Game over

Well, the baseball season is over now. We (The Amarillo Dillas) didn't make the playoffs, but I can't remember enjoying a job more than this part time summer job. The folks I worked with were a genuine blast to be around. I really hope we can do it again next year.

Great Moments in Sports

To appreciate this story, you have to know a little about the baseball field here in Amarillo. The pressbox is perched atop the grandstand, something like thirty or forty feet above the lower seats.

We have been amusing ourselves in the pressbox at the Dilla baseball games, as the games go slowly at times, by dropping various objects onto the fans. Nothing dangerous, it is mostly scraps or wads of paper. Once a spider, and once a pen (by accident.) The target is anyone's beer cup, preferrably full; secondary targets are any contact with a person, or at least having the object noticed, usually generating a look up. Last night I had a hit, as referenced here.

Tonight we were thoroughly bored, due to a very late start - like 8:40pm, as opposed to the normal 7:05pm. I have had a bit of a stomach problem lately, and have been carrying rolaids for the last few days. One of the mascots for the team took a rolaid I offered and scored a careful direct hit into a half full cup of beer. We could even hear the thonk/splash.

Photojournalism and Photoshop

If you haven't heard, Reuters is burning down over some agenda-driven journalism and a little ham-fisted photoshop work.

I was in journalism in high school, and I sometimes work as a semiprofessional photographer now. Not in journalism; I shoot some sports and event photography. I use photoshop quite a bit, generally for getting a picture 'just right' or to correct something I missed when I took the shot. (I am also a lazy photographer.)

To alter images this way is perfectly acceptable, in my mind. Some people don't think images in contests should be manipulated at all; I submit that even in conventional photography, there is a good deal that can be done to significantly change basic elements of a picture. Cropping comes to mind. For that matter, photography as the final judge in what happened isn't really that decisive a tool. The photographer can decide what is seen, without ever changing anything after the fact. Digital has just made it easier, and faster.

Journalism is very different, based on the intentions of the person who changes the image. I do not have a problem changing light levels or color balance or cleaning up dust or scratches. But when you add or remove things in an image that change the story told, you are shaping the news to your belief. Just as reporters can lie about quotes and events, you can make an image lie, too. The mainstream media, while perhaps destined to not be as mainstream as time goes on, is doing that now. I believe editorialism has been in broadcast media for decades; and if you don't think the media is slanted, I am not going to waste my breath trying to convince you.

The emergence of the new media, specifically blogs, has a chance at waking up the old media; when the major news outlets put up something that is not completely factual, the blogs will call BS pretty quick. Little Green Footballs, among others, caught this episode. LGF also proved without a doubt the Dan Rather memos were amateurish creations, typed up by some political hack with default Microsoft Word settings. Other blogs have shown other photos from the current war in Lebanon are staged. There is now an army of bloggers looking at every photograph out of the area now, and you can bet that when something that does not fit the known facts is found, blogs will point it out.

A project for all you bloggers

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, and a blogger has come up with what I think is a neat idea to mark this particular milestone.

Over at 2,926 you can get all the details, but to sum it up, each blogger that signs up is assigned a name of one of the people who were murdered on 9/11. Next month, on September 11th, you put up a post honoring that person. Simple enough, except that the date is only a month away, and they only have about half of the names assigned. So, you guys need to get over there, get a name, do a bit of googling and put up a post. We need to not forget what happened, and we need to not forget those people.

Fatherhoodism

I was at my wife's workplace for lunch today. Yesterday she finally told everyone we were expecting so I got all the handshakes and hugs. One of the ladies she works with mentioned to me that they were going to 'get me ready for fatherhoodism.'

I have been kicking around the idea of being someone's dad for a long time, but it hadn't really hit home until the last couple of weeks. Just now, with that remark, it seems... well, huge. Wow.

How do you prepare for something like this? I figure you can't. You just have to be. All your priorities change, protectionism kicks in, all of that kind of stuff. If you don't take it seriously, you end up producing a person no one likes. Get it right and not much else will matter.

Today makes eleven weeks.