Simplify!

I saw this near a relative’s house over this Thanksgiving weekend. Armed with my new Olympus XZ-1, which won a gold award from DPReview largely because of its 1.8 lens. I was very happy for a time with my first digital camera which was an Olympus C750.

The XZ-1 comes equipped with a few different scene modes and art filters, I quickly got out of the car and walked up the street to see what I could get. An old truck in front of an old house. What good is that? Do I need to get closer? Do I need a different background? Do I need to come back when the sun is overhead?

Simplify!

I wasn’t going to be around that much longer, I thought, and even when I did see the sun had moved a bit, I was still happy with what the 3″ screen was showing me. I took a few shots with a few different art filters on. This one is one that brings a high contrast to the image. Not too much tweaking other than an old type of frame around it with my PhotoScape and here we are.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Back to work tomorrow.

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Children’s hopes and fears surveyed across the world

ADDIS ABABA, 20 November 2012 (IRIN) – For the past three years, the ChildFund Alliance, a coalition of development and protection NGOs, has surveyed thousands of children around the world about their experiences, aspirations and concerns.

“When I grow up….” 54 percent of Ugandan children surveyed would like a career in medicine

Highlights of the third survey – of 6,204 children between 10 and 12 years old in 47 countries – were released on 20 November, revealing:

50 percent of respondents in developing countries, would, if made president, focus on better education to improve the lives of other children.

25 percent of respondents in developing countries would provide for basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter.

46 percent of the African children surveyed said they had experienced a drought.

10 percent of children in developed countries had experienced drought.

44 percent of children surveyed in Africa said they had experienced a bush or forest fire.

15 percent of African respondents said improving health care was a priority.

5 percent of children in developed countries said the same.

67 percent of children surveyed in Ghana said they would like to grow up to be doctors, nurses or dentists.

43 percent of children in developing countries said they would like to become professional athletes, artists or entertainers.

43 percent of children in Sierra Leone say death, illness and disease are their greatest fears.

For more on this story, visit: IRIN Global | In Brief: Children’s hopes and fears surveyed across the world | Global | Children.

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Making peace means leaving the protected place where we are right

Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote: 'From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring.' Photograph: AP/Zoom 77

… Poets understand tragedy better than politicians. For what makes tragedy tragic is not that the situation is sad there are other words for that but that it is where the sloganising binaries of right and wrong no longer function as a useful guide. Which is why making peace means leaving the protected place where we are right.

For more on this story, visit: Making peace means leaving the protected place where we are right | Giles Fraser | Comment is free | The Guardian.

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My baby in the middle of painting her front door

She wears her painting clothes. Like any serious artist, she has special clothes for special projects. The painter has his smocks, the writer has his robe or smoking jacket or favorite flannel shirt, the cyclist his shorts and shoes, the photographer his fingerless gloves.

Rachel taking a break from painting the front door
Rachel taking a break from painting the front door
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Imagine All My Words — The John Lennon Letters

By Tim Riley

“The John Lennon Letters”
A book edited by Hunter Davies

Like rain into a paper cup, words fairly giggled out of John Lennon’s pen nearly every day of his too-short 40 years. Now Hunter Davies, the Beatles’ early “authorized” 1968 biographer, has collected 285 Lennon letters, postcards, telegrams and to-do lists from early childhood to Dec. 8, 1980, hours before he was killed. They are bound in a handsome layout with reproductions of every entry, many of which are typed—hilariously—beside Davies’ transcriptions. Almost all reward close inspection both for Lennon’s intriguingly loose hand and whimsical cartoons. If he hadn’t become a songwriter/performer, Lennon could easily have gained notoriety as a scathing countercultural satirist on a par with B. Kliban or George Crumb.

For more on this story, visit: Imagine All My Words – Book Review – Truthdig.

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