Charlie Stout Writes About: Everything

Don’t expect any brilliant writing from me today, because I just don’t have it in me.  What I do have in me is half a can of Monster, which according to the label, contains L-Carnitine, Taurine, Ginseng, and something I actually recall from high school health class, B Vitamins. L-Carnitine sounds like something you’d find in the pathology report of a body found in an alley on a CSI type show: “Here’s what’s weird – we found traces of L-Carnitine in the victim’s bloodstream.”

“But these powder burns are consistent with a gun shot from close range.”

“Yes, and we see a higher concentration of L-Carnitine in the tissues damaged by the bullet.”

(slow removal of sunglasses) “This is going to be one Monster of a case.”

Speaking of monsters, here’s some truly crappy photography from my first year with a camera.  I hope you hate it.

My first camera was a Fujifilm Finepix 40i.  With a built-in mp3 player, this camera served iPod duty in addition to taking marvelously pixelated images.  I bought the camera just before a plane trip, thinking I’d listen to music all the way to wherever I was flying.

“What are you listening to, son?”

“My camera.”

I always liked this shot until I realized that I’d created an awkward merger between the vertical stabilizer of the aircraft and the plume of smoke from a distant power plant.  The color in the sky is what drew me to the window to snap this little snappy snap.

When I pointed the camera down at the runway, it automatically adjusted the exposure to allow me to capture some detail in the runway.  Unfortunately, it also caused the evening sky to blow out to white.  Decisions, decisions.  These days, I expose for the highlights and then dig the shadows out in development.  By development I probably mean Adobe Lightroom, which did not exist when this photo was taken nearly ten years ago.

I remember this evening vaguely: I was driving home home to West Virginia from my home in North Carolina, and when I saw the color in the sky and the sliver of moon hanging lazily above the mountains, I knew I had to drive up to a high point and photograph it.  Again, the camera is on an auto-exposure setting (I shot on AUTO for a long time – years – before I figured out how to actually use a camera) but because I pointed it up at the sky it did a fair job of exposing the sky and leaving the ground nice and silhouettey.  Silhouettey is not a word.

All I remember about this day was that it was at a church camp where I was volunteering.  Church camp is a great to get away from the trappings of modern society and get out into nature and allow God to speak to you.

That probably means different things to different people, but I’m going to go ahead and put myself on the record as saying that if you’re going to hear God actually speak to you, it’s probably going to be in a place like this with wind whispering through the pines and not in your living room with a man screaming through the damn television about how much your donation is needed to keep him on the air.  Just sayin’.

Can you believe how pixelly these images are?  I think they were shot at the lowest quality setting for the camera.  This is because instead of taking a few good images of the winter West Virginia landscape, I apparently wanted a hundred-odd shitty ones.

Going back to the church camp thing: church camp is a great place for a young male if you are looking to meet truly crazy women who honestly believe that because they met you at church camp then it must according to a Divine Plan™ that your paths have crossed and that the relationship will blossom into an expensive diamond ring and a couple of carseats.

So, you know.  There’s that.

Here’s a perfect example of the crap people shoot for their 365: sunset from a retail center parking long.  I suppose there is some poetry here – no matter how much we strip-mine and strip-mall away the landscape, the sky is still above us and it is still awe-inspiring.

But still, don’t do this.  Ever.

Why was it necessary to document a flat tire?  It was not.  But as a camera owner, that’s exactly what I felt compelled to do.  There was a whole world of snow and trees and beauty around me that day, and all I wanted to photograph was this flaccid tire.  Go me.

That is all.