Police have a tough job. It isn’t made any easier when some Barney Fife goes on a power trip to exercise authority over a photographer he knows he can bully. I guess one of the advantages of living in a place with no significant mass transit is we don’t have to put up with this:
Snow in Norman
We’re buried in another six inches of snow, on top of an inch of ice that shut everything down in central OK yesterday.
This is when the mental midgets make some comment disputing the Global Warming problem. They obviously don’t get it, thinking that if it’s freezing and snowing in the southern Plains of North America that means the whole world is getting colder, not warmer. We sure do need a modern day Copernicus to educate these people.
There goes another tree limb
I changed my travel plans to return home early and came back to OK. I got the last seat on the last plane to come from the East into Will Rogers last night. Didn’t want to miss the big ice/snow storm, ya know. Of course my business reasons for foregoing the Florida beach for this white stuff were cancelled today. I could have just stayed where I was. Oh well.
Work has brought me to Florida — land of the hanging chads, the place that got George W. Bush elected in 2000, despite him losing the popular vote to the man who invented the internet.
As I usually do when traveling I picked up the local newspaper. The one here is published by my one time employer, Gannett, the media giant that brought us McPaper (USA Today). The Pensacola newspaper is a nice publication — a collection of good local stories supported by advertising hawking reverse mortgages and pharmaceuticals (yes, this is where retired folks go to retire).
Leading sports is the obligatory (at least around here) story about Tim Tebow worshipers. I saw on ESPN that Tebow struggled in practices at the Senior Bowl up the road in Alabama. No mention of that in the local paper here — just how he was met at the practice with star-struck fans screaming and crying because they had actually seen hero Tebow with their own eyes. Oh, my. No doubt they’re prying up the sidewalk so concrete chunks can be fashioned into monuments to be erected in town squares across the Deep South.
Buried in the back of the paper is a Billy Graham column on the power of Satan.
None of which has anything to do with a few photographs I took this evening on the beach. As you can see in the photograph above, the sand here looks like snow.
This is the first post to my re-designed website and first-time blog. The purpose of this blog is to generate some energy to push my photography farther than it has been. I don’t mean marketing it as much as I mean expanding my photographic interests. And, creating an expectation among readers that I will do that will give me some not-so-subtle impetus to act.
This website and blog is also meant to show how varied by photographic interests are. I have friends who perceive me to be some landscape photographer. It is what I have done the most and enjoy the most. Others know me from my news days, or as a sports photographer. (This gives me the idea that I should have a gallery of early photography from the 70s and 80s when I was doing much of that).
In the 90s many of my photography friends saw me shooting fine art nudes, even though it meant my candidacy for future public office in my red state was jeopardized . (Uh, that’s supposed to be funny). The 2000s brought much focus on my family and a return to my first interest in photography: exploration of nature and history.
This blog will also explore my thoughts on some political issues, particularly as they pertain to freedom of expression – so as to have some general application to photography.
Anyway, who knows where it goes from here. Wherever that happens to be it will be public for all the internet world to see.
A long time ago and far away (1978)
