/
/
Three Circles.
How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains /
"When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full."
How the Food Makers Captured Our BrainsBy TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: June 23, 2009
A recipe for indulging: salt, sugar and fat, mixed many ways. But we can fight it.
/
Sam at a cold, windy, shaded belay on West Crack, Daff Dome, Tuolumne, CA.
/
Sam on pitch 3 of Nutcracker in Yosemite.
/
Got a quick trip to Tuolumne and Yosemite, CA in over a long-ish weekend with my friend Sam. Got humbled on a super-classic climb, Nutcracker, but had a great time on West Crack on Daff Dome. It was interesting hauling the 5d around on the climbs, but worth it. Also got to randomly meet up with some friends in Yosemite.
/
Tuolumne highcountry.
What's new? Lemme tell you... /
Canon 5d, 38mm@f/4, 1/80s, ISO800, bounced ETTL flash.
Polly is recovering well which means she’s making good progress and has times of feeling good and times of feeling uncomfortable. Its amazing how much you can’t do if you’re can’t flex or lift one of your legs. I’m really happy to see her smiling in this picture. Unfortunately, its been unbelievably busy at work this past week and I haven’t been able to help as much I would have liked. So, its been a huge blessing to have Polly’s mom around to help give care and with the house.
I was able to get a flash this week and am looking forward to learning a new aspect of photography. I don’t think I’ll get a second flash or anything fancy any time soon, but it’ll be fun to learn with for now. The picture of Polly above was shot with it and that really made the shot possible (even at f/1.8 and ISO3200 it was too dim to take a picture).
I also picked up a Lexar FireWire800 CF card reader that makes bringing in RAW files so much easier and faster. Also a bonus it daisy-chains right into the external hard-drive as well. It really is too bad that Firewire didn’t take off more on PCs. Works great on my Mac.
Search Me: A photoessay of an internet search database /
Search Me
Simon Norfolk for The New York Times
Published: 20090614 A look at the architecture of search: the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery that lie behind your Internet queries.
Climbing with Polly /
Got out for an afternoon to climb with Polly on Thursday and had a great time. It’ll be a few months before she’s out climbing again, but the fun will return! Highlight of the afternoon was climbing Beckey’s Wall, 5.7 as a single pitch and taking the time to just sit and watch the afternoon go by.
Polly trying to see if the clouds were going to bring rain.
Me working on taking portraits at 35mm.
/
“What makes the good picture stand out from the average? Here is one answer: A good picture makes us curious and makes us want to know more.”
/
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. ”
Technical Creativitiy. /
In addition to the technical aspects of photography that are interesting to my engineering side, I have really enjoyed learning to draw out the the creative half of my brain. Learning how to “see” and find interesting ways to frame or expose an image helps with the technical aspects of being a design engineer as well. Finding a way to approach a large scale project as well as the fine-grain engineering details and all its included paperwork with a fresh mind each day feels similar to learning to “see”. The quote below was taken from a photography blog, but it has impactions beyond just using a camera:
/
/
“Creativity is something you can actively work at, and the more closely you know your own process, the more reliably the muse appears. Having said that, I think we all know that some days just do not go the way we want, and sometimes that’s chalked-up to being uninspired, or bored, or lazy. Probably the latter two.
I really believe that the more you understand what inspires you, the more readily you can put yourself in her path.
Ask yourself how you feel, how you think, about this thing about which you are so uninspired. Find an opinion; find something in there that you ARE passionate about.
”
/
Part two of Sunday’s pictures up the canyon. The door to this pumphouse was open for a little bit. A friend took some really cool pictures that inspired my curiosity to try something similar. See Prachi’s The Bain Project for that work.
THE COST CONUNDRUM, what a Texas town can teach us about health care. By Atul Gawande /
This is a long read, but very, very insightful. Patients are looked at as profit by more places and people that would make most of us comfortable.
/
First in a series of images from this past Sunday. This image captures the feel of the morning better than the rest that I took. I like that the meltwater in the lower right can be seen but everything in the top 1/5th of the frame is hidden in cloud.
Took the morning to drive up Little Cottonwood Canyon and see what there was to shoot, and didn’t get all that I wanted due to a downpour (and not wanting to soak my camera).
/
“…the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”