I’ve been going out to shoot often. I try to take a half hour walk every day. When I walk with my camera, I try to go out for over an hour because I stop to take photographs. I’m not getting the cardio as I was with the recumbent bike, but I don’t feel safe in the gym. I’m doing my best to maintain my workout routine and I’m trying not to get the dreaded covid. I’m not a good candidate for suffocating to death.
As a result of my concerns for the covid, my world has become smaller and smaller. I get periodic short visits with my mom after having my temperature taken, filling out a questionnaire about any recent travel and confirming that my only symptoms are anxiety and depression. I get to see my grandchildren who live in Columbus. We have social distance visits with masks and outdoors. I haven’t been up to visit my Cleveland grandchildren since before March. I do lots of zoom visits with family and friends and I attend Sabbath and holiday services on zoom.
The only person I see regularly, indoors is Nancy. She was working at home for a couple of months and then had to return to her workplace in the middle of this mayhem. She works for a municipal parks and recreation department. She is diligent about staying safe. I am grateful that she’s been so responsible about her health and mine. Periodically I remind her not to kill me.
I’m also trying to maintain my mental health. That has become a challenge. I am grateful to have such wonderful friends and family around me and to have Nancy in my life. I am grateful that I can stay engaged with the cause that has been a significant part of mine and Pauline’s lives for more than 25 years (the Siegel Rare Neuroimmune Association). I am grateful for my health and financial security. I am grateful for my photography. It helps to keep me sane.
Nancy and I were traveling as much as we possibly could given that she has a job. Our travel created some wonderful photography adventures for me. That part of my life has come to a screeching halt. Our travel is limited to infrequent day trips.
As my life has become smaller, so too has my photography. Since I began taking my photography seriously, I have been drawn to the large scene. I love landscape photography and night photography. Given the Covid, it has become difficult for me to find the big scene locally, and for me to feel safe doing so. Seeing smaller is safer for me. It has been a wonderful discovery to find pleasure in seeing and capturing small. I find myself drawn to the same aesthetic, but it exists for me on a much smaller scale. I remain drawn to the abstracts … the textures, patterns, light, and color. In some ways, I’ve translated the abstracts I was seeing and capturing in a large scene into an area in front of my face with a 100mm macro lens. I’m grateful that I have been able to find creative pleasure in this new approach. There’s no doubt that it is an adaptation to staying alive, but I am grateful, nonetheless.
Being on lockdown has also afforded me more time to work on my images. I always shoot in raw and I work my photographs in Lightroom. Unless I am attempting to do something totally out of the ordinary with my photographs, the only time I use Photoshop is to retouch an image. Retouching for me is pretty much exclusively removing an object from an image. I used to work my images in Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. I took a class on Lightroom and was totally sold on the approach. I’ll write a blog about Lightroom and my workflow one of these days.
I am out shooting a lot and I create a lot of images. Due to the volume, I usually focus on global adjustments to my photographs. With the extra time available to me, I have been doing more with local adjustments, both with the gradient filter and the brush in Lightroom. I dodge parts of the backgrounds to increase luminance. My close-up images are usually bright.
I often shoot more than one photograph because I want to be sure the image is tack sharp. As I am using such a narrow depth of focus, it doesn’t take much to miss the mark. If I end up with more than one good image, I’ve been doing more experimentation with black and white images. I am also doing more with variations of color and light and particularly on images that are more abstract. The Covid lockdown has encouraged me to be more creative about my photography.
As I completed writing my last blog, I felt as though my rants about the state of the country needed to take a pause. The pause was really for my benefit. Giving too much thought to this stuff is not good for one’s mental health.
And then I watched the debate last night.
Dear family and friends who are planning to vote for the Orange Emperor:
The perfect conservative supreme court and the legions of the most conservative federal judges will be entirely irrelevant in a totalitarian dictatorship. There’s no balance of power with a dictator. And for those of you who are voting for this deranged, arrogant, self-absorbed moron because you believe it is in your economic interest, your perspective is shortsighted. The security of your wealth depends on your living in a stable society, one in which our institutions continue to function with some degree of predictability. If the Orange Emperor carries out the strategy that he defined for all of us last night, there is going to be unadulterated chaos. People will go to the streets. We’re going to make Tiananmen Square look like a garden party. China doesn’t have a second amendment. We’re all armed to the teeth. The stock market will collapse. Our economy will collapse. Our institutions will cease to exist as we’ve known them. Our institutions have already begun to collapse under the weight of his incompetence and evil intent. Our enemies will take advantage of the situation, and who knows what form those actions will take. Where are you going to run with all your money? No one will allow you to enter their country because we’re all covid carriers to the rest of the world.
The Orange Emperor described his plan last night and his actions fill in the gaps. He’s been working to suppress the vote in jurisdictions across the country and by appointing his stooge as the postmaster general. His communications to supporters on twitter, through his personal television network and at his super-spreader rallies concern a rigged election. He is driving the message repeatedly that the only way he could possibly lose the election is if the democrats cheat. The ballots are a mess and a fraud. He’s actually uttered the words that he could win if we just get rid of the ballots. He not only refused to condemn the Nazis and white supremacists, he asked them to go on standby. He’s preparing them to go to the streets between November 3rd and January 20th to cause violence and chaos while he fights the election results in the courts and the legislature. He’s asked his legions of thugs to go to the polls to intimidate voters. He will not commit to a peaceful transition of power.
His AG and the silent republican white guys in the senate are accomplices to his overthrow of our democracy. Do not be confused. He doesn’t want to become a dictator. He’s a dictator now. He wants to use the military to squash people’s first amendment rights to peaceful protest. He’s using the judiciary and the legislature to go after his enemies. He’s a moron, so he doesn’t really understand how a democracy works and he’s not interested in learning. Democracy doesn’t suit him. He doesn’t understand American society because he’s never had to work for anything and he’s cheated at every opportunity. He’s cheated on his SAT’s, on all his wives, on his taxes, on his business partners. He lied to dodge the draft. He lied to the American people about the dangers of the covid virus. How could he possibly understand or relate to the average person’s life. He looks down on his supporters. He can’t relate to the American life most of us know. He speaks and acts like he is the president of his people. The rest of America is his enemy.
Why is anyone drawn to this cult of personality? I don’t understand it. He’s a phony. His values reflect the worst of what it means to be human. According to the people who know him best, he’s a total failure. And he’s orange. He’s no different than Charles Manson and Jim Jones. What is the unconscious attraction to this creature? How is it possible that 40 percent of our voting population have sworn blind allegiance to this sorry example of a human being? I honestly don’t get it.
You also had an hour and a half to listen to the Orange Emperor’s vision for America over the next four years or until his dictatorship ends from clogged arteries. Crickets.
The republican party had no platform from its convention. They’re deferring to the Orange Emperor Cult. He has no plan because he doesn’t think beyond the next bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Here’s what we know from observations. He’s going to kill the affordable care act and because there is no replacement, millions of people will have no health care. Millions of people with pre-existing conditions will either not qualify for insurance or their premiums will be so high that it becomes unaffordable. And to be clear, doing away with the mandate was also doing away with the financial support for pre-existing conditions. There has to be a way to subsidize the medical costs of those who have the highest risk of needing medical care. What you are watching from the Orange Emperor and the chorus of republican white guys is a slight of hand tactic to implode the entire health care system. They don’t care because their interests align with the insurance companies that support their campaigns, not with the average American.
The Orange Emperor and his family will do everything possible to steal your money to enrich themselves. We know that he has debts of millions of dollars to someone, and from his behavior, it is likely to some foreign countries. Russia is a likely choice. Saudi Arabia and Turkey are also in the running. And this makes he and his family a security risk for our country. If he loses the election, he’ll probably go to jail. He will try to eliminate social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, and every other kind of hate and divisiveness will thrive. He will try to privatize the post office. He’ll destroy the planet because he thinks climate change is a hoax. He’s attached himself to Dr. Whack Job who thinks herd mentality is the answer to Covid. Millions of us will get sick and die before this theory is proven correct or not.
I’m not a fortune teller so I have no way of knowing how our country or the world will manage the largest economy with the most advanced military imploding. I’m pretty sure none of this will be good for the Orange Emperor’s precious markets. Putin must be going near unconscious from giddiness.
I’ve spent the past seven months being so anxious for my family, friends and myself and doing everything possible to encourage them to stay safe and healthy in the face of this horrible pandemic. The very real threat to our democracy has actually made the pandemic a secondary concern. Is this what happened to the dinosaurs?
A study published this week by researchers at Cornell determined that the single largest disseminator of misinformation about the pandemic was the Orange Emperor.
And then he gets the Covid and turns into a one-man super spreader.
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