Making stuff happen

Regarding this:

Dubious Luxury, Feb 22: Pic by Dan Nugent.

I offer the following guide:

In the future, doing anything is indistinguishable from checking your email.

Edit: This is of course a necessary consequence of building Universal Turing Machines.

Friday Photo #5

Pagosa Springs and the San Juan River

More travel photos, but this one is much more current. I took a trip to New Mexico a couple weeks ago, to visit my good friends Miya and Andrew. We did some skiing in the area, including an overnight trip up to Colorado, where we skiied at Wolf Creek and stayed at the Pagosa Springs Resort.

I like Pagosa Springs a lot. The town strikes an interesting balance; it caters to tourists but doesn't feel dominated by them. The centerpiece is the hot springs resort, right on the San Juan River. The resort lodging is rather forgettable -- clean and functional at the level of a cared-for roadside motel. The springs themselves are the attraction, and they're worth the visit. The resort springs are manmade pools, sculpted into grottoes that provide an aesthetically pleasing experience. The water itself is mineral-laden and is heated by natural hot springs on the site. The coldest pools are near the river, about 80°F, with the hottest pools above 115°F.

I have visited the resort before, but this experience was unique. Pagosa Springs has been covered in snow this winter, and the whole town was shrouded in white. Another couple inches fell on the day we arrived, which was enough to clean things up and present a soft white landscape. And it was cold. Evening temperatures were just below 0°F; in the morning we faced about -18°F. It made for an interesting hot spring experience, but also for a wonderful effect on the atmosphere. The hot pools produced prodigious amounts of steam, blanketing the town in foggy steam and depositing rime ice on any exposed surface. The brilliant sunlight of the morning was bounced and filtered by the billowing clouds. The net effect was of a warm oasis within a desert of snow.

The photo itself is serviceable but not terribly exciting. I grabbed it with my P&S as we walked back from breakfast. (Prior to breakfast there was too much steam to see anything.) But it's an unusual winter image and provides me an icon to remember a wonderful trip.

Friday Photo #4

Eiffel Tower from Below

Holly and I took a trip to Paris and Belgium last summer. We visited the Eiffel Tower at the end of a long exhausting day, but it was a worthwhile time to be there. The tower in the fading daylight was quite magical.

Travel photography is challenging. Good habits like patience and tripods fall by the wayside when you're trying to get a photo in the midst of milling tourists. Many of my photos from this trip need to be rotated a bit since I didn't slow down enough to square things up. But this intentionally asymmetrical take on the tower works for me. It illustrates the massive size while keeping the tower instantly recognizable. I'm not terribly happy with the open sky at the top but at least the high clouds keep it active. I also need to spend some time opening up the shadows a bit, but I believe there's enough data there to give me some texture and color.

I bought a new lens for this trip and I love it: the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4. One of the big compromises with travel photography -- at least how I practice it -- is that changing lenses becomes rare. It's tough to carry a lot of lenses, and it's tough to find the time and place to change them. (One example: while on top of the Arc de Triomphe, I dropped my 28-105mm onto a concrete bench. Fortunately the UV filter took the impact, but it's the kind of risk you run when juggling multiple lenses in restricted quarters.)

Because of this, zooms rule for travel photography. And for what I like to do, the 17-40mm range is killer. The ultrawide 17mm can be used for unusual and fun takes like this photo, and the 40mm provides a very reasonable midrange for more standard shots. But where this lens really shines is for interior photos. A lens like this will give you outstanding interior shots of churches, museums, monuments, hotels rooms, train stations -- any indoor space. Plus this lens is just fast enough to get you some hand-held shots even without flash, especially if you can brace against a pillar or chair. Highly recommended.

Ignorance is Strength

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth."
George Orwell, 1984

This statement by Mark Penn (campaign adviser for Hillary Clinton) is the best argument I've seen yet why I should vote for Barack Obama. Essentially he's saying that Obama is the Establishment Candidate. And this is, I guess, based on Obama's skill at fundraising from millions of small donors... as opposed to Clinton's ability to get the max donations from the wealthy and powerful.

Uh-huh.

I won't go into my incredulity in any detail, but suffice to say that this is a charming example of the Rovian approach to politics: take stock of your worst liabilities and randomly accuse your opponent of them. Of course this requires that you have no sense of decency or honesty, but it's proven to be effective in the past. And that's just great but it is, you know, indecent and dishonest.

I guess I don't mind Clinton having someone like Penn on her team. After all, it's clear that the Republicans are willing to fight dirty, and it's good to have someone who can see it coming and have ideas on how to fight it. I just wish she didn't listen to him so much.