Blathr Wayne Lorentz

It took me a while, but I finally managed to buy each of the original cartridges released with the Atari 2600 in 1977.

The sticking point was Star Ship. It took almost a year for one to show up on fleaBay for under $50.00. My budget was $5.00. So when one finally appeared, I was all over that Buy It Now button.

To mark the occasion, I put them in a stack on the dining room table, and took photos which I then turned into i-device wallpapers. They look pretty good on my iPhone. I haven't tried them on an iPad yet, but I made them with plenty of space around so that they'll work in both portrait and landscape on an iPad.

You may notice that the screenshot with the cartridges arranged in a helix has squiggles where the time should be. This is because on weekends, I don't want to know what time it is, and iOS doesn't allow one to remove the clock, so changing it to a language I can't read is almost as good.

It's also not possible to remove the date bar, but I can replace it with the weather, which is less awful than seeing the cold, bony hand of time scratching across the top of the screen.

The original wallpaper files I created are here:

• Regular
• Helix

This store has a wide selection of books.

I havenʼt seen Van Halenʼs Panama video, but I suspect itʼs more compelling than this.

You know how mid-tier cities desperate for attention create little signs or murals or plazas just so that people will take photographs of themselves and post them to social media and give the city free publicity? Carnival wins this game.

At Carnivalʼs cruise port in Cozumel, Mexico there is a small white sand beach. It is conveniently located right at the end of the pier that the tourists use to get off the ships.

It has a perfect little row of perfect little palm trees and perfect sand in front of perfect blue water, and the perfectly massive profiles of Carnivalʼs cruise ships in the background.

Thousands of people take pictures there each year and post them online without realizing that itʼs a marketing campaign. The stealth equivalent of those giant photo frame props that second-rate cities place around town to let the vanity-afflicted know exactly where to stand in order to get the perfect picture of themselves for social media.

Carnival deserves a big fat “good on you” for doing a great job with this guerrilla marketing technique, and pulling it off at industrial scale. It couldnʼt have been cheap to execute, and certainly demonstrates extensive vision and cooperation between departments within the company.

Security doesnʼt have to be ugly.

I like to take pictures of generic street scenes when I travel. When I look back at the pictures later, they very often help me remember a place more vividly than a photograph that's focused on a monument or a building or a bird.

However, it appears that I'm not all that interested in cleaning my lens before I take pictures. Most of my Falmouth photos were ruined by a smear of sunscreen on the lens.

Didn't anyone ever tell you to make sure your optics are clean?

Looking for a fine collection of photos depicting Mozambique, Italy, Japan, and the Middle East? Just search Adobe Stock for “Atlantic City, New Jersey.”

Crowdsourcing used to be all the rage in the tech industry. It was a way to get content for your project for free. Use your automation system to ask enough people for content, and some small percentage will happy oblige. The problem with crowdsourcing is quality control.

If you let anyone contribute anything, anyone will contribute anything. I once built a crowdsourced system for people to share photographs of landmarks. A significant percentage of the photos contributed were people standing in front of a camera holding up their resumes, presumably hoping that someone searching for a photo of the Berlin Wall might magically hire them to write code in India.

In the example above, we see the result of two levels of folly. Getty Images allows anyone to upload photographs to its system in order to sell those pictures to other people. That's the crowdsourcing. Then Apple outsourced photography for Apple Maps to a bunch of entities, including Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, and also Getty Images.

The result is a photo of a city in China among the photographs that are supposed to depict the West Texas city of Midland.

Never trust content you don't control.

Flying over Houston Hobby Airport (HOU). Much improved over the last time I flew from there.

Have you ever noticed that if you search for “doctor patient vaccine” in Adobe Stock, 90% of the fake doctors injecting their fake patients are using the same technique that a junkie uses to mainline skag? Have these photographers never received any kind of vaccine ever in their lives?

I thought I was being all clever, using my phoneʼs camera flash to see what was making that noise in the dark.

It turns out, I donʼt want to know.

It rained last night, so this morning, I can be an artsy-fartsy photographer in the garden.

This morning, one of the bushes in my garden decided to surprise me with yellow flowers.

Good bush.

I put my camera in a plastic shopping bag. As I was wandering around, the camera took some pictures. So now I know what my stuff sees when Iʼm carrying it home.

White Oak Bayou creeps along in front of the downtown Houston skyline. One of nearly a dozen individual skylines that Houston offers. Itʼs funny that way.

A young woman celebrates graduation by throwing her cap into the air from a car that my Uncle Eddie would have driven in the 1970's.

His was better because it had curb feelers. Hers is better because itʼs in pristine condition in 2022, while his is probably rusting away at the bottom of Gravesend Bay.

It was just this morning I was thinking that I donʼt see so many cowboys in Houston anymore. Then, just before lunch, a clown car full of them drove up to the roof of my parking garage and belched out a whole passel of dudes.

Those are not lampshades in the foreground. Those are the kinds of cases that are used to transport big-ticket cowboy hats on planes. There are cowboy hats that cost more than a MacBook Pro.

Discovery Green at night. You canʼt see the park for all the lights and buildings, which is mostly true durng the day, as well. There is a trend in modern park design to over-build in order to make a single park everything for everybody. The result is that very often, as in the case of Discovery Green, it ceases to be a park and is transformed into a playground for adults.

Even in Houstonʼs hottest neighborhood, thereʼs no shortage of urban decay.

Or people to take pictures of it.

Time and tide conspire to turn a piling into a cylinder of art.

Meanwhile, in West Texas.

Couldnʼt sleep this morning, so I took the new lens out to the balcony. I didnʼt bring the tripod because I didnʼt want to wake everyone in the house. Next time.

My wife bought me a new lens for my camera for my birthday. Seems like a good excuse to visit Death Valley again.

Sandstorm sunset.

If this is what rush hour looks like, you may be in the Valley of Fire.

This is either the Long and Winding Road, or the Yellow Brick Road, depending on your age and taste in popular entertainment.

A day in the Valley of Fire with Darcie.

I wonder if a daisy smells the same to her as it does to me.

Thereʼs nothing like a good sunset to make you understand the vastness of the desert, and how insignificant you really are.

Sunrise was a little bit different today, so I broke out the good camera. I'll have to do some processing on it to get out the grain, but it's OK for this hour of the morning.

The clouds are over California. The mountain in front is Griffith Peak (11,063 feet), and the one in its shadow is Charleston Peak (11,916 feet).

“Does this sunlight make me look fat?”

The planet has moved into that special alignment which allows me to see the sunrise for a couple of weeks each year.

Right now, in preparation for our move in two months, Darcie is using a vintage Polaroid to take pictures of each pair of her shoes.

Itʼs pretty much the most Darcie thing Iʼve seen in a long time.

When I load photos of Valley of Fire into programs like Lightroom, they automatically crank the color down 15 notches because the programmers at Adobe in Seattle canʼt conceive of a place that isnʼt as humid and grey as where they live.

I took the Hasselblad out to the Valley of Fire today. My main lens is just about toast because so much sand gets into it on these trips.

Am I in the way of your picture?

How about now?

How about now?

How about now?

How about now?

Here we see the elusive Yellow Haired Picture Snapper in her native habitat. Letʼs watch as she stalks her prey.

I guess if I never take pictures of dogs, my phone has no reference point to work from.

Perhaps it thinks “Dog = ugly cat.”

You know that adage about “Donʼt use all your film in one place?” Neither does Darcie.

I really really wanted to rescue Darcie from inside the cigarette vending machine, but I was fresh out of quarters.

Mitchell Mesa at sunrise looks like a Apple wallpaper.

Today I learned that my Hasselblad has a sunrise mode. Who needs Photoshop?

Getting Darcie to leave the hotel was like trying to pull a six-year-old out of Disneyland.

If it doesnʼt rain where you live, rain on vacation is entertaining, not annoying. Or at least thatʼs the lie I keep telling myself.

You can sometimes salvage a bad weather photography day by going black-and-white.

I was reflecting on something yesterday. But it may have just been the Ripple.

Darcie hates that joke.

Meanwhile in Williams, Arizona…

And then there are days when you show up for work and the city is installing 40-foot-tall light-up neon showgirls on the sidewalk. This city is a slave to Instygram.

This service station is just a shell of its former self.

The fact that this is the first photograph I took with my new phone should tell you everything there is to know about me.

I should get an award for finding the one photographic angle that hides each drunken frat boy and their lifted 4x4 behind its own cactus.

Dramatic sky is dramatic.