Kai Otton

Karen Dalton

Ig

I have been quite flattered with the positive response to my recent surf photography.

Haven't done that much of it but it is a lot of fun and I look forward to doing more in the future. More waves, better pictures...

I posted some shots on DPReview and got several comments on how I should do this or that to alter them.

Like most people I love to give but hate to get criticism.

So I wrote this little screed, which was quickly taken down and redirected to Siberia by a moderator, for some real or imagined sin:

On Post Processing

You know it is funny. I have been involved in digital photography since the 1970's, during the time of dos. Before there were software packages like Photoshop, In the nascent era of the craft, I sometimes was forced to invent methods to digitally manipulate slides. Because pre Corel, there was simply nothing out there. Then with the rise of GUI interfaces a few elementary paint programs finally came on the market but they were extremely primitive in the beginning.

Telling people how to post produce their pictures is like telling a person the proper way to sleep with their spouse. We don't really care how you do it, most of us are happy to do it our way and furthermore it's none of your business.

Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion. We live in a world where everything is supposed to pop. But some days are gray, sometimes reality doesn't pop. Is it a sin to go down the path of aesthetic verité and present things as close as you can approximate to how things actually look to you in the real world?

Of course we live in a world where photos can now be de-hazed, saturated and vibranced until they rattle off the shelf like radioactive Kewpie dolls. And we have all done it. But there also comes a time when an artist might see the value in verisimilitude and is content to have their creations fall in line with what they actually perceive.

So we certainly don't have to go down the path of super attenuation and our pictures don't have to look like everybody else's.

Criticism is fine and when one is posting images on a public forum one has to expect that there are people out there who want to legitimately help and have their own opinions. But keep in mind, many of us are happy with our work just the way it is.

Robert Sommers

I think that everybody should do whatever the hell they like with their artistic creations. If you want to boost, stretch or manipulate, have at it. If you are a literalist or representationalist, good on you too. LMTFA.

Basket of deplorables

Half? I'd say she was being pretty charitable.

White Heron, Santee Lakes

Buzzy Linhart

Mail call

I got this letter from a friend long in Thailand:

Looking at my continual warnings that I am about to reach my limit of free articles with various news organs, I wonder what you do to keep informed without breaking the bank. Embarrassing to say, dating from my first email account (opened with the help of a young guy at an Internet cafe in Thailand in 1995) I still have Yahoo as my home page (blushes). That has been pretty awful, but Idon't know where to turn for better sources. I mostly just skim over news, and that is doable on a free basis, but is there a more cost effective way to dig into real content than sending hundreds of dollars a year to the 'Grey Lady'?

R

Well in the first place R, I think Yahoo is still my homepage too. Don't be too embarrassed, I'm not. I just never look at it. If you were still on AOL we could all rightfully laugh at you. But Yahoo doesn't cause many snickers. I have one of the earliest yahoo accounts on my pacbell.net email.

The question of where I turn for news is a good one. My first stop is always Google News. Why? It is an uber aggregator, concise, thorough and most importantly, neutral. I hate news with a spin. I had to turn off Rachel Maddow today because it was so smarmy and self congratulatory and I equally abhor Fox. Give me the news straight up and I will spin it myself, I don't want or need any favors.

Beyond that I can and do go just about anywhere, from Alternet to Breitbart and all stops in between. Townhall is a good place to take the pulse of the right, Daily Kos or Mother Jones on the left. NPR. WSJ when I can get through the payscreen. WaPo where I am usually forced to read headlines because body is often restricted. Sometimes I get lucky. The only one I pay for is the New York Times. Los Angeles Times is now a total joke.

Huffington Post is pretty good but you have to read about Kanye or somebody's nipple slip. Talking Points Memo is a necessity.

But it all starts with Google News.

Just A Little Bit Of Rain

It was a wild world.

This story today from Live Science just blows my mind. Earth is what four and a half billion years old?

We have lost 10 % of our wilderness in this world since 1990. Twenty six years. 3.3 million sq km of wilderness, down the drain.

Imagine a tape four and a half billion inches long, everything going great, irrespective of a few plagues, floods and comets. Then Wham!

Look at how fast we fucked it all up, right at the end. We are wreaking havoc with incredible speed.

And that is what kills me about the Inhofes, the Bachmanns, the climate change deniers.

They are so easily bought, or part of a self fulfilling end times strategy.  By the time they figure it out, if ever, it is/we are already too far gone.

Ten percent of wilderness gone will have profound tertiary effects all the way down the line, less trees producing oxygen, hotter weather, rising tides.

Better start drinking again.

Thank you sir, may I have another...

Still pretty chill from yesterday. Shame to bum things out with politics. Will try to be brief.

I got a ranty email from a trumpy friend this morning.

Well...... Robert you can thank your man?, obama and hillary for obama care! Instead of going after the root causes health care, gouging , fraud, ten dollar aspirins, etc,etc! Never was there talk about reducing health care from the top down, just more tax and doubling of insurance rates.
You've heard of the military-industrial complex, how about the pharmaceutical-insurance-medical complex?
M

Not sure you can visit Obama's supposed sins on his replacement. But you go right ahead M. I think that M was using my recent bitching about my botched health insurance as an opportunity to take a shot at Hillary, who he absolutely despises.

I think that it is all on Obama. Obamacare was a grand experiment with great goals but it is not working structurally. Not enough healthy people premiums to take care of the sick people premiums, broken government reimbursement promises, I'm not going to totally dissect it right now but it was constructed on the fly with bobby pins and scotch tape and the craft is now taking on a lot of water. More and more companies are fleeing the exchanges.

And like so much from this President, you have to wonder if it will be sustainable in the future? This program, which surely was the least thought out and most poorly conceived and wrought social program in history?

Obama has labeled himself as a transformational president. Transformational people tend to have outsized egos and major messianic complexes. They do everything on their own, with their perfect vision, and alienate friend and foe alike.

The problem with the godlike is that mere mortals usually have to come back around to clean up their mess. Of course the architect then has a failsafe out, blame someone else for improper implementation, I did my part, etc.

Of course any sane person would have similar doubts about the grand Obama enchilada, the Iran deal.  Sustainable, you tell me? There have been 31 incidents of harassment with Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf so far this year, up from 23 in all of 2015. Contrary to the genius's in the administration, it has been estimated that the Iranians have sponsored Hamas and Hezbollah to the tune of $100,000,000 and not used the money to rebuild their economy as was forecast. They are still committed to foment all sorts of mischief.

Anybody want to take bets on this one working out?

Not sure why the administration continues to defend the deal so vigorously. You won, get over it. Nobody else has to like it or not believe that it will lead to certain disaster down the road.  Its your deal, for better or for worse.

By the way, I think Donald Trump has nearly the same disease of conceit, just not so well hidden.

*

And then there is the big tiger in the room, China. China has been rapacious in gobbling up its neighbor's historical seas and building artificial islands of late. Obama took time out from his apology tour of Laos to tell the people in the region that they had his assurances and total commitment in their fight against the neighborhood bully. Good luck on that.

Obama calls his strategy to give up on the middle east and concentrate on Asia the big pivot. Once the people of that other region had his assurances and total commitment. But he got tired of them. Pivot here, pivot there.

*
Clinton is on record as being against ratification of the TPP or Trans Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. So another Obama baby might soon crumble into dust.

*
I have had it up to here with the current administration. John Kerry launched into another one of his  "don't talk about the terrorists and maybe they will go away" talks the other day. Some pissant in the Philippines calls our leader the "son of a whore" and the Prez goes and shakes his hand the next day. We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time pissing all over ourselves.

Much of our own military despises our leader (Trump has a 19 point lead with active military) and he has tied their hands operationally in many different ways in his desire to be absolutely politically correct.

Bill Clinton was a realist who made alliances and got things done. He demanded a certain respect internationally and I think that Hillary will as well. I look forward to a day when our country is respected again and is not such a timorous mouse.

*
Obama was clear the other day about Colin Kaepernick's constitutional right to protest. Democracy is messy or something like that, he said. All for it.

He didn't mention the pig in a police hat socks. And I thought, way to support law enforcement in this country. And thought a bit about these poor innocent people. Killed or seriously wounded in the last few weeks. Of course there are plenty more.

Officer Clint Corvinus, senselessly killed by a thug in Alamogordo.

Or Officer Nigel Benner, killed in Rio Rancho. Same story. How about a word for him?

Or these two:

Officers Toamalama Scanlan and Juanita Davila, shot by a visitor to a prison in Fresno who got mad because they wouldn't let him cut in line.

A visitor who had done over a decade for rape and then was released when Laos wouldn't take him back. Anybody thinking about these poor cops? Did they have it coming, Colin? Barack?

Misty Roses

Bethany Hamilton

I don't think I am the most easily impressed guy that you will ever meet. But I have to admit that I was majorly blown away seeing Bethany Hamilton yesterday. Her charm, her strength, beauty and composure are simply overwhelming.

 I assume that pretty much everybody knows her story. She lost her arm in an unfortunate encounter with a shark while surfing in 2003. She wrote a book about her experience and later a movie Soul Surfer was made that recounted her tale.

Bethany was back on her surfboard a month after the attack. I don't know much about her, I know that she is religiously devoted and now has a husband and child.

She paddled out from next to where I was standing at the Swatch Pro at Lower Trestles yesterday. She didn't have the best day but the waves were squirrelly and sporadic.

Movie star beautiful, I watched as she waited what seemed like an interminable time for a set.

I read recently, and I paraphrase, that she wants to be looked at as a surfer and not necessarily anything else. Not be defined by her loss of an arm. I totally get it.

Bethany is one of those people that seems to radiate joy. A genuine smile. I confess to feeling my heart sink when I watched her struggle a bit to get out of the rocky surf. Not easy with one arm holding a surfboard, she did it with total composure.

Count me in. I am a big fan. Extraordinary woman.

Hurley and Swatch Pro Surfing Championships

Sanoguy invited me to go up to Trestles today to check out the pro surf contest. Got up at five and then met him later at Daniels Market with all my photo gear.

I brought the Nikkor 70-200 2.8 vr but never took it out of the bag. All shots were taken with the Nikon D7200 and the Sigma 150-600mm C zoom telephoto lens.

No problem parking and a shuttle took us down to the beach. The waves started out small but got better as the day progressed.

Its kind of hard for me to take surf pictures and not think of my late friend and inspiration, Rick Griffin.

I want to get out the toothbrush and spray some more white paint on them, tweak the more psychedelic  aspects until they conform to the Pacific Vibration.

Quaffed too many shrooms at Stone Steps in the day, I suppose.

I wrote to his widow Ida last week. Ida said that she knows why we were such good friends when she looks at my photos and my love for the southwest, something Rick shared. That made me feel good.

He was one of a kind, an inspiration to so many of us.

Fun and epic day. Amazing surfers, both the men and women. Phenomenal athletes.

There were lots of people, lots of families. I shot off my tripod  at the far end of the beach, in the nursery area.

Bethany Hamilton

Coco Ho

1737 shots to cull through and ponder.

Haven't surfed since I was seventeen and was never any good. Am certainly no expert. Don't know all the current surfers. But love the waves, the water and the spray, the athleticism, aesthetics, etc. An excellent day, I feel better than I have all week. Might even go back for the final round.

Thanks, Mike.

Thousand dollar wedding

9.8.16

It has been a tough week. I have been fighting a serious bronchial thing. Can't go see my doctor because since I got the new health insurance I discovered that none of my long time existing doctors are covered by the new plans.

New cat is sick too. I was afraid for a while that we were going to lose her. Les thinks that she might have swallowed a bad lizard. Hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones.

Business is slow. None of the people that told me that they were going to show up ever did.

So the week has been pretty much a total waste. Bought about ten old Nero Wolfe paperbacks at the Bottom Shelf for a quarter a piece and quickly devoured them. Now I am on to the collected works of Ring Lardner. Anyone want to read the Nero books, just ask.

Buzz is still having complications with the new kidney which I won't go into.

I had my Trump photo expunged from DPReview for unclear reasons but the moderator said that the political content offended many. Guess I did it again.

The blog was going great guns last week, over two thousand readers a day but has now settled back into the normal range,

Still feeling fat. Still feeling slightly allergic to people. Waiting for a second wind.

Go figure.

You have to love the French.

A car is found parked outside of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It contains six full gas cylinders and one empty and has documents inside with arabic writing.

Its owner is on a terrorist watch list. The Peugot 607 bears no registration plates. Its hazard lights are blinking. Parking in this zone, the Quai de Montebello, is strictly prohibited. This car has been parked illegally for over two hours.

The suspect is a 19 year old french girl who had plans to go to Syria. Her accomplices are a radicalized 29 year old Frenchwoman who also wants to run away and join ISIS with her 34 year old boyfriend. They are picked up and then later released.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he was waiting for a report from investigators on what the possible motives were for the incident?

Excusez-moi, quelles sont vos motivations? Avez-vous été bien traité comme un enfant?

Nose rider

Sonny Boy Williamson II - Nine below zero

Foxy Lady

I thought that the Greta Van Susteren resignation was sort of interesting today.  She had been a strong defender of Roger Ailes when the sexual harassment stories first broke, which probably did not endear her to some of her female colleagues at Fox.

She said she never saw that sort of behavior from her boss. Well, it seems as if she was apparently the only one in the organization that didn't. At least twenty other women have reported similar improper entreaties from the recently resigned Fox boss.

“Now, remember, you’re Doris Day. Go put your uniform on, get over to the DoubleTree, and thank me for this." Roger Ailes to Laurie Luhn

The Laurie Luhn story is particularly disgusting, of course Roger is purportedly enabled the whole way by Murdoch, Bill Shine, Dianne Brandi, countless other minions at Fox and I suspect Ailes own wife as well, all who seem to look the other way while he does his thing.

"Of course, the first thing that occurred to me is that, unfortunately, we have a disgruntled employee, a colleague," she says. "I read that her show wasn't being renewed and, being a lawyer, I thought she got angry. I deal with Roger Ailes often. I've often been alone with Roger Ailes in his office over the course of 15 years and I've never seen anything like what I'm reading about in the papers and the magazine." 
"If Roger Ailes were how he's described, there's no way I would've stuck around. I don't feel like putting up with that stuff and I wouldn't," she says. "Even if he weren't doing it to me, I wouldn't want to work in that environment. I sort of feel bad for Gretchen Carlson because it's sort of a weird thing that she's done. What she's alleging is something that is alien to me. I've never heard it." 

Way to stick up for your fellow workers, Greta. Now Gretchen Carlson, who was equipped with some very choice recordings of Ailes sexual come-ons, is walking away with a cool twenty million and Greta is looking like an out of the loop chump. The one woman Roger Ailes wouldn't hit on.

I hate to say it but go figure.





I've never been a fan of either Van Susteren or the network. The Scientology thing gives me the heebie jeebies. Greta the theta, the long lost emissary from planet Xenu.

Did you know that Joseph McCarthy was best man at her parents' wedding? O Reilly may be facing his own music soon. With an aging demographic and Trump driving the bus, the whole network seems to be melting down...

kulture kross

kulture kross - Crossword Labs



This is my first attempt at creating a crossword, I cleaned it up a bit. I believe that you can work it out on the screen. Just click your cursor in a box. Good luck! Let me know if you solve it and I will toughen up the next one. I screwed up and gave away a clue so you got one gimme.

Atom Heart Mother

Trump über Alles

Can't wait for the national election to be over? Well who can? Here's a link to an election clock so that we can count down the seconds together.

Of course minds are pretty much made up already. Don't think anybody is going to change their opinion, even after the debates. You loathe one or the other, or both.

I have at least three friends that will be voting for the Donald. Lance says that Trump hates the banks, that Hillary loves the banks and that we need a shakeup in this country. The outsider "wild card" who will shake things up.

What I see is a guy that seems to lie one hundred percent of the time. A rich kid who has really done nothing but leave disaster in his wake. A man who believes in nothing except power.

 Lewandowski was trying to explain the infinite amount of pivots on immigration, you know the ones that Giuliani said illustrated the candidate's range and breadth? Cory L says that Trump needed to solidify the red meat base first and that after they are firmly back in the fold, he will then soften the message.

The question is, where does reality enter the fold? What does he actually think, what is the real policy? Or is that too much to ask? The guy had a dream. A dream to buy the presidency, maybe he is poised to win a bet with his pals on just how stupid his fellow citizens are?

I guess what scares me the most or one of the things anyway, is this ideology testing he is advocating. Shades of Joe McCarthy and the House Un American Committee. I wonder if I would pass the test, I sort of doubt it. Bring on the thought police. As American as Father Coughlin.

*

Then there was the story of the non disclosure, non defamation clause that every Trump volunteer has to sign. For perpetuity. Forget Putin, jump straight to Stalin. And he wants every government worker to sign it too if and after he gets elected. great way to keep discipline in the ranks. Wow. Where are we again? Kazakhstan?

Who has this guy not sued? Thirty five hundred lawsuits and counting. Talk about using your money as a bludgeon or cudgel. But the lawsuit against the Miss America finalist who found evidence that the pageant was rigged takes the cake.

And it goes on and on. The guy is just a bully born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has wreaked a trail of havoc everywhere he has walked. Read this article in Vice and you might come away thinking that the apple fell not far from the tree. Was his Daddy really in the KKK?

I know Michele Bachman says that god anointed Trump, I can only say God help us. I tell you what, I will own all the stupid shit that President Hillary does, if you vote for Trump, and he wins, you be willing to own what comes next.

Northern Lights

Jeff and Gena send a picture from their home in Alaska.