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A Disenchanted American’s Reflections on Independence Day

Posted on by wotantx
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I was the kind who never missed parades or fireworks. Well, it’s been a few years since my last parade. Any fireworks I see this year will likely be from my balcony.

Why?

Well.

The idea of America has always been better than the implementation of America.

Read our founding documents. The ideals of our founding are the most noble ever espoused. Freedom is the natural state of humans, not subservience. Government exists to protect freedom.

The same country shamefully kept the despicable institution of slavery. This country also denied half its adult “free” population (women) the vote.

Some 800,000 Americans killed each other over the issue of slavery. Despicable people, such as Woodrow Wilson, helped perpetuate the myth that the Confederacy had some noble reason for existing when, in their own words, their reason for existing was to perpetuate slavery.

I grew up with this myth. It took most of my life to correct my misperceptions.

Far too many of my fellow Americans still believe the myth, despite evidence of its untruth being more easily obtainable than any time in history.

The idea of America has always been better than the implementation of America.

The thirteenth through fifteenth amendments should have made up for some of the wrongs of slavery. Due to the cravenness of our politicians, however, it took another century to accomplish what those amendments set out to do. We are a free people, indeed.

And on the subject of the 14th amendment. Some of our truly despicable politicians believe they can overturn it with the stroke of a pen. That amendment exists to ensure that former slaves are citizens. Don’t like that birthright citizenship is still a thing? Fine. Amend the Constitution. But we are a nation of (written) laws. People born within this country are citizens until then.

The idea of America has always been better than the implementation of America.

For a supposedly free people, we have a ridiculous number of victimless crimes. How many people are in prison in this country for nonviolent crimes? How much violence is committed that wouldn’t exist if victimless crimes weren’t a thing? If we were truly free, we could live our lives as we choose, so long as we aren’t harming others. Unfortunately, far too many of my fellow Americans think they should be able to regulate what others do.

The idea of America has always been better than the implementation of America.

The last six or seven years have been devastating. From electing an absolutely vile human to be president to the extreme idiocy of so many people in the face of COVID, it’s hard to take pride in this country.

A lot of people in the “party of family values” fly “F— Joe Biden” flags with their kids in their cars, and probably when they go to church. Do they kiss their moms with that mouth, too?

“Let’s go Brandon,” was never clever.

Someone once said, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Well, COVID was, and is, real. It kills people. The vaccines, like all, are safe for most people. But this country places a huge premium on pseudoscience, and it seems like most of its people are willfully ignorant of how science works, while at the same time living with a world that only exists because of science, including vaccines. George Washington understood this, shouldn’t you? Isn’t the “Father of our Country” good enough for you?

The idea of America has always been better than the implementation of America.

It’s hard to have a positive opinion about the reality of this country. We’ve done good. We’ve done evil. The ones who squawk the most about the former don’t want to acknowledge the latter. Some, of course, don’t want to acknowledge the former. But I’m not writing for them. The ones who won’t acknowledge our evils talk the most about our goods, as if that absolves of us our evils. However, you have to acknowledge our evils in order to appreciate our good. That’s patriotism. Ignoring the evils, that’s nationalism. Nationalism is, itself, an evil. It places the State above the Country. It places the State above the people. Nationalism is a cancer growing in this country. Nationalism doesn’t embrace our ideals. Nationalism exists despite our ideals, and too many Americans are nationalists, not patriots.

The idea of America has always been better than the implementation of America.

Friday Morning Thoughts on My Photography Skills and Lessons Learned

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:49 Second

I have to learn to stop trying to be a perfectionist. The boat and car are clipped in the raw, so there’s not really much I can do about it. But, they aren’t the subject. Unless you’re going to pixel peep, that “flaw” isn’t noticeable.


I’ve known a degree of shadow clipping can be acceptable; sometimes, things really are dark, and if there’s no detail in the shadow, it’s no harm, no foul. I’ve been treating highlight clipping as much more of a sin. Indeed, sometimes it is. Clipping the blue of a sky can cause a very unnatural color that can be hard or impossible to fix, depending on how bad it is. Clipping a tiny rock in a gravel road? Not so much.

As I’ve been teaching myself darktable, I’ve come to realize that I’ve been using my camera to hide my lack of skill, and then blaming the camera for it. It’s time to up my game and manage light properly.

My Take on RTO

Posted on by wotantx
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This is something I posted to my Linkedin profile.

Some jobs can’t be done remotely, and some do require a hybrid schedule. But for jobs that can effectively be done fully remotely, there is no justification for returning to the office.

RTO is about one thing, and one thing only: control.

Newsflash: This isn’t the nineteenth century. This isn’t even the 20th century. Outdated notions of how work works need to change. But too many bosses want to control their employees and not empower them (*cough* Elon Musk *cough*).

They are not leaders. They are managers who are stuck in the past. And they embody the worst quality of managers: micromanaging.

Trust your employees and they will deliver. We proved it.

I’ve Been Doing it Wrong

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:54 Second

No details in this one. That will come later.

I’ve been re-evaluating photo editing software, and spending a lot of time on darktable. I’ve been seeing issues with recent photographs. I’ve learned a whole lot in the last hour.

I’ve long known the Dynamic Range setting on Fujifilm cameras affects the raw, but I’ve never appreciated just how much they do. I do now—hat tip to Mark Adams for pointing it out.

A lot of my issues are because of how much the camera underexposes the image as you increase the dynamic range (and I think even more so with Dynamic Range Priority, which I have been using exclusively for close to a year now). After taking a series of test shots at DR 100, 200, and 400, I see the problems now. I may post those later.

I don’t think I can use DR 100. I think I will need to shoot in DR 200. I can usually work with DR 200 in my camera, and it doesn’t underexpose the image too much.

We shall see.

Versatile Color

Posted on by wotantx
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Introducing my new custom recipe Versatile Color.

Changing Philosophy Again

Posted on by wotantx
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The more experience I get with photography, the more I change my approach. Perhaps I am starting to overthink things. I’ve already changed how I approach my recipes, no longer emphasizing the highlights and shadows. My recipes are now much more about the color profile; after all, I’m not trying to emulate specific film stocks. For instance, were I attempting to re-create Kodachrome 64, I would need to get the contrast right.

I still find myself spending too much time trying to “fix” the histogram when I’m framing a shot. This leads me to second-guess myself. Instead, I need to be more concerned with getting the look I’m going for and using Raw Studio or Lightroom (depending on what the scene requires) to get the contrast right.

If I only shot jpegs, I would still have to figure all this out; jpegs are lossy, and it is much more difficult to “fix” them.

I think I will address this problem by switching all my recipes to use the DR-P Strong setting. Basically, I will start shooting everything flat. At the very least, this method will give me the most versatility in how I create the jpeg; sometimes, the DR-P Weak setting produces perfectly fine jpegs.

Some Early Morning Photos

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:1 Minute, 44 Second

These three images, taken during my trip to Big Bend for New Year 2021-2022, have been some of my most challenging to work with. Some of that was technical errors on my part: I decided to trust my camera to pick the dynamic range, which it didn’t do a good job of; some of it was I likely had one or more filters, other than a UV filter, on my lens; and I think I chose the wrong lens for this. I was using my then-new Viltrox AF 33mm, which doesn’t appear to be great for landscapes with such great distance. The other issue I had on this entire trip was the type of cloud cover. The stratus deck I dealt with for much of the trip only served to scatter the rather feeble sunlight, leading to blown highlights and ground that was far too dark.

The camera-generated jpegs are pretty much useless.

I’ve tried editing these in LR and other software with mixed results. However, my recent work from the Texas Renaissance Festival (see Favorite Edits for examples) made me decide to work on them again. I think of previous attempts I had overused masking. My approach here was much more simple. I made general lighting and color adjustments (S-curve, pulled the highlights and whites down all the way, reduced the contrast), added a little dehaze, and softened the blues. I then used a linear gradient mast to add light, highlights, shadows, contrast, whites (where I could get away with it), and blacks (where I could get away with it).

The result of this approach was to remove almost all of the clipped highlights in the skies and most of the clipped shadows. While certainly not among my favorites, I think they turned out reasonably well.

All three of these were taken along FM-170 (the River Road), which runs along the Rio Grande, sometimes hugging it tightly. The particular location is known as the Big Hill, a very steep hill where the road climbs the flanks of a laccolith.

DSCF9197 DSCF9189 DSCF9193-2

Something New Here: My Photographs

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:1 Minute, 45 Second

I’m going to try doing something a little different with my blog. I’m going to start sharing photographs that I take and explain a little of what I’m doing. Maybe this will keep me interested enough to keep the blog updated like I keep threatening to do. We shall see.

As a gift to myself for losing a substantial amount of weight, I bought myself a Fujifilm X-T30 digital mirrorless camera. I’d been thinking about getting a new camera to replace an aging Nikon DSLR that, quite frankly, I never learned to use to its full potential. I chose Fujifilm after a lot of research. They have some unique (not all unique anymore) features: their bodies are designed like film cameras with knobs and dials; they have a proprietary sensor that is not Bayer like pretty much every other digital camera has, and they have film simulations that have different palettes that mimic various film stocks and from those you can create all sorts of looks, mimicking various types of real-world film or create your own look to your taste.

I keep my pictures at my Flickr. Most of these are going to be from my Fuji, but some are with other cameras, such as cell phones or the old Nikon DSLR, or some older point and shoot cameras. For the most part, the EXIF data contains the camera info.

The older pics are generally marked as All Rights Reserved. Newer pics are Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). I intend to update the older ones to this license in the future.

Since I should probably include at least one pic with this introductory post, I’ll give you one of my most recent. This is one of the Bald Eagles at the Houston Zoo. Both of them are incapable of flight due to injury, and so it is possible to get close to them. This was shot using an 18-55mm lens and cropped. Aside from cropping and the watermark, this is an SOOC (Straight-Out-Of-Camera) JPEG. Enjoy.

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My Story Isn’t Over Yet

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:3 Minute, 24 Second

Those who have been paying attention to my social media may have by now noticed the proliferation of semicolons everywhere, including my current profile picture.

I’ve not been shy about telling people that I have bipolar disorder; the stigma associated with mental illness kills people. As part of my own therapy, I have decided to fight that stigma in my own ways, and that is primarily by sharing it and writing these blog posts.

It is a sad fact that people with bipolar disorder are much more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, and even more than people dealing with major depression in the absence of a mood disorder. People with bipolar disorder are also fairly likely to require at least one hospitalization in their lives as a result of their mood disorder.

There is no shame in mental illness. As I said above, the stigma associated with mental illness kills people. We are taught it is a weakness, and not a disease that is every bit as serious and deadly as cancer.

This is even more true for men. As men, as husbands, as fathers, society expects us to be stoic, to not talk about our feelings, to not show “weakness,” to be strong for our families. This may sound a little flippant, but at least society “allows” women to discuss their feelings. It is for the wrong reasons, but the “expectation” is that they will.

Thankfully, I have not experienced any pushback from friends and family on this. I know many do receive pushback. Times, and attitudes, are definitely changing, though there is still a lot of work to do. The number of celebrities coming forward about having bipolar disorder or other types of mental illness is certainly helping.

So now to the point of this article.

I will not discuss the details that actually lead up to, and I may well never want to, but it is time for me to explain why the semicolons are popping up.

I had been dealing with mild to occasionally moderate depression for much of the last half of 2019. Neither I nor my (wonderful) psychiatrist were able to determine where it was coming from. In mid to late January of this year (2020), a variety of personal problems hit all at once. My depression was already tending towards moderate, but these problems lead me to spiralling quickly into very severe depression. For those familiar with the PHQ-9 assessment, my score went from about 14 to 24 in the span of roughly 2-3 weeks.

Adding in an extremely stressful event at work and I reached my breaking point. In mid February, I attempted to kill myself. I did this in secrecy, away from my family. The attempt, obviously, was unsuccessful. More to the point, I gave up. I won’t provide further details on exactly what I tried to do, nor when or where or any other information regarding the circumstances.

It was in the days following this that I started adding a semicolon to my social media bios.

On the strong advice of my psychiatrist and my therapist, I admitted myself to a mental health hospital for about a week. Getting me away from the stressors that lead to this did wonders for me. As of March 5, my PHQ-9 score was a 3(!). All of those stressors are still present in my life, but between the mental “vacation” and greatly increased therapy, I am better equipped to handle them.

As I’ve written in another post, dealing with mental illness is like being in a daily battle with your own brain. No amount of medicine or of therapy will stop that. Those are tools. I still have to do the work myself.

As always, I am writing about this both as therapy for myself, and also in the hopes that I will reach someone else who deals with mental illness, perhaps in silence. You are not alone. There are people who care and will help you.

My story isn’t over yet; neither is yours.

The Mentally Ill are People Too

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:3 Minute, 3 Second

The response to mass shootings where the mental health of the perpetrator is in question or where there are known mental health issues often includes exhortations to prevent the mentally ill owning guns.  There are significant, to put it lightly, legal, moral, and ethical problems with this.

The mentally ill are people too. Continue reading “The Mentally Ill are People Too”