Blue

Ahora resulta que Juanito es Churchill. La dirigente del PAN en la ciudad de México, Mariana Gómez del Campo, le da trato de estadista, con tal de propinar una puya a Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

En concierto con los que promueven que se quede en la jefatura delegacional, para ella Rafael Acosta Ángeles ha pasado del “¡no más Juanitos!” que exclamó el 29 de junio al “hombre auténtico con ganas de chambear, valiente, que da la cara y se va a quedar gobernando” del 10 de septiembre.

El 16 de junio, en la explanada de la delegación Iztapalapa, en el acto de soberbia, autoritarismo y humillación política más diáfano que haya ofrecido el ex candidato presidencial, Juanito mintió ocho veces al protestar y aceptar ser el prestanombres electoral de un movimiento que lo hizo vencer y al que ahora desconoce:

1. “Al ganar no se la va a creer”. Y se la creyó. El que no juntaba ni para el registro del PT ya aspira a la Presidencia de la República.

2. “Él no va a ganar por sí mismo”. Y hoy piensa que los acarreados por López Obrador votaron por él porque los convenció, no porque su líder les instruyó.

3. “Va a ganar por Clara (Brugada), que se entienda bien”. No entendió. Y, dirían en el barrio, no sabe el tamaño de los alacranes que se está echando al hombro.

4. “Aceptas lo que te estoy planteando”. Y que lo manda al diablo.

5. “Al momento de ganar, presentas tu renuncia”. Ya adelantó que no lo hará: que el 1 de octubre tomará posesión y se quedará.

6. “Sí lo cumplo”. Y no.

7. “Todo sea por el compromiso con nuestro presidente legítimo”. Ya lo desconoció como tal, porque no recibe de él ningún apoyo.

8. “Protesto (cumplir con mi palabra)”, sumando ocho mentiras en 79 segundos.

Juanito, él solito, no vale más que lo que les sea útil a los adversarios del tabasqueño. No lo eligió el pueblo como a cualquier candidato. Fue fruto de un arreglo político que traicionó. Si existiera el referéndum, y se hiciera uno mañana, bastaría una declaración de López Obrador para regresarlo al 3% que tenía con el PT antes del dedazo público de AMLO. Juanito debe renunciar porque si no atraería la mayor ingobernabilidad que se haya visto en el sitio más importante del DF: su población es mayor a Monterrey y Guadalajara juntas, y su presupuesto ronda los 3 mil 700 millones de pesos.

SACIAMORBOS En promedio, cada voto costó 106 pesos en la elección federal de julio, considerando lo que se gastaron los partidos y la poca gente que fue a sufragar. Según el Tribunal Electoral del DF, Demetrio Sodi en la delegación Miguel Hidalgo rebasó el tope de gastos de campaña por un millón de pesos y Carlos Orvañanos en Cuajimalpa por 226 mil. Tomando en cuenta los sufragios que les dieron la ventaja… ¡les salieron más baratos esos votos! A Sodi en 56 pesos y a Orvañanos en 29.

Los partidos se definen en los hechos y no en sus programas de acción y declaración de principios. En esos documentos está plasmada la imagen que un partido pretende dar de sí mismo pero la realidad se descubre por la forma en que se definen sus militantes a la hora de votar y por las políticas públicas que promueven cuando gobiernan. El PRI es parte de la internacional socialista y se pretende un partido comprometido con temas progresistas y modernos. Nada más falso.

En los últimos meses los priístas han demostrado en los hechos una gran congruencia ideológica. De 187 legisladores priístas que han sido invitados a pronunciarse sobre iniciativas que implican la penalización de las mujeres por interrumpir sus embarazos: 172 han votado a favor, 15 en contra y 3 se han ausentado. En el 60% de los 15 estados en los que se ha modificado recientemente la constitución para “garantizar la protección de la vida desde la fecundación” el PRI gobierna y tiene mayoría en el Congreso local. Los priístas han votado junto con el PAN iniciativas que incluyen cárcel de hasta 10 años para las mujeres que aborten y la penalización de la interrupción del embarazo incluso cuando es producto de una violación o cuando la salud de la madre está en peligro. En algunos estados su celo los llevó a dejar fuera de la ley la anticoncepción y hasta la fecundación in vitro.

La iniciativa es del PAN y la han defendido y anunciado públicamente. Su objetivo: proteger la vida desde la concepción y castigar el aborto. El origen: el revés que sufrieron cuando la Suprema Corte de Justicia convalidó en agosto del 2008 la ley votada por la Asamblea Legislativa del Distrito Federal que despenaliza el aborto en las primeras doce semanas de gestación. Los panistas y las organizaciones católicas y de ultraderecha habían intentado paralelamente que la Corte declarara inconstitucional esa ley y detener la publicación de la norma oficial 046 —norma que define los criterios que deben ser aplicados por las autoridades de salud en la atención a víctimas de violencia sexual ofreciéndoles las opciones de anticoncepción de emergencia e interrupción legal del embarazo—. Fracasaron, la Corte convalidó la ley y la norma, después de varios retrasos, se publicó en el mes de abril. Sin embargo, ahora pueden decir que van ganando y es gracias al apoyo de los priístas.

Beatriz Paredes dice que sobre este tema existe un debate al interior del PRI: ¿Qué debate? El 72% de los priístas que han tenido que pronunciarse lo han hecho inequívocamente a favor de penalizar a las mujeres y de reducir los márgenes de control sobre su vida sexual y reproductiva.

Los priístas votan como conservadores y son conservadores. Parecería innecesario decirlo pero siempre es útil recordarlo.

Bien conocidos por su incongruencia…

By John Herrman, 2:15 PM on Sat Sep 12 2009, 42,547 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

People don’t neglect backing up their computers because it’s hard—it isn’t, at all. No, people file into the inevitable death march of data loss for one reason: Backing up usually costs money. But it doesn’t have to.

When your concerned friends and family insist that you have to back your data up (as anyone who’s seen my atrociously beaten-down laptop in the last few months has done to me) they’re effectively telling you two things: That backing up your data will save you a massive headache in the future, because more likely the not, your hard drive will fail; and, less bluntly, that you need to buy a hard drive. And who wants to do that? It’s hard to lay out the cash for a backup hard drive, since the payoff is uncertain, and (hopefully) far away. It’s a good investment—not an easy one.

The good news is, most of us cheapskates can still keep our most important files safe without spending a dime, or wasting more than a few minutes. Here how:

Note: These methods don’t give you traditional, full backups—they are ways to keep copies of the files that matter most to you, like your documents, photos, music and videos.

Share

Do you live with someone else? Do you share a network with someone else? Then hey, you’ve got an ready-built backup system right there! There are a few ways to deal with this setup, from stupid-simple to moderately complex.

First, you need permission. Whoever your networked buddy is, sit them down and have a talk. Give them a glass of milk, and explain to them how important data backup is. Persuade them. Coax them. Scare them. Offer to store their backups in exchange for them storing yours. Great! Now you have a partner in data safety. Congratulations.

The easiest, most direct and least intimidating way to get free backups is to set up simple file sharing on your PC or Mac. On the PC, it’s just a matter of ticking a few boxes and setting a few parameters (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7) and on Mac, it’s not much harder (To another Mac, to a PC, courtesy of Lifehacker).

Now you need to decide what to back up, and how to do it. If privacy isn’t an issue, like in a scenario where you’re just syncing files between two open access family computers, you can simple copy your documents, photos, video and audio to opposing computers’ shared folders, and voila. If privacy is an issue, like if you’re trying to back up sensitive documents or embarrassing photos, you can simply create a password-protected archive of some or all of your data, then copy that over to the backup folder.

But this is all a little manual for my taste—for a longer term solution, I’d recommend something a little more automated. All we need with such a simple setup is a basic backup utility. For Windows, I’ve been happy with IdleBackup, a free little utility that’ll copy selected folders to any destination you want—including network folders—while your computer isn’t working. For Mac, Lacie’s SilverKeeper is as simple and powerful a tool as you’ll need, syncing folders locally or over a network on a set schedule—also free.

Go Online

Again, short of purchasing a whole lot of online space especially designed for the purpose of storing full backups, this’ll be a scenario in which you’re picking a choosing what you save and what you don’t; your intention here is to save and recover the files that matter most, not restore your entire operating system. Luckily, with increasingly generous offers from online storage companies, you can put quite a bit of your stuff on someone else’s servers for nothing. A few of the best:

Windows Live Skydrive: This one really deserves more publicity that it seems to get, because it hands you 25GB of no-strings-attached storage, for free. The 50MB filesize limit is a little low considering how large the online disk is, but for document, photo, and even music backup, it’s hard to beat this.

File Factory: 100GB of free storage with a 300MB file limit. The catch? It can be a little slow, so this much data isn’t necessarily that usable.

Dropbox: This is more than just a backup service—it has plenty of nifty file syncing and features, too—but it’s a super-simple way to store 2GB of data online, with well-designed clients on every major platform

Mozy: Gives you 2GB of storage for free, or an unlimited amount for $5 a month. Comes with an extremely handy Windows utility that makes it easy to specify what gets uploaded, and what doesn’t.

Orbit Files: Offers 6GB of space, but with fewer options available for non-paying customers, and no software client.

Scatter Yourself In the Cloud

The bad news is, this is the most time-consuming way to skirt proper backups, both in terms of setup and recovery. The good news is, you’re probably already doing this, to an extent.

If my laptop died right now, I’d lose my settings, a little bit of music, a few day’s worth of documents, and well, that’s about it. That’s because so, so much of my data lives in various online services, just by nature of how I work. Rather than undertaking a day-long effort to upload all your files to myriad websites, just consider changing your habits a little, and easing into a cloud over time. That these services provide useful backups is incidental—usually they’re intended as web apps—but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve the purpose beautifully. Use them for their intended purposes-be it document editing, photo sharing, or music streaming—and you’ll soon realize that, without even trying, you’ve create a wonderful, distributed backup of your most-used media across the internet.

Documents:

Google Docs: This one’s a no-brainer, since a lot of you probably already use Gmail, with which Docs is tightly integrated. It can sometimes break formatting in files, but at least you won’t lose important data.

Office Live: Microsoft’s take on the online office suite comes with a free 5GB, which, let’s be honest, is an awful lot of Word documents.

Zoho: As an online office suite, Zoho offers a few little features that Google and Microsoft don’t. As a storage service, though, they only offer 1GB. Still!

Photos:

Flickr: The obvious choice for photography geeks, Flickr give you unlimited storage for free, at a rate of 100MB a month.

Snapfish: With fewer options for enthusiasts, Snapfish’s draw is its unlimited storage and orderable photo prints.

Picasa: 1GB of Google’s storage space for free out of the box, with a nice client to boot.

Photobucket: Another 1GB of free storage, but this one takes video as well.

Facebook: This might seem like an unlikely recommendation, but they’ve got one of the best deals going, in a way. If you’re not concerned about the quality of your photo uploads—like, you just want them for onscreen viewing—you can upload unlimited photos here, 200 at a time. And in any case, a medium-quality JPEG is better than no photo at all.

Music:

MP3Tunes: Puts your music library everywhere, with a bevy of client apps for various platforms, including the iPhone. 2GB of free storage isn’t much, but it’s something.

File Factory: Mentioned above in the general storage section, FileFactory also has a web interface for music. 100GB is quite possibly enough to store your whole library.

Deezer: A French music streaming service that also lets you upload as much music as you’d like, for personal use.

Video:

This is the most hackish of the bunch, but YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and the like usually support private or invite-only videos, which means they can act as last resort backup solutions, though the loss of quality and long upload times might make these plans a little unwieldy.

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments—your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Happy data-hoarding, and have a great weekend!

By Trey Ratcliff, February 17th, 2009 in How-To | 266 Comments | Forum

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By Trey Ratcliff (aka Stuck in Customs), one of the most famous and renowned HDR photographers on Flickr. In his article Trey describes some professional insights and useful photography tips that he collected over the years of his career.

A camera does not work like an eye; film does not work like memory. There is a fine line between a photo that is quite nice and one that is quite breathtaking. At some unknown point, a photo can cross the Rubicon and be forever a piece of beautiful art. That hinterland between a regular photo and evocative art is a shifting area from person to person and taste to taste. However, that zone can be narrowed a bit once you start to consider the way the brain stores memories and emotions.

And yes, it gets a bit touchy-feely here trying to determine if your work has crossed that line. With rigorous practice and peer feedback, you can start to appreciate where that zone is and, consequently, improve your hit ratio.

The back of the Taj Mahal during a summer sunset.

The good news is that divining your way to more beautiful photos does not require rune rites of scapulimancy. There are some basic things and mantras to keep in mind as you practice and fail, then practice and succeed, then practice and fail, then practice and succeed, and rinse and repeat. We’ll detail a few of these below.

1. Think About The Brain

I’ve always thought about photography differently. I grew up seeing out of only one eye, thanks to several botched surgeries in the 1970s using refurbished archaeological tools of the Australopithecus medicine men.

When you see out of one eye your whole life and then start using a camera in your mid-30s, something happens to you! You come to realize that a camera works nothing like the eye. Forget 3D; I’m talking about the way the brain stores images and scenes.

Upon birth, you have legs, but it takes a few years for your legs to get along with your brain well enough to actually walk you around the savanna a bit. The eyes are the same. They get wired faster than the legs, but the neural pathways from the optic nerve to the parts of the brain that matter take a while to find their chemical trails. You start to sense light levels, then shapes, then edges, then relative positions and the like. And then, around the age 2 or 3, you finally come up with a tagging system that allows you to know generally what a “barn” looks like. Your brain has been working nonstop over that time to give you the visual and memory infrastructure to enable this watershed event.

Fourth of July on Lake Austin: the first HDR photograph to hang in the Smithsonian.

Now, let’s fast forward to today. You’re older, your brain is more or less fully formed, and you happen upon a barn in a field. But it’s not just any barn: it’s the barn you’ve been wanting to see your entire life. And in the distance, a storm is brewing as a gentle sun sets. It’s beautiful; you lock it into memory. The way you lock it into memory is nothing like the way a camera records the image on film (or a CCD). This is what I quickly came to realize as I sat there, looking at a photo I took with a fabulously expensive Nikon and showing it to a friend. “Well, you really had to be there.” I’m sure you’ve all said that!

Now, this first step is a big step: it’s a philosophical re-assessment of how the camera works in contrast to how the memory maps a scene, the latter being a process of layering visual reality with the emotions and memories linked to that scene. You see, you are not just remembering that barn but are remembering every barn; you are not just remembering that storm but are remembering every storm. A beautiful photo must tell the epic tale of the memory, linked with the other emotions that fold into a whole.

2. Engage In The New Global Salon

In the 1860s, all art roads led to the Salon in Paris, which was the most important judged competition of art in the western world. During a period of just over 10 years, the Impressionist masters battled it out in a competitive and cooperative tour de force that created a panoply of creations that we now cannot imagine the world without.

The reason Paris became the center of the art world and an explosion of new art is the combination of new technology in travel and communications combined with Napoleon III’s focus on infrastructure around the Salon.

Hong Kong from a peak on a summer night as the city comes alive.

Today the same thing is happening, although perhaps not everyone really realizes it in a grand historical sense. It’s called Flickr. Flickr has become a techno-Salon, allowing the world to easily use the Internet to enter the competition and force each other to evolve and improve their art. The automated “Explore Algorithm” does a pretty good job of automatically filtering the best photos that are uploaded every day. Go ahead and look at some of the current best of the last 7 days.

Click “Reload” a few times and I promise you will have seen something that impresses. It is quite unbelievable the level of art and beauty that is created every single day. Now, all of this amazing art on Flickr can either inspire or intimidate you, depending on your mindset for competition. I hope it inspires you to upload one photo a day and see if you can make it in the top 500 or even the top 10. And don’t give up. Competition makes everyone better; this is an undeniable truth, and you are not realizing your full potential if you remove yourself from the process.

I can think of a number of things Flickr can do to improve this new global competition. Its AI algorithm to find the most interesting new artists still makes many mistakes. Maybe I will save that for another article! But in many ways, Flickr is close to squandering an amazing opportunity to set the art world on fire.

3. Get Rid Of Your Toy Camera

Oh, look at that camera you have! It’s so tiny and slim and techno-looking. Look! It fits right in your pocket! Oh my, you can take it to parties and sporting events, and it’s so convenient. Oh, it is 10 megapixels, too? Oh my. Well, that is a good camera then!

No, it’s not. It’s a toy: give it to your kids or the nearest gradeschooler (for whom it was designed) and get serious. I know that 19-year-old punk at Best Buy told you that your compact camera is really neat and just what you need. But are you gonna listen to him or me?

Get yourself a DSLR (I have suggestions on my page that aren’t very expensive for people just starting out). For those of you who don’t know, a DSLR is one of those cameras you see the pros carrying, but it doesn’t have to be a giant one like what you see in the NFL endzone.

Sorry to be rude about the toy thing, but you want to take more beautiful pictures, no? Well, a decent DSLR has such a good sensor chip, combined with more flexible lenses, that your batting average will dramatically improve.

An ancient Hindu temple at sunset in the jungles of Indonesia.

Also (people with DSLRs already know this), it is important to have a good wide-angle lens for landscapes. Beautiful photography does not have to be of a landscape, but it commonly is, and this is what many people envision when they want to make their own beautiful photos. So, we should talk about wide-angle lenses here for a moment.

If you are used to using a toy camera, then you have never really seen the world through a good 10 to 24mm lens. It’s almost the difference between regular TV and HDTV. The vistas are wide and bold; the clouds, sun and mountains all fit; the river and bridge are easy to compose; and so on. Once you go wide-angle, your landscape will never be the same!

4. Carry A Tripod For Those Beautiful Sunsets And Sunrises

Oh, what’s that? You don’t want to carry a tripod? What are you, a 9-year-old? Now, come on. You’re a grown-up, and you want to take some seriously beautiful photos. Do you think pros carry around tripods because they like the extra weight? No, of course not. They know what the heck they’re doing.

If you bit off on getting a DSLR, then you are going to need a tripod, especially for sunset and night shots. Unless you have the steady hand of a T-1000, you are going to get some camera shake.

A tripod allows you to do the following things with landscape photography (in no particular order): set up and take your time to compose a photo with serious intent; keep noise low as the shutter stays open longer; look cool as you carry it around; keep the shutter open for 5 or more seconds for those fleeting sunrise and sunset shots; use it as a weapon in a tight spot while traveling (not kidding).

Dresden, Germany

So, are you still worried about carrying it around? The problem, you understand, is mostly your attitude. Let me provide a different perspective. Nothing in life is worth doing unless you’re serious about it. Believe that you are going to shoot that sunset, and you are going to take your nice DSLR and tripod out there and make it happen, and no one is going to stop you. You’re carrying that tripod around because you’re serious about it. Otherwise, you could just go sit on a pretty beach at sunset and drink beer with your friends and not be serious about it. Go ahead… but you won’t be getting any beautiful photography out of it.

5. Admire Impressionism

I spoke earlier about the Salon of Paris and what happened during the Impressionist movement. While the process and examples of what happens when artists start cooperating and competing is interesting from a social-group evolutionary perspective, this section is more about the art itself.

Early critics of the art form found it crude, sloppy and unconventional, to the point that they felt it didn’t even deserve to be placed alongside the classic masters. But the public was awestruck by the new art form. It doesn’t take a critic to know good art, but it does take a careful and discerning eye.

Consider the colors and styles of Degas, Cézanne, Monet and Renoir. There is not a single detail about any well-known Impressionist painting that is the slightest bit “realistic.” But yet, the rough shapes and colors still make sense. Something about it just feels right. What is that something?

An icy lake at sunrise, fed from the seasonal melt at Glacier National Park; a panorama of 90 shots.

To me, what feels right about Impressionism is what we discussed above. These Impressionist images go deep into viewers’ brains and evoke memories of shared scenes and events. The memory is in fact an Impressionist playground of fleeting colors, shapes and edges. A face here, a blur there, a hint of something almost there, but not quite.

Look at Monet’s work. Think about how the yellows of a sun in the distance is the same yellow as an up-close flower. But something about the colors makes the sun feel brighter than the flower. How does he do that? Can you get closer to achieving this with your photography?

As you look at Impressionist paintings, juxtapose them with your own photography. If you want to evoke the same sort of feelings, then consider how it was done without resorting to realism.

6. Practice With HDR

What is HDR? It’s short for High Dynamic Range photography, and it’s all the rage. I have a tutorial on HDR on my blog. But here, I’ll explain HDR in a circuitous but meaningful way.

About 80% of my photos are in HDR, but I do something a little different. As you start looking into HDR (many of you already have), you will begin to notice how absolutely horrible most HDR looks. When many people begin experimenting with it (myself included), it is overdone and looks too psychedelic. Over time, mine have improved via rigorous self-examination and an evolving methodology.

Remember that bit about me growing up and seeing the world with one eye? Now, we come to the second part of this daring mini-biography as we are cross the stepping stones to my point. My background in college was Computer Science and Math, so I’ve always thought about things in terms of algorithms and software. The very first time I used a DSLR camera, when I was 35 or so, I very quickly came to the realization that something was missing.

A young Amish boy allows me to freeze time after I help him carry wood with his sisters.

That missing something was the “software” layer between the eye and the memory. Consider what you do with the barn and apply it to how the camera works. You survey the scene. Your eye jumps around from interesting object to interesting object, sometimes moving slowly, sometimes quickly. Your eye lets in more light in some areas, less in others as your pupil dilates. You squint into the setting sun and see warm colors splashed across the clouds, grass and barn. You remember other barns, other storms, other sunsets. You may have been with someone or were alone, but you certainly remember. You lock it all up in your mind’s eye forever.

Because we are visual creatures, a photo or painting can evoke great memories. But the only way to trigger some of those intense memories on a deep level is to adjust the light levels in the photograph, so that the light levels and color match those buried in your head. The HDR process can help achieve these goals.

7. Take Your Camera Everywhere

Don’t just take your camera out on those rare occasions when you actually decide to set aside a portion of your day for photography. Face it: we’re all busy people with real lives, and setting aside three to four hours for anything extracurricular is tough. But it takes only a few seconds to get inspired for a photo, and it’s no good if your camera is back home.

Gulfoss in Iceland. Catholic theologians of old believed this was the entrance to hell.

Keep it in the trunk of your car in a fun little photo backpack, with a small selection of lenses. You never know when you will see something wonderful. Use this opportunity to take at least one photo a day. It doesn’t have to be a grand landscape; just something small and nice that you may not have noticed before.

8. Understand The Fantasy/Reality Membrane

Do you have kids? Are you a kid at heart? Think about when you were a kid and what happened when you turned into a jaded old grown-up. Maybe by the end of this section you can ask yourself some new questions about reality.

Kids have this remarkable “membrane” between fantasy and reality. They can jump back and forth between the two in an effortless way. In fact, the membrane itself is wonderfully “thick,” in that there is a vast dream-state wilderness where the world is both fantasy and reality. When pressed, kids will tell you what is real and what is pretend, but that is often a painful process that pries them from the escapism they felt so viscerally just a few moments before.

My personal foray over the last year into learning how to draw.

When we are all grown up and serious, that membrane is razor thin, and there is little tolerance of “pretend” and “fantasy.” Why is this? Is it because we are surrounded by other serious people and want to conform? Is it because fantastic escapades are what “kids” do and thus not pertinent to our lives?

Obviously, we can all still get into that fantasy zone, and we all love it. That’s why movies are still such a potent force; they give us social permission to be like kids for two hours, once a week. It also explains the growing relevance of online games.

But when we start talking about photography — well now, that is a different subject! Photography is a serious art form, practiced by classically trained masters whose reality is quite serious indeed! There mustn’t be anything fantastical in the art form. The process goes from camera straight to the film, you see!

Poppycock.

9. Learn To Draw

This is a weird one, eh? Who on Earth has time to learn to draw? Well, you would have time if you stopped wasting it on less important activities. You’ve got one life here, so you might as well start applying yourself. “I don’t have any time! I have kids to look after, a full-time job, a bunch of cool games to play, books to read, exercising to do, a bit of photography, and blah blah blah.”

As a personal experiment, I wanted to see if anyone could learn to draw. This is similar to an earlier experiment I did on myself to see if I could take something I hated and turn it into something I enjoyed. That experiment was with coffee, but I was afraid that learning to draw would be harder, particularly because of the jitteryness introduced from the first experiment.

A tame wild-haired horse on the windy fjords of Iceland.

I’ve always admired people who can just grab a pencil and paper and make something amazing. Man, I’ve always wanted to be able to do that! I began the experiment with the hypothesis that great natural artists can draw anything without any instruction whatsoever. These are true masters, and I was unlikely unlikely to reach that level. However, I thought I could become adequate at drawing and be at least satisfied with myself. A great side-effect, I envisioned, would be new insight into photography: into line, shape, light and composition.

All of this turned out to be true. So, if you have hit a rough spot or are in the doldrums with photography, take up drawing. A few instructional books out there are practical hands-on guides that give you basic pointers. I think you will be quite impressed by how it starts to bleed into your photographic art!

10. Make Mistakes

Make a lot of mistakes. Throw yourself and your art out there and see what works and what doesn’t. Show your stuff to true friends who will give you frank feedback.

Don’t be like those sorry saps on American Idol who make fools of themselves in big auditions because they’ve spent their whole life listening to their tone-deaf mom tell them they are incredible at singing “Over the Rainbow” or because Aunt Mabel enjoyed it so much during the grade 2 play.

Get yourself online and begin making friends by finding other photographers who you respect. Beg and plead for them to come look at one or two of your photos and give frank feedback. They will cut you apart, but just take your medicine, lick your wounds, and go out there and improve.

Fin

And there we have it: 10 things to shake up your world a little bit. I’m no Baudelaire when it comes to writing these sorts of polemics. However, just as he drove Manet to be Manet, perhaps I can do my own little part to stoke the fires and help drive a new art revolution. Evolve and evoke, or whither into nothingness.

Extra Credit

To end off, here is a random selection of some of my other favorites.

The Lonely Trinity

An elderly woman, who has never cut her hair, ascends the stairs to her daily Hindu pilgrimage

Dante’s Gates of Hell, a sculpture by Rodin, captured in proper lighting

About the author

Trey Ratcliff describes himself as a slightly evolved monkey that happens to carry a camera. He’s become unintentionally popular from his photography blog, mostly because his mom emailed about 350,000 people to tell them about it. Trey can found there on his blog or followed on Twitter at @treyratcliff, where you’ll be the first to get news of his latest daily creations.

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Me encantó este artículo, buenísimo.

What if we ran kindergarten classes with the same rules as social media marketing?

• Children are encouraged to make at least one drawing or painting every day. Refrigerator art goes stale quickly and you want to stay top-of-mind with your parents.
• Rachel Davis, the most popular girl in class, writes an eBook explaining how other kids can get popular too. It’s well received from pre-K through third grade, but although it contains clear examples and actionable advice, somehow the unpopular kids still never get invited to the cool kids’ slumber parties.
• Little enterprising Genevieve Morrow puts Google ads on her fingerpaintings, but they don’t generate enough cash even to cover her candy necklace habit. She finally starts making real money when she converts her afternoon lemonade stand to resell Thesis WordPress themes to second graders looking to enhance their personal brand.
• Children are admonished that having a lot of friends is not as important as having a few genuine friends who will play with you even after you throw up all over the good blocks in front of the whole entire class. The children agree in principle but little Patrick still cries when he gets only three stickers in his Valentine’s Day booklet.
• Learning that making nice comments about people helps forge relationships, little Bobby Gray compliments every male member of the good kickball team. He is denied the coveted spot and earns the nickname “Bobby Bootlicker.”
• Teachers explain that “What I did on summer vacation” doesn’t grab attention. Better is something actionable (“Five ways to have fun on summer vacation”) or provocative (“Why waterparks are more dangerous than you think”) or something personally relatable (“What Dora the Explora won’t tell you about summer vacation”).
• After a stern lecture on the value of being honest and real, little Bobby Neuman courageously admits that during recess he pooed his pants and buried the evidence in the gravel under the blue slide. His bravery is not met with the loving acceptance the teacher had promised.

OK, class, what have we learned?

Leave a comment and join the fun!

By Jesus Diaz, 8:50 AM on Wed Sep 9 2009, 17,467 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

If there’s anything better than a home made Boba Fett costume, it has to be this Lego Boba Fett costume. This little kid will be one of the most popular and happiest kids next Halloween, as his face shows:

Boba Fett Lego Costume

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These photos were sent by his dad, Gizmodo reader Brad Methvin:

The scale came out perfect because minifigs are 40mm. My son is 40 inches. I originally made this for Halloween, but DragonCon was do-able so, I rushed to finish so my 3-yr old would be ready for the parade. I was actually finishing it on the MARTA (Atlanta Rapid Transit). When we arrived but he saw Darth Vader, all bets were off. He was not going near the parade or any Star Wars characters. I had to carry all the costume parts all over downtown Atlanta until we made it back home, where he asked me if he could put on his costume. (ahh being a parent)

His 8-year old brother, (who I SHOULD have begun with) will be getting a Jango costume on a larger scale for Halloween. I’ll send it when I get it done.

Yes, Brad is probably the coolest dad on his block. Probably the whole city, and half of the US too. This one beats the AT-AT couple costume—although not on dorkiness. [Thanks Brad]

Tsss…. yo quiero uno.