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Photography Phriday 03.22.2019
So the whole College scandal thing, lets unwrap this a bit. As a college student, graduating spring 2019 whoop whoop, there are definitely things that irk me among this whole scandal. However, there are topics that I feel need to be restructured. This is by no means saying there is a right or wrong answer because the whole situation is in one big grey zone. There are some points I want to touch about the fact of the matter, moral interpretation, and going forward.
After talking with some college buddies at different walks in there life, family, Professors, coworkers, even my Boss! There were varying degrees of what should have happen, what could have happen, and on, but the gist is ” It’s not fair” with my interpretation “Life is not fair”. Not to say that bribing a coach and having someone Photoshop you into a sports team is right, which it isn’t. The truth is that rich people or people with prestigious have a certain level of power over others. Again, it not right, but it is normal. An example that doesn’t involve money is schooling. One of my Professor of whom I ask insight about this topic for used his own personal experience being grandfathered in to Harvard because he is a legacy child meaning his one of his parents went to Harvard so his chances were greater that other student. Is that fair? honestly no it’s not and he agrees as well, but is it not a surprise. People may want things to be fair and even; however the reality is far from it.
Is Lori Loughlin or whoever for that matter, wrong for wanting her child to have an education at USC..no! Just like parents that move to a neighborhood to have their child zoned for the school in that area. Yes, not everyone has that opportunity, but for those that can good for them. For some one to be bribed well yeah that pretty wrong. I mean we have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to prevent all this from happening in other countries so yeah bribery is literally everywhere. Some can say is good because it gets things done with the resources you have other say its an abuse is the flex of power..well shocker it is kinda all of those things. Going back to the scandal sure maybe the prestige of the school was what the parent sought in order to boost their own standing as a parent..I don’t know. Looking broader there I don’t believe there is anything drastic that change from this whole situation.
Although I do want to say that for public colleges they are hurting themselves by dropping their reputation for the sake of money, the flaw of people being swayed by monetary value. I believe the goal of a public University should not be governed by money,but by students that are the cream of the crop. I myself go to Cal-State LA maybe if I tried harder I could have gone to UCLA, but I don’t have a problem with my state college right now. For private schools, I feel like they may face this issue a lot more since they have a target demographics of people that can incur the cost anyways. Will these condition of higher weather high power continue? yeah most likely people tend to follow those with wealth and that gives them leverage over a lot of things, you would have to live under a rock not to know that. But I feel that do to this generation of fast instant media people may never forgot it and will lessen that distance between money and power.
Lyrically Sound: Mantra
Purpose. That existential threat that looms over the lives of every human being on this planet.
Some create it, some find it, some tell themselves they’ve found it, some go their whole lives in search of it. It is pesky and malleable, but so completely necessary to anyone who has lived for any large number of years.
This is the theme behind Bring Me the Horizon’s song, “Mantra,” and it is used to convey how fickle humanity can be in their pursuit to find
“Do you want to start a cult with me? I’m not vibrating
like I oughta be. I need a purpose, I can’t keep surfing through this existential misery.”
It is a powerful song. Not only because it is telling people to “wake up”, but the fact that it also attempts to remind people to seek out truth above all else. It tells us you can only find real purpose when you start to open your eyes to that truth. It seems like a contradiction, and yes I may be looking too hard into it, but that is the beauty about interpretation. So, let me explain this possible, accidental brilliance.
The song in its entirety speaks out about blind faith and those who follow others without fact or reason. Trying to find purpose is hard and some people tend to get impatient, bending to the beliefs of another because they think it might help them understand. This can be seen in the “believer” character in this song. They are someone who is putting their trust in a cult leader who is saying things like.
“But if I choose my words carefully, Think I could fool you that I’m the guru?”
and manipulating them into doing what they want.
“It’s time to tap into your tragedy” Think you could use a new abuse. Close your eyes and listen carefully.”
Even though the person responsible for the misguidance isn’t the brightest person.
“Wait, how do you spell epiphany?”
The believer will still listen in hopes the end will justify the means.
From Verse 1- 2 and even the bridge, it is all read in a way to criticize the believer and anyone who easily trusts someone offering them purpose by showing how easy it really is to do so to others. But then you get to the chorus, and things start to change.
The chorus states,
“Before the truth will set you free, it’ll piss you off. Before you find a place to be, you’re gonna lose the plot. Too late to tell you now, one ear and right out the other one cause all you ever do is chant the same old mantra.”
using an “outsider’s” perspective to simultaneously rebuke and give hope to the two lost characters (believer and cult leader) in the story by telling them that their way of thinking is wrong, and that if they change they will be able to open their eyes.
The two characters in this song fall into two categories. The believer who is unwilling to see the truth, and cult leader who is unwilling to seek it. They are the same even if they come from two different perspectives. Those unwilling to see the truth already know it but aren’t willing to change because of it. Those unwilling to seek it have yet to know it and are afraid to know it because it threatens their way of life. Both don’t want to change, because they are content with the way things are, “chanting the same old mantra” as if saying it will somehow give them purpose.
It makes you wonder. What is real and what is not? Does the outsider really have all the answers? I don’t know, but if you are not open to change then you will never find out. Because all you will ever be doing is following the same old mantra.
But then again I could be wrong. The lead singer Oli Skyes has also gone on record saying that this is also a metaphor for a relationship because getting into one is like joining a cult so who is to say?
Photography Pridays!! 03.08.2019
Happy Friday!! There is no particular genre of photography for today’s topic. Although I will be talking more about taking pictures in rainy weather; Disclaimer, I will be talking about “SoCal rain” which is mostly ferocious sprinkling.
Most DSLR’s and Mirrorless cameras today are weather sealed, but I would highly recommend double checking the manual or specs sheet to see if it is officially protected. These shot I used my Olympus em1 mark ii with 12-100mm f4 the less popular and hipster brother to the Panasonic G9 or Gh5 for that matter. These cameras
But wait there’s more! remember even if the body is sealed, albeit, with a lens attached…the lens should also have some kind of gasket around the mount to prevent moisture from seeping into the sensor. In a little drizzle this will work fine
The when you are sure your gear is property protected be sure to protect yourself as well! wouldn’t want you to miss the shot because you slipped. For camera settings I tend to expose to the right on my Em1 mark ii meaning I shoot slightly overexposed and pull the details back in post. Try to keep the ISO low if there is bright diffused light in order to maximize the dynamic range. I used the extended low at ISO 64 this allowed me to keep the reflections of puddle from being blown-out i.e. stop it from getting super bright.
If it is raining with heavy defined drops, such as having slower shutter speed this will give some nice motion blur to the water, but if there is a lot of light you will need a neutral density filter to cut the light. For street photography, a shutter speed of around 1/400- 1/800 will yield good results for people moving and static subjects. In the case of the picture about I might have been able to pull more detail from the very bright tile.
There are definitely certain moody characteristics to the environment after rain. Yeah, there will be fewer people, which could be a plus or minus. Rain gives a different feel to
Photography Phridays 03.01.2019
HAPPY MARCH!! Today’s look is at my nikon d500 dslr. This beast is Nikon’s flagship APS-C sensor and aside from the reverse lens mount compared to every other camera it is still amazing to this day!
With mirrorless cameras coming in left and right DSLR’s are going to be phased out as some point in the near future. However, this is something special about the way a DSLR feels in the hand. Yes I know I sound like the typical person going from film to digital saying film has this “special feeling” that can be replicated. wanna know something? IT’S TRUE!!
The feel of a DSLR, the ergonomics, and yes the weight are things that are changing in the modern mirrorless camera. I am not going to lie and say THICC and GIRTHY cameras are better. I would much rather be holding my OMD em1 mark ii wtih 12-100m f4 on vacation, doing street photography, or at a crowed wedding venue weaving in and out. Yet, at the same time when I pick up the D500 the olde’mechanical beast it still lives on. Like having a new car that is better than the old family van;But when you need to pick up seven people from the airport or haul a ton of gear the van always can and will get the job done. It will keep running not with the most grace and sophistication,but it wont ever let you down.
Right now I enjoy the D500 with sigma 18-35mm f1.8 ,but at some point I may trade it in for a Fuji Mirrorless with the unique Xtrans sensor or Canons EOS RP for the full frame sensor. I feel with my always on the go lifestyle the D500 is seeing more life on the shelf because I can’t as easily slip it in a bag or conceal it for candid shots.
The D500 still lives to its flagship APS-C name with impressive low light and IQ for having a crop sensor.Plus 21mp isn’t a deal maker compared to mainstream 24mp sensors. Battery life can not be touched by any Mirrorless and the small quality of life touches like a deep grip and illuminated buttons!
Having been a canon shoot for over 3 years then shifting to Nikon and Olympus for almost a year I can say Canon has some catching up to do on the sensor IQ. The amount of detail I can recover from Nikon and Olympus is night and day compared to Canon. Canon definitely has ergonomics and auto focus nailed down tack sharp,but they are slowly falling behind in terms of sensor innovation with Back Side Illuminated sensors (BSI) and Sony’s eye autofocus.
For now I the D500 will a little bit of extra time and effort amazing photos are still produced by this mechanical beast! well see what happens in the future..Fujifilm X-h2 maybe?!
Photography Phridays 02.22.19
A quick an simple guide to capturing pictures of the moon or really any bright object in the dark!
Disclaimer,I don’t really have too much experience with astro-photography, but as an enthusiast I am always willing to learn and try! These are some of the techniques I used to get super up close shots of the moon.
My two must haves are to get a long telephoto lens and a tripod. Any tripod will do as long as it can stand up and isn’t made of paper mache. For the lens you’ll need is a minimum focal length of 200 mm the aperture or f stop doesn’t matter because to get maximums sharpness the aperture will be set manually to f11. Also shoot in manual or aperture priority mode it will help control the sharpness and light transmission.
The image above was a little under 200mm with a speed-booster( adds more light and reduces focal length). Shooting micro 4/3 still yielded a nice image and this is why I prefer the m4/3 setup for reach as it provides a x2 crop even though I added a speed-booster ( The only adapter I had). To reduce the super bright light of the moon set the shutter speed to around 1/125 and shoot at the lowest iso to reduces noise. I shot at iso 64 with its extended low range on my Em1 mark ii for a cleaner shot.
Using a tripod is a must as it allow you to keep the camera stable. A 50$ amazon tripod will work with some creaks and plasticky bits will work although I would be careful with a super heavy lens. A flip out screen will make the task much easier to view but is not necessary. The next part is focusing manually while taking test shot to make sure the image is sharp or to your liking.
At the very least keep an open mind and play around with the settings. The fun aspect of this kind of photography is taking the time recompose and the achievements getting that shot in your head! TLDR to take a picture of the moon is a tripod, <= to 200 mm lens, f11, and 1/125 the rest is patience and elbow grease!Cheers and Happy snapping
Photography Phriday 2.15.19
Valentines day passed but that doesn’t mean I can’t talk about my love..of computers! (sorry for missing last week )
A recap of my computer building experience, I started with a prebuilt hot mess mini tower with 4gb of ddr3, 2 cores, and Radeon 3000 graphics on the motherboard. The second iteration of the build process was simply adding a graphics card, a Geforce GT 530. The Fermi-based GPU had a whopping 96 Cuda cores and clocked at 700 MHz running 1gbs of delicious ddr3 memory. This allowed me to run league of legends, combat arms, and MapleStory at relatively decent frames. Then as I mention later I tried starcraft ii and learned hard what CPU bottlenecking was. The old Athlon ii with its two cores was running full tilt to keep up with the Zergs spawning meanwhile all the Protoss templars teleporting around. Yeah, 10-15fps on low wasn’t ideal.
So my next adventure was to upgrade the CPU!
When everything arrived it took a few hours and everything was all together with some troubleshooting here and there. But my rig was together and running well. The next step was to add a Geforce gtx 550 ti this was around when Skyrim came out and I could not play it on the old gt 530. Mostly due to the cost of the 560ti I decided to choose the 550ti. It was a mid-tier card at the time and I got it with Batman Arkham city plus 25$ rebate card! It had 1 gig of Gddr5, 192
Photography Phridays 1.31.19
- apologies for the hiatus, school, work..help!
This time were are gonna talk about reviving one of my passions..Computers! more specifically building computers!
It all started when I was in middle school. Now this was more of “side quest” interest from gaming I was never into competitive gaming, but casual gaming was usually a way for me to hang out with friends since living in Las Vegas everyone was far away and there wasn’t anything to do outside( especially summer) so to gaming was perfect. Now being raised primarily by my grandparents tech-knowledgeability was zip, but from playing games on a lowly laptop with a intel centrino cpu and integrated graphics I wanted to know why frames were so bad on maplestory, combat arms,league of legends, starcraft ii and how to fix it!
Fortunately, that lead me to do my own research and I just so happened that one of my closes friends was studying computer science and was into building computers. My first experience of building a computer was like learning code for the first time..
What I understood thought really early on was that laptops can’t really be upgrade. The only thing I could do for my 15 inch notebook was increase the ram from 2gb of ddr2 to 4gb to ddr2 Running WINDOW VISTA!! Boom desktops were the way to go for me. My first desktop was a prebuilt unit from walmart. Some Acer mini tower, and yes I used to bring it to LAN parties since it was the size of a modern day xbox one! The specs were really..budget it cost about 350$ and it had 4 gb of ddr3, a dual core AMD athlon, and a 1tb WD blue( that still works today!!) along with integrated graphics on the Motherboard radeon 3000 or something..yeah they don’t do that anymore thank God! I remember being able to play league at a whole 30fps on low to medium on 1366 x 768! Other games seemed to be ok like some fps and stuff,but at the same time I didn’t know what a game looked like with eye candy and 60fps for that matter. It was when I tryed starcraft ii the demo that I realized..my machines was getting wrecked. All two cores maxed out and the gpu..well trying average was 10fps then it crashed. From that point I was like alright maybe it was just Starcraft I dont love the game anyways lets try skyrim..haha nope..
So that spawned research that gave me the knowledge to build the computer now! Of course of course there was various other parts like going to a gts 530, then to a phenom ii cpu, them to completely building up my entire computer in a new chassis,but I save that for another time. Right now I am working on a relatively new ryzen system with the venerable ryzen 1700 with 8 cores and 16 thread, a whole quadruple the core count and 8 times the threads of when I started! More later as my personal experience and build continues!!
Photography Phridays 1.11.19
Pool; a sport for the witty introverts and those who want to hit things with a stick,but lack the hand-eye coordination for baseball.
I do enjoy sports, but the problem is A.) the glasses kids get in the way and B.) (the big one) is I am afraid of pulling down the team especially with a lot of other people around watching and competing at the same time. It could be because I am an HSP (highly sensitive person), but even then I that is a self-assessment. To simply put I can manage a group of a few friends or family members before I get overwhelmed. This is where Pool comes in!
My cousins visited for about 2 weeks for Christmas and up past new years. Naturally, it was a good change of pace as the current immediate cousins are still little kids the oldest being 16. The place we went to is called ” The Cue Ball” and to me is one of the best places for Pool. For one the place is cheap as in for about 3 games I paid about 16 dollars or about 5 dollars per game and the price drops lower later in the night. as CASH ONLY!
Sidenote: I am no pro at Pool, it is something I enjoy to place every so often,but the only time I see a pool table it is usually tucked in the corner at a bowling ally that is always full or at a boba place again..always full! This place has over 10 tables and in the 6 times I have went there was no wait time!
As a casual player, I prefer that somewhat lax and pub-like vibe of The Cue Ball. The smell of beef nachos is intoxicating and with cold beers available it sounds like the perfect recipe for a man cave type hangout. Especially, when the whole environment is so chill that you
Lyrically Sound: Missing
There was something about the band Flyleaf from 2005-2010 that made them stand out above the rest of the crowd when It came to lyrics. They seemed to be that band that everyone loved but didn’t really know what their deal was. In fact, it took me a very long time to even realize that they were hardcore Christians and all their songs were inspired by their spiritual walks.
Regardless of their inspiration, however, their lyrics transcended what it meant to relate to a song because their lyrics begged to be interpreted. Flyleaf’s music is pure poetry and each time you listen to a song you get something new out of it. Enter: Missing.
No matter how you look at it, Missing is a song about love. Whether it be the love of a mother,
“I saw the queen, Swam up below her star on sea beneath,”
Or the love of friends,
“Found something sweet on the island with the daughters of Eve.”
We all want to be loved, and to not experience love is to feel a void.
“Oh, somethings missing in me, something deep within me, I felt it deep within me.”
A void we want to be filled, but can’t seem to find something to take that place.
Whether it be the love of God, that one person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with, or something else, it is something we long for. We can all relate to
But this is not the reason why this song is great. In one way or another, there is going to be a time in our lives where we feel so empty that we can’t help but feel something is missing. That thing doesn’t have to be love, and Flyleaf understands this. So we listen. And as all our pent up emotions are belted out in a single song we begin to understand what it is that is Missing. If only for a second.
“as lovers left me to bleed alone.”
Missing is a song about love, yes. But it’s words can manifest itself into any period of our lives where we feel lost or inadequate. It touches the souls of the broken and the hearts of the damned, and I think that is why it is lyrically sound.
Photography Phridays 1.04.19
What a better way to end 2018 than car repairs…I had something planned today, but as it turns out my car had other ideas
*
Unfortunately, I wasnt in the position to say otherwise and the plus side was the idea of having a new car over my 02 accord was more enticing. But oh was I wrong! Buying salvage is not bad per se, but know what you are getting into. In this case we trusted my uncles friend and he turned out to be sketchy.
First, off it took forever for him to get paperwork done, on top of jacking up the price, he dismissed problems I asked him about as “it can’t be messed up because I did it” -without actually checking it out-!! Again things felt like a mixed bag driving as if it was better than my old 02 accord cause that car was over 10 years old, but something felt off on the 15 accord. After replying all 4 times after a few thousand miles things started to raise some flags. Again the car had under 14k miles when it was purchased replacing the tires that early was weird. There was also a lot of
bottom with one bolt: really bad
yeah…so the rear right caliper was missing the bottom bolt to clamp it together. This caused uneven breaking and the
The main thing is now my car is driving wonderfully, it is safe, and I basically gonna keep the car forever since so much money has been sunk into it. I am definitely thankful that nothing happened to me while all these issues showed up! The plus side is now my car has nice smooth Monroe shocks! 😀