Shards and Phractures

Lightning is one of the most frustrating subjects in photography. Think about it. You can't know where lightning is going to strike next. And you can't point your camera at the sky and push the button as soon as you see the flash; by the time the nerve signal gets from your brain to your finger, the bolt is gone, and there's nothing left to see in the picture except a lot of dark. So the only way to take a lightning picture is to point your camera where you think the lightning is going to strike, and leave the shutter hanging wide open for as long as you can, and cross your fingers that the "Lightning Gods" will be kind to you with this storm. You take black picture after black picture, while trying to keep your equipment dry, while trying to keep from becoming a target for the lightning yourself. And all the while, lightning strikes again and again--off to the side, where the camera isn't pointed...up in the clouds, where you can't see it...and directly i...

You can learn a lot just by watching...professional wrestling. Okay, now that I've driven away half my reader base, never to return...and half the rest are laughing hysterically at my social blunder and obvious lack of intelligence...allow me to illuminate. Professional wrestling is a television show pretending to be sports; think "soap opera for guys." Wrestlers are actors and stuntmen, putting on a match where they try to appear to be beating the snot out of each other--hopefully, without actually beating the snot out of each other, because there's always another show to do the next night. The wrestlers know who is supposed to "win" the match, but the actual wrestling is basically made up on the spot between the wrestlers. Most wrestling plotlines involve the "Face" (good guy) opposing the "Heel" (bad guy). Faces wrestle by the rules, while heels cheat. More importantly, faces try to get the crowd to cheer for them, while heels try to g...

...okay, so maybe "started it all" is a bit of an overstatement...let me explain... I grew up with photography. My father had his old Minolta or Canon out often, and I still have boxes and boxes of slides of my brothers and I growing up and all of the places we lived travelling with the military. I actually remember taking a picture for him from the top of a pagoda at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan, because I could fit into the gap he wanted the picture taken from and he couldn't. I must have been six or seven years old at the time. I bought my first camera, a Minolta X-500, with my first paycheck after I finished high school, and I set out to shoot as many pictures with it as I could. That camera even went with me to Air Force Basic Training, and I still use it today, when I get the urge to shoot film instead of digital. But, growing up, no one ever told me about all the other stuff photographers are supposed to know about, like composition, and lighting, and exposure...and it se...

Now, I'm an understanding and patient guy. And I've been a Yahoo email fan for years. Check the profile (data_devil) and you'll see that I've had my email address for nearly eight years. I don't know of any of my friends who have managed to keep a Yahoo address alive that long, before it became deluged with spam and totally unuseable. I was there when Yahoo barely gave 4mb of storage, not the amazingly large numbers you get now. I was there when Yahoo bought up Egroups and merged them into the Yahoo network. I've always reccomended Yahoo email to friends who were new to the 'net and needed someplace to check their email. I'm having a really hard time doing that anymore. My Yahoo account is screwed up somehow. On my computer at home, the Yahoo screen locks up right after it puts the logo in the top left. Sometimes a Refresh will get it going, other times I just have to close the browser and start over. It happens on the main Inbox screen and at every emai...

I had a project to do, about a month after my girlfriend and I got together. A major storm had blasted through and torn up a tree outside my mother's house. There was junk everywhere, from that tree and all the nearby palm trees, and it needed to be cleaned up. My best friends were helping; this wasn't unusual, they lived next door and had the same problem. And my new girlfriend pitched in just so we could spend some time together. I grabbed the biggest branch from the downed tree, and couldn't move it easily. So, under the mind-altering influence of clean Arizona air and (very likely) an overdose of testosterone, I came up with the brilliant idea of breaking this branch with a karate kick. I dragged the branch to a low wall, propped it just so, and called on my vast knowledge of karate skills (that is, four lessons in tenth grade, plus dozens or even hundreds of hours of Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and The Matrix), and delivered what I hoped was a clean and powerful and impres...

I'd like to welcome everyone to the inaugural edition of Shards and Phractures. What is this blog for? Basically, it's a place for me to rant and vent about the things that annoy me, and cheer on--or maybe just babble about--the things that don't. Writers write. They need to write; it's almost an addiction, or maybe obsession is a better description. A cool color combination in the sunset, or an interesting phrase from the morning DJ...anything can spark an idea, and lay the foundation for an essay, or an article, or a novel... I am a writer. I've been a writer for as long as I can remember (I had a third grade school principal tell me that one day he was going to read a best-seller written by me). I've tried to deny it, by putting down the pen for months or years at a time. I've also tried to support it--I originally got into computers to "support my writing habit," and I now have over twenty years of experience playing with them. So, Shard...