"I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I’ve coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud,what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers." Interesting read on someone trying to operate a farm on a local basis and how agri business has shaped the laws to make it impossible.
Interesting pics
Nathan sent me in this link of interesting pics. The better ones are near the bottom.
Fashion shoot
ust did a fashion shoot for a company called Fuze Apparel. Check out the pics on the site!
Where did that food come from?
"The apple-blackberry sauce sold widely in Seattle supermarkets, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture organic seal on the label, says it comes from Chino, Calif. It also says "Product of Canada." So how do you know where it's from? You don't.
Dried banana chips are labeled as being from Sumner. But banana trees don't grow in Sumner. Peanut butter from Canada? There are no peanut farms in that country.
Congress passed a law in 2002 saying that consumers were to be told where the food they buy comes from. But five years later, shoppers who try to determine the origin of meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables and frozen or canned food in most of America's grocery stores often enter an Oz-like land of obfuscations, omission or outright lies.
Without knowing where the food came from, consumers can't be certain it is safe, experts say.
"This labeling becomes vital in ensuring that products are of high quality," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "If people know they're going to get caught for shoddy practices, they're much less likely to engage in them."
So what happened to the labeling law?"
Whats in a name?
"Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling incompetence, please say "Premier" rather than "Diebold," because Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems."
You know, I fear how history will view us Americans at the start of this century.
We are not a caring people. We are not a forgiving people. We are not a law abiding people.
I'm just saying, it does not look good.
The Dark Side
"Amid revelations about faulty prewar intelligence and a scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruce Cheney, the most powerful vice president in the nation's history." Evil
DIY Guide: Your own Supervillain Hideout aka tailrace tunnel of Niagara
"Behind the raging horseshoe falls of Niagara there lurks a dormant monster, a century old redbrick tunnel painstakingly laid. There is no recorded tally of its human cost but in 1906 it would be the biggest tunnel of its type in the world. Like the secret hideout of a supervillain it defies belief and comprehension, a stronghold behind the crashing waterfall. To rappel through the treacherous bowels of a decrepit powerstation is the single entrance." and more at Sleepy City
Thoughts on the Canon 21MP EOS-1Ds Mark III
If you have not heard Canon just announced the 1ds Mark III with a new 21 MP sensor and, but of course, I have a few rambling thoughts about it. First off here are the basic new stats to get that out of the way:
• A maximum shooting rate of 5 fps, for a Canon-specified 56 Large Fine JPEG frames, or 12 RAW CR2.
• An ISO range of 100-1600 in 1/3 step increments, plus L (ISO 50) and H (ISO 3200).
• Promised much faster CompactFlash write speed, owing to the EOS-1Ds Mark III's support of the UDMA protocol utilized by newer CompactFlash cards such as Lexar's 300X and SanDisk's Extreme IV and Ducati Edition lines.
• The ability to configure a Speedlite wireless flash setup via menus in the camera (when the attached flash is a 580EX II).
• Most everything that's found in the EOS-1D Mark III, including dual DIGIC III image processors, 14-bit A/D conversion, JPEG, RAW and sRAW file format options, 45-point autofocus system, 63-area ambient metering, E-TTL II flash metering, 300,000-cycle shutter, 3-inch (diagonal), 230,000-dot rear LCD, Live View, Highlight Tone Priority, High ISO Noise Reduction and more.
• The Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III professional digital single lens reflex camera is scheduled to begin shipping in November and will have an estimated selling price of $7,999
So what gets me all hot and bothered is this tid bit:
"The ability to configure a Speedlite wireless flash setup via menus in the camera (when the attached flash is a 580EX II)."
In my dirty little brain I hope this means you can finally sync the damn thing to strobes faster then 250 of a sec. This slow sync is the reason why all my sport shooters have to go medium format so they can sync up to 800 ad really freeze the action. If this solves this it could be a very big win for people.
Now what makes me cringe is that the pixels have almost doubled. Why o why would that make me cringe? Another reason people go with a medium format solution is that it's just sharper. No debates. Medium format is just sharper. More glass makes for a better image. Even the 1ds Mark II was out resolving the lenses and producing softer images. Now we are gonna use the same lenses with a chip that has almost twice as much detail? Hmm... Me thinks there will be some very soft images coming around soon.
Still pretty sweet though and if I fell in a pile of money I'd buy one. Anyone wanna rack a big old pile of that stuff up for me?
on creating
There is a fine line between over thinking to inactivity and and working to avoid thinking at all. The artists job is to navigate this minefield.
Always and forever
smiling suits and shining teeth
always reaping death
always
F-Stop Mag
Where Professional Photographers discuss their craft. Such as:
"Our featured image was shot for a Levis campaign. We are inside a mine, and before us is a beautiful model who has just swung a giant pick-axe. In the background a man is straining to push an almost-overflowing mine cart. The composition is tight and triangular, with de-saturated colors and delicate lighting. And with a closer glance we find that this duo is mining not for silver or gold, but distressed denim: the mine cart is filled with designer jeans and above the man’s head more are embedded in the rock."
How the Iraq Resistance Unmasks the American State and the Promise of Zapatismo
"America's Emotional and Moral MalaiseThe explanation of Bush’s hold on the United States developed in The Business of Emotions over the past few years, can be summarized thus:
1. Without authentic emotions, the vital connection between thinking and feeling is lost and the ability to act, morally and politically, for oneself and for others, is compromised.
Authentic emotions in the United States are being commercialized out of existence.
Americans are alienated from their feelings by the emotional labour they perform at work, in what is now a predominantly service economy.
Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers.
This is hardly a problem unique to the United States, but the commercialization of emotions is most developed there.
Other countries at least have the counterweight of some historical ballast to keep them in check. The United States, rooted in the topsoil of history, built among the graveyards of the civilization it supplanted, has no such corrective.
The more commercialized the emotions, the weaker the resistance to depravity."
via wood s lot yet again.
Fashionistas!
Did something a bit different the other day and did a photo shoot for a fashion company called Fuze Organics. You can see a pic or two under the Fashionisitas! tag in my galleries. I'll add more when I get more time. When will I get more time you ask?
Everyone had a good time and hopefully I'll be doing more fashion projects in the future. It was interesting to just relax have fun and make people look good.
Umberto Boccioni
Like many other Futurists, Boccioni was heavily influenced by Cubism but in his painting and sculpture he used the Futurist approach to express dynamism of the human or animal form. However there is a marked difference between his work prior to his acquaintance with Cubism and that which came after. After his contact with Cubism, Boccioni retained his Bergsonian approach so that The Farewells(1911) shows the same couple several times in various time-place views rather than several couples. However Cubism gave him not only a wider painting vocabulary but his concept of pictorial language changed fundamentally and appears to be on an entirely different level of experience. His later works tended to break up the subject figure and shifting the parts within the painting rather than repeating them whole as in The Farewells. In Materia (1912), for example, Boccioni "shatters" the image of his mother in Cubist fashion and merges it with a view of her surroundings as an expression of simultaneity. I knew his bronzes, but not his paintings, check them out: Umberto Boccioni
The Coldest Heart
Nice video animation on a music vid. The Coldest Heart by Bells Will Ring. via drawn
"Heckuva job, Brownie."
"The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe." via wood s lot
A new day begins
"A fresh attitude starts to happen when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday, and now it is gone; today is today and now it is new. It is like that — every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new." ~ Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Everything that was old will be new again. Welcome to the blog, version 3.0.