time

Art  /  Editorial  /  Photography
Another Time, Another Place
October 29, 2017

This isn’t at all what I had planned on posting today. We shot a series of photos back in August/early September that I had planned on releasing today but I am still not done with all the editing. This is a pretty time-intensive project and very little margin for error. Somethings are best not rushed so we’re waiting a week or two. Please accept my apologies for that.

I didn’t want to let another Sunday pass without posting something though, so I went back and picked up some images from the early days of digital photography. This was back in 2003-2005 when it was still a challenge to convince some people that digital photography was viable. A lot of people looked at me like I was crazy back then. Most magazines wouldn’t even look at digital submissions. The cameras produced images that were a whopping three and five megapixels deep and cropping was something one wanted to avoid at all cost.

Most of the pictures we took back then have been lost for various reasons and even among those I still have there are several I wouldn’t share publicly. The noise content was much too high. Low-light sensitivity was practically non-existent.  Managing contrast was difficult. We tried a lot of different “tricks” and the majority of them didn’t work well.

Still, there are a few from back then that I don’t mind sharing. I actually have a couple hanging on my living room wall.  Learning to shoot digitally wasn’t completely like starting all over but there was a serious learning curve and the quality of the pictures is a testament to that.

The announcement this past week that Sony is releasing its new a7RIII in November has me drooling at the advanced features and very anxious to get my hands one (If anyone at Sony is watching, I’ll happily take a demo). When I do, though, there’s going to be another learning curve. Bruce Dorn was right, video is where the future of photography lies and as much as I’ve balked at it the time has probably come to jump in and start learning. That means there’s going to be another round of images that, ten years from now, make me shudder a bit. Everything is cyclical.

For today, here’s a selection of older images. If you’ve been around a while you might have seen some of them. As always, click on a thumbnail to view the full-size gallery. Enjoy.

[tg_masonry_gallery gallery_id=”11598″ layout=”contain” columns=”4″]

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Current Issues  /  News & Comment
Time To Change
March 11, 2017
charles i. letbetter - time to change

Daylight Saving Time renews an old debate

 

charles i. letbetter - time to change

The Short Version

You’re going to lose an hour of sleep tonight, no matter when you go to bed. That semi-annual ritual known as Daylight Saving Time rears its ugly head again tonight, stealing an hour from us in the middle of the night, waking us before we’re ready in the morning. For those who still have manual watches and clocks, as I do, it means re-setting everything before you go to bed. Failure to comply means you’re late for everything on Sunday. Resistance is pointless.

Messing With Time

[dropcap]I moved to Indiana in April, 2005, a year before this state began observing Daylight Saving Time. The experience was rather surreal because where Indiana sits on the globe makes it extremely susceptible to messing around with time. For most of the summer, I had workable light by 6:00 AM. I could schedule a shoot call time for 4:30, be ready to start shooting as the sun came up, getting in that wonderful morning light, and be completely done before most people even arrived at work. On one hand, it was glorious. I loved getting photos in the can so early. At the same time, though, it made the days feel impossibly long. There was still sunlight at 9:00 PM despite the fact that the state was still on standard time. Summer days in Indiana last forever whether one messes with the time or not.[/dropcap]

Twice a year we enter into this all-too-brief an argument as to whether this exercise in time manipulation is necessary. Everyone in North America, Iceland, and Western Europe participates in this time warp. Governments say it saves energy, but those claims are dubious at best. The actual percentage of savings is like 0.03% and is offset by the fact we do more running around and keep air conditioning running longer.  Roughly 44% of Americans are in favor of it, but 40% are against it and 15% don’t care. Sounds like how we’re split on just about every other issue on the planet, doesn’t it?

What amazes me, though, is that we spend all this time and energy worrying about something that doesn’t actually exist. Time is a totally human construct that, while based on naturally occurring events, is itself quite unnatural. Hours, minutes, days, weeks, months, and years all exist only for humans. Animals, especially those in the wild, have no concept of time. Fish don’t feel years go past. Lions note changes in seasonal migration patterns and adjust their hunting accordingly, but you don’t see them carrying around day planners scheduling when the next herd of Impala are expected to run through their territory. Time is make believe. Time is a socially-induced alternative reality designed to keep us in line with authoritarian mandates of when we should or should not participate in certain activities. Ignoring time is anti-social and socially disruptive.

Consider, for example, what would happen if you showed up at the front door of your favorite restaurant shortly after sunrise and demanded to see their dinner menu. Unless you prefer the greasy-spoon setting of a 24-hour diner, one is not likely to be greeted with warm enthusiasm. They are going to tell you that you are too early. The restaurant is not open because no one eats dinner at sunrise.

Inversely, we all know the panic of rushing to our favorite fast food place to order a muffin before “breakfast hours” end. That dining establishments dictate when we can or cannot eat certain foods is rather absurd when one gives it any decent amount of thought. Yet, they do so in an effort to group all the biscuit and gravy eaters into a specific time-space for the sake of profit. We’re told it’s unprofessional to start drinking before 5:00 PM, when most people presumably finish work, but why should the millions of people who work mid-shifts be forced to wait when they get off work at 3:00 PM?

The more we mess with time, the more we mess it up. Yet, there have been moments in history when time was crucial to our development. The industrial revolution would not have happened had their not been clocks and watches and a set, uniform measure of how a day passes. Science needs the ability to measure and quantify what happens within a precise measure of time. Synchronization of things such as flight schedules and traffic lights could not happen if there were no uniform measure on which such events could be based.

Yet, the amount of control we give time is enslaving. Not only do we allow time to dictate when we eat and work, we allow it to dictate our most primal instincts. When we sleep, and how long, is measured by an artificial time. When and how frequently we procreate is dictated by the settings on a mechanical device. Adjust that artificial measurement, as we are about to do, and one messes up our entire perception of reality.

Don’t believe me? What do you think causes jet lag? As we travel across continents, our perception of time is altered and we arrive with the physical sense of what we should be doing out of alignment with the rest of society is doing. I have problems every time I visit California because there is never a coffee shop open when I’m ready for coffee.  The same thing happens on a slightly different scale when we invoke Daylight Saving Time. We confuse our bodies (and our pets) by arbitrarily saying, “no, it’s not that time anymore, now it’s this time and you just have to adjust.”

Even as I’m writing this, I realize that I abuse time as well. When I tell the family, “We’re leaving for the store in five minutes,” I fully expect everyone to have their shoes and coats on and be heading toward the car within that five minutes or I’m likely to get very upset. Just this past week, we had a day completely upended by continual interruptions after we had already set a schedule of events. By the end of the day, nothing on our original schedule had happened and we both felt tired and frustrated because other people had messed with our sense of time.

I cannot help but wonder to what degree we might all be better off if we relaxed a bit of our grip on time. Our society is less reliant on strict work schedules now, so why shouldn’t one be allowed to follow their natural body rhythms and work on a project at times when they are likely to be their most productive? We have means of communication that allow us to have conversations separated by hours and miles, why are we not using those more effectively? Perhaps most importantly, why do we limit eating certain foods to specific times of day? Is a burger any more healthy for you at 9:00 AM than it is at 1:00 PM? On mornings when I’m up and working by 4:00 AM, should I not be able to have lunch four hours later at 8:00 PM and dinner by 2:00 PM? Why should I, or anyone else, be forced to adjust to someone else’s artificial concept of time?

I know the theory of less time management and fewer time constraints would lead to more productive and healthy lives. Yet, just like our semi-annual debates over Daylight Saving Time, we ultimately just go with the flow, accepting the change forced upon us.

And so we are slaves to something that we just made up. Incredible, isn’t it?

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PotD  /  Social Commentary
Time Ticks Too Loudly
February 21, 2016
charles i. letbetter - time ticks far too loudly

A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.—W. H. Davies

 

charles i. letbetter - time ticks too loudly

Time is a measure we use to punish ourselves with the reminder that we can never have enough of it

I have a new wrist watch. I’ve not worn one in well over ten years. In fact, I can’t honestly say I remember the last time I wore a wrist watch; the batteries tend to not last too long and I rarely have time to stop by a jeweler to have the battery replaced. Watch bands also seem to be problematic for me. But, this watch was only a dollar, a promotional item actually, so how could I refuse something that cost less than a cup of bad coffee?

Most watches today are smooth, digitally driven timepieces, but this one is old-fashioned gears and springs with a contemporary face. I don’t expect it to last too long. Mostly, I forget it’s on my wrist until the face gets caught on my shirt sleeve. The watch is about as simple a timepiece as one might find.

But early this morning, in the darkness before my alarm went off reminding me there was a fashion show which would ultimately end up being disappointing, I noticed something about my watch which may ultimately be disturbing: it ticks loudly. Tick. Tick. Tick. No tock, mind you, because the tock response to the tick only occurs in devices driven by a pendulum; it is the return of the pendulum that creates the sound. Spring-wound watches just tick, tick, tick, and in the middle of the night this watch was annoyingly loud.

My mind immediately thinks of that chorus from the Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like An Eagle:

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future

Over and over and over that phrase repeats with all the annoyance of the ticking on my watch. Time. Ticking. Slipping. What am I doing in bed? Why do we have to sleep? I should be up, awake, living.

We were in the car yesterday with the TED Radio Hour playing on NPR, half-listening, half-daydreaming as Keith Chen talked about how our language affects our ability to save money.  Specifically, people whose language does not contain the future tense tend to save better than those who do use the future tense. That part is interesting enough, but toward the end of the talk Chen says that not only does the absence of future tense correlate to higher savings, but better health, better eating habits, less likely to smoke, and more likely to practice safe sex. All of this hinging on how our language leads us to understand the future, and in a broader sense, time itself. Extrapolating those findings out to the extreme, we might conclude that how we understand time, the perspective our language gives us on time, may lead us to behaviors that affect just how much time we have. Future tense kills.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Loudly. Far too loudly.

In the quiet of the night, every sound is exaggerated, of course, and so is our reasoning. Acting on thoughts one has at 1:00 in the morning is rarely a good move. A cup of coffee, perhaps some bacon and eggs, a moment to give those thoughts a second examination, might prevent one from doing something they would later regret. The ticking of my watch doesn’t change volume levels between 1:00 AM and 7:00 AM, but my perception of that ticking, and my perspective of time, does change. I’m less disturbed by either once I’m up and active and waiting for the next fashion show. I worry less about running out of time in my life, and more about being on time for the next runway.

Still, I wish I had more time; more time when my brain is active and not feeling sluggish from the morning’s work. Getting up so early often means that by the time my schedule opens up around 1:00 PM, either my brain or my body is exhausted. I want to keep going, to edit more, to write a couple more articles, or perhaps read a bit, but rarely is there enough energy for that to happen and I end up feeling that I’ve wasted time napping. Just imagine what I could have gotten done had I stayed awake!

With each birthday, time ticks a bit louder, reminding me that I have less of it now than I did 12 months ago, and raising the question of how I will use the time I have left. We’ve all heard the platitude about living each day as if it were your last. That doesn’t work, though. What we do today affects tomorrow, and for the greater majority of us there will be a tomorrow. We can’t live as if there are no consequences for our actions. The fact that we might die tomorrow does not excuse our lack of responsibility today.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Time for me to wrap this up. Another fashion show starts soon. If you’ve not been reading the reviews on Pattern, I’m disappointed in you. Those take a lot of my time, and I only have so much of that to give.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Louder and louder.

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Photography  /  PotD
Too Early For Intelligent Thought
February 20, 2016
charles i. letbetter, too early for intelligent thought

The early bird gets the worm. The early worm… gets eaten.—Norman Ralph Augustine

 

charles i. letbetter - too early for intelligent thought

Technology has improved a lot since this picture was taken. Early mornings, however, are still the same

 

Even by London standards, I am up way too early. You see, it’s not enough that we cover all the important fashion shows, I still have to keep up with my standard shooting schedule and this morning that includes doing some long exposure photography downtown. In order to pull off the look required, we need to be standing in the middle of the street by 5:00 AM. In order to be standing in the middle of the street by 5, I had to wake everyone up at 2. Being able to make coffee with my eyes still half shut is a very good thing.

Getting up early isn’t all that difficult for me on most mornings. I rather like London time, sort of. Our British friends tend to get things started around 9:00, which equates to 4:00 in Indianapolis. So, that’s typically the time I’m up and running. But we’re even beating that schedule today. As I type, Kat is doing hair and makeup on a lovely young model who is trying her best to be awake. My composition time is slow as I type a few words then have to reach for more coffee. More coffee. Always, more coffee.

Of course, you won’t be reading this until much later, will you? No, you have better sense than to be getting up this early. You’re almost certainly still lying in bed, totally oblivious to the fact that in order for your world to be ready for you at whatever time you decide to put your feet on the floor, someone else had to get up before you and prepare that Starbucks that you grab every morning, or the muffin that you eat while driving to work. You’re smart, letting someone else do the work like that.

I think of those poor chaps at the BBC who have to prepare the morning report, or the writers for Business Insider who have to not only write, but do research to be able to concatenate the most important news into a list of things I need to know before I start shooting off my big mouth. Of course, this is a Saturday, so there are no such lists. Not quite as many people are up at this unholy hour, which is why it is the perfect time for us to be taking pictures in the middle of the street.

The biggest danger in getting up so damned early is that the brain hasn’t had enough rest and recuperation time. I’m running on all of two hours sleep today. Yesterday, I splurged and had three hours. Some days I’m lucky and get a nap during the afternoon, but that won’t likely happen today as, being Saturday, there are children at home. All day. They don’t stop unless you’re throwing food at them, and even then it seems as though they just barely slow down. How can I be expected to exercise the level of intelligence of which I am capable if my brain is still half asleep?

Speaking of children, they seem to do early better than anyone. They hit the floor running the moment their little eyes pop open, especially on Saturdays when we would dearly like them to sleep a little later than 5:30. I’m convinced that they are able to get up so quickly and easily because their little brains are not yet full of enough information slowing their boot up every morning. They don’t care too much about the Chinese stock exchange, couldn’t care less what the price of oil is, and neither of the slackers are planning on voting, given they’re only 5 and 7. They care a little about the weather since that determines whether they can play outside. They care about what’s for breakfast and whether they can stream some mind-numbing drivel via Netflix. Their little brains boot up in .002 seconds because their operating system isn’t yet weighted down with garbage.

I remember my own father getting up this early, much to my mother’s frustration. He always said he enjoyed the peace and quiet and I can certainly appreciate that. The difference between he and I is that I can get up without disturbing anyone else in the house. Poppa had some difficulty with that quiet thing. Mother accused him of being too much like a bull in a china shop. By the time he finished making coffee, the rest of us had at least stirred.

If we are all very lucky, and it will take no small amount of good fortune, I will be able to share the results of today’s adventures with you. I expect you to feign appreciation if we do. After all, we’ve gone to all the trouble of getting up way too damn early in the morning; too early to be doing hair & makeup, too early to be having intelligent conversation, and too early to be taking pictures.

But here we are, the early birds. Those worms better be tasty.

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