[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“What emotion does this photo invoke in you?”] [/caption]

A few days ago, Mai told me that photos of landscapes make her feel lonely.  That really caught me by surprise.  The usual response to photos such as the one above is one of awe.  People usually feel a new appreciation for nature and/or that spot.  And, sometimes, people express a desire to visit that place too in order to experience it themselves.  But I never thought someone could look at a landscape and feel a sense of loneliness.  (Unless, of course, the photographer meant to invoke loneliness by selecting a certain type of photo or white balance)

My latest Photojojo capsule.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“I took this first one while I was waiting for my wife to finish up at work so we could go see some houses.”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“After putting it off for a few years, we went to a Corn Field Maze. It was fun for a little bit until we couldn’t find our way back out.”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“160” caption=“Katy Ho, a fellow Cornellian from C/O 2005 on the same bus in Brooklyn that I happened to be on.”] [/caption]

One in 1,600,000.  That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family.  And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The trinkets I received for becoming a member of the Free Software Foundation.”] [/caption]

I’ve been wondering about a peculiar aspect of human motivation. Why do we require a present of some sort in exchange for a donation? Let’s take NPR for example. During membership drives a donation will net the donator a hat or tote bag or something like that. But why does there have to be a prize for donation? The point of donation is that you realize some organization or cause needs your money. So why waste some of that money to get a mug? And if you wanted a mug emblazoned with the NPR logo, you could just go to the NPR store and buy it. But getting gifts must entice more people to donate or organizations wouldn’t waste money on it when they could be using all the money to cover their costs.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My two Canon DSLRs”] [/caption]

Recently I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of people repeating some version of the mantra, “a great photographer can make a great photograph with any camera.”  They’ve then been following this up with, “therefore, why not just use an iPhone or point and shoot.  There’s no reason to buy an SLR anymore.”  Like everything else in life, the truth is gray rather than black and white.

Recently I was listening to Fresh Air’s interview with David Weigel.  The occasion was a book he had written about how the Republicans are shifting what their party is about.  Frankly, I’m a bit concerned.  The party seems to be less and less about small government and big business and more and more about courting religious fanatics.  Seriously, a lot of these people sound just as bad as the Mullahs in Iran.  There’s nothing wrong, of course, with courting religious voters.  For some people they don’t care if their government is going to have financial policies that will harm them as long as they try to make abortion illegal again.  But religious fanaticism is wrong whether it’s Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, or any other religion.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Kinda like this. Only with wires and computers and, really, having nothing to do with clouds.”] [/caption]

I previously blogged about cloud computing and, as you may remember, I am no fan.  Recently, while listening to The Command Line Podcast, I came across yet another reason to stay away from the cloud.  Cmdline mentions Bruce Schneier’s recent post on file deletion in the cloud.  Bruce’s main point is that you can be reasonably sure on your own computer that a file is gone when you’ve deleted it.  This is not the case with cloud computing.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Just barely beat the sun getting our bird feeders up on the first day”] [/caption]

Almost since we moved into our house we’ve been fascinated by the birds we have seen in our front and back yards.  Both the wife and I love birding in general and I love photographing birds.  So, after a bit of discussion we decided to get a bird feeder.  We ended up getting two of them to accommodate different birds and different seed types.  Then I dug a hole and attached the bird feeders to a stick we had in the garage.  I read a few books on birds and expected it might take a while for the birds to discover the feeder.  I was extremely delighted the following day to find birds at the feeder when I got home from work!  These little guys would flit out of the woods, peck a bite, and fly right back out.  So it was very hard to get a photo, especially with the sun beginning to set.  At the end of this post is the best shot I got.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Creative Entrance”] [/caption]

blah

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Maid of Honor Toast”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Best Man Toast”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“First Dance Married”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“All the men in the wedding court”] [/caption]

Here are some of my favorite photos from the group portraits session.  Some of these (mostly when it’s a group photo) were me “stealing” a setup that the official photographer had already set up.  Many of the shots with one or two people are quick shots I grabbed while others were being shot by the official photographer.  This is one of the reasons why people who have photographer friends are so lucky.  I was able to capture tons of shots that the photographer couldn’t because she just couldn’t be in two places at once.