As you depart,
remember to look toward the storms of life,
not in fear, but in knowledge.
If they have just passed,
look with eager anticipation
toward the new life God brings
in your world.
If they approach,
prepare yourself
building on the firm foundation
of Jesus Christ
your Savior and Lord.
And if the rain pours down
with no end in sight,
take comfort in the promise of a faithful God -
that those who rest on Him
remain firm.
In my ongoing quest to find things to take pictures of in order to try out lightroom, I thought I’d snap one while I was out at Riverside today preping for our annual fire inspection at our lab.
Yes, it really looks like this.
Went out today to get some shots and test out the new Lightroom. Here are a few of the results.
For those of you who don’t know (or haven’t heard), the new version of Adobe Lightroom came out Sunday. My copy is still in the mail, but I’ve been playing around with the trial until my serial number arrives. All in all I’m really enjoying it, and the final additions from Beta 4 to 1.0 are, in my opinion, the two features I felt lacking in the earlier versions.
First, Lightroom now includes snapshots, where you can maintain multiple versions of your raw files as you work. The upshot of this is that you no longer have to deal with multiple xmp files for different versions of your files. Instead, you can maintain and adjust multiple versions - say one in color, another in black and white, and a third with a higher contrast setting. The second useful feature is a dust removal tool. What this basically means is that you really never have to send your images to Photoshop - Lightroom can basically serve as your one stop processing shop for RAW files of all types.
I think I’m going to like it.
I played around a bit with using the SB-800’s for macro stuff. The Carlsberg bottle was all I could find on short notice.
I’m not sure what terrifies me.
Most of us worry about all sorts of things, I think. We look to the future with uncertainty, never really knowing what it holds, and often trying to hedge our bets as much as we can. One side of God we don’t often like to talk about is his terrifying nature - the God who Isaiah and so many others saw with fear and trembling. In our society, God is either a harmless looking man from a painting or flannel board, or a nasty little inconvenience to doing what we want. I think that in many ways, there are very few of us who take God really seriously.
Our idols, on the other hand, are extremely important to us. We don’t really see them as idols, of course. Even when we mention them as such, it’s often just a passing comment - something we do because we need to draw some connection between idolatry and modern life. As I think about life and reflect on this passage, God’s question comes back - Do they terrify you?
When I think of the things I worry the about, the things I lose sleep over the most, the things that occupy my thoughts… are they not my idols, all comfortably in place to give my life value and worth and, dare I say it, save me? My money, my success, my friends, my family, my good deeds, my reputation - am I afraid of losing them? A puff of wind can knock them down.
Why do these things have such a hold on our lives? Why do we allow it?
May we trust in you, God.
May we trust in you.
Are you a sheep?
Alone?
Defenseless?
Lost and wandering away from the tender care of the shepherd?
He is not content to let you remain outside the flock. Over rough and steep roads, he seeks to bring you home.
Are you a coin?
Forgotten and lost among the backdrop of the world,
counted as worthless by all but your master?
He is not content that you remain unused. He searches diligently among all his creation, knowing your value and worth, redeeming you for a purpose and cause.
Are you a child,
estranged from your father?
Have you turned your back
on one who loved you
and cared for you,
providing all you need?
He is not content that you remain in need in a foreign land. He waits for your return, looking daily to embrace you again.
He is God.
Your shepherd,
your owner,
your Father.
He passionately
and recklessly
desires one thing:
you.
in case any of you wanted to see the clip i referred to, here it is in all its glory…
edit - the videos are being taken down due to the BBC enforcing copyright claims… but, if you happened to, say… go to youtube and search for “top gear redneck”, then you would probably find a link to a video there, if this one isn’t working…
Watching last night’s episode of Top Gear was a rather interesting experience. For those of you who’ve never watched Top Gear, it’s a British Car show which is currently watched by about 350 million viewers worldwide - over twice as many people as watch the Super Bowl - each week. The three hosts test cars, engage in silly challenges, and do crazy things in general.
Last night they flew to America to do one of their cheap car challenges. In the past they’ve bought Porsches for £1500, cars for less than £100, and even mid-engined Italian supercars for less than £10,000. Generally they end up buying cars that are old, break down, and are junky in general. This time, of course, was no exception. They were given $1000 to buy a car and then drive it from Miami to New Orleans, with a series of challenges along the way.
In general, the whole adventure was very funny, and a pleasure to watch. There were two parts, however, that made me cringe. The first occurred in Alabama, where they pulled into a gas station and were nearly killed by local rednecks. Granted, they partially brought it upon themselves by driving through the state with slogans like “Hillary for President” painted on the side of their car. When they pulled in, they were promptly accosted by the owner, who called “the boys” to come and settle the situation. Rocks were thrown at the television crew, and the presenters and the production staff ran for their lives, chased by a gang of hooligans in pickup trucks. Of course, all of this is caught on film and shown for all the world to see. The gas station owner was, of course, classic. “What do you expect?”, she said, “You’re in a hick town.”
As if that made assault and battery ok.
The irony, of course, is that this occurred in the South - what is considered (as was pointed out) the bastion of Christianity and conservatism in the United States. One of the things the presenters were jokingly poking fun at was the intolerance that is often associated with those two particular ideologies, and unfortunately it was proven in an all too dramatic fashion.
But as I watched, I thought two things - first, what does it say about the subculture in the “red states” that drives the perception of many people to assume that intolerant and bigoted attitudes are the norm? Many people will say, “Well, but it’s not really like that…”, and in many places I’m sure that’s true, but the evidence captured by the BBC was fairly convincing, and I don’t think they picked that gas station simply because they thought it would cause a stir. Intolerance is not unique to America, nor is it unique to the South, but there exists a (I think accurate) perception that many people in the South are far less tolerant of others than in other regions.
Second, it struck me as sad that this occurred in what claims to be the most Christian part of the nation, and the part of the nation with a mandate on moral values. I don’t know if the impromptu lynch squad was full of pew-filling Christians, but there’s a part of me that wouldn’t be too surprised to find out they were. Can we really justify intolerance to people who believe differently than we do to the extent that we threaten them with physical violence? We often try to distance ourselves from events like the Spanish Inquisitions and the Crusades, saying those were “back then”, but unfortunately I think there isn’t that much that separates us from the people we try to eschew.
The final segment of the show ended with them driving through New Orleans. They’d planned on selling their cars when they got there, but instead were confronted with a scene of massive damage and destruction, even one year out. In the words of James May and Jeremy Clarkson:
Clarkson: This is extraordinary… every house… I’ve been driving now for fifteen miles - there isn’t a pavement, there isn’t a building, there isn’t anything that isn’t smashed. It’s such a vast scale of destruction.
A year had passed since Katrina had blown through, and we had sort of assumed that after twelve months, the wealthiest nation on earth would have fixed it, but we were wrong.
How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing this is here?
I was reminded of the quickness with which we forget. How can the rest of America sleep? Because in a very real sense, we don’t know that it’s there. We don’t know it’s there just like we didn’t know about the tragic levels of homelessness and poverty and hopelessness that existed in New Orleans before Katrina hit. We are a nation that ignores what we don’t want to see because it helps us sleep better at night.
There are times when I’m proud to be an American, and there are times when I wish America were more worthy of being proud. Tonight was one of the second. I wish my country’s ideals were not only words on paper, but were modeled daily by her citizens, rich, poor, black, white, red, blue, Christian, atheist. There is so much here that is good, and no place I would rather live, but tonight I was painfully reminded that we have so far to go before America is a place everyone can be proud of.
So I have been known at various times in the past on multiple occasions to disparage Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (CLS) as a feature that was nice, but really not terribly necessary for the average photographer. After using the old SB-28 and then my Novatron strobes, I didn’t see how any shoe-mount flash system would be able to give great results consistently, unless paired with PocketWizards and used in manual mode. After looking at a couple of demo videos and seeing some test shots, Lisa and I decided to order a couple of SB-800’s and Gary Fong Lightsphere II diffusers for our future wedding shoots.
They arrived today, and I have to say… even after 5 minutes of use, I’m fairly impressed. They haven’t failed to go off, and the results are fairly good, right out of the bag.
Possibly more to come later on…
Just as Christ gave up all for you,
may you sacrifice all you have for his sake.
May you embrace your identity as Christ’s treasure,
comforted in the knowledge that he desires your heart and soul.
And may you not only believe in your own value and worth,
but embrace the paradigm of Christ,
recognizing every person’s significance
as a created child of God.