Bad Artist, Bad!

I have been neglecting my photography so much recently, it's crazy. As I've told you before, I'm getting a bit tired of paying to process rolls of film with no good images on them, but I can't yet afford a really good digital camera. I have a crappy Canon point and shoot, but what I really need is a solid digital SLR. Since my film camera is a Canon Elan 7, it makes sense to buy a digital Canon SLR, as the lenses are compatible.

But what that requires is money, something I don't have a whole lot extra of.

To be honest, I'm also feeling rather short on inspiration. I think what I need to do is bribe some of my friends to sit for actual portraits, as shooting people is what I'm best at and the most interested in. I'm also tempted to take a portraiture class, as I'm sure there's a lot I don't know.

Yesterday I ran across the website of somebody from college who is now a professional photographer. His images blew me away and I was once again reminded of the frustration I feel whenever I look at images created by professionals. There's this quality that theirs always exhibit that mine lack, yet I can't pinpoint exactly what it is they do that I don't do that creates said quality. My photos, even the best ones (which are lovely for a non-pro, I'm not half bad), still have this snapshot-ish, "real life" quality about them, whereas the ones created by professionals look much more "filmic" much in the same way that the image quality of film looks different from a home video. Objects and people just seem to occupy images differently. Color and light is better, saturation is improved. Depth of field looks not quite real. What I can't figure out is if it's a technical thing, like they simply have a better understanding of the controls of their camera and when to use what, or if it's a question of equipment. Does buying a Canon 30D magically improve your images? Or is it something else entirely, and I'd be just as well off with a lower end Rebel XTi?

These are the questions that utterly cripple my inner artist. The same one that once contemplated art school, that now feels utterly dejected when viewing the work of her contemporaries.

In the comments section share with me your theories about why professional images still look better than even the best amateur ones. Is it one particular thing? Or is the sum of several parts--equipment, a better eye, technically mastery, lighting, dumb luck? Also tell me if I should get the XTi or save my pennies for the 30D.

The Sports Imbecile Does March Madness (Part 2)

And...we are off and running. Do you know what I am learning? That although sports imbeciles often, unwittingly, do very well in March Madness, they often don't do very well at all either. Alas, it seems that the pure fact of being clueless about college basketball does indeed mean that your brackets will bite the big one.

Teams I selected to do well that are now eliminated: Gonzaga, Penn, GW, Old Dominion, Stanford.


The good news: All of my final four teams remain in the game. At least for now.

While I am not in very last place in the office pool, I am pretty close to the bottom. I'm sure this fact is making my smug male coworkers as obnoxiously smirky as usual.

Tonight at happy hour, I will pour a 40 out for those five departed teams. Farewell Gonzaga, Penn, GW, Old Dominion and Stanford. I hardly knew ye. Quite literally, in fact.

Another Strike Against Outsourcing

I was already feeling tremendously grumpy today, so a half-an-hour on the phone with the geniuses at Capital One didn't help.

Due to some not particularly great spending habits in my 20's, I have found myself with a rather unpleasant credit card debt, and a really high interest rate on one of my cards. I'm using my Capital One card, which has a low APR as the card that I transfer my higher balance from the other card to. I do this once every couple of months and it's slowly helping me regain my erstwhile financial stability. And my sanity.

Until today.

It seems that Capital One has joined many of its contemporaries in corporate America in the outsourcing trend. Now, when I call to make a routine balance transfer, I chat very briefly with somebody in the midwest before being transfered via a very fuzzy connection to some lady in India.

Apart from the loss of American jobs that outsourcing represents, it is a major pain in the ass for me, the consumer. Why? Because the ladies who work the call center in India, no matter how nice they may be in real life, maintain only tenuous graps of English, the only language I happen to speak fluently. Call it poor foresite among the adminstrators at Amherst Regional High School, but I am not proficient in Assamese; Bengali; Gujarati; Hindi; Kannada; Kashmiri; Malayalam; Marathi; Oriya; Punjabi; Sindhi; Tamil; Telugu or Urdu. While my inability to parse words in any of these toungues is not normally a handicap in my daily routine, it represents a major disability when attempting to communicate with the customer service reps at Capital One.

Normally, I'm a pretty laid back kind of gal. I tend to find that being nice to customer service reps and not losing my cool is a better way of obtaining the high quality of service that I desire. But doing so is hard when the person on the other end of the phone is convinced you want to transfer money from your personal checking account to a credit card. Why I'd want to do that is beyond me, but after saying very firmly into the phone "No, it's a credit card account" about a dozen times we still weren't jiving. I finally asked to speak with her manager.

Although incredibly surly, her manager was ten times more efficient and more importantly, *proficient*, and I had the matter of my balance transfer ironed out in all of 45 seconds. But this was after 30 minutes of arguing (in my cubicle, co-workers listening--mostly my bad, yes). It should not have been this painful, especially since the knowlege that the experience is going to suck doesn't make me want to repeat it, and for the sake of my credit rating, I really need to. I told her this much, and in response she rattled off a three-minute long term of agreement that I then agreed to without really listening to. So I might have just sold my first born off to Bollywood but at least I'm feeling a bit better about my financial stability.

And to think that more Americans are unemployed because of this simply adds insult to injury.