As I just said to someone via IM: I'm not sure if concert shooting is fun in spite of, or because of, the crappy conditions. The showier performers are constantly in motion. The lighting is either spectacular or terrible, depending on the half-second; low ambient light combined with frequent bright flashes mean you're waiting for those magic moments when light, motion, and melody sync together.

The burn rate of digital photos at concerts is horrendously high. I started shooting concerts because they forced me to think outside my careful-composition box: shoot, shoot, keep trying, trust that you're going to delete 90-95% of what you take but you won't get that magic photo without trying.

I'd been threatening to do something like this for months, and finally got around to it.

Admittedly, this photo is slightly inaccurate, since I had a trim shortly thereafter:

Amy, photo by Suzan
at Midtown, Atlanta, Georgia, United States by domesticat.

I was ready for a change, and when a co-worker with very curly hair showed up with a great cut, I asked her for her stylist's name: Bobbie. I scheduled an appointment before I could change my mind, and even as I walked in the door of the salon, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.

She was skater-punk and tattooed, and had a simple, tousled, comfortable-looking haircut. We talked about what had gone right -- but mostly wrong -- in prior haircuts. I showed her my driver's license photo to give her an idea of how much my hair curled when handled well. I mentioned that I was looking for a change, but had a family wedding in a month and a half, and needed to make sure that I was salvageable by then.

Way #6 you know you're a public servant: you vote in primary races, and recognize the names on the smaller races, because they're the people that fund the organization you work for.

As a child, there was a mystique about voting, since I didn't go inside when my parents voted. Voting was a secret rite of passage into adulthood, like buying car tags or knowing what engine part needed replacing even without checking under the hood. For years I wondered what happened behind those doors, and when finally inducted into that secret, opinionated society, I was a little disappointed at how simple and mundane it really was.

Voting this way
at , North Daye Hill, Alabama, United States by domesticat.
[photo: sign outside voting area]

My thoughts on last night's final primaries, and the speeches given in their aftermath? A single meta-quotation suffices. Oliver Cromwell, to the Long Parliament, and more famously requoted by Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

[source]

Or, in lolspeak:

Git, kthxbai? Srsly.

They've been piled haphazardly on a shelf next to my desk for nearly a decade, and I knew I'd have to tackle them eventually. Two weeks ago, I decided it was time; scooping up all the ones I'd found, I hurried to work and then dropped them off during my lunch hour.

Nineteen rolls of film. I knew what most of them were; I'd had 18 of them developed years before. Once scanned to photo CD, I could then upload the hi-res versions to flickr, swapping them out for my low-res versions on domesticat one directory at a time.

Ask people what they would save in a fire, and you will hear the same refrain of answer over and over again. Pictures. Photos. Snapshots. Wedding photos, baby photos, ancestor photos; they're as irreplaceable as they are priceless. (In reality? It's wishful thinking. When your world is aflame, you save yourself and hope for the best -- says she who came out of a burning house holding her glasses and one shoe.)

I think we should declare May 1 to be Jonathan Coulton Day. This will make perfect sense to any of you who have heard this song. Words, general sentiment, etc. not suitable for children.

Great. Now I have to get some OTHER song in my head. I'll let you know when that happens.

Oh, and for those of you who missed her this weekend in Atlanta, this is what my mother looks like: