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Did a walkabout the other day with my new old camera, a new 12 year old Canon 5D mark II, it's a full frame camera, which I have been wanting for 12 years now, well no longer, and I can't be more pleased with it, and the super quality pictures. This is a "Carolina Bay" in by area that I have shot for 10 years or more, always interesting. A Carolina Bay is a very interesting aspect of Mother Nature, google it for more details if your interested. 
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 Outside Batesburg-Leesville, SC, pasted by this spot for 30 years, before I stopped to capture it to last for another 30 years !
 The Ridge Cafe is long gone, but the sign lives on through photography. Ridge Spring, SC
Videos by Peter Dusek and Michael Widell, and inside look into this type of little known photography ! Let me know your feelings ! Take a minute and relax and be enlightened ! Video by Will Senior WHAT IS A NATURAL HIGH ?A natural high comes from any activity that makes you feel good—but doesn't involve drugs. Doing things you enjoy, like riding your skateboard or dabbling in photography, releases natural feel-good chemicals in your brain like dopamine, which regulates movement, emotion, motivation, and pleasure
Nature Most of us are so divorced from our ancestral home -- the natural outdoor environment -- that leaving the city and going where the cell towers don't reach feels like entering an altered state of consciousness. Probably because our consciousness has changed. I know when I'm out there, whether it's at a secluded beach, deep in the redwoods, or alone on a snowy mountaintop, I feel different. I notice new things. My brain works better. I'm high by virtue of eliminating the extraneous sensory clutter of the city. Music We've all heard -- or performed -- music that has left us with goose bumps and chills. We're utterly struck by it, held by it, entranced and touched in such a deep way that we feel moved physically and spiritually. I always think of a concert my wife and I took in some years ago -- a choral performance that ended with a piece so piercing and transcendent that it took my breath away. The hairs on my neck and arms stood up and I was swept up in some collective out of body experience. To this day, listening to the piece catapults me back in time and I feel it in my gut. Science has confirmed the existence of the euphoric music-induced "chills." Researchers asked participants to choose music that gave them the "chills" each time they heard or played it. Then they allowed subjects to listen to the music while they monitored their brain activity with PET imaging. (In other parts of the experiment, they listened to other peoples' musical selections or general noise.) Each participant's chosen music, the researchers found, exclusively produced activity in brain areas associated with "euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse." The researchers suggest that as humans evolved they developed the ability to experience euphoria from more abstract activities like music. Although unnecessary for hard scrabble survival, music likely contributed to social bonding and the cohesion of human communities, which in turn aided survival. Music is also a way to tap into the rhythm underlying life itself. You won't find any clinical trials, but there's real music happening right under our noses every single day. Musicians just reveal it. Dream Remember how you'd hang out at night with your friends, looking up at the stars, just thinking and talking about how immense and crazy and impossible and possible everything is? Remember when you were filled with wonder? Dreaming is one thing that still gets to me and makes me feel like a kid again. Best of all, we have direct access to it. It's the great mystery that we get to explore every single night of our lives. Every night, we enter a fantastical world of our own creation. In this world, time is relative; we can live out entire lifetimes in the span of a single sleep cycle. We become artists, novelists, world-builders and storytellers that put Tolkien, Spielberg, George RR Martin, and Salvador Dali to shame. And we get to live and breathe and act in those worlds as if they were real. It's amazing. What's going on here, chemically? Some researchers think that our brains release very small amounts of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound, during sleep. That certainly seems plausible. Okay, they are more, but you get the point! I was totally surprised the first time it happen to me while doing a walk in Nature with the camera, I just couldn't believe how good I was feeling, later while rethinking this, I realize that it was because I thoroughly enjoy my photography, and this is my reward. I'M NOT ALONEI found out much later that other photographers have this same feeling as well, but most don't talk about it much, I guess for the same reason I didn't at first, because it sounds to strange, but now I'm looking forward to getting HIGH! Peace Out !   Quite often it is necessary to remove the clutter from your overworked mind, according to the Dalai Lama, one should seek at least an half hour each day to be alone, in order to refresh the mind. But,I find it necessary to get out in nature , hopefully at least once a week to free my mind. It works best for me to take the camera along, as this makes me look at things differently, and inversely causes my mind to concentrate on anything other than the reoccurring information that caused me to seek the solitude of nature in the first place. This event is best preformed by being alone, with no expectation of what to expect! Just wander the local park or sit at your local coffee shop, or in bad weather, retreat to your local library, find a seat with a view of the outside, and just wait...... soon you will be drifting away in a barrage of new thoughts and you will feel the weight of the issues you had earlier diminishing, and in some cases you’ll see some solutions that you didn’t see before.. Bonus points!
I even have had success by just escaping to the front porch late in the day, and plugging in some ambient music and watch the clouds flow by. Give it a try, all you have to lose is a half hour if it doesn’t work, but I feel it will be time well spent! Cheers ! NO NEWS IS NOT GOOD NEWSGot the notion to start the blog again for some reason, but I have nothing to write about right now, but I know that will change soon, so stay tuned. As you can see below, you CAN get blood from a turnip !! I'll just squeeze my camera a little harder !  One of the hardest things about entering art competition is deciding what to entry, just because you like it doesn't mean that the judges will, or that the public will want to buy it, so I've decided it's an educated guess based on what has won in all kinds of contest and what people tell you that they really like, and then you pick from the one's you like. This photo was one that I couldn't decide where or not to enter in the SC State Fair, but after looking at it for 3 or 4 days I decided not to, but use another one instead. |
