Perhaps...
...my favourite ever picture of Stripes. It's not easy to photograph a cat, let alone when they are sleeping. They're too aware, alert, too suspicious (as if they feel that the camera is out to capture their craven little souls). The trust and biddability that I take for granted with the dogs is glaringly absent with felines. So this moment of vulnerability is all the more precious for all that.
Le temps des pommiers
Apple blossom, in abundance, all around the area.
(apologies for the alliteration)
La vie en rose
Thank you to Beth and John for responding to yesterday's post with your own reflections and reactions. Dialogue is always good, because it opens the mind to other perspectives and insights. Social media can be a dangerously closed echo chamber, and we're getting more and more of our news and information from this platform, rife with sources that may be biased, specious or aligned uniquely with our own beliefs. In so doing, consciously or not, we see the world through a filter, like the rose one on these blossoms...
Manchester
Today's images focus on what's simple and good, because the world we're in can often seem just the opposite of both those things.
Manchester is the city from whence I left, more than four decades ago, when my family immigrated to Canada.
Fast forward to 2017, and immigration is a tainted word, connoting more fear and hatred than it does hope and promise.
I've read this hate today, in the comments sections of various media, and in the words of friends and even relatives.
Why is it that white, Christian people get away with overtly hating Muslims, while at the same time being among the first to blanket all Muslims - or any others whose skin colour or religion or race is different - with the egregious stereotypes of fomenters of hate and violence, of criminality, of brutality, of inferiority and contemptibility, by virtue of their of Otherness?
Hate is hate. It doesn't matter what your genetic, ethnic or religious fabric is made of. Your moral outrage against the many is not justified by the actions of the few. Last week, a White man ran down dozens of pedestrians in Times Square, with fatalities. Where was the moral outrage then, as soon as it was determined that he wasn't a Muslim terrorist. Look back in history - all cultures, races and creeds are guilty of atrocities. This includes you, the so-called civilized Western world. Like it or not, we're all humans; we all bleed red, and we're no better or no worse than the next person, even if we convince ourselves otherwise. The world doesn't owe you any more than it owes anybody else.
Most of us are immigrants; indeed, we don't have far to look up the family tree to find someone who made a bold, brave move into the unknown, leaving behind everything that was familiar, to make a new start. My dad did that for my family. Does that make me any more Canadian than a Syrian or a Haitian or a Tunisian who followed a similar path?
This whole nativism trend is a travesty of thinly-veiled contempt wrapped up in abject hypocrisy.
You're entitled to your hate. But it's yours, not mine, and it will come back at you tenfold.
J'accuse.
Je refuse.
Je me désabuse.
Old photos from a new camera
A couple of years ago I bought a sweet, funky Nikon Df camera body, then (as is my wont) applied the logic that it was too nice to use. I basically put it away for a couple of years and yes, more or less forgot about it.
I've been doing a lot of cleaning and organizing, and when I was going through my camera equipment I came upon the Df and realized that it was meant to take photos, not fade away in a camera bag.
When I uploaded this week's worth of images, I also discovered a bunch that I'd taken when the camera first arrived, and I'd put it through its paces. These images appear to be from two summers ago; Arwen was still quite a lanky little baby at the time, and she had her foreleg shaved from either her spay surgery or the infamous ate-my-underwear adventure. It was a sweet trip down memory lane, and the photos were too nice not to share.
The Df will now become a primary member of the equipment arsenal. I'm liking how it handles and what it produces (the light board pictures from yesterday's post were done with the Df and a macro lens). I just wish Adobe didn't make it so darn difficult to edit RAW files...
