HDR Efex Pro is a new HDR program being pumped and drooled over by the various hype sites I read and drool over. These sites are, of course, set up to whet the lust of people who want to make other people think the images they take are breathtaking, soulful, and moving. Aside from the Kwik-E-Mart name (brainstorming sessions must be grueling), the following line in their promo video annoyed me: "We've been taking pictures of interesting places and they just come out FLAT." What do these brave capitalists mean by the term? FLAT's technical relevance has been consumed by that ever pressing need to find a new synonym for "uncool." It's opposite is the antimonious expression that describes a photo that "pops." What I mean by saying it has no relevant technical associations is actually much worse. What HDR technologies actually do is flatten extreme exposures so that shadows no longer shade and highlights no longer flare and blind. They flatten images! They pop by flattening! Something like a LDR, a low dynamic range image, would be less flat (and possibly "pop" in its own way). The marketers simply know that flat = ugly/drab/boorish, and therefore would never try and argue that it's actually what they are selling. The viewer (you) is welcome to make a judgment before proceeding to the next paragraph.
What HDR technologies really show is that the culture I belong to is afraid of the world, the world in which reality "pops" our pixels out of rational bounds making everything look scary, the photographer untalented, or even a "negative" person! If you make an ugly picture, chances are that you have an ugly outlook on life. Either that or you're inept. When did we become so terrified of the battles within? Beauty for a while was the idea that images brought viewers to a point of understanding the overwhelming, overpowering nature of nature and the closeness of death - they called it sublime. It was, at least, an attempt at reconciling angst. There was an attempt to face the extremes.
Another thing the promo video explains is that you can blend your exposures together it makes them look "more like what you really saw when you took the photo," then proceeds to show cityscapes that look gleaming, vibrant, colorful, and plastic. Although your city may be fine the way it is, the images demonstrate a mild inferiority complex. They announce to the world that you don't live in a shithole. As if! The subtext reads, unfortunately, that you are mildly delusional and live in a world where memory is hijacked by nostalgia, or that your city isn't good enough without teams of programmers prettying it up and hiding any blemish. Beauty now means tamed, submissive and presentable to the parents. Beauty - Bah! I'm tempted to eat a couple boxes of raisins, bags of prunes, and cans of corn and use their software to really "pop" and "make exciting" an HDR mesh of my own diarrhea.
I find myself scouring my photo archives for images I know I've gotten but have no clue what year, camera, or occasion they might be from. I spend hours flipping through folders, reminiscing and discovering goldie oldies that I can embarrass friends with by posting them on facebook pages. I'm currently in the middle of hunting for old photos of not a human but a dog, Denali, who recently passed away and was the main focus of a Winter Solstice celebration (photos below). I know I've seen this animal off and on for years, clicked at it here and there, but have pretty much no clue when and where.
Sometimes my long hours of photo searching jumps a level and turns into google research on different organization schemes or ideas to make the hunt simpler. For instance, life would be so much better if facial recognition software was available that could search through my image database, tag, and pull images back that belonged to whomever. It turns out that apple's iPhoto has already thought of this and integrated something like it into their services. I've looked and looked for the competitor's response but nothing yet (although someone on chimed in the comments for a youtube video that F-stop for the GNOME desktop might have it in the works.) However, however, the iPhoto Faces program has been out for about a year and there's not much talk about other programs bringing it in. I guess it's time to learn how to run mac programs on a PC. I never thought I'd say that! Anyway, enjoy a couple photos from our Winter Solstice celebration:
Photos can be boring and complex at the same time. The trick is figuring out how to affect others into thinking about certain ones as the latter. I might dismiss an image and skip through it for reasons that are completely unrelated to the reason it fascinated someone else. Different ideas are for different people novel or cliche. That's why it is scary to look into a photograph for too long. You begin to get a warped sense of its importance and relevance. For example, the first image in the set (about 400 photos that evening) was picked because it had a decently interesting subject, a pretty color palette, and some background figures that struck me as "interesting enough" as well. It made the cut, but my decision was split second and hopefully matches the mindset of the average information starved peruser. It's funny, though, how big of a story can be created with the long look applied.
If we elevate it from being more than just another random party moment caught digitally, the photo can be seen as a psychological triad. The dancer caught in a prayer is clearly the subject, with alternate selves that depict not devils and angels on either shoulder, but an angel in the center stuck between the devil and the apathetic hedonist. I like how the prayer posture is similar to the moment before a diver hits water, only the splash will happen in one of two heavens above. One is a void of exploration and cold science and the other is fluffy, pink, and filled with pleasure. But both are barred, caged, and restricted (or do the walls keep the heavenly in?). One of the symbols most visually packed with information is the eye simply based on its directionality. The triad is engulfed in an odd lover's triangle. The hedonist looks randomly about; the devout peers inward; the devil maintains a pretense of ignorance. They seem to be looking at no one in particular yet are all aware of each other. The symbolism with the wrist bands and admittance - about who has paid to be there - can bring about other complex themes.
Some photographs are easier to do this to than others. And most seem to be trying not hard enough at all. But I recommend a deep look at images every now and then because it is always surprising what tasty treats they can be, even the most banal. Here's fifty from my third involvement with Zeus's warehouse, on the New Years night of 2009.
The nightlife implies a shadow world, which is why artists like Frank Miller strike chords with the bleak contrast of black and white. What is hidden in the black - and burnt out in the white - reveals the key component of the night: ambiguity. Just as photography mimics the brain's system of memory, shadows and quick bits of detail hone in to represent memories of the night. Technically speaking, this is why most flash photography fails. It reveals too much and by doing so constructs a distorted image and warped perception of the experience. It would be like using an X-ray camera to photograph a football game (although other, deeper truths may be revealed in that project). Attention to all details might portray the world of the autistic whose tragedy lies in not being able to simplify the grass into the concept "lawn" and succumbs to the overwhelming visual onslaught of every blade. It does not connect with the more common mental habit of simplification, erasure, and categorization.
One of my struggles is to try and represent the little bit of detail that can turn a swirling scene into a slight articulation of the removal of ambiguity and to expose a few of the multiple readings possible in the instant that light flicks out and breathes meaning onto objects. The teeter-totter lies between the one side that looks like a beginning art student's third roll of film that elevates their psyche into a sad delusion of the artistic, hazy, dark, subdued and meaningless abstractionism, and the blown out crystal clarity and pock-marked boredom that happens once said person buys a flash. Sometimes I tip to one side and others to the other. The perfection in the middle is rare. This time I think I tipped to the side of the tipped to the side, hazy, out-of-focus, noisy, and artsy-freaking-fartsy.
I'm back to the 40d since my 5dmarkii was yanked (maybe I'll post more about this if I can get out of my depressed funk) and therefore I am back to fighting an enemy I had pushed into the corner a bit: noise. Of course, even with superior sensors, noise is always an element when trying to get the most out of every photon. By bumping up the ISO, the sensor starts to get much less choosy about what counts as a triggering, data filled pulse. I really hate noise. I'm attempting to do some batch noise reduction on the photos from the white party. Getting the process down has thrown me into the funky world of learning the different kinds of noise. There is luminance noise as well as chroma noise. It makes sense that there could be two types of errors because we perceive light both in the type of color of light (chroma) as well as its brightness and intensity (luminance). Chroma noise doesn't seem to be much of a problem, but in the dark depths of the nightlife life, luminance is hell to counter. I didn't dare shoot over an iso of 500. High sensitivity and big sensors seems to be the best way to be able to achieve any kind of decent depth of field, but those toys are so many paychecks away. Anyway, I batched some noise ninjitsu into these files, so I hope and pray they don't look too processed. Here are photos of the 9th annual white party at the Depot:
And the party continued at Zeus's urban temple. I got my second wind at about 8:00 in the morning as I realized it was bright outside and danced myself sweaty silly! Such a good night/morning!
The struggle to gain control over darkish environments is an obsession and a curse. Initially I thought that the most important aspect in order to push the edges of light was to get lenses with very wide maximum apertures. I ditched zooms because their limit (something to do with the space needed for zoom mechanisms) was f2.8. I transitioned to lenses which which could push 1.4 and above. This helped for two reasons. The first is the obvious: the bigger the aperture, the more light can hit the camera's sensor and thus, the brighter the possible exposure in a given lighting scenario. Secondly, the big hole aids in another perilous aspect of low light shooting: focusing. Getting a good focus in low lighting situations is what I spend most of my time gritting my teeth over. Having a wide aperture lens can help you achieve focuses easier(regardless of the F-stop you may happen to be shooting at,) because the aperture only tightens when the shutter is pressed. It's at its widest when focusing.
Now, there's a big downside to shooting wide open. The depth of field is hair-width thin at f1.4 or f1.2. So, while it's a bit easier to focus, shooting moving subjects can get incredibly frustrating because anything that takes a subject closer or further from the focal plane will ruin your conceptualized focus. This causes the amount of blurry, unusable photos to skyrocket.
The next solution is to bring your own lights. I, for a while, started collecting party lights and bringing them to locations simply for the fact that I could get more usable photos (while "elevating the party to another level," too). It's a gonzo journalistic approach and one that I don't mind, but requires a lot more energy investment, variety, and perhaps even permission. So, the next stage was to bring my own strobes and place them in strategic mounts to fill the scenes with drama. The advantages are that you can stop the aperture down to something more flexible like f4.0 or whatever and then use shutter dragging techniques to get a decent mix of ambient and sharp lighting. However, doing remote flashes (or even on-camera flashes) has the potential to completely change the way a scene is viewed, which destroys the images as seen in the natural setting - which might be what the photo hunt was all about. Flooding a dimly lit area with a flash of light will make everything bright. If you were impressed by the light wafting down to hit someone's cheekbone as they walk through a doorway, the results of using strobe will probably fail. One solution is to use lights on 90 degree angles in order to just catch the rims of faces, which should preserve a lot of a scene's original color and chiaroscuro but add that little hint of focus and sharpness. It's an alright technique but it means constant manipulation of the lighting direction and placement as photo goals are met (or fail).
Of course, these techniques only push the limits; they do not announce victory over them. Recently I realized that the true power lays not in the lens's aperture or personal light strobes, but in the sensor's sensitivity. ISO. With an ISO that was, say, ten times more sensitive without noise, most of the lighting limits would go away. Of course, physical limits (ie. the limits of the laws of physics) seem to be maxing out, although hopefully new technologies will continue to whittle away at the noise inherent in high-ISO captures. There is kind of a "high ISO war" going on between Nikon and Canon at the moment, and although it leads to huge increases, each technological revolution only helps gain a stop or two. Significant, but more is desired so quickly. The other way is via higher megapixels, because if you can keep noise ratios the same while the megapixel value increases, noise becomes smaller and less noticeable.
So those are some initial and general thoughts on pushing the darkness away from the successful images. I have more that I'd like to go into soon, but I'll leave it at that for now. If anyone has any low-lighting shooting tips, I would really appreciate them.
Ninety photos in the set above. I'm either getting lazier or giving into the demands of others. My editing has gone to shit. People want more, more more. The vote is in and the decree is quantity over quality, although I'm a firm believer in the power of cutting down. Eliminating the zillions of blurry photos, or uninspired ones, or dismal failures full of boredom, or disgustingly biased and unrepresentative photos (yes it's true!) allows me to look better than I am. It certainly allows me to look better than others who post every single one of their "artistic masterpieces" - blurries, blackies, whities and all. But I should probably cut down to 50 like I was before. Next time I'll bring you all LESS, LESS, LESS!!!
So, I missed out on all of the truly cool, excellent events and opted for sleep instead. The main DJ act was The Spacemen (were The Spacemen?), who are supposedly humans who dress like freakish alien gargoylic aliens and wave their tendrilled fingers around like mad, to the beat, and appear very "alien." You'll not see any photographs of them from me! I also missed the main fire event up at the Wanderlust area, opting for sleep instead, oh those lovely z's. There was, assuming I can trust those who made me jealous, fire jumproping... as well as spinning and burning and dancing and flailing about. Cowboys and Indians made an entrance. And there was talk of finding teeny-bopper raverlettes and combining them with an equestrian for fun and perhaps profit. My main contribution was waking up the next morning, wandering around with a bag filled with colorful and lacy fabric, and enlisting some help in order to throw the said fabric over Clayton's geodesic dome. It was pretty. And sweet. And bitter. Sweet.
It is now time for resolutions. I've committed to resting the entire week so that I can pound my body into the ground and never stop shooting and shouting this weekend for e11. I'm hot and bothered and hopping mad at my laziness (but also happy). In vengeance, I'm gonna go crazy psycho machine pumping greased up steamy mad!
You've heard of those fat shaking machines? They consist of a big rubber bands that are yanked left and right, jiggling the jiggly areas which vibrates the frustrating fat away. That way you can get fit while perusing TV, munching low-fat chocolate bars, and huffing down to the day job where you sweat behind screens for the remote controlled predator and kill Iraqis patriotically. We've all been there. But that lucky Goldilocks found the right temperature after only three tries. I can never find the comfy medium. Everything's either too much or too little. My own chocolate laxative relates to socializing. I want to be able to be social, but only when I want to be. And socialization, although I should know by now, leads to others reaching out to me rather than me reaching out to them. I mostly like the me reaching out. So, then, Goldilocks is either lonely - and calls everyone she knows in order to find something to do, or Goldilocks is swamped with the outgoing social searches of others. Last weekend I found myself swamped by the latter problem. So I ditched everyone and headed down in search of my own connections. It was a blast. I took a few pictures.
Superheroes - those masked and caped social outcasts who live in schizophrenic fantasy worlds of daisies, chainsaws, and narcissism are now mainstream. Batman: The Dark Knight represents a geek's wet dream: the object of their introverted/egocentric adolescent infatuation - the comic book - became animated, got a television series, began launching piss-poor action movies by real people - some of who were 'actually hot,' and became "good." For the first time ever, girls started appearing at comic book conventions. Even though the girls were paid to be there, the superhero has finally been deemed worthy as a worship object. To help people know how to behave, injected into the Dark Knight's plotline were obsessive fans who dressed like Batman, too. It was comic book culture's ploy to model a mainstream reality that worships them. Has it permeated to the inner bimbo? Has the superhero really a fashion icon that influences trends like Hollywood stars, Michelle Obama, and ANCO? If so, comic books have transcended the shunned corner of the nerd to the level of Greek mythology. They are the stories told over an over. Have they become our myths? Is youtube the new 'word of mouth'?
Peek inside the photos to the Hero Lounge. I first heard about this place through Joe Frank, who would watch, absentmindedly, as a McGuyveresque action star planned and executed dashing escapes on the television. He identified with the character on the screen. He wanted him. He looked for him. He found him, at the Hero Lounge. They, in the natural but exciting and brand-new way, became lovers. They honey-mooned, crooned and looked at each other in amazement and awe. But enchantment dissipates and soon indifference and boredom began to permeate. The aura of celebrity chain-whipped knuckles. There they are.
It was the castle to withstand wind we built in the desert to celebrate entry and exit into life. The wind roared endlessly all day, and I only felt peace for a few minutes as I woke up slowly. Then the eggy sun heated that air up again and the air whirred as it was beaten by the photon blender. You can only capture the visual aspects of wind when it hits things and makes them defy gravity. Photographs can't capture the sound or the motion. Last time I was in this desert, it did this:
and threatened to carry off stages. But the castle held. Only the flags on top and streamers behind revealed the torrential quantities of air tearing past.
For those confused by the photos, I'll give a more descriptive, informative summary. The event was instigated by the death of someone who has been actively involved in the burn community and who did not want the grimness of a funeral to see him go but rather a celebration. That's why the military made an appearance. The flag ceremony was actually quite moving - I was emotionally affected throughout but when Hope was given the flag, she let out a scream of joy and celebration, the crowd followed suit, and then: music began, thumping away into the desert air.
What struck me about this event was how metaphorical the castle became. It was a representation of the life of the individual. It was created out of donated wood, brought together with the energy of volunteers, yet was something no one could predict. There were no images or blueprints drawn. It was made from casual, natural inspiration. It became bigger than itself, was celebrated, and music played throughout it. But the most crucial and emotional aspect was that it was taken away from all the celebrators before we were ready for it. People wanted to continue playing on the castle, listening to music and bands playing from it, yet it was taken before its time. We watched it burn magnificently, felt its warmth, but there was something tragic. As the coals began to burn low, we were all aware not of the castle, but the lack of the castle. It allowed us to all feel a sense of group loss. We all experienced the vibrancy and then the void.
I recently joined up with a little group in Provo that has sprang up as a response to the recent bombing in Gaza. What I think so so cool about the project is that they are not looking particularly to meet fourth order Maslow needs, the food/water/shelter stuff, but to hit at the first order. I don't know if that seems silly, but I like the idea of addressing needs (art IS a need) that go beyond day to day survival and allow for human expression that connects widely disparate times. No offense to Americans (well, maybe a little), but considering that art is usually at its best in the midst of turmoil, boiling violence, and fear, the spoiled, pale-green, super toddlers that we Americans are probably make some pathetic creations compared to what the Palestinians are capable of. The purpose so to open a communication conduit between artists there and artists here, and to raise money to donate for art supplies and that sort of thing.
We had our first event on Wednesday. Food was cooked (tabouli and this other "meat bread" thing) and we paired up with the Provo Cafe, Pennyroyal in order to show a documentary and hear an intro by the filmmakers. It was a success! 98 people responded on the facebook page Event page, and although not that many showed up, it still was a pretty decent crowd for a group that has just started making connections. I didn't have time to take many pictures, but there are a few.
A white party. It sounds almost racist. But wrongs become righted when you find out it's all done under a black light that actually makes everyone blue. Serves us right for being martians. It's a great theme party because everyone has at least a white t-shirt. It's pretty much a chance for all those guys who show up everywhere in blue jeans and a thin white t to be in the in instead of "too cool for all that fashion bull." Of course, what I love to see are the amazing ways that people creatively intertwine the theme's limitations with inventiveness. Blue hair or pink hair becomes all that much shocking.
On the lighting side, I really need to investigate the effects of blacklight on photography. Blue always seems to be a wavelength that interacts in strange ways. It's the most high energy frequency, of course, so that may have to do with the way it skews and burns out in places. Blue seems to rip less sophisticated sensors apart. Try looking at blue televisions or led's with a cellphone camera. Check out the photos above to see what I mean! Especially <this> one. Those are led's, and so perhaps it's just that they are so small and bright that they behave differently than anything else. If anyone has resources or knowledge I'd love to know more about the phenomenon.
I almost didn't make it for Halloween! Schoolwork has risen and I've been too bogged down with homework AND trying to sew a costume at the last minute. I failed, ran out of time, and decided to just go anyway. The night before I had dressed as a wrestler disguised as a car reflector - you know those ones that keep the heat out of parked cars? But for China Blue's party I was going to be Jolly Old St. Nick. It couldn't be done in time, so that look'll have to wait until Christmas or next week or sometime. Jen succeeded in becoming a peculiar puppet with a puffy head. Now, today, daylight savings has ended and time has shifted. If I try to forget, maybe tomorrow I can sleep in for an extra hour.
Oh, also - I tried doing my first photosynth, and it's of the China Blue house. Check it out by clicking photosynth. You have to install the plugin, but it's really cool once you do. It let's you explore through a point cloud of 2-D images in order to get something like a 3-D feeling. I added about 130 images but they are only 40% "synthy," so there are a lot of disconnects and many different sets. But that's ok! You can still explore the living room that goddess and mistress Charity destroyed! Wahooo!!
Just like this country's banks, I am now in debt. But I have a camera again, which makes it worth it. I just hope I can get out again soon. So, Jen's fashion show was amazing! I was a model in it, so I didn't get many pictures, but Caitlin was amazing enough to shoot and she should have her stuff up later this week. I can't wait. Thanks to all the models! We had four boys and six girls, which I think is great because girls are so often overrepresented. I'd much rather have both sexes be put under whatever gaze it is that takes them in. Also, Breana was wonderful for doing make-up. As well, two people helped do hair styling - Alex did an amazing job coming at the last minute and doing hair with her friend Autom. It was a big production - and all for five minutes of us strutting our stuff inside of the much larger show, an October Evening. We were one of about 15 different groups lined up to entertain.
After the party I went to Nate's dirty thirty birthday with a few who still had energy. I actually should have gone to bed, but I stayed up all night anyway. Who can beat pudding wrestling in a dimly lit garage? The interactions were furious. And I got to take some photos again! Check em out.
I also used a slide show automation tool, animoto, to make the following:
Uncle Uncanny's music festival was small enough that you could get around to see everything, but big enough that doing so was more than likely to cause exhaustion, fatigue, and loss of sleep. With larger events you just have to give up and acknowledge that there are more experience available than obtainable, but with this you could perhaps get close. We arrived just after a torrential downpour had made mini-flash floods sweep across the place, but because of the dark and the absorbent desert sand we couldn't see a sign of it. So the earth felt alien and unexplainable to tip-toe across, non-solid and squishy under foot. Music, shadow dancing, and sleep commenced.
Inspired by the wondrous Circus Pandemonium, I set up a trapeze and then proceeded to just about break my neck. After blacking out, waking up, letting the blood dry, and then running into the sunset with my camera in hand, I ended up at a sweat lodge. And this is where my story really begins. I've been to quite a few lodges before and they have usually been free, creative places to express and explore and get to a point where you almost pass out. I love the sounds you can make inside them when you can get everything out of your nose and throat and just have these resonant open air canals. Sometimes there is a bit of mysticism and oddness, but I usually ignore that.
China Blue resident Starman was running the sweat, and to begin he asked if anyone had a song to share or something to say. I was there in part because I wanted to meditate on my neck injury, give it some rest, and "cleanse," so I said that. The person to my right, in a beautiful Irish accent, said that he wanted the lodge experience to help think about how to better know when to assist other people and when to keep silent and stay back, for their own spiritual or experiential growth. I agreed in my mind that this was a challenging boundary to figure out. It butts the ego itself against the instinct to baby others against letting them figure out everything on their own. I felt satisfied that I was in good company.
And then the weirdness began. I wanted to open the conversation up to allow for responses to people's statements. I did not want the dialogue to simply be people on their own soapboxes, so I began talking about how I hoped it would be an environment where people could respond to what others said. The Irishman's response was something like this: criticizing other people meant that you did not accept what they had to say, which meant that you had your own worldview you wanted to spread in the world; the critique of others was the reason why there was so much violence, bloodshed, and war in the world.
I was stunned. I'd always thought that wars are only fought because people do not ask enough questions. The leaders and those in power very love this mindset. People with weak foundations are afraid of being questioned. And then we heard about how the universe was split into two genders, male and female. And then we hear about how humans are beings of light, made of photons. It's ridiculous. You won't find a physicist alive that would agree with that. Regarding gender, it's more social than anything else - and a recent one. To be even looser and say that the universe is divided into sexes - male and female - is just as silly. These are categories based our own view and the fact that most can be easily put into on or another box. It's comes down to one having a large reproductive cell and the other having a smaller one. For much longer than sexual specialization has been going on, life has continued through asexual means. There are all sorts of sexes in the natural world. We shouldn't believe these silly sorts of analyses simply because they make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Never let the aura of a situation stop you from calling bullshit!
The care and time that so many people put into costumes is a little bit overwhelming. I mean, you hear about a jellyfish themed party, but you don't expect to see people dressed up as them everywhere! I counted at least five people who had modified tentacles on decorated umbrellas. How compete? I, myself, stole Jen's newly-minted jellyish shirt and so I felt I'd approximated at least the texture and colors of the jellyfish. But it was so little compared! I think one of the best quotes I heard was from someone commenting on her friend's excuse for not coming: "I'll have to take forever to get ready!" The response was, "You don't even know what it means to get ready for a party. I've been working all week just to get ready!" Additionally, the place was adorned and decorated with jellyfish of all sizes. A geodome was jellyfish themed, the dj booth was a mobile jellyfish that could drive, they decorated the walls, and little blinking baby jellyfish were on fingers all around.
Oh the jellyfish! They are my second favorite marine invertebrate (next to the wondrous octopus, although the mantis shrimp and the sea cucumber are pretty captivating, too). I've always wanted one for a pet. Just look at these gorgeous things.
For more information about the mobile jellyfish from the year 12000, check the group's website.
Here's a small set from the latest Easy Street fiasco. This one included water in liquid form, indoors, which seemed to quickly turn to steam. Still at 5:00 in the AM the place was sweltering. Humidity just makes raw heat feel oppressive. It's the inverse of sitting in the sun's chromosphere, over one million degrees centigrade, hotter than the surface, but not enough particles to pick up the heat and even feel. Yeah, so it was like the inverse of that.
I wasn't there for very long - I had a trip to the black hole (in white canyon, southern Utah) the next morning even though thunderstorms were making that trip dangerous and uncertain.
This set has been like, published, and can be ordered as a cute little book from Blurb. Click!
From the photos it might not be apparent that this river trip was not just an everyday occasion. It wasn't like all the others! This one was unique! (Yes yes, I know that we are always heroes in the center of our own universe, and we feel that our own experiences are more fulfilling, rich, and poignant than others, but there's something almost Disneyland-like about the "river trip" that I don't love, they seem somewhat formulaic in spirit and the photographs almost always look the same).
But anyway, beneath our river uniforms - the anonymizing elements of life vests, helmets, and sharp sunlight on a one way track - it was a reunion of friends who had not seen each other for years. Some had not done the trip for ten years, others had done it every year for the past twelve. It was a group of 26 quite amazing people who met for relaxation, adventure, conversation, and a common enthrallment of and in powerful forces of nature. The smoothness and calm of the river can easily become a violent, life-sucking force. It's a metaphor for the fragility of our relatively calm planet hurtling through mostly empty space. One small thing goes wrong and it's all over. So, we slid through a groove in the rocks that had been set down from the Oligocene and popped out even longer ago, the late Cretaceous. It was relaxed yet rigorous, sacred and profane.
For further information, I'll refer to Jas's page on the trip.
Brandon, a rafter/photographer on the trip, also has pics: click!
I spent seven days at this year's rainbow gathering, which was in Wyoming this year.
The biggest question I have returning from the rainbow gathering is this: what was the impact on the mosquitoes!? I, myself, noticed a dramatic shift in the cleverness of the mosquitoes after about four days of battling. The early ones were lazy. I must have killed hundreds. Jen, sitting in one place while people were balancing rocks around her, killed one hundred and five, placing them in a morbid graveyard which was intended to warn the others. But after three days of massacre and blood exchange, they would not simply land. They would hover near, test their landing pad, and would require much attention.
Humans were driving evolution by killing the careless. The arms race had begun. If we had been able to stay I'm sure that we would be able to have conversations with them in 100 years.
The stories from spending a week with thousands of people are endless. I could write all night. There was death camp, the warriors of light, searches for people, rock balancing, wacky mysticism, my own secular preaching, nonchalant nudity, incredible and continual acts of altruism, and loud people.
Loud people. When you get so many people together you are quite certain to have a number of annoying ones. And the fact that they are prominent and vocal makes them seem to be more numerous than they are. I mean, some of the kids there were downright coarse. A 15 year old girl's voice could sound like a raspy 40 year old, screaming out constant obscenities. I couldn't believe it at first, but eventually I simply slept through the pre-dawn "good morning!'s, fighting dogs, and incoherent thundering.
It makes sense, though. I mean, what is the rainbow gathering but a collection of numerous regional outsider groups. Most of the people don't fit in, are socially awkward, and have antisocial tendencies. It's an odd mix, and some will always feel like outsiders even among a throng of thousands of others that feel the same way.
