BlathrWayne Lorentz

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.