Devauld.ca

The past couple of weeks have seen great advances in the technology in my home, as well as a lightening of the proverbial wallet. A new furnace was installed to replace the 1980s version that was still spitting dust around the basement. Furthermore, two days were set aside to have all but one of the windows replaced with some that are actually sealed.

Comfort will come in the winter, when I can stand in the kitchen and not feel cold radiating from the wall of glass. I definitely wasn't comfortable when I opened by credit card bill.

A tick of thought has been digging into my consciousness for some time. Ever since Al Gore invented the internet, we've been living in an Information Age. Without drawing too heavily on Sid Meier's work, I would have to agree, although I would argue that the age in which we live has brought us to be the Observation Society.

I'm positive the thoughts have been racing around my brain for some time, and it was the viewing of the amazing WALL-E production that brought these thoughts to the frontal lobes. Everyone pulls a different message from the film, probably a sign of an excellent production, and the message I walked away with was the separation the poor souls on the Axiom lived with. Throughout, people were separated physically by only a couple feet, but would never turn their head to look at their real life counterparts. It goes without saying, physical contact was completely out of the question.

Think about the world in which we live. A mass of people work for TheMan®, then return home to watch a few hours of quality reality television. Reality television seems to be taking the place of reality

California State declared that the 'average American' spends 4 hours each day watching television. That number is over 16% of the hours in a day. Factor in 8 hours of sleep (too high) and 8 hours for work (too low) and with the 8 hours remaining the number is half of the free time the average person has available to them

Mathematician know that almost half of people are above average

The 'average american' would rather watch people cook, renovate, interact, dance, date, compete, cope, cheat and succeed than actually do it. It is not hard to find evidence. 97.5 million paid money to vote on who should have a chance at recording an album, and 122 million picked who would dictate taxes and policy for their country. Fitness is the worst it has ever been, and more and more people are using the internet to find a mate.

Human nature re-enforces the problem. People will publish most of their lives on the internet in hopes that someone will read it and find it interesting. The desire for the cliché 15 minutes of fame roots deep within our psyche, and we re-enforce it by enabling others to have their moment.

Above reproach? I doubt it. I spent some time crafting together all these words, in hope that you would read them.

Photo Friday's challenge this week is The Ordinary. Luckily we just finished some Macro work with fruits. Here's a kiwi, stupidly close.

Ever since my business partner defected from the forces of evil to join the righteous side of the fight we've looked forward to pooling the company's funds towards a lens that we could both use. Today, we broke the seal and purchased a new piece of glass.

We picked up the Nikon AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED. That hodgepodge of letters and numbers all add up to one thing: Awesome. Obviously, Nikon has expanded their Japanese plant to extract Awesomeness from the source and distill it into easy to purchase units. The photo above is not a crop, it is the full frame image, and a version exists that is so large and sharp you can make out the dust on my sensor. I giggle whenever I think that this picture can be printed 2 feet across and still resolve better than 150 dpi.

Of course we didn't stick to using just the lens. The photo above also utilized a 1.7 teleconverter, which pushed our reproduction ratio well past 1:1. To end the night we reverse mounted a 50mm lens, and filled the entire frame of the D3, with less than 8mm of a tape measure. That means with the ridiculous setup, we are projecting the image 4.5 times bigger than it is in real life.

This flickr set is where I've put some the the results of our experimentation and where I will continue to add new miracles when they are found.

The pile of photos that were taken on the trip out to the west coast of Canada, has been reviewed and submitted to triage. Right now a show of the peopleless photos can be viewed on flickr by clicking here.