Around the Garden

Just some images that I had taken several weeks ago but all are still objects. I'll upload my rabbits photos in the next post.

Priscilla Ahn - Dream

I heard this song for the first time from my sister's mp3 CD, and fall in love instantly with the melody. And after searching for the lyrics, I fallen even deeper..hehe..

Dream

I was a little girl alone in my little world who dreamed of a little home for me.
I played pretend between the trees, and fed my houseguests bark and leaves, and laughed in my pretty bed of green.

I had a dream
That I could fly from the highest swing.
I had a dream.

Long walks in the dark through woods grown behind the park, I asked God who I'm supposed to be.
The stars smiled down on me, God answered in silent reverie. I said a prayer and fell asleep.

I had a dream
That I could fly from the highest tree.
I had a dream.

Now I'm old and feeling grey. I don't know what's left to say about this life I'm willing to leave.
I lived it full and I lived it well, there's many tales I've lived to tell. I'm ready now, I'm ready now, I'm ready now to fly from the highest wing.

I had a dream

Canon EF-S 55-250 f/4-5.6 IS

Say hi to the newest member of my photographic equipment family, its a Canon telephoto zoom lens 55-25o f/4-5.6 IS. the cheapest Canon telephoto zoom with IS available to date. New item will cost around 2.2-2.3 million rupiah, but I got the used one from bursa.fotograner.net for 1.75 million rupiah, both physical appearance and function is good, no defect detected to date, and adding to my luck, it is still officially guaranteed by Datascript until September 2010.

Why a telephoto zoom lens? Because I like to take a portrait and snapshot, means taking a picture silently from distance without get noticed by the subject so that I can capture the most natural looks, facial expression or behaviour of the subject. And I also happen to love taking picture of my rabbits, which IMO the weirdest but tame rabbits ever known by me. Additional usage will be taking nature photography like my recent trip to TMII where I extensively use this lens to take many portraits of birds from distance.

But this lens still has its disadvantage. First, its quite slow, so adequate lighting is a must, and second, it can't produce an extreme blurred background, the solution will be Canon's EF 70-200mm L lens series which will cost around 7-16 million rupiah depending on its aperture opening and IS, so no, I'm good with my lens thank you. Another disadvantage is that on a holiday trip, I would want to take some picture of me and my spouse or friends with vast background and that means I'll have to change my lens several time with a wider lens, and that is why I also brought my Canon EF-S 18-55 mm II kit lens. the ideal choice would be Canon 18-200 mm is, but it'll cost around 6-7 million rupiah, so again, I'm okay with changing lens at least for the time being.

And here it is.

This is how I keep it, shortest focal length and focus point.

Here it is at maximum focal length 250mm

And here with the focus point extended to infinity

The Hoya UV HMC 58mm filter that I bought to protect the optic, also used, got it for 125 thousand rupiah.

The IS (Image stabilizer)

And I just noticed that taking pictures of a lens from the front using flash will gives you a funny looking reflection depends on the angle of flash light

This is how it looks on my EOS 400D digital. It extends quite long.

And this is what the lens can do, note that this image is taken from 2.5 meter from the object

At 55 mm

At 250 mm

It is Beyond Humanity, It is Godliness

What is Godliness? If you had read my post before about humanity, I think you’ll notice that I stated something like “… it is beyond humanity, it is Godliness”. So in this post, I would like to share some of my view towards the concept of God.

Humanity has a long course of history in what they refer to as God. During the primitive era, they refer the natural phenomena as God, they refer to the Sun, or Jupiter as God, and the Torah actually refer God as the creator and controller of the world, but I’m not going to explain every single of it. Based on my observation, God has two important elements that are essential for humanity to refer it as God. The first is power, and the second is love.

From the eye of the mortals, God is powerful, had it not powerful, they would not refer it as God. Why would human need God as a powerful being? Because to humanity, God is the answer, the answer of uncertainty, the answer of good fortune, the answer of catastrophe, the answer of life and death, the answer of everything. A friend of mine mentioned that Humanity has an inborn “fear” that sourced from the uncertainty of human fate in the afterlife, and also the inability to accept that what if when we die, we will just vanish into the thin air? And to that matter, the mortals turn into the Almighty as the answer. That is why humans are drawn to God, they cherish God, they worship God, and they fear God.

Describing God as a powerful being is a simple task, since I think most of the people have quite the same view about it. But to describe the love part of God in my point of view, now that is a very complicated matter. But I’ll still try my best here even though I’m quite sure that there is a big chance that I might be misunderstood, not just in the bad way, but also in the good way.

God is a being that is full of love. God’s nature as the creator of the universe means that every day, we live in His mercy. With every step we make and every breath we take, we are living in His world, God is everything in life, and God is everywhere surrounds us and each of us is part of Him and from that, we can also say that “we are in God, and God is within us”. Well you get the idea, not the hardest thing to explain is it?

But God’s love is so much more than that, it even extends beyond our understanding of love itself and here are several examples. When a baby is born or an elder is dying, the mortals tends see these events from their narrow understanding of life as a good and bad events, while God just sees it as a normal cycles of life. When a generous one gives to us, and the wicked one robs from us, we will cherish the former and curse the later, but that is not the way of God, for God is also understand that the generous one may happens to act based on his own personal satisfaction of being referred as a good man wished that he’ll be in heaven in the afterlife, so he is actually a merchant who sells good deeds and wished to get paid afterlife, giving debts to God, and the wicked one may be struggles to survive in this world and he just happen to know no other way other than being a robber. When a man has missed judge us, and think of us in a bad way while we actually has a good cause in our doing, we are disappointed to them and despise of how shallow they are, but God understands that the man with shallow mind is also helpless against his shallowness, he might not even aware that there is something deeper beyond the shallow water that he has been swimming in his entire life, and therefore in a way, he is also can’t be blame for it. Haven’t we while judging the other usually forgotten to look at our own flaw? And after realizing the mistake, we think badly of ourselves? Yet God knows that we are helpless in our way, just as the others are. And that is also why we referred God as a forgiving one, for the rain drops equally to the good and the bad.

But can humans see things that far beyond what are seen from the naked eye? Can we humans deal with such unfortunate events yet so unattached to the negative emotion? Can we human understand that good and bad is just our narrow limited perspective on how things happen in life? Well God can, and God is. That is why God is also powerful even in his love.

Now I’ll recite a poem that I write a couple of weeks ago.

A vision beyond perception

A feeling beyond emotion

A mind beyond rational

An understanding beyond judgement

A passion beyond desire

A serenity beyond patience

This poem gives me a mixture of feelings. It is my way of trying to describe the vastness of God’s love, of God’s vision, and how the concept of God’s way should be, it still isn’t perfect and probably never will, but this is as close as I can get. But at the same time, it also arouse some sense of desperation in me, of how can we humans reach this state? Are we bound to suffer the inability to understand life and God?

The mystics of the old said that to find God is to find love, to experience God is to experience love. So in that sense, other than a being, God is also described as a “way”, a “state” that one must reaches during one’s pilgrimage of life. Wait a minute; did I just say must reach? Didn’t I in my previous post of humanity has just explained the nature of humanity and separate it from Godliness? Didn’t I in my explanation about God’s love just described of how God’s love seems impossible to human standard? And isn’t reaching God is like totally be “inhuman”? Well I think we can, in fact here on earth I think our reasonable choice is to reach Godliness and still retain our Humanity at the same time. And I will not tell you how or which way is it or which religion I think suits the most, the debates can go on for lifetime and no solution can be formulated.

To me personally the search of the meaning of life, the meaning of God, or love is a very personal matter, and no one – I mean it, NO ONE – but YOU yourself can tell you which is the right way to go, I only tell you that you need to do it, not how you can do it. That means a thorough understanding of self is needed, endless self-exploration has to be endured, you have to understand YOU, understand, understand, understand. After all, how can I explain about Godliness before I Explain about Humanity? How can you reach “your” God if don’t know your humanity?

Photoshop, First Attempt

I decided to learn something or two about photoshop. Even though I was originally a naturalist, after doing much reading about photography, and looking at some great photos, I realize that there are just a thing or two that you can't achieve without digital post-processing even with the most powerful photographic equipment to date. And here is a statement from a master whom I've been learning from all this time.

"Digital photography is one part photography, and one part post-processing software.

Since post-processing has such a big impact on composition, why ignore it?"

-Harold Davis-

I think that is all needed to be said. So after spending 12 hours of clinic work with just 4 patients, this is what I come up with.

Of course this are just some experiment about the usefulness of "layer" in Adobe Photoshop. What I'm planing to do with post-processing is something different than these result. but enough for today. I'll experiments some more later on. :)

Orchid

Okay, enough with religion, philosophy and awareness thingy for a while. I have some analysis related to the "humanity" post, but haven't had the "feel" to write it down yet, so here is just some light update.

These are images that I had taken about several weeks ago during my early days of learning photography. I used these image to measure the sharpness of my EOS 400D in a variety of light condition and at the same time trying to appreciate the beauty of my mom's orchids by taking it from several angle.

Enjoy!

Some comment please, along with which one do you like the most and why. Thank you. :)

On Human, Human Race, and Humanity

Sure you have heard the word “humanity” (kemanusiaan). When you hear it, what is the first thing that crosses your mind? I imagine you will visualize a scene somewhere with poor people – By the merciless economy or by the wrath of mother earth – helped by social workers of any professions like doctors, military, etc. Hence the words “Dana bantuan kemanusiaan” or “Misi kemanusiaan”. Well of course it is not false, but not entirely correct either. Using it in such way as I mention above will narrow the potential of the word in which it only represents the “sympathy” part of human quality while human qualities are much more than just sympathy.

Humanity has the word “human” within it, it represent every part of the quality of human. Therefore it describes humans along with its histories, achievements, discoveries, religions, cultures, philosophies, and every other aspect of “human race”. Every greatness of human race is a part of humanity, yet every wickedness, savagery, trickery is also a part of human race. The politics between the rulers of the nations are part of human’s histories. The savagery of war is also a part of human history. Those are the way of the mortals and therefore also represent by the word humanity.

Many of you of course will feel uncomfortable with the idea that humanity can also be associated with the negative aspect of human being. If the word has been used for a good cause like those that I mention above, how come it has a bad meaning at the same time? But let me gives you an example. When a man has done something bad and he regret it, yet can do nothing about it, what would most people say to calm him? “Don’t be too hard on yourself; you are just human after all”. When we somehow getting careless, or worst have our emotions, or lusts and desires out of control, we are doing a bad thing in many living standard of human, but that is a part of being human, we make mistake, we get careless. Even In many prayers, phrase like “Have mercy on us dear Lord for we are imperfect, and perfection only belongs to You” appears in many religions. As a human we realize our limitation, and should have embraced it as a part of being a mortal living.

Humanity represents human being as a whole. When you hear the word humanity, you can’t just think of it as good human qualities, even if Webster told you so at the fourth meaning of humanity, because it would be cheating. To separate the negative aspect of human from the terms humanity is a denial, a rejection towards reality, because the nature of human being itself is not perfect. If it is perfect, then it is not human, it has surpassed human, It isn’t humanity anymore, it has become a being beyond humanity. It is Godliness.

So humanity neither represent goodness alone, nor badness alone. It has no polarization of the good and the evil. It has no standard. But nonetheless it is a great word; a concept with profound meaning. It is greater than the many concepts that represent goodness alone like virtue, wisdom, humility. It is only surpassed once again by the concept Godliness.

Bliss

A vision beyond perception

A feeling beyond emotion

A mind beyond rational

An understanding beyond judgement

A passion beyond desire

A serenity beyond patience

-Aron Husink-

Quote of the Day

This quote teaches me the best lesson for today, and I shall remember it. Because no matter how deep you learn about awareness, sometimes you’ll still lose your grip.

“What you see here, is not me, but an illusion of me”

-Wongky MD-

And it strikes me for the second time at Gold’s Gym while running at treadmill and there is a commercial HDTV shows this.

“A Character is like a tree and reputation is like its shadow.

The shadow is what we think of it.

The tree is the real thing"

-Abraham Lincoln-

FN: spending 45 minutes at treadmill will either make u contemplate, or make your eyes stray to find some nice looking chicks. But it certainly helps to make your abdominal muscle lines appear more contrast, due to the effect of slight dehydration, at least until the dehydration resolve. :P