April 24, 2008 - "One"

Canon 5D, 24 - 105 mm f/4L IS @ 35 mm, f/8, 1/80 sec., ISO 200, polarizer

As some may know, I'm a statistician in my "day job". When I tell people that, they instantly visualize me as a numbers guy, someone who sits at a desk with an old calculator in front of him, counting things. Well, sometimes that's sort of true. But statistics is really about quantifying and defining patterns. It's about looking for evidence that change is or is not occurring in some "process" of interest. It's about testing the validity of theories. It's about discovering that "detectable" differences exist between one group and another or between one period of time and another. If you've seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", you know what I'm talking about. We're not bean counters (we leave that to the accountants). I literally cringe when someone says, "Oh, you do financial analysis". Nope. That would bore me to tears.

In my mind, a camera is also a detector of change. When used properly, it's not a "bean counter". It creates something that's more than just a simple slice out of time, a document of "what is". When used properly, it creates images of contrast between here and there, between then and now, between what is "human" and what is not.

To do all this, all that is required is a brain behind the device. Oops. There's always a catch, right?