Porn

Have you ever heard the gripe with wildlife TV shows and photography and such that these things portray nature in a kind of un-genuine way? That looking at wildlife photos and video and such would lead one to believe that there is a moose behind every tree and a jaguar down at the every watering hole and a grizzly waiting around the next bend in the trail. Wildlife porn, I've heard it called. (I thought maybe I should explain the title of this blog article fairly early on...my mom will probably be reading this after all). The theory is that when kids go to nature that they expect all this great wildlife to be on display...and they're bored when it isn't. It really didn't do that for me. I can still remember the fam' sitting around our little black and white TV watching Marty Stouffer's Wild America (after The Cosby Show) and I don't demand constant wildlife viewing action in my outdoor experiences.

Even though the results are mixed (some kids are bored by the actual un-pornographic nature of nature and some kids' interest is piqued I wanna see that) this blog entry aims to show the readers (all both of them) that my photography is not just me happily strolling along wooded, pristine streams snapping pictures when I feel like it between sips of tea and bites of Fig Newtons.

This is really tough, knowing how much entropy to include in pictures. OK so it's not really all that tough. “Really tough” is climbing Mount Everest or having someone you love get killed in a car crash or something. But it does take some thought. Should I include the litter (or errant blade of grass or what have you) because that's how the scene really looks – or should I crop it out because it doesn't look “nice”?




This (somewhat mediocre...VERY mediocre, actually every single picture in this entry is mediocre) picture is a crop of the one directly below. The brighter colored leaves in this picture are floating on top of the water, the bland-colored leaves have sunk to the bottom.




OK, this is the non-porn crop of this picture...this is what's really there.




This is kind of like a picture I put in my last blog entry. Sort of anyway. It's actually just a zoomed-in version of the picture below it.




And this is the non-porn version.




Ahh. At first glance it's kinda questionable whether or not you'd see anything amiss here. Maybe I shouldn't tell you in hopes that you won't see it.

Insert long pause here so you think I'm actually not going to tell

See how the water is flowing in a smooth arc off of this rock? It's a little too perfect (to continue on the porn theme it's kind of like a picture in Playboy. Ahem, that is what I hear about Playboy anyway...never seen it myself. Mom, I can feel you blushing from here). It's so perfectly curved because this “rock” is actually a chunk of broken concrete culvert.




Happy happy joy joy (anyone else remember Ren and Stimpy? We didn't really watch much TV [except Wild America and Cosby] and we didn't even get the station that showed Ren and Stimpy but somehow my brother and I got ahold of a videotape of an episode that featured the amazing flying butt pliers. Trust me, you don't really want me to explain that one - besides that you can get a good idea of what it is just by the name which is pretty descriptively accurate.) this picture is pretty harmless. Just a cheesy “softwater” picture of a stream flowing. Yeah, it's all right but see the picture below for the whole scene.





So just for fun I Googled "'ren and stimpy' 'flying butt pliers' wrestling" and lo and behold I actually got quite a few sites where people actually recall (with fondness) the flying butt pliers episode. Apparently it was a classic episode.