A Storm Cell

Photo of the Day

I have been pretty silent on the various types of social media since I found out about the attack in Boston yesterday. It kind of caught me off guard, and I didn’t really feel like posting anything. I will have a little more on that later. For now I would like to talk about this picture. I took it in 2010 while sitting out one of the many rain delays that I saw that season. I was becoming a pro on what to do during a delay. It seemed as if every game that I went to featured some form of a rain delay. This one nearly force the cancellation of a game against the Braves. I really wanted to see them play though so I stuck it out. I was sitting under the second deck of the park with my camera on my knew hoping to catch a lightening strike. After a few attempts I managed to get this shot. Trying to capture a lightening strike handheld is not an easy chore, but I was lucky enough to do it. This was one of my favorite pictures that I made in 2010.

Technical Data

Since this was a jpeg I really couldn’t do much to this shot. I did want to try a couple of things though. The first was to straighten this picture. Like I said above in a ballpark you do not have the luxury of a tripod. Apparently my knew is not as straight as I think it is. After straightening the image I cooled it off a bit by adjusting the temperature. The sky had a very muddled look to it, and by cooling the picture off I think that I fixed that. Other than that I just made some minor adjustments before exporting the picture. One other detail is that I found out about export presets in Lightroom. I can now have a set export preference for the various ways that I distribute my images. This is a great way for me to get my images out. I sometimes forget to change my settings when switching back and forth. This will really help me out.

New Blog Layout

As you can probably tell I now have a new blog layout. I was actually making the change as the events in Boston were unfolding. It was only when I came out of my cocoon when I realized that something bad was happening. I have a few ideas of what my blog should look like, and I don’t think that I am there just yet. This is a step closer though. I wanted to accomplish a couple of things with this switch. The first is that I wanted a nice sidebar so that I could have a few more widgets to help direct people to things that I like. The next thing was that I wanted to make the site easier to navigate. The old template was nice, but you had to go through the blog one post at a time. This is a way to get my work out there much quicker. The one thing that I have lost here is the exif data that posted automatically every time I put a picture up. That data is important to some who want to know the settings of the camera. For now I think that I will have to do without that data.

Boston Marathon Bombing

All of you have heard of the tragedy in Boston yesterday. I was once again shocked by the depths to which some people can sink. You start to wonder where this world is headed when you see things like yesterday. I found a great post by comedian Patton Oswalt. He really sums things up much better than I could. I will leave you today with his words as I think that they are great.
“I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.””