How you play the game
If David Brooks wasn’t happy when he submitted What life asks of us, he darn well should have been.
In it, he discusses a (neglected) book that came out last summer, On Thinking Institutionally by Hugh Heclo that suggests that the institutions our creed of individuality rails against may not be our enemies. Brooks turns where everyone should when the profounder issues of life are discussed, to baseball:
In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.
In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution:
“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”
Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.
“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect … . If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game … did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”
The photo is Warmup by Rudy Malmquist and I’m 100% confident that he was happy when he saw this picture. I bet you will with many more of his.
Barack Obama Inaugural Extreme Photographic Awesomeness
Photographer David Bergman explains How I Made a 1,474-Megapixel Photo During President Obama’s Inaugural Address. He says that this was his first inauguration and that he felt that as the biggest, it deserved a big photo. So…
I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.
My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.
Bush has his “sour face” on but he does have one of the plush chairs! You absolutely have to check this out!
High-def surfing Freak Show
Shawn Malone of LakeSuperiorPhoto.com passed an incredible video along to me (be sure and check out her and Brian’s Lake Superior & Great Lakes surfing shots while you’re there).
The video is called Backdoor Switchfoot. It’s part of Making Waves: The 14 Days of Vincent Laforet and it is a full HD video of amazing quality that was produced by photographer Vincent Laforet with a Canon 500mm f4 – on a RED One at 100 frames per second at 2K using the Wicked Circuits EF Lens Adapter (the equivalent of a 1600mm on a 35mm camera). On his blog, he writes:
Creativity in surfing is the opportunity to express oneself on a wave. Surfing is nothing but the physical extension of one’s ability to explore that realm between land and sea. Being free to do it without the constraints of commercial endeavor or competitive goals creates true freedom of expression. Somewhere between the land and the sea Jamie tries the other side, switching his feet around on take off, choosing the opposite stance, then midway, switches back… as if to say I can do “whatever I like.” Jamie embodies the term “free surfer.”
We had a long behind the scenes clip queued up for you today (including the ND filter piece that I promised) but the newsman in me forces me to put this clip out now – for the non-surfing crowd out there: this footswitch by Jamie is something unique to his skill set, and something seldom captured.
The best thing about watching, let alone filming, Jamie – is the privilege of seeing someone do something so beautiful, so difficult, so effortlessly. The last time I saw something like this on such a regular basis was when I photographed Michael Jordan at the United Center in Chicago for his last 3 years on the court.
I cannot stress how amazing this video is. Go watch it. For somebody who has been on the internet since online photos are a big deal, a video of this quality over the web is like a big sign that says “Welcome to the Future.”
The photo is Jamie “Freak Show” O’Brien by HalonaCoast and it’s in his great Surfing set.
Enter the Lorax
In Machine-Animal Destructo-Mat, Roger Peet writes that he’s impressed by the time and energy put into the development of new methods of destroying all life, even to emulating the semblances of life through biomimicry in the pursuit of destroying it.
There’s a certain insight available into the tangled economic logic underpinning industrial world-destruction available through images and video of these machines. Notice that the precision of the Timberjack’s stepping mechanism is so lovingly described…if it were to sense a rare orchid below its ten-ton tread, lo! It would pull the offending limb away and whisper a prayer of thanks to Gaia for her wisdom. And then the process of ripping the forest down and shredding it would continue. I imagine a little cartoon bluebird perched on the Timberjack, trilling a happy song!
I imagine facing an army of the damn things after rogue Eastern European hackers crack their command codes. Hopefully Spiderman will be able to take care of them…
Saturday Afternoon Cartoon Break: Spiderman vs. 1980s Toy
You find the strangest things lying around these days…
I’m pretty sure that the giant robot is this toy, pieces of which are in my son’s closet.
I never knew that the Dynaman toy was based on Kagaku Sentai Dynaman (aka Scientific Squadron Dynaman).
This video of the opening of Dynaman I think proves that the Japanese have 12% more awesome on average than any other people of the world.
Apple Tree in Winter
My father took this photo of the apple tree behind the house I grew up in sometime in the early 1970s (if it was later in the 70s, I would have built a ski jump on that stump). Today (January 6th) is his birthday and though he’s not here to celebrate it, it’s nice for me to think about him looking out the kitchen window, seeing the beauty of this scene, grabbing the camera and stepping out to take a picture with his Nikon.
Happy birthday, dad.
The red light means stop.
Nicholas Kristof has a chilling op-ed in the New York Times titled The Evil Behind the Smiles. He writes that wealthy travelers who visit poor countries often are approached by young girls who coax them toward brothels. While some may be acting “voluntarily” – something that is not legally possible for a girl of like age in those travelers home nations – many are like Sina Vann who:
…mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.
“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”
Sina now works with Somaly Mam, a former enslaved prostitute who now runs shelters for rescued girls – more about her in this video by Kristof that includes some alarming facts about child sexual slavery. Somaly also wrote a book called The Road of Lost Innocence.
The photo is Untitled by Swatt, who writes:
Once, we made a film in Cambodia, about child prostitution, in a village called Svay Pak, just weeks after it had been raided by the police, and their brothels became the sets for our film.
You can view the rest of her photos of the making of Holly. Here’s information about Holly from Priority Films – the trailer seemed to load better at MetaCafe and there’s also a video on the making of Holly.
This is truly a sickening stain on the human condition and I fervently agree with Kristof when he hopes that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda.
