One of the thread contributors on DPReview ruminates on photographers and photography:

Sunset Behind Art Deco Building

It Never Ceases To Amaze Him

Hi everyone. Some of you probably know that I returned my V1, but I still like coming here to visit.

I spent some time this morning reading some of dp’s camera reviews and the comments posted by individuals regarding the reviews. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter what comes across the table there are some . . . well many that pick the camera apart. I’m convinced that if a manufacturer produced a PERFECT camera there would still be those that would find fault. Who was it that said . . . “you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Isn’t it true? I have to feel sorry for those individuals because no matter what camera they purchase, they will be focused so much on what the camera can’t do that they will never enjoy what it can do. Hence, an unhappy photographer.

I know perhaps what some of you might be thinking . . . “why then did you take your V1 back”? Difference is, I didn’t find fault with the camera. It did what it was made to do, take excellent pictures. No question there. It just missed a few features that I would have liked, that’s all. But many individuals get so worked up and express such unnecessary negative comments. It’s totally uncalled for. My advice to these individuals, apply for a job. Obviously these companies are being deprived of their expertise.

Sometimes I have to stop myself from laughing out loud when reading these kinds of threads. If you find no fault with a camera but take it back because it missed a few features, then you did find fault with it. Of course one would have to ask two questions:

• What features are you finding to be lacking?
• Why were you not able to ascertain this lack before you bought the camera?

I am beginning to think that there are very few folks in this forum who really understand photography as a creative process. They are far too much like folks who when trying to buy a stereo system read the pamphlets to help narrow down their choice without ever bringing in their favorite CD and actually listening to it on the various systems available at the local big box store. My point is that they are more into features for features sake than in knowing whether what they are buying will be suitable to get on with the effort of image making.

There are those who dislike the Nikon 1 V1 because its sensor is “too small”. And yet they marvel at the fact that the vibration reduction (VR) feature of the camera works so very well. I can attest to this because shots made with a lens handheld at nearly 1/5 sec are pretty darn free of blurriness due to shaking. But it seems that few of us stop to think what makes this camera so effective in this area. I would venture to offer that its lightweight and small size are the key. But if you increase the size of the sensor then everything on the camera gets scaled up and suddenly you no longer have a low light level handheld marvel with which to shoot.

Something about “amateur enthusiasts” reminds me far too much of bicyclists who have the finest bikes in the world and hardly ever ride them because they are in search of a leather saddle of a specific color to go with the paint job that they just acquired. And even if the saddle was available there are the issues of finding matching pedals and handlebar tape. And of course if you fail to get a jersey that matches the bike’s color scheme you will never forgive yourself. Oh well…

You can often spot the wannabes in photography by the lack of images made and the length of the list of features that just won’t work for them until the next firmware release. Time for these guys to “fish or cut bait”. You either know how to use a camera or you don’t. If this camera does not work like the more expensive one you own, then learn what the differences are and cope. And once you have made up your mind that excuses are the refuge of those who cannot produce  jettison the complaints and focus on the images.

My guess is that plopped down in the midst of the last century most of these guys were never have made it as enthusiasts. Unless of course they would have done what everyone else did and that was cope with the shortcomings that are inevitable with any stage of development of a technology. But I doubt seriously that most of them ever would have done something like that. They would have instead found something a good deal less taxing that spending countless hours in the darkroom on a single measly print.

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Who We Are

We are a community that loves God and loves others, and we seek to live life as God has directed. We are far from perfect, but we are forgiven. Together we gather around God’s gifts of word and sacrament to be reminded of His love, to be assured of His grace and to sing His praises.

Welcome
Because you matter to God, you matter to us. Holy Cross invites you to see if being a part of our community helps you strengthen your relationship with God.

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What We Believe
Holy Cross is a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and a member of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod. As such, this congregation affirms the confession of faith of the ELCA, which accepts the canonical scriptures as the inspired Word of God and as the source and norm of our proclamation, faith and life. We subscribe to the Nicene, Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds as declarations of the Christian faith and to the Lutheran Confessions.

Our Mission
At Holy Cross, we sense that God has called us to:

Invite all into God’s family
Grow as followers of Jesus
Serve in His name

It is these actions that guide our efforts throughout the year.

Our Wider Church (ELCA)
The ELCA is an engaged, active body of people who put their faith in God into action — in millions of ways, all over the world. More than 4.5 million consider themselves members of over 10,000 ELCA congregations. Quality education is important, and the ELCA has eight seminaries, 26 colleges and an assortment of elementary, high school and lifelong learning centers in the United States. Providing help – both by the work of its people and through financial support – the ELCA seeks each day to proclaim the love of God and make the world a better place to live.

Whether you have been a Lutheran all your life or you are exploring what Christianity could mean for you, we invite you to consider the ELCA and Holy Cross Lutheran Church.

Our History
Holy Cross has its roots in the 1950s. As families moved to the western suburbs, they yearned for a church home and began meeting in one another’s homes to build community. Several of those founding members remain active today.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church established Holy Cross Lutheran Church in 1959, and the first service was held on Palm Sunday at Hadley Junior High School with 102 people attending. The original building on Geneva Road was erected in 1959 and is known today as the Gathering Place. An educational wing was added in 1964. By 1974, increased membership prompted the building of the present sanctuary. Because of continued growth, a building program was completed in March of 1990, giving us additional education areas, fellowship facilities and office space.

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Nikon 1 V! (front)

The question came up on the DPReview forum as to whether there was a difference in scene rendering when using one shooting mode over another. There are essentially five (5) modes. They are as follows:

• Smart Scene Selection Mode
• P – Normal Program Mode
• S – Shutter Priority Mode
• A – Aperture Priority Mode
• M – Manual Mode

To check this out in a very casual manner (I did not use a tripod nor did I adjust the camera in any way except to change modes and when in Manual mode did not alter the exposure whatsoever) I made the following five images:

Five Images Without Post Processing

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Five Images With Post Processing

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Rosehill Cemetery Grave Markers

Rosehill Cemetery has a very ornate entrance which is overshadowed by its location just under the train tracks to the east of the cemetery.

About Rosehill Cemetery

Rosehill Cemetery is a Victorian era cemetery on the North Side of Chicago, Illinois, USA, and at 350 acres (1.4 km²), is the largest cemetery in the City of Chicago. The name “Rosehill” resulted from a City Clerk’s error – the area was previously called “Roe’s Hill”, named for nearby farmer Hiram Roe. He refused to sell his land to the city until it was promised that the cemetery be named in his honor.^[2]

Rosehill’s Joliet-limestone entrance gate was designed by William W. Boyington, the architect of the Chicago Water Tower and the Old University of Chicago, who is buried in Rosehill. As Rosehill Cemetery Administration Building and Entry Gate, it was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1975.^[1]

Like its sister cemetery Graceland, Rosehill is the burial place of many well-known Chicagoans. The cemetery contains many monuments that are notable for their beauty and eccentricity, such as that of Lulu Fellows.[1]

Several graves from the old City Cemetery, originally located in what is now Lincoln Park were relocated to Rosehill. Some of the gravestones and monuments were also moved to Rosehill Cemetery and can be seen. Monuments relocated from City Cemetery are generally encased in protective glass.

Rosehill was featured in the films U.S. Marshals, Backdraft, and Next of Kin.

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Unlike the cemeteries in the suburbs, those in the city limits of Chicago and Evanston seem wary of bicyclists. You can stroll in on foot or by automobile but bicyclists and often motorcyclists are prohibited.

Rosehill even more so than Graceland is a visual treasure. It is quite a bit larger than Graceland and has a small lake at its center. While there are perhaps fewer mausoleums those that are present along with the grave markers are quite superb in their ornamentation.

Be sure to visit the web link above for the cemetery to view the notables buried there. Connie and I shared the shooting duties today. Enjoy.

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West Entrance to Calvary Catholic Cemetery

Calvary Catholic Cemetery lies in Evanston, IL. Like several of the others we have visited it is full of very old and very lovely mausoleums.

Serving the Catholic Community Since 1837

The history of Catholic Cemeteries in the Archdiocese of Chicago actually predates establishment of the diocese. The first Catholic cemeteries were churchyard cemeteries of parishes in existence before the diocese was formed. Some of these cemeteries, still operating today, were Catholic burial grounds twenty five years before the opening of Calvary Cemetery, the oldest diocesan cemetery, in 1859.

Pinpointing actual dates is difficult because sometimes the cemetery started while the parish was still a mission, and sometimes after the parish was formed. The first Catholic cemeteries were not in Chicago proper but in the rural regions.

Unquestionably, the oldest Catholic Cemetery is St. James, Sag Bridge, which started making burials in the early 1830’s. By contrast, in the unincorporated settlement around Fort Dearborn, people were still being buried next to where they lived or in the fort cemetery.

Situated on a bluff overlooking the Des Plaines River near where Archer Avenue crosses it, St. James was predominantly settled by Irish immigrant laborers. Many of them worked on the Illinois-Michigan Canal which was started in 1830 and finished in 1848. Parts of the canal can still be seen in this part of the county.

In those days Chicago was part of the Diocese of Vincennes, and besides St. James, there were three other parishes which had cemeteries: St. Patrick, Athens (Lemont); Transfiguration, Wauconda; and St. James, New Strassburg (Sauk Village). In cemeteries like these one can find grave tablets with birthdates prior to the American Revolution.

Read More…

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Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

–Amadeus (1984)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vci4wM6jDDM

Unique Grave Marker

Critical Opinions

I am not a professional or expert, and I didn’t know one must have a gallery here in order to post opinions. But, regardless, all I was trying to say is that the OP’s pics were not the best I have seen from the N1 series. In my honest “opinion”, the sepia was waaaaay overdone and a blurred shot of geese with nothing in focus may not have been very “artistic”, as an oil painting, maybe. That’s all.

This was the response to my asking to see some examples from another thread member who offered a critical opinion of the images proffered by a first-timer to the group. When I read his opinion I decided to ask whether he had any images the rest of us could see. Sometimes folks who have rather pronounced opinions about someone else’s work are rather defensive when asked to show work of their own.

But that point aside the real problem with offering opinions is that they are far too often unaccompanied with any quantitative evaluation that helps to steer the person in the direction you would have wished to see them go. Emperor Joseph is offering a critique of Mozart that is very much like this, in essence pointless. And Mozart responds in the only way one can to such “hot air” and “blathering”.

If I were king I would require that before you open your mouth to offer someone else your opinion you must either have in hand some images of your own that provide an example of your ideal or be prepared to offer some quantitative steps to “fix” the problem. Otherwise perhaps you should maintain your silence.

Another Cemetery Visit

Queen of Heaven Cemetery is across the street from Mount Carmel Cemetery. Both are Catholic cemeteries and have lots of rather ornate mausoleums on their grounds. My bicycle club rides through these at least once a year to see the grave of Al Capone and to otherwise enjoy the beauty of the ornate stone carvings.

Tonight the sky almost promised a cloudy version of the very nice sunset of yesterday, but it never materialized. But I decided to go in anyway and try to capture the essence of the place for the time being.

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Jennifer May for The NYTimes - Diners wait until everyone is seated at the Blue Cliff Monastery.

TRY this: place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love — let’s say it’s that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.

Now comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.

Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.

Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.

The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel. In one common exercise, a student is given three raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing on, holding and patiently masticating.

Lately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.

Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it. You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had enough. Or that it really needs some salad.

“This is anti-diet,” said Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of “Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.” “I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.”

The last few years have brought a spate of books, blogs and videos about hyper-conscious eating. A Harvard nutritionist, Dr. Lilian Cheung, has devoted herself to studying its benefits, and is passionately encouraging corporations and health care providers to try it.

At the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, Prof. Brian Wansink, the author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” has conducted scores of experiments on the psychological factors that lead to our bottomless bingeing. A mindful lunch hour recently became part of the schedule at Google, and self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey and Kathy Freston have become cheerleaders for the practice.

With the annual chow-downs of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday behind us, and Lent coming, it’s worth pondering whether mindful eating is something that the mainstream ought to be, well, more mindful of. Could a discipline pioneered by Buddhist monks and nuns help teach us how to get healthy, relieve stress and shed many of the neuroses that we’ve come to associate with food?

Dr. Cheung is convinced that it can. Last week, she met with team members atHarvard Pilgrim Health Care and asked them to spend quality time with a chocolate-covered almond.

“The rhythm of life is becoming faster and faster, so we really don’t have the same awareness and the same ability to check into ourselves,” said Dr. Cheung, who, with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, co-wrote “Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life.” “That’s why mindful eating is becoming more important. We need to be coming back to ourselves and saying: ‘Does my body need this? Why am I eating this? Is it just because I’m so sad and stressed out?’ ”

The topic has even found its way into culinary circles that tend to be more focused on Rabelaisian excess than monastic restraint. In January, Dr. Michael Finkelstein, a holistic physician who oversees SunRaven, a holistic-living center in Bedford, N.Y., gave a talk about mindful gardening and eating at the smorgasbord-friendly headquarters of the James Beard Foundation in New York City.

“The question isn’t what are the foods to eat, in my mind,” he said in an interview. “Most people have a general sense of what the healthy foods are, but they’re not eating them. What’s on your mind when you’re eating: that’s mindful eating to me.”

A good place to try it is the Blue Cliff Monastery, in Pine Bush, N.Y., a Hudson Valley hamlet. At the serene refuge about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, curious lay people can join Buddhist brothers and sisters for a free “day of mindfulness” twice a week.

At a gathering in January, visitors watched a videotaped lecture by Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced tik-nyot-HAHN), who founded this and other monasteries around the world; they strolled methodically around the grounds as part of a walking meditation, then filed into a dining room for lunch.

No one spoke, in keeping with a key principle of mindful eating. The point is simply to eat, as opposed to eating and talking, eating and watching TV, or eating and watching TV and gossiping on the phone while Tweeting and updating one’s Facebook status.

A long buffet table of food awaited, all of it vegan and mindfully prepared by two monks in the kitchen. There was plenty of rice, herbed chickpeas, a soup made with cubes of taro, a stew of fried tofu in tomato sauce.

In silence, people piled their plates with food, added a squirt or two of condiments (eating mindfully doesn’t mean forsaking the hot sauce) and sat down together with eyes closed during a Buddhist prayer for gratitude and moderation.

What followed was captivating and mysterious. Surrounded by a murmur of clinking forks, spoons and chopsticks, the Blue Cliff congregation, or sangha, spent the lunch hour contemplating the enjoyment of spice, crunch, saltiness, warmth, tenderness and like-minded company.

Some were thinking, too, about the origins of the food: the thousands of farmers, truck drivers and laborers whose work had brought it here.

As their jaws moved slowly, their faces took on expressions of deep focus. Every now and then came a pause within the pause: A chime would sound, and, according to the monastery’s custom, all would stop moving and chewing in order to breathe and explore an even deeper level of sensory awareness.

It looked peaceful, but inside some of those heads, a struggle was afoot.

“It’s much more challenging than we would imagine,” said Carolyn Cronin, 64, who lives near the monastery and regularly attends the mindfulness days. “People are used to eating so fast. This is a practice of stopping, and we don’t realize how much we’re not stopping.”

For many people, eating fast means eating more. Mindful eating is meant to nudge us beyond what we’re craving so that we wake up to why we’re craving it and what factors might be stoking the habit of belly-stuffing.

“As we practice this regularly, we become aware that we don’t need to eat as much,” said Phap Khoi, 43, a robed monk who has been stationed at Blue Cliff since it opened in 2007. “Whereas when people just gulp down food, they can eat a lot and not feel full.”

It’s this byproduct of mindful eating — its potential as a psychological barrier to overeating — that has generated excitement among nutritionists like Dr. Cheung.

“Thich Nhat Hanh often talks about our craving being like a crying baby who is trying to draw our attention,” she said. “When the baby cries, the mother cradles the baby to try to calm the baby right away. By acknowledging and embracing our cravings through a few breaths, we can stop our autopilot of reaching out to the pint of ice cream or the bag of chips.”

The average American doesn’t have the luxury of ruminating on the intense tang of sriracha sauce at a monastery. “Most of us are not going to be Buddhist monks,” said Dr. Finkelstein, the holistic physician. “What I’ve learned is that it has to work at home.”

To that end, he and others suggest that people start with a few baby steps. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Dr. Cheung said. “You’re not supposed to be able to switch on your mindfulness button and be able to do it 100 percent. It’s a practice you keep working toward.”

Dr. Bays, the pediatrician, has recommendations that can sound like a return to the simple rhythms of Mayberry, if not “Little House on the Prairie.” If it’s impossible to eat mindfully every day, consider planning one special repast a week. Click off the TV. Sit at the table with loved ones.

“How about the first five minutes we eat, we just eat in silence and really enjoy our food?” she said. “It happens step by step.”

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, “and then, O.K., I’ve got to go do my work,” she said. “Anybody can do that. Anywhere.”

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. “Mindful eating includes mindless eating,” she said. “ ‘I am aware that I am eating and driving.’ ”

Few places in America are as frantically abuzz with activity as the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but when Thich Nhat Hanh dropped by for aday of mindfulness in September, hundreds of employees showed up.

Part of the event was devoted to eating thoughtfully in silence, and the practice was so well received that an hourlong wordless vegan lunch is now a monthly observance on the Google campus.

“Interestingly enough, a lot of the participants are the engineers, which pleases us very much,” said Olivia Wu, an executive chef at the company. “I think it quiets the mind. I think there is a real sense of feeling restored so that they can go back to the crazy pace that they came from.”

It’s not often, after all, that those workhorse technicians get to stop and smell the pesto. “Somebody will say, ‘I ate so much less,’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And someone else will say, ‘You know, I never noticed how spicy arugula tastes.’ ”

And that could be the ingredient that helps mindful eating gain traction in mainstream American culture: flavor.

“So many people now have found themselves in an adversarial relationship with food, which is very tragic,” Dr. Bays said. “Eating should be a pleasurable activity.”

Consider These

O.K., so you don’t happen to live in a Buddhist monastery. You can still give mindful eating a spin by incorporating a few chilled-out gestures and rituals into your regular calorie intake.

WHEN YOU EAT, JUST EAT. Unplug the electronica. For now, at least, focus on the food.

CONSIDER SILENCE. Avoiding chatter for 30 minutes might be impossible in some families, especially with young children, but specialists suggest that greenhorns start with short periods of quiet.

TRY IT WEEKLY. Sometimes there’s no way to avoid wolfing down onion rings in your cubicle. But if you set aside one sit-down meal a week as an experiment in mindfulness, the insights may influence everything else you do.

PLANT A GARDEN, AND COOK. Anything that reconnects you with the process of creating food will magnify your mindfulness.

CHEW PATIENTLY. It’s not easy, but try to slow down, aiming for 25 to 30 chews for each mouthful.

USE FLOWERS AND CANDLES. Put them on the table before dinner. Rituals that create a serene environment help foster what one advocate calls “that moment of gratitude.”

FIND A BUDDHIST CONGREGATION where the members invite people in for a day of mindfulness. For New Yorkers, it’s an easy drive to the Blue Cliff Monastery, about 90 minutes north of the city: bluecliffmonastery.org/ on the Web.

Lee Gernes - Thai Garden Restaurant

I previously owned the P7000. I got it just to have it available to walk around everyday with and so that my my wife would have something simple to use. She likes taking pictures but she doesn’t want to really learn the ins and outs of photography. She used the P7000 a couple of times but then hardly ever picked it up.

I purchased the V1 for street photography to go along with the D7000. Now my wife is using the V1 all the time. In fact when I go on location to do photography more than once she has wandered off and self-absorbed in taking photos with the V1 So I sold the P7000.

She loves the EFV and more than once she has said out of the blue about the V1 “I love that little camera.”

The V1 has its pluses and minuses but if your wife is like my wife go with the V1.

On the dpReview forum a fellow wanted to know what kind of camera to get for shared use by himself and his spouse. This kind of exchange goes on endlessly for one reason alone. Men are squeamish about buying cameras that are too automated to match their “highly technical” self-image. So the burden rests on the tiny shoulders of their wives to provide a “cover” for their purchase of a compact camera of some sort or another.

The response above was written like so many by a husband who cares about his wife’s enjoyment of his passion for photography but is like so many of us somewhat clueless about what a person who is more interested in the moments that the camera captures than the technical perfection of the pictures.

I come from the view camera tradition. That means the large cameras with bellows and heavy lens and a tripod and a dark cloth to shield the sun from the rear of the camera so that focus is possible. In fact you carry a loupe with you to ensure that you can see what you are doing on the ground glass. You schlepp around a spot meter and a whopping six (6) or so film holders to give you a good days quota of a dozen images. The whole kit weighed in a something over 30 pounds when I carried my Deardorff view camera and its heavy tripod.

I later traded in that 5×7 inch beauty for the more svelte 4×5 Zone VI view camera with its soft sided case that allowed my to reduce the weight to about 20 pounds with a large ash wood surveyors tripod. And you could never tell what you had until you got back to your darkroom, mixed up the chemicals and tedious developed each negative for the proscribed time to get a negative which would hopefully print nicely on Grade 2 paper.

After the negatives were dried and stored in glassine envelopes it was then time to mix up more chemicals in trays and begin the laborious job of printing the best of the negatives that you had determined by looking at the proof sheets you had printed by contact. Of course those proof sheets had to dry for an hour or more before you could hope to handle them. And they had to be examine by loupe again to verify that the focus was just so and that the shadow detail you hoped you had gotten was really there.

Now along comes something like the Nikon 1 V1 and it offers the promise of instant picture verification in color (not just black and white) and it weight in at under 5 pounds (soaking wet) with a kit of three lens, and other accessories (including flash) and guess what I pinch myself every time I bring the thing out to make images. Whoopee!

In the large format world the “toy” cameras are 2-1/4 square ones, like the Hasselblad. I owned one of these for use with color slide film to serve in shooting both landscapes and interiors. My Leica was strictly what most 35mm image makers think of as a point-and-shoot camera. But to hear the average 35mm camera user talk about it theirs is the only real digital camera around. Rubbish. Absolute Rubbish.

If these guys (and the majority seem to be males) were really all about image quality the least image quality they could stomach would be from a Hasselblad with a digital back. Now that camera really delivers sharp, colorful images. But when you only own a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

There is no perfect camera but 35mm users are in search of something that is both automatic in all respects having to do with exposure determination and yet fully manual when it comes to setting the aperture and shutter speed on such a camera. Kind of a contradiction in purposes but I figure that they feel more “serious” about their photography when they are fiddling with dials and the like.

So it comes as no surprise whatsoever when the wife of a fellow photographer eschews the use of the Nikon P7000 in favor of the Nikon 1 V1. I bought and kept for three days the successor to the Nikon P7100. It is a wonderful camera but I am convinced it was developed to keep “serious photographers” on holiday from having to explain to themselves that using a Point-and-Shoot camera was not a sign of personal weakness.

For my money it was a nightmare to use and overly complicated. I owned up to having made a mistake and promptly bought the fully automated Nikon 1 V1 without a moments hesitation other than the increased price point. And it has done everything I could want of it.

Some of the fellow on the forum are constantly wringing their hands when they discover that it does not do everything that their more expensive DSLR will do for a third the price and a quarter the weight. This all leads me to believe that most of them have no understand of the marketing strategy that a large photography company must have to allow their tiers of products to survive.

Sure you want innovation but you need to consider what producing any model means to those above and below it on the pricing totem pole. So no, I am not concerned that it does not yet have 1 billion mm lens that are able to capture the backsides of gnats in total darkness without the aid of a tripod. I need only the three lenses I have to do what I want to do, which is make images.

And I truly cannot tell you how liberating it is to turn to Aperture 3.2.2 and “develop and print” my images without having to mix chemical or stabilize water baths and turn on safe lights to print images in the wee hours of the morning each weekend. I don’t have to run out to the store for paper or film because I discovered that my supply was running low. All my images are kept on a SDHC card about the size of a postage stamp (actually smaller) and thousand of them are maintained in a piece of software like Aperture 3.2.2 from which I can recall the images from a particular date or location or by subjects name or via facial recognition.

I have died and gone to photographic heaven! Pinch me…

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Uploaded by stuckincustoms on Jan 13, 2012

Deval Patrick, Timothy Murray

Republicans in Massachusetts often say that Deval Patrick’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign served as a template for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign two years later. What they won’t tell you is that the conservative template of attacking Obama with unrelenting invective was also created here in the Bay State, and used against Patrick.

I should know.

I helped create that template.

I certainly wasn’t thrilled to read the following in the January 17, 2005 Boston Globe:

Deval Patrick, the nation’s former top civil-rights enforcer and an experienced legal executive at two multinational corporations, is laying the groundwork for a possible campaign for governor, a move that would make him the first major African-American candidate for governor in the state’s history.

Luckily, the Globe article suggested that his chances for victory were slim:

Although he has no experience in electoral politics, his background, professional experience, and his race would offer Massachusetts Democrats a nontraditional choice. Whether he can generate the kind of excitement to be an effective statewide candidate is not clear. As a first-time candidate, Patrick has a sharp learning curve as he tries to navigate the treacherous back alleys of Massachusetts politics. Patrick will plunge into a world where he has no proven skills of hobnobbing with voters, jockeying with skilled political leaders, handling an aggressive media, and dealing with the party’s powerful and demanding special interest groups. Patrick must also take a crash course on the mechanics of campaigns. He has no political base or organization, and he would have to raise millions of dollars.

The Boston Phoenix was also skeptical about Patrick’s chances, but I had absolute confidence about what would happen if Patrick ran. So did a friend who shared my disapproval of Patrick’s actions during his tenure as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights during the Clinton administration. The day the Globe piece ran, I called him and asked if he saw it.

“Yeah,” he replied. “He doesn’t have a prayer in hell.”

For most of 2005, it seemed our prediction would be correct. It was hard to envision Patrick getting past Attorney General Thomas Reilly, the apparent choice of the Democratic Party establishment. It was virtually impossible to envision Patrick overcoming the likely criticism of his Justice Department work.

In December, Mitt Romney announced that he wouldn’t run for a second term as governor, clearing a path for his capable lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, to become the state’s next leader. Surely, I figured, she’d have a clear path to victory.

However, in early 2006, Patrick took advantage of a series of gaffes by Reilly to become the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The prospect of a Governor Patrick worried me. Didn’t we have enough progressives in positions of power in this state?

On March 11, I attended a Patrick campaign event at Faneuil Hall. I couldn’t make it inside the packed building, so I stood outside with about 200 attendees who watched the event on malfunctioning monitors. Patrick was introduced by his wife, Diane, and veteran Democratic congressman Jim McGovern, who was nursing a foot injury. Patrick delivered a nearly half-hour speech filled with progressive talking points; the speech did nothing for me, but virtually everyone around me ate it up.

After the official rally ended, a limping McGovern came out and addressed the outside crowd, stressing the supposed importance of returning a Democrat to the corner office and making a lame Dick Cheney joke: “Last week in Washington, they had a 21-gun salute, and Cheney returned fire!” McGovern then introduced Patrick, who again received thunderous applause. Patrick promoted his website and stressed the importance of raising money for the campaign before speaking to reporters.

Seeing the intensity of Patrick’s support at that rally began to unnerve me. Didn’t these people understand the importance of having a Republican in the Corner Office to offset the Democrat-dominated legislature?

I knew I had to do something to directly attack Patrick and his overly enthusiastic supporters. Already, there were two anti-Healey sites in operation, in addition to the high-profile liberal site Blue Mass Group, whose founders were staunch supporters of the Patrick campaign.

Someone had to put things back in balance.

I launched “Deval Patrick Watch” on April 19 with the following mission statement: “Massachusetts Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick has run a campaign marked by unrestrained scorn for those who disagree with the liberal/progressive vision, and unrestrained glorification by members of the Bay State press corps. The intent of this site is to present the case against Mr. Patrick…”

It was only a matter of time before Patrick’s fan base caught wind of the site, and sure enough, four days later a Patrick supporter denounced Deval Patrick Watch for polluting the political atmosphere. His criticism only emboldened me to go even harder against Patrick and his supporters (or, as I would later brand them, “Deval’s Advocates” and “Devaliens”). Any attack was an asset. After a May 11 post accusing Patrick of excessive pandering to liberal Catholics, I received an e-mail from a Patrick supporter who accused me of not “getting” the motivations of socially liberal Catholics and concluding, “…[Y]ou seem awfully convinced that your role is to bash liberals and/or [Deval Patrick] regardless of careful thought, analysis, or the insight of others.” Another progressive, objecting to my cracks about Patrick’s speeches, wrote: “DR, I get it that you support Kerry Healey. What I don’t get is why you are obsessed with fear and loathing of Deval Patrick. It’s one thing to be opposed to his campaign but commenting on the sound of his voice? This seems weird to me. What is behind the hatred???”

In the May 2006 edition of Boston Magazine, Jon Keller explained what fueled the contempt so many Bay Staters on the right had for Patrick. The piece, “Saint Patrick and His Devils,” summarized the Clinton-era controversies that led conservatives to label Patrick a “quota king.” Keller’s piece gave me new purpose, and I ramped up the anti-Patrick rhetoric on the site, even going so far as to cite the Justice Department cases Keller mentioned as proof that Patrick had a chip on his shoulder regarding white people. I also began to aggressively promote other anti-Patrick bloggers and talk radio hosts, praised every reporter who wrote an article even mildly critical of Patrick, and repeatedly slammed the progressive bloggers who sang Patrick’s praises.

In mid-July, I met a regional coordinator for the Healey campaign for lunch in Faneuil Hall. I explained my willingness to do anything to help the Healey campaign stop Patrick, who I condemned as a radical-left hyper-partisan. I mentioned that I would be willing to appear in commercials for the Healey campaign to offset likely allegations that she only appealed to reactionary whites, but he seemed cool to the idea. The coordinator thanked me for my enthusiasm and stated that he would be in touch. He also stated that the Healey campaign needed volunteers more than anything at this point, to offset the Democrats’ union advantage.

A month later, a Patrick supporter e-mailed me after I wrote a post suggesting that Patrick was jealous of those who had “undeserved” financial success, and wanted to tax the hell out of them because of that jealousy. He asked me if I was jealous of the Democratic candidate. Did I resent the fact that Patrick had galvanized the state with his charisma, his rhetorical polish, and his compelling life story? Was I simply unable to accept Patrick’s popularity?

I never responded to his e-mail. In fact, I immediately deleted it.

On September 19, Patrick won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, easily outpacing Tom Reilly and businessman Chris Gabrieli. I then went into maximum overdrive attacking Patrick and praising Healey. The Healey campaign needed all the help it could get, since polls consistently showed Patrick with a significant lead over her — even though most voters agreed with her on “hot-button” issues.

Healey’s campaign was not only hobbled by Romney’s negative, gay-baiting image, but also by the independent candidacy of Christy Mihos, a convenience store magnate and onetime Romney supporter who later had a falling out with the governor and his second-in-command. Mihos pounded Healey during the debates, characterizing her as an incompetent lightweight and making a better case against her than even Patrick did. Mihos wasn’t a bad guy by any means, but he really had it in for Healey.

Healey was further injured by the negative reaction to a harsh ad she ran criticizing Patrick’s past advocacy on behalf of convicted rapist Ben LaGuer, who had alleged that jury racism played a role in his conviction. After Patrick acknowledged his past skepticism about the fairness of LaGuer’s conviction, Healey ran an ad showing a woman walking at night in a parking garage, presumably being stalked by a potential rapist, while a female narrator attacked Patrick for once saying that LaGuer’s letters to him were “eloquent and thoughtful.” The narrator asked, “Have you ever heard a woman compliment a rapist? Deval Patrick. He should be ashamed, not governor.”

Patrick’s supporters attacked the ad as old-school race-baiting from a desperate, fear-mongering, right-wing politician. I didn’t believe the ad was racist, but the allegation was out there, and it stuck to Healey.

For weeks prior to the election, I was convinced that all the polls showing Patrick ahead of Healey by a wide margin were fabricated, that the Bay State simply would not vote for Patrick, that Healey would somehow keep the Corner Office in GOP hands. However, the Sunday before the election, it finally dawned on me that Healey didn’t have a prayer in hell.

On November 8, a day after Patrick’s historic victory, I shut down Deval Watch, declaring:

What can we say? He proved us wrong. We admit it. We were the first in line to doubt his ability to win this election. We believed that he was too liberal even by Massachusetts standards to go over. The voters felt otherwise, and we accept their judgment…We tried as best we could to present the case against Patrick. The jury came back with a different verdict, and again, we accept their decision. We congratulate Mr. Patrick on his victory, and hope that he will serve the state well. He proved us wrong last night. Now, it’s his duty to prove his critics wrong over the next four years.

Just before Thanksgiving, a fellow Patrick critic, blogger Aaron Margolis, e-mailed to say that he and his brother Matt had planned to start their own version of Deval Patrick Watch on the morning of Patrick’s inauguration. They wanted me to be a contributor. I responded, “I’d be honored to contribute, and I hope that I’ll be able to be effective in the role. The site was very difficult to maintain, but I enjoyed attempting to make the case against Patrick. You guys do an EXCELLENT job, and I hope that I’ll be able to make an effective contribution. Together, we can!”

In early-2007, I was having a ball with the new Deval Patrick Watch; the Margolis brothers and I relentlessly ridiculed Patrick for spending thousands of dollars on new drapes for his office, leasing a Cadillac DTS for state business instead of a less expensive Ford Crown Victoria, and hiring a personal assistant for his wife Diane. I enjoyed giving it to Patrick, especially over a highly controversial proposal to allow casino gambling in Massachusetts and a highly bizarre speech commemorating the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, in which Patrick referred to the event as a “failure of human understanding.” <Boston Phoenix reporter David Bernstein actually a href=”http://blog.thephoenix.com/blogs/talkingpolitics/archive/2007/09/12/Failure-Of-Human-Understanding-Indeed.aspx” target=”_hplink”>gave me credit for fueling the controversy over Patrick’s speech in the conservative blogosphere.

Michael Graham, the Boston Herald op-ed columnist and talk radio host, pummeled Patrick two days after the speech:

Perhaps that’s Patrick’s problem. Maybe he’s living in another world, an imaginary liberal land were every Muslim radical is just one hug away from Methodism, and every criminal can be rehabilitated by a proper diet and midnight basketball. The rest of us, alas, are trapped in the real world.

Graham’s piece reminded me of me.

By the summer of 2010, I knew I was going to defeat him. Or, more accurately, Charlie Baker was going to do it for me.

Some of my conservative friends weren’t thrilled with Baker, the former head of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and an aide to previous Republican governors William Weld and Paul Cellucci; as early as February, they had expressed concerns that Baker couldn’t go the distance, that he lacked Senator Scott Brown’s charisma, that he had no experience running a major campaign. I wasn’t buying any of it. I figured Baker’s win was a foregone conclusion.

I wanted Patrick gone. I had spent the last four years denouncing the governor on Deval Watch, mocking virtually every aspect of his administration, fantasizing about his landslide loss in 2010, lamenting the impact his policies had on the Commonwealth. I highlighted every critical op-ed I could find about Patrick, particularly emphasizing criticism from progressive-leaning writers. I spread my contempt for Patrick to other conservative sites. I couldn’t wait to see Baker push Patrick’s face into the sand.

However, the Baker campaign seemed not to know how to deal with the independent candidacy of state treasurer Tim Cahill, an ex-Democrat whose campaign appealed in theory to right-leaning Democrats and independents. The Republican Governors Association went after Cahill, presumably on Baker’s behalf (though not at his official behest), with a series of humorous ads mocking Cahill’s tenure as treasurer. While I loved the ads, I couldn’t help thinking that the RGA, and the Baker campaign, probably should have just ignored Cahill.

Right before Labor Day, Michael Graham suggested I start a “Deval of the Day” feature on Deval Watch, a “This Day in History”-style page that would count down the days until the governor’s defeat by chronicling his past gaffes and outrageous statements. I reviewed a ton of news stories and Youtube clips, including the footage of his speeches from the first campaign.

I was struck by Patrick’s November 7, 2006 Election Night speech. As the speech began, I found myself annoyed by his voice, irritated by his catchphrases, vexed by the cheers of the throngs at the Hynes Convention Center. I tried to figure out just what it was the enthralled audience saw in the guy. Why did they think he was so compelling, so thoughtful, so gifted?

Then, another thought popped into my head: what if this guy had been a Republican?

I continued to watch the speech with this particular thought in mind, and then it hit me. If Deval Patrick had been a Republican, the hope and change stuff would have actually meant something to me. If Deval Patrick had been a Republican, I would have been in that audience, cheering and clapping right alongside his enthusiastic supporters.

If Deval Patrick had been a Republican, I would have crawled over broken glass to volunteer for him and to see to it that he became governor.

I got it. I understood it. It took me some time — a long time — but I finally figured it out.

I thought back to that e-mail that Patrick supporter sent me in August 2006, the one that asked me if I was jealous of Patrick, the one I never responded to.

I knew now why I couldn’t respond.

The answer was “yes.”

I was jealous as hell of Deval Patrick. I resented the fact that his charisma and talents were being used to promote an agenda I had profound disagreements with. I hated the fact that this American success story wasn’t on my side.

As Patrick concluded his speech, the sound of his theme song — Heather Small’s “Proud” — filled the Hynes Convention Center. The song’s chorus seared my ear: “What have you done today/to make you feel proud?” I couldn’t help thinking that over the last four years, I hadn’t done a thing to make me feel proud.

I still wanted Baker to win, so I pilloried Patrick and Cahillon the right-leaningRed Mass Group, declaring that a Baker victory was necessary for the state to regain its economic footing. But my heart wasn’t in it.

Two weeks before the election — when it was obvious that Baker, despite his effective commercials and strong performances in debates with Patrick, Cahill and Green-Rainbow Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, just wasn’t going to seal the deal – I e-mailed a blogger who had been critical of Patrick in 2006 but had undergone a change of heart and announced that he would support Patrick’s re-election. “If he gets re-elected,” I wrote, “I hope there are enough people on my side who will concede something that, only now, I’ve come to realize: that Patrick may, in fact, be one of the most effective political figures in Bay State history. I hope Republicans in this state study how effective he is, and why he is such a compelling figure.

“I fear they won’t.”

November 2 may have been a great night for Republicans in other parts of the country, with the GOP regaining control of the House after four years, but for Bay State Republicans it was awful. Not only did Charlie Baker fail to unseat Patrick, but Tea Party-backed challengers to the state’s all-Democratic House delegation lost across the board. Sixteen Republicans won seats in the state legislature, but that was the only thing the elephants could raise their trunks about.

A libertarian friend was horrified by the Bay State results: he was convinced that the Cahill campaign and the Globe‘s attacks on Baker helped Patrick win. I didn’t share his sentiment. Baker was a good candidate overall, but his team let him down, trying to position him as a Bay State version of Chris Christie when there was no evidence whatsoever that Massachusetts voters would support a Chris Christie-style candidate. Baker’s campaign promise to lay off 5,000 state employees if elected went over like the proverbial lead balloon; those who didn’t have an ideological grievance against state employees recognized that Baker’s promise would simply jack up the state’s unemployment rate. (A libertarian-backed ballot initiative to cut the state’s sales tax in half also frightened voters who feared that social services would be slashed if the ballot initiative passed.)

In addition, Patrick ran a flawless campaign, emphasizing that the state was doing much better than other states with regard to weathering the financial crisis. Patrick was simply a more empathetic candidate than Baker, and empathy counts for something in politics, a reality Republicans in this state and elsewhere often refuse to recognize.

In a Red Mass Group post the morning after the election, I begged Bay State Republicans to study what made Patrick effective. A few days later, I appeared on WRKO’s Pundit Review Radio to discuss the piece. One caller wasn’t thrilled with my argument and trashed Massachusetts as a “dumb state” and a “ridiculous state.”

“I profoundly disagree with the notion that this is a dumb state,” I responded. “Despite my disagreements with the outcome of Tuesday, I love Massachusetts, and I’m proud to be from Massachusetts.”

I was wrong to let my own hyper-partisanship get the best of me. So much invective, so many attacks, and for what?

I found Patrick’s 2011 memoir, A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life, to be a fascinating work. For all my political grievances with Patrick, I cannot possibly deny that his life is a testament to American exceptionalism.

In the book, he notes:

I am hardly the only product of Chicago’s South Side to have gone on to better things or the only kid from a hardscrabble background to have had a measure of success. That ‘rags to riches’ story is distinctly American, and though it is not told often enough, it is still told more often in this country than anywhere else on earth.

Every word of that is true. As is this: if I had a child, and that young man or woman viewed Deval Patrick as a role model, a symbol of how to come from nothing and become something, I’d say he or she could not have made a better choice.

Back in 2006, not only did I hate Patrick, but I also hated Republicans who had crossed over to support him. One Republican in particular was Rev. Peter Gomes of Harvard Divinity School. I spent years loathing Rev. Gomes for his decision to back Patrick, feeling that he had abandoned the GOP in the name of political correctness and raw racial solidarity.

It wasn’t until after he died in February 2011 that I reconsidered my contempt for Rev. Gomes. He wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe in the fall of 2006 explaining his decision; at the time, I refused to read the article, since I regarded him as beneath contempt for his refusal to support Kerry Healey. Now, five years later, I decided to read the piece.

Rev. Gomes wrote:

[As] a native of Massachusetts, I was brought up on a very simple political syllogism: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves; Abraham Lincoln was a Republican; therefore, vote Republican. With few exceptions, I have done so. It was always a matter of pride to me to belong to the party of Coolidge, Lodge, Saltonstall, Herter, and Sargent, men of probity and good government — or ‘Goo-Goos,’ as James Michael Curley used to call them–and I was proud that the first black senator in Congress since Reconstruction was Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts.
Thus, it was no small thing to abandon the party of Lincoln, and I did so not simply to vote for Deval Patrick but to affirm that the values I have always held, that stood for the best in Massachusetts, are now to be found in this non-Yankee from Chicago. Ronald Reagan, at whose second inauguration I offered the benediction, once said that he hadn’t left the Democratic Party but that it had left him; I must say I feel the same way about the Republican Party.

Fortunately, I changed my registration before the nasty tone of the final race had been set, moved to do so by the conviction that words matter, ideas count, and an articulate vision is no small thing in the important matter of public discourse and public policy. When I think of some of the finest public utterances in our American experience — Lincoln’s second inaugural, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural and fireside chats, and, most significantly, Governor John Winthrop’s sermon aboard the Arbella about Massachusetts as the biblical ‘city set on a hill,’ I realize that we have been starving for words that move and inspire us, instill hope and not fear, and suggest the highest purposes for the common good.

Thus, for me, rhetoric is important, for it suggests ideas and ideals, and they become the foundation for sound policies that restore confidence in government as an agency for good.

The dead man’s words had new life. I understood now why Rev. Gomes left the GOP, why he found merit in the Patrick campaign, why he found a reason to believe.

I’ll never have a chance to tell him I’m sorry. I’ll never have a chance to tell him I get it.

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