If they can't find you handsome, at least they can find you Yendi.

Pakistan has sentenced Dr. Shakil Afridi to 33 years in prison for intelligence activities that helped locate Osama bin Laden. The US government is predictably up in arms about this, but my own feeling is that if it's out of line, it's out of line in being too short. Why? Dr. Afridi used a vaccination program as a cover for collecting DNA samples hoping to prove bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.

Bin Laden doesn't seem to have been very dangerous to anybody in his final days, but even at his most dangerous there were things that were much, much scarier. In 2003, some people in northern Nigeria got the idea that American vaccination teams were really there for some ulterior motive, and here's what happened:



In 2002, polio had been restricted to rural areas of Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. In 2012 it's spread across central Africa, as well as to Yemen and Indonesia, all because some Nigerians thought, almost certainly incorrectly, that Americans were using vaccination programs as cover for other activities. Now we find out that Americans are using vaccination programs for other activities, which is bound to set back global health programs all over the world. You can bet Pakistan won't be well-covered anytime soon. This can't happen.

If the US manages to slide their operative out from under the consequences here, they'll be killing thousands of innocent children. This needs to be a major scandal in this country, and we need to make sure that the CIA never uses global health as a shield for their own nonsense again. There are worse things than terrorism, and we can't forget that just because we've managed to kick most of them out of our country. And if we don't do damage control now, we won't be allowed to - we aren't magically immune from the return of polio, or other diseases, if immunization efforts in the rest of the world fail because of a lack of trust in the immunizers.

I've added fifteen-inch prints of most of my photos to my online store, including fifteen new photos from this month which are 33% off until the end of May.

I got 200 feet of paper rolls in the mail today, so it's time for you guys to make me work.

In another discussion, gunga_galunga asked: "So what do you generally do for processing? Do you use photoshop or lightroom or something else? And what kind of changes do you make?" I thought the processing of a portrait I took of alecaustin yesterday would be nicely illustrative of the simple version of my process, so I'm going to make a post of it. I use Lightroom for simple edits, which serves for the vast majority of my photos.

( long, many example photos )

Projects continue to come along, though slower than I would like. Learning how to work effectively is still the biggest thing going on here, but I'm making progress.

Photographically the first two weeks of May have been my most productive year since 2008. You haven't seen a lot of those photos because I'm saving them for a sale next week, but it's going to be fun.

I'm starting to think about what songs I need to have in shape for Fourth Street, so if anybody has anything they specifically want, this would be a good time to say so.

I'm putting some design and architecture thoughts at Nefarious Designs, and a side effect is that there will be teasers of future projects there. This one is intended to be irregular, so hopefully not posting there won't stress me out like neglecting Trochaic Footbridge has been. I need to get back to that Right Soon Now, and get ahead.

The previous post seems to have accomplished something - looks like 2+2 is going to be adding a photography forum. It's magic.

The Minnesota Zoo will be closing their dolphin exhibit and sending the two remaining dolphins to other zoos. Not before time, I think; something bad has clearly been going on here to lose so many so fast, and without being able to identify it, they can't fix it. As much as having them here has been good for zoo attendees, I'm glad they're doing the right thing for the dolphins.

Cultural milestone this week - a local sports star announced a same-sex engagement... and nobody cared. As far as I can tell there's been no media notice at all.

I'll leave you with last week's LOL WUT moment:

Been a long time since I tilt-posted on 2+2, thought I'd copy it here.

I don't think I sufficiently appreciated the well-developed form and rules of strategy critiques when I was here regularly. I've been looking for a photo critique group, and they're downright awful. Not only are the vast majority of photographers completely uninterested in talking about photographs, but the ones who are are some of the worst critiquers I've ever seen. They're vague, personifying, parochial, stagnant, egotistical, and more condescending than TheHip41. Not to mention clueless - I actually had two people today tell me that I should go back and retake a photo of an active construction site.

If 2+2 were a photo forum, 75% of the traffic would be in Software and Computer Technical Help, and 24.9% would be NVG. There would be a pittance left over for the strategy forums, but every thread would be required to have six guys talking amongst themselves about how great poker was before the internet, five guys demanding results before they'll say anything, four guys who think you're playing Omaha, three guys who think it's impossible to make money playing poker, two guys telling you to have AK next time, and one guy who tells you what he would do if it was against the players at his table, but only on the flop, because he doesn't understand that anything is happening on later streets.

So first I want to recognize that the amount of actual constructive strategy discussion here is exceptional, even if it sometimes seems to be drowned in the other stuff. And second I want to say that 2+2 needs to add a photography forum, not for 2+2's benefit so much as for the world's. There are skills here that are absent out there.

Thank you for letting me vent.

The photo referenced:

If you're a fan of both ursulav and Fourth Street, it may be useful to go and agree with me here.

(And if you've neglected to be aware of ursulav, you've got a lot of cool stuff ahead of you.)

One of my curling teams is reshuffling its roster, and as such I can offer somebody out there the opportunity to take a spot for the last four games of the year without spending any money on it. Dates are 5/13, 5/20, 6/10, and 6/17, all at 5:00 pm in Burnsville. The team is 1-4 at this point, so coming in as a brand new player would be entirely appropriate.

I won't be there tomorrow - it's Rob's birthday - but will be for the last three.

I'm not sure how I feel about it as a photo, though. I'd be interested in hearing opinions. Photo from a late March walk with Clan Hopkins in MVNWR.



(Alternately, post if you find the hidden mallard.)

The human eye can see a lot better than a camera, so when photographing scenes with large disparities in light levels, we often have to resort to postprocessing tricks to make things work. Mostly this is an issue when trying to shoot interiors accurately while not wildly overexposing the natural light coming through windows, but I don't happen to have any interior examples ready to hand, whereas I do have several exteriors with this problem from this week. Examples are Adobe-focused because that's what I use, but I expect most programs have similar tools at this point.

( Long, many illustrations. )