow of my favourite 11 pictures I’ve taken this year. I’ve tried to not over-process the images, for the most part leaving them the way they came out of the camera.
So what have I learned? I like photographs with a short focal length, that is, only a very narrow slice of the image is in focus.
I take close-ups. Probably too many close-ups. (It was hard to find any photos that weren’t.)
I like pictures with moody lighting, or shots that focus on something other than the obvious subject.
Also, apparently, I like taking pictures of animals.
Another year down, another batch of files archived in the development of a new hobby.
Sometimes a Girl Just Wants to Get Her Work Done
Mind this off-topic post. I apologize, there is no science or journalism here. Instead, this is a response to AV Flox‘s wonderful story, “I Just Want to Go on a Walk.”
A female friend of mine, after reading the story, asked me
“Hey Colin, what was your response to this piece? I have a guy friend who isn’t responding well and I’m trying to explain it to him, but it might be helpful to have a male perspective.”
The only response I could come up with was to recount a story; a scene I’d seen play out in a coffee shop where I often spend my afternoons writing.
Why COP17 will not succeed
As world leaders meet in Durban, South Africa for the next two weeks for the COP17 Climate Change Conference, I am struck by the overwhelming sense that nothing good will possibly come of it.
Rather than being miffed with politics in general, this is a far more measurable sense of impending doom. It is hard to expect success from a project aiming for an impossible target.
From the Washington Post today,
International climate negotiators have pledged to keep the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels.
Granted, that goal sounds wonderful, as 2 degrees C has been paraded around as the upper bounds on “safe” climate change. There is only one problem–for all intents and purposes it is not possible.
550, 000, 000 Years of Plate Tectonics
Curse you, fluffy water!
This week marked the first snowfall of the season for my sleepy hometown of Brantford, Ontario. The advancing signs of winter, combined with the attacks by the tilted Earth axis and the purveyors of daylight savings time on the length of our day, drives pretty well everyone to become cold, cranky messes. But as I was sitting in a coffee shop, festering in my first world problems, a twitter conversation between Brian Romans and Matthew Garcia reminded me that it wasn’t always this way.
No, my friends. Brantford, it seems, used to be a lush, subtropical, coastal paradise. One where, if you were lucky, you might have seen the planet’s first tree, or the first steps of a timid tetrapod as it clawed its way to land.
Just 385, 000, 000 years ago, Brantford, Ontario was right……………………………………………………..
……………………………………….
...Here.
That white line in the centre of the image is the equator, and the happy red dot is where I could have been relaxing on the beach right now. The creator of this image, Ron Blakey of Colorado Plateau Geosystems Inc., was kind enough to leave the faint ghost of the current geography on the map, making it surprisingly fun to see where your home would have been way back in the day.
But as it turns out, that specific image, of Devonian paleogeography, was not the only such picture created by dear Dr. Blakey. Oh no, there are DOZENS of pictures of North America alone.
And what is the only reasonable course of action when presented with such beautiful scientific imagery? Why, set it to some sweet acoustic guitar, of course.
The images created by Dr. Blakey are not spaced at regular temporal intervals, but thanks to some simple math the animation should be a scientifically accurate representation of the changing face of our little blue planet.
The Pitch Cemetery: Exclusive Access and Journalistic Bias
This is where a freelancer's dreams normally end up. Credit: mugley
The following is the first of what I hope will become an ever more frequent series on this here blog. Below is a pitch I submitted to a magazine editor regarding a potential freelance story. My pitch was rejected (or, at least, it’s been a few weeks with no reply), but the most important thing to me is that I sent it in the first place. Even trying to step foot into the world of magazine writing is a daunting task, and one that I’ve for the most part avoided, largely due to timidity. I hope that by posting my rejected pitches here, I can: hang my dirty laundry out to dry, document the travails of a fledgling journalist, and maybe, just maybe, hear the critiques of other writers.
As for this pitch specifically, the story idea started as a pithy tweet. A positive response from an editor I respect turned into a brief 140-char discussion, and ended with a prompt that I send him an email. I suspect that this pitch, cobbled together in an hour or two, was both too abstract and too exhaustive. So here lies the pitch in its (almost) original form.
CMBR 