Author: photog

What is Wrong with This Picture?

photog Current Events, Trump , ,

Look at where the country is headed in the next few months.  Donald Trump is the popular choice for president with about half of the voters in the United States.  And he is almost certainly going to be convicted of felonies in up to four different state and federal court legal trials.  Theoretically he could be given a combination of sentences that easily exceeds his life expectancy.

Now what is anyone to make of this?  It’s patently absurd.  Without even going through the charges like the hush money trial which obviously stretches the underlying statute completely out of its jurisdiction, all the charges are political prosecutions that have never been used in the way they are being presented.  An obvious example is the case involving classified documents.  Joe Biden had many classified documents in his possession and was in fact proven to be allowing someone without a security clearance to access these documents and he has been completely exempted from criminal penalties.  The naked fact that these are political prosecutions is impossible to obscure from insiders or the general public.

If Trump loses or is excluded from the presidential race then his future looks to be as a political prisoner in the banana republic jail that the Democrats now maintain for their enemies.  But even if he wins the election there may be state charges that even as president, he cannot pardon himself from.  What are we to imagine about the legitimate president of the United States officiating over his office from a state penitentiary?  Will he be allowed to leave the jail cell for the State of the Union speech?  How will his secret service detail spend their time behind bars?  Will they have to spend time watching over him in the dining room, the prison yard and in the workshop making license plates?

The blatant overreach and the pretense that all of this is legal and measured will probably strike anyone who isn’t a Democrat partisan zealot as proof that we’ve completely left equal treatment under the law far behind.  And that is the part that I believe makes this present situation novel.

What we will see will be the delegitimizing of the claim that this is a nation of laws.  There will be an ironclad example that proves that justice in present day America is no different than what existed in Stalin’s Soviet show trials or Mao’s Cultural Revolution struggle sessions or the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror.  “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

So, this is a lesson that I learned over the course of the last four years.  Now the rest of America, even the most brain-dead will get a clear view of this on display.  I suppose the rest of the world will see it too.  And the myth of equal justice will be laid to rest.

But there’s a follow-on test we will observe.  What happens after this lesson is learned.  If the Left gets away with this and Americans just knuckle under to it, then we’ll also see another myth exposed.  That’s the one that says that Americans are proud of their freedom and won’t tolerate a tyrant.  That’s the one I’m waiting to find out about.  I can’t say I’m overly hopeful about this second one either.

Of Raspberries and Road Work

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner

Princess Sack of Potatoes is on Spring Vacation from Kindergarten so she is visiting. And so, she and Camera Girl went to the local lakeside park to play on the jungle gym and swings with the other paroled inmates of the local centers of lower education.

They’ve left me on my own recognizance and I am reveling in the freedom and using it to inspect my domain in the cloudless sunshine of the day star (Sol, G-type main-sequence star, G2V; approximately 4.6 billion years old).  And right away my leisure is disturbed by the state road crew and their private contractors come to remove the dying ash trees that threaten the power and communication lines during wind and snow events.  Unfortunately, one of the largest trees along the road is an enormous ash that adjoins the west field.  And his last day is now at hand.  The crew has a machine of incredible strength and capability.  It’s a gigantic arm that grips the tree near the top of the trunk with hydraulic fingers and then brings into play an enormous saw that cuts off the tree below the grasping hand.

Then the arm, defying gravity and inertia rotates at the shoulder and deposits the top of the tree on the side of the road.  Then it takes a purchase farther down on the trunk and repeats this operation a few times and voila, no more ash tree.  Just a pile of logs.  The crew then takes a conventional but enormous chain saw to the stump and bring it down to the ground in a few minutes and then off down the road to the next victim.  Ah well.  These ash trees have been dying off for decades.  My area is relatively off the beaten path so I guess it’s finally caught up to us.  American Chestnut, Elm, Ash.  Good heavens, what will be left in another few generations, you have to ask.  But I guess there is some hope.  The project to restore the American Chestnut either by selective breeding of the survivors or by genetic engineering of a hardy strain is slowly (but hopefully surely) reaching the end point where the trees will be released in to the world for regeneration of that majestic species in Eastern North America.

The thornless red raspberries that I planted a couple of years ago are back in leaf again and spreading nicely in the bed where I planted them.  They have been a rare case where the product lived up to the advertising.  They produce abundant, large, delicious fruit and they seem to thrive enthusiastically in the very boggy spring soil of that part of the property.  And since both Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes are big fans of this fruit, I have gained great praise for my project in introducing them to the yard.  This summer I hope for a bumper crop of many quarts of the fruit.  The only real hazard is the local black bear population.  With both blue berries and raspberries on site an ursine prowler is something to consider.  Well, I’ve got my bear spray.  Yogi beware.

Well, the girls are back so I must adjourn.  We must be at play in the fields of the Lord.

Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 16APR2024 – Photo-Expedition – 2024 Eclipse

photog Glenn W, Guest Contributors, Photography , , ,

Editor’s Comment:

Glenn was kind enough to allow me to publish a private e-mail he sent me.  As some of the regulars know I set up this website originally because I resented the left-bias that permeated most if not all of the photography websites.  So I am always excited when someone on the site has a photography-based post to share.  And going on a trip to get a special photographic shot is near and dear to my heart.

 

Hi photog,

 

Since you were kind enough to give me photography advice for the eclipse I wanted to get back to you and let you know how it went.

First off, I purchased a Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 lens. Rather than buying brand new I decided to buy a “good as new” lens from MPB. I think it was a good choice and I like the lens. I don’t know what reputation it has in the photography community but the non-solar images I’ve taken seem really sharp and I like it.

Leading up to the eclipse I was practicing by taking pictures of the sun. I felt like I was having problems getting sharp focus (you can’t use auto focus when using a solar filter, there’s not enough light). I found a tip by a solar photographer that you can get a good focus for solar photography by going out after dark and focusing on a far away star at the f-stop you will be using for the photographs. I did that and marked the spot on my focus ring using a marker.

I took a lot of photos of the eclipse but in the end I am disappointed in my photographs. I am not surprised that they weren’t as good as I hoped but I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity for the world, I still had a great time. I made a newbie mistake that I only found out about after the eclipse. I had my shutter speed set to 1/30 sec in order to get good color and detail. Well, I found a page on reddit where some experienced folks were chatting and they say that the minimum shutter speed for photographing the sun should be 1/250 sec otherwise motion blur will be induced. Sigh… I never imagined the earth and sun could move that much relative to each other in 1/30 of a second.

I still had a blast and enjoyed trying my hand at the photography. My wife and I sat on a berm on the edge of a Walmart parking lot in Decatur, IN. We ended out chatting with a bunch of fellow eclipse watchers and had an all around good time. The sun moving from partial eclipse to full eclipse in the blink of an eye was one of the most dramatic things I have ever witnessed. It was sudden and dramatic. Many people in the crowd let out a gasp when it happened. I witnessed a solar prominence moving with my naked eye from over 90 million miles away. It’s one thing to read about such things and another thing to see it in person.

Once again thank you for the help!

 

photog’s reply:

Hi Glenn. Thanks for sharing your experiences during the eclipse. The point of totality must have been very impressive. Very exciting.

I’ve always wanted to see a total eclipse. But life intervenes.

I know what you mean about photographic mistakes. A couple of years ago I went on a river trip to see bald eagles. I had the right lens and the camera was adequate but what I failed to notice is that I had the exposure set too slow for the focal length and it introduced too much shake into the shots. Out of more than a thousand files barely a handful were truly sharp. But you live and learn.

I don’t know all the latest tastes in lenses but my feeling is if the lens allows you to get the shots you want and provides a quality you’re happy with, then it’s the right lens. 500mm is a good long focal length. Birds, other wildlife and landscapes and cityscapes fit right in with such a lens. As you can probably tell from my daily photos I have a 90mm macro lens on my camera a lot. But when an interesting project presents itself it’s good to make sure you have the right lens.

Recently I was talking to a friend about a “walk-around” lens. He was enjoying a 24-105mm zoom. I told him that I used to have a 28-75mm f2.8 zoom that had been described derisively as kind of plastic-y. And it was made of a lot of plastic. But what it was good for was a walk-around cityscape lens. It was plastic so it was light but the images looked excellent to me. Now that was an a-mount lens so I sold it when I bought into e-mount. But I never forgot how much fun it was to have this light, versatile lens when I was walking around Manhattan for hours. So it’s great to learn all the places where different lenses serve their purposes.

Thanks for sending this message. This was the original reason I started the site. I was tired of the liberal bias on most of the photographic websites. They would ruin the fun of talking about photos by saying something stupid about politics and then because the moderators were also liberal they’d punish only one side for arguing. Very annoying.