Gun day at the photo shoot

I've been making steady progress in my studies of photography over the past 10 years. This year I finally bought an DSLR (a Canon D7), and it has been a joy to really learn how use the controls of a high-performance camera. My 14 year old daughter JuJu and I have been attending photography classes for the past year. Today we attended a model shoot at St. Louis Photo Authority in St. Louis, Missouri, where the owner, Ed Crim provided four models and excellent guidance. It was a lot of fun, as you can see from my work. Today the theme for the models was "guns," which made me a bit apprehensive, but we had a great time shooting models who all had access to guns as props. Here's a sample of the portraits I took. Nothing like having the right equipment and some good teachers. Click for higher res images. IMG_0170 Ed Crim II

IMG_0198 Ed Crim II

IMG_0337 Ed Crim II

IMG_0233 Ed Crim II

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The most astounding fact about the universe

Neil DeGrasse Tyson recounts the most astounding fact about the universe in this short video. How can anyone who listens to these words with an open mind not feel a sense of awe? And yes, this idea tracks the words of Carl Sagan, who pointed out that we are made of star-stuff: I plucked the Tyson video link off of a light-hearted look at the life of Tyson.

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The importance of grooming in human animals and the other primates.

Here are a few photos I took at the St. Louis Zoo over the past few weeks. All of these involve physical grooming by primates, three of them featuring two orangutans and one of them involving a larger group of chimpanzees. This is one of the ways these animals know who is their friend or foe. Orang Grooming Orang grooming II Orang Grooming III chimpanzees grooming We human animals groom for this same purpose, but we generally engage in verbal grooming: gossip. Using words rather than physical grooming we can connect with many more fellow humans at one time than any of those animals limited to physical grooming. I make this claim based on the work of Robin Dunbar.

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Dusty Smith summarizes the Old Testament in ten minutes

I don't know anything about Dusty Smith, but I've seen a few of his videos and enjoyed them. Here's his latest: A video reviewing the "History" Channel's series on the Bible, the entire review taking less than ten minutes. It seems to me that Smith's crusty commentary serves as a counterbalance to the uncritical cherry-picking reading of the Bible characteristic of many American religions. In the following video Dusty asks how self-respecting women can claim to be Christians, even in light of the New Testament.

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