The Rough Draft

So tonight I caught an HBO documentary called Baghdad ER. It’s graphic, brutal, honest and impartial (thank God for HBO) and it got me to thinking. Neither the US or Canada wants us to see their soldier’s flag draped coffins returning to our respective home soils. They say it’s out of respect for their families. Now I agree, the press can be intrusive, obtuse and worst of all false. When my youngest son died in a house fire and my other son lay in hospital in that grey middle ground between life and death, they were like vultures hovering over a kill.

However, if you (and by you, I mean the government) insist on sending our citizens into harms way, we (and I mean all occupants of both coutries) deserve as a society to see the physical and emotional cost of our enacted foreign policy. You do not get to skate on the results of your decree. You don’t get a free ride. If the cause is just, we will continue to back you and the system but if the cause be not just, then you deserve whatever political outcome you will reap.

The whole no picture taking thing smacks of a current problem we have in our society, lack of ownership of our actions and the outcome that is spawned from them. In simpler times, you gave your word, and you followed through. If a mistake was made, you owned up to it and took your lumps. Of course, this has always been lacking in our political cousins. They spend so much time trying to please everybody, they have little left to own up to except their mistakes and as we’ve all seen, very rarely do they own up to the havoc they have wreaked.

So here’s a challenge to our Prime Minister, the US President and both their cabinets. Next time a plane lands on native soil carrying the coffins of fallen soldiers, you take a good long a hard look at those flags, who’s intrests they died protecting and you ask yourself, “Was it worth it?”

Cause frankly, not too many of us think it was, in either country.

Every now and then I get a hankering to shoot in black and white. It’s getting harder and harder to find labs that will process Black and White film. A nice midstep is B & W filmstock that can be developed using the C41 process (the same process you see in the automatic developing machines). I actually liked this stock because it had a very solid sepia tone to it. Sepia warms up the image a bit and sort of builds in the nostalgia.

This was a fairly fast film, 400ASA which gives the water in the shot a sort of molten metal effect.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I think this is bullshit. A picture captures nothing but a slice of time. The moment is pure, all that came before and all that goes after simply doesn’t matter. It’s just three kids jumping on a trampoline in summer having fun with a hose.