Filler

I haven’t gotten as much sleep as I’m used to the past few days, and at this point am not sure if I can write coherently for more than a few sentences.  This is another picture from the Hahn Horticulture Gardens on campus that I took last week.  Turned out pretty cool.  I’m off to class and then back to the systems lab to work on this CS project…

-Ben

Focal Activities

I went walking with a friend this afternoon up to the Hahn Horticulture Gardens on campus to take some pictures as the sun went down.  I found this pretty specimen floating in the middle of a small little pond at the back of the gardens.  I had to underexpose the shot quite a deal to get the colors to turn out this nicely, but I’m very please with the results.  I got quite a few other good pictures this evening that will probably make their way onto the site in the near future.

We recently read an article in my Professionalism in Computing course about the “Philosophy of Human-Computer Interaction” (http://www.bloomington.in.us/~dstokes/hci/essay.html).  The author of the essay discusses several different philosophical interpretations of modern technology in the first section, including one by Albert Borgmann.  Borgmann writes that “Postmodern technology uses the hyper-reality of simulations to get rid of the limitations imposed by reality.”  The author of the essay then paraphrases Borgmann and states that the “antidote for losing our personality to the shallowness and superficiality of hyper-reality is to return to focal activities … practices which center our attention on the richness of life.”  The essay goes on to discuss key elements in the design of interfaces between humans and computers.

However, more than any of the practical suggestions made later in the essay, this section on the nature of so-called “focal activities” stuck with me after reading it.  As a Computer Science major and someone who has grown up with computers around, I spend a great deal of time using and interacting with computers during any given day.  This passage made me kind of step back and think about just how much time I spend in the “hyper-reality of simulations” and what, if any focal activities I have.

What activities do I do that help me to focus on the richness of life?  The first thought that came to mind was dancing.  It’s something I look forward to (three days a week now), and an aspect of my life that hyper-reality doesn’t seem to intrude upon.  I guess I do try to encourage others to join me through more modern means of communication, but the focus is on getting them to come and share the experience rather than on the technology with which I send an invitation.  Maybe one of the things that draws me to it is this disconnection from the virtual world and the constant interaction with other people (in person as opposed to email or instant messaging).

Thinking about it a little more, I realized that photography has become one of those focal activities for me. I feel like my interest in photography has always (for the past two years) been a product of my desire to both better appreciate the world around me and to share some of that wonder with other people.  Over the past two years, I have definitely developed a much more acute sense of my surroundings.  Certain things like natural symmetry, or the way the light at sunset filters down through the leaves of a tree, things that I used to not even notice, now jump out at me and appear almost everywhere that I look.  Looking back, I realize that I have been seen many cool places, but haven’t truly experienced many of them, which only makes me want to go back again (especially some of the national parks out west).

I know that when I recently purchased my new camera, I did put a pretty heavy emphasis on its technological capabilities.  However, rather than just wanting the latest shiny toy, instead my focus was on getting a tool that would be able to help me to capture and share my experiences, one that offered enough in the way of functionality to give me control over a lot of the aspects of shooting.  I also know that I am using the hyper-reality of the online, virtual world to share my pictures, but I’ve tried to keep the focus here on the pictures.  You won’t find any flashy graphics or animations, simply pictures and text, there’s barely any HTML/CSS formatting at all on my part.  To me, the website is just another tool to use to share what I’ve seen and done with anyone who is interested.

The whole photography process has become a very meaningful thing to me.  The act of searching for that perfect shot, waiting for the light to be just right is both challenging and deeply rewarding.  Going back through the pictures taken gives me a chance to reflect and delve even deeper into the scene and find new or hidden meanings, even if they are only personal ones.

-Ben

A Small Reminder

This picture also comes from our last day in Riva San Vitale.  After our last lesson of the day, Jessica and I walked up the road a short way to the local cemetery.  As I mentioned from my narrative post from the trip, this cemetery was considerably different than your typical American one.  The plots in the cemetery, marked by fairly ornate and intricate stones and carvings often spanned over a hundred years and had many members of the same family.  I was especially touched by this one.  The expression on the face and the detail of the clothing are both amazing.  The figure itself was not very large, only a couple of inches tall.  The colors of the flower against the figure also stuck out at me and grabbed my attention.

I decided to play around with this image a little as well.

Luckily the Canon was powerful enough to let me crop the image down to this size and still maintain a good resolution.  You can make out a lot more detail in the figure here.  You can clearly see the strands of hair and the eyes that were so carefully made.  I also tweaked a few exposure settings slightly to give the figure more of a bronze color and to bring out the bright colors of the flower, which I think turned out pretty well.

-Ben

Spring Blooms

This picture comes from a walk I took with my former roommate Harold at the end of my Sophomore year.  We had just finished feeding the ducks and decided to walk all the way around the duckpond.  Overall, the walk was a great thing.  I had never really walked around the far side of the duckpond, and we got a chance to talk about a lot of different things.  I know I’m really going to miss having him around next semester, but maybe he’ll come down for a visit sometime (hint hint if you’re reading this Harold…).  If my incredibly vast knowledge of flora (I can never be sure how well sarcasm comes across in my writing) serves me right, these are a bunch of newly bloomed dogwood flowers.  I’m more used to seeing white ones back home.

Not too much to say about this one artistically or stylistically.  I really like the way this one came out.  It’s neat to see how the focus drops away gradually as you move from the front of the picture to the back, and it’s hard to tell the flowers from the regular leaves towards the top center of the shot.  I’m not sure if more light would have made this a better shot or not.  It would have made for some interesting shadows falling across some of the flowers, but I think I might like the way the colors turned out pretty evenly here instead.

-Ben

More Focus Experiments

As the title implies, I was playing around with the manual focus functions of my camera the other day.  This picture was taken in my backyard as the sun was going down.  The flowers in question are daylilies.  I do enjoy being able to easily manually focus this camera as opposed to my older one which automatically focused every time.  I like how both of these pictures turned out.

The flowers look really good in the first one, with the blurry background drawing attention to the flowers themselves.  I also like how the sun shining through the trees came out in that shot.  The second picture is just the opposite, with the background in focus.  The flower in the middle of the foreground is blurred, but still looks pretty cool.  The camera’s exposure changed with the change in focus, causing the flowers to show up much darker in the second picture.  Another cool thing in the second picture that was completely unintentional was the flower bud in the middle of the foreground lining up perfectly with the tree trunk behind it.  At first I had thought this was some kind of weird lens flare from shooting towards the sun.

Sorry for another long pause between pictures.  I’m leaving this Thursday for my study abroad trip to Switzerland and Italy, so starting Friday (hopefully) I’ll be uploading pictures and details from Europe!

-Ben