The Future is Now

On Monday, I rejoin the standard working world of 9-5 employment.   I used to be good at that; too good in fact, working far beyond my contracted weekly hours to manage the responsibilities I had beyond my job role, and my creative life suffered for it (not to mention my social life).  That’s not a mistake I want to be making again.  The time off has cleared my head and re-focussed my priorities.  There’s a definite appeal in the challenges that a good job sets you… well, the appeal is in solving those challenges really, and that’s a great brain work-out.  But there’s a pleasure in photography that I don’t find anywhere else and I can’t lose that.  So, here’s to a more well-rounded future.

 

Where in the world?  A banal place, usually for me a place when I enter into a glass-eyed stupor until I emerge blinking at the other side.  This was taken at an airport, Zurich Airport, in the terminal shuttle tunnel, to be precise.  It’s one of those “don’t ever put your camera away” lessons.  I was standing in the rear of the shuttle, looking out the back window, when this image jumped out at me.  If I’d had to dig my camera out of my bag to capture it, it would have been lost.  I then inverted the colours and cropped a tiny bit, and that really made it pop for me in a way the original didn’t quite manage.

From little things, big things grow

From little things, big things grow, as some local ad is touting on TV at the moment.  Last night, after a passing comment on a comedy show, Australian TV saw the first mass gay and lesbian TV wedding. The wedding itself is now up on YouTube.  It was seriously touching, and it angers me that option to legally commit to a lifelong relationship isn’t open to everyone.  How gays and lesbians could possibly “cheapen” or “dilute” the meaning of marriage, when there’s the Kim Kardashians and Brittany Spears of this world marrying on whim and divorcing seemingly on the same, I don’t know.  The one real downer in my wedding ceremony was when I had to listen to the registrar say “”Marriage, according to the law of this country, is the union of one man, with one woman” (I married in the UK) and keenly feeling how unfair this exclusion was on my gay and lesbian friends in the audience.  They shouldn’t have to witness this kind of discrimination in a modern world, especially legally mandated discrimination.

Romance and love is free for everyone.  Legal lifelong committment by marriage should be the same.

This was taken on Lake Zurich, Switzerland.  I actually didn’t even notice the heart graffiti on the bell until I was looking through my photos at home, but for me now it’s what makes this photo.  Of course, the year 1995 appears clearly on the bell, so this image hardly passes as an antique photograph, but it’s the feel of romance of the water, from a time when water was a key mode of travel around the world, that I wanted to capture.