Posts tagged "photography":

Journal:Photographers, reflections

It's a Saturday; my wife is in a mindfulness retreat, and my day is even less structured than usual. In the morning, my brother, an aviation buff, had sent me a link to an air museum in Sirvihisar, in central Turkey, joking that he'd love to see it some day. I looked up Sirvihisar in Wikipedia and noticed that one of the central personities who hailed from there was an Armenian poet, Moushegh Ishkhan, who once wrote that, for Armenians, whose diaspora lacked a territory,

Standards

Yesterday, I was alone in the house most of the day, but didn't accomplish so much with my time. At the computer, I learned a little about alternative protocols to http, meaning gopher and the various attempts to update it, either by creating a better structure, beautification or increased security (I suppose those are the main categories?). Gemini was the most popular of these. It reminds me of other attempts to revive or create a standard - such as in language we have the 20th century revival of Hebrew and the creation of Esperanto - but then there have been other new languages that attempted to improve on Esperanto.

New Year's Eve; AI and photography

Yesterday, New Years Eve we had a meal with/for the Moldovan workers building our house addition. Lots of meat, which D ordered from a Palestinian restaurant in Ramle since we never touch the stuff + tabouleh and other local salads. The building contractor brought the booze - a bottle of scotch and wines. They seemed to appreciate the occasion and tomorrow they have the day off. Moldovans are mainly Orthodox, but they don't seem to mind celebrating both dates.

Diary

In the morning picked up one of my grandchildren from the railway station in Modi'in (one of two such drives today, because in the evening I had to pick up son). I had a meeting with the accounts department people at the office, then spent the morning doing some cleaning and laundry (but then, forgot to hang the machine till about midnight, discovering it only on my room and lights out check.)

Journal

Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I'm getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.

Back from America

Back from the US to the turmoil of this Jewish-Israeli intifada, which is only getting worse. With this people and government it's like the cliché about when an irresistable force meets an immovable object. So far neither are giving way though the government is showing more signs of stress than the people on the streets are showing signs of despair.

In the US

I am in the US for the last ten days. I came over because my brother was in hospital. He drove himself there just in time, in the middle of a heart attack; collapsing on the hospital floor. They gave him CPR and snapped him back, and, in the following days performed catheterization and angioplasty. However, he suffered another three cardiac arrests afterwards at the hospital, where he also needed CPR. I arrived just before they installed a device called an Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which is considered necessary in order resolve a problem known as arrhthmia, where the heart is not able to maintain its normal rhythms.

Various approaches to photography

Photography influences our propensity to experience reality visually. Professional photographers are more likely to identify subjects of interest because they are actively looking for them. Lately I have been pondering this in the context of awareness and consciousness. The cultivation of seeing can help us change the way that we view reality. But the heightened awareness can also be inimical to our mental state or spiritual purposes. For example, an instagrammer who loves to publish viral photos will always be on the look out for them. The eye and center of consciousness shifts in accordance with one's intention. If I have a prior conception of the unity of all beings, I might look for expressions of that; if I have an ideology of compassion, I will be seeking a compassionate vision. In every case, this is about finding ways to support established opinions or conditioning: My prior opinion determines the way I see reality. I look at and photograph the world from a certain viewpoint.

2022-06-05-Wordpress

I spent most of the day improving a WordPress website that I manage voluntarily. For that site and another, I use the flexible theme Weaver. The theme developer tries his best to keep up with WordPress's changes, but maybe it's a losing battle. It seems to me that at a certain stage Autommatic lost the plot. In the attempt to make everything simpler, they keep making it harder. I've tried a few times to adopt their block editor but each time gave up and went back to the classic editor, which itself is sufficiently cumbersome and unfriendly. I try to do some of the editing in html but Wordpress usually messes it up.