Images That Were Nearly Discarded – Bad Fish
If you are a long-time reader, you know that I am loath to throw an image away. If I go to all the trouble to get out on the boat, put on all that gear (which is becomming steadily more burdensome year-by-by-year), and fin around for an hour or so snapping pictures of anything that moves and much that doesn’t, then I reckon that even a less than technically acceptable shot deserves a few minutes to see if it can be revived.
I give a poor, but promising image ten minutes. If it still doesn’t amuse me, then I let it go back into the black hole of the tens of thousands of images that I’ll probably never touch again. Here’s a good example. These are Pickhandle Barracuds (Sphyraena qenie) at about thirty metres on the bottom of Magic Passage:
The water was fairly clear, but it was dark there, so I had to make up much of the colour from memory. Since I hate the flashy thing, the deeper I go, the more I have to make up. It ends up being less a photograph and more a funky bit of art.
Here is a mob of Spotted Garden Eels (Heteroconger hassi) at about thirty-five metres, right at the mouth of the passage. It’s nearly monochrome, but you do get the impression of the wavy critters swaying in the current nabbing tasty bits as they float past:
You probably know by now that the sub-adult Silver Sweetlips (Diagramma pictum) is one of my favourites. They were born to pose. I sanpped this shot as a throw-away, because the current was quite strong and I was kicking like a mad man to reach the mouth of the passage. When I looked at the shot on the computer, my compassion overflowed and I spent a while massaging it. That seems to have breathed some life back into it:
![Silver Sweetlips [sub-adult] (Diagramma pictum)](http://www.messersmith.name/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/silver_sweetlips_IMG_2056.jpg "Silver Sweetlips [sub-adult] (Diagramma pictum)")
While we’re on Sweetlips, I’ll toss out a couple of others. This is the Oriental Sweetlips (Plectorhinchus vittatus), a sub-adult. The adults have many more horizontal bands much closer together. It would be a perfectly good shot, if I hadn’t amputated part of its tail:
I did seriously consider skipping this next one, because it was so horrible that I didn’t think I could make anything of it. This is a bit rarer type of Sweetlips in these parts and it’s difficult to get close to them. I did this at full telephoto on the Canon G10 and it shows the woes of being too far away underwater. The UW photographer’s mantra is, “The closer, the better.” This one is a Diagonal-Banded Sweetlips (Plectorhinchus lineatus). They are very handsome fish. Too bad this is the best shot of one that I’ve yet managed:
Another surprisingly difficult fish to make into digital bits for your camera is the Trumpetfish (Aulostomus chinensis):
This also was a snap-shot. The Trumpet fish is, I’m certain, psychic. I don’t believe for a nanosecond in human psychics – please, don’t get me started. But the Trumpetfish knows when you are just about to push the shutter release and moves, qhite gracefully (grinning, I’m sure) just out of range. The only way you can get a clean shot is to see one in the distance, get behind some blob of coral or rock, sneak up close and then pop up like a tank-killer helicopter and kick loose a round.
It seldom works. Oh, I forgot to mention that you have to hold your breath while you’re doing all that.
Related posts:
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- Blurry Fish and Barrel Sponges When you pictures are streaky and blurry, what can you do? Turn them into art! Why throw away valuable pixels? Photoshop yourself to Nirvana....
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- About the Hat I’ve shown you several examples of the differences between juvenile forms and adult forms. I can hear you yawning already. But, look at these beauties: They are Silver Sweetlips (Diagramma pictum). I think that they are one of the prettier fish that it is easy to get a camera on....
- More of Magic Passage I’m about to run dry of images from last Saturday’s dive at Magic Passage. I have just a few more. I have to admit that I often take the easy route of showing pretty fish pictures instead of actually writing, which is the whole point of this journal, at least...
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Hey Jan! Loved your shots today, and specially your commentary — really gave me a feel for the kind of hard work and thought and planning that goes into these photos you share with us….your paragraph about the “psychic” Trumpetfish made me grin, and the part about having to pop up like a tank-killing helicopter and loosing a round, now that’s damn fine writing!
Yeah, Steve, psychics and paranormal phenomena in general are among my major pet peves. Strange, coming from a Christian, eh? I guess the finger of the sceptic can be pointed just as well at me. You know what? I don’t care!
I love it when people drool over my images. But when somebody (such as yourself, someone who knows good from bad) complements my writing, man, that’s some good stroking. Makes my day.
Nah, not strange, why should belief in supernaturalism necessarily accompany being a Christian? The bottom line is truth…can we verify and test it in experience? I like what process theologian David Pailin says: “”Attempts to defend theism by ignoring the question of truth…are fundamentally atheistic. They worship human wishes rather than ultimate reality.” I would think any Christian in a scientific world would want to follow that kind of “hard line” about truth in regards to the paranormal and the like.
And as far as my kind words, as Joe Friday said, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Or sir, as it were.
Well, Steve, that is certainly a provocative comment. It brings to mind a struggle that I deal with almost daily. Unless one defines two sorts of paranormal, supernatural, non-emperical, or whatever you want to call it, one for matters of divinity and another for “everything else that can’t be proved”, then I don’t see how one can escape the paradox of at once believing in the divinity and all the baggage that comes with that and believing in the scientific method, which reduces anything not demonstrable to the level of “untruth”, since there’s no room for “maybe”.
Let’s take miracles. Sometimes I believe that they are possible and sometimes not. I certainly believe in God, but I’m not sure how much the divinity mucks about in the physical world. I’m essentially an Open Theology ahderent. I have serious issues with little items like omnipotency and omniscience, at least as they are understood by contemporary Christians. For me this takes nothing whatsoever away from the value in my life of belief (which is, in itself, paradoxical). I have thought about this problem of miracles so much, in fact, that I’ve come up with a theory of how God could do it without us ever discovering the secret. The divinity affects OUR world through the use of quantum entanglement. Think about that one for a while! (Not too long or you’ll roast your brain.)
None of that, however is my biggest problem. My biggest problem is that I think too much. I’m also more than a little crazy. Bad combination.
Hey Jan! Loved what you wrote, and yes, David Pailin is provocative — and deep. I knew I was opening up a real can of words, I mean worms, with my remarks.
I suspect you and I have travelled and worked the same terrains and fields of thought, in our own very individual ways. I have some thoughts, and I’d love to follow-up, but given the possible length of answers we both might end up writing — and given the issue of how much time we can spend writing, as much fun as a meeting of minds is — I’d be happy to continue this “off camera,” so to speak, via e-mail, and not weigh down your wonderful, light-filled journal with heavy-duty philosophizing! Or, maybe the discipline of limiting comments here to a few thoughtful paragraphs is fine for you — I just want to be very courteous, as I am, in fact, a visitor to your wonderful territory.
In the meantime, as far as the all-too-familiar conundrums you bring up — conundrums I, too, continue to wrestle with — I want to recommend a book I just read and really enjoyed: “One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind & Spirit” by Robert W. Godwin. I think the author points to some very powerful and real answers to the kind of questions we both are raising here. Can’t recommend it enough — one of those books that changed the way I look at things. I also think you might like his wacky sense of humor and terrible puns. Check it out on Amazon.com. With warm regards,
Steve
I’m happy to continue our comments here in the journal. Somebody might stumble upon them and be amused. It also helps me to keep my comments succinct. Since I have no internet connection at home (don’t get me started), I have to do all of my journal work at the office. Therefore, I have to watch the time. I’m afraid that if we started playing by email, we’d probably both find that we’re stealing too much time from other activities.
Thanks for the book suggestion. I get to a genuine bookstore about once every four YEARS! Therefore, I do appreciate when friends make suggestions; they often lead to purchases. This one sound very interesting.
OK, sounds good…couldn’t agree more, and being more succinct will be a good discipline….there’s something about philosophy, and theology that leads to prolixity, I swear! As in Zen, less is more.
I’m not surprised at your 4 year periods, given where you live. I doubt that “One Cosmos Under God” would even be at your typical Borders or Barnes and Noble anyway, assuming you had any chain bookstores in big cities near you. The book is brilliant, idiosyncratic, thought-provoking, and fun — if it ever finds its way to you, I’d love to discuss it with you.
PS — As for miracles, my favorite India sage/philosopher states my view succinctly: “In reality there is no such thing as a miracle; there are only laws and processes which are not yet understood.” Sri Aurobindo
And so, to keep the ball rolling……as for divinity affecting our world, to me, that’s mainly a matter of waking up to the divinity that’s *already here* and already involved with mind, matter, and life, but to our present sense of things, only felt and glimpsed “through a glass darkly.” My life experience and experiences in meditation have led to me some sort of certainty that consciousness is fundamental, and not merely an “emergent” property of matter; indeed, and rather, what we now know and see as matter, life, mind, spirit, are all all emergent qualities of a primal and underlying consciousness. More than a mere belief or blind faith, this seems to be what I’m discovering and proving, in *very* modest degree, in the laboratory of my daily life and practice. Of course, your mileage may vary, but until one takes the trip, how can one know for sure? By that, I’m not advocating mediation, or Buddhism, or any other -ism or -anity…just that we can can be scientific and see if mind/body, and yes, even material, bodily life itself, begin to change if we “wake up” to a deeper love and beauty and truth and become more alive and sensitive to what I’m finding is really inherent in each of us and all things. So, full disclosure — that’s where I’m basically coming from in all these comments, and in my love and appreciation of the beauty and goodness in this world of sorrows and suffering.
Truth is, mate, that I HATE being brief. I want to know what is the sound of a thousand hands clapping. The Zen Master asks for ONE ??? I can beat that. What is the sound of NO hands clapping? HAH! It’s the same as for ONE! And, DON’T CALL ME GRASSHOPPER AGAIN OR I’LL GIVE YOU SUCH A SMACK!
By the way, we have NO bookstores. Okay, okay, we DO have a couple, but you would not find browsing useful. I order books from Amazon about once a year. Other than that, we go to used book stores in NA once every four years with a budget of a couple of hundred dollars, buy all we can until we’ve run out of money, and then send them by US Postal “Service” in a thing called an “M Bag” because it’s cheap.
I can go along with the Aurobindo quote, in the sense that we may not understand the process by which demonstrably unexplainable things happen. Though I’m a huge fan of coincidence, it doesn’t cover all the ground. I think we miss a lot of connections. I heard the extremely unlikely landing on the Hudson described on CNN as “miraculous”. This irks me severely. The guy had maybe a one an a thousand chance of pulling it off, but he was a skilled pilot and a quick thinker and he beat the odds. For something to qualify as a miracle I think that we all have to agree that, by our understanding of what can and can’t happen, it simply cannot happen. Otherwise, you can just say that it’s a statistical outlier. The word is overused to the point of devaulation.
I too think that consciousness is organic (in the sense that is a property of the organism). Maybe it’s the “Breath of Life” that is mentioned in Genesis. I like your metaphor of “waking up” to what’s already there.
re “truth is, I HATE being brief post” and “DON’T CALL ME GRASSHOPPER!”
LOL! You are more Zen than you may know! (If I could actually know a real master like Master Po in “Kung Fu,” he, and only he, could call me “Grasshopper,” because it would not be condescension, but great love.)
Also, happily, there actually is a koan about the sound of “no hands” clapping.
Oh, and by the way, koans are *stupid* and a huge waste of time, unless one needs that punishing path. They aren’t at all what most Westerners think they are, as if there is an answer to the sound of one (or a bizillion) hands clapping. The actual goal is to so wear out the conditioned mind and it’s dualisms (this, not that! that, not this!) so that it just gives up and our natural nature and insight get a chance to show up. You can beat yourself silly with a koan, but for me, there are better ways, or else, take a broader view of koans, as in approaching everything “as a little child” and thinking/feeling without preconception, if you can, “what is this?”
Wow, fascinating about book buying in your world…I think I’ve actually heard about something like that “M-bag” thing from a friend who was in the Philippines….I imagine ordering from Amazon overseas is pretty expensive, too….still, I’d be busting my budget all the time, I’m afraid.
re post about “the miraculous”
I *totally* agree with every point you make. The term “miraculous” is totally misused and abused, not to mention the logical (probably, linguistic) problem of when the “impossible” happens, it’s not longer “impossible!”
But what really gets me to the cushion to work on anger is when I hear someone, in the midst of some horrendous tragedy or disaster, talk about *their* so-called “miraculous” salvation, while dozens, or hundreds, around them are dead or maimed. Or, the “miracle’ of a Bible not being burned, while the whole damn church is burned down! WTF??? What kind of cloud-cuckoo “god” is that? Throw in the naive idea of “god’s” omniscience and omnipotence, and you really have a kind of insanity and psychotic “god” that’s more a projection of people’s poisonous pedagogy than anything to do with the Love that loves us that I mentioned in my other post.
Now, this isn’t to say that there’s always no grace at all in one person’s salvation while those around him perish. I understand that people want to relate their feeling of connection to a God to what happens to them. I understand the huge gratitude one feels after a brush with death or maiming. Surely there’s someone (Someone?) to thank for being alive, they must feel. I’ve certainly felt that when my ass was narrowly saved from death.
It’s just that all anthropomorphic concepts of God, of omnipotence, of omniscience, and of divine Love, simply won’t stand up to scrutiny in the face of an exceptionalism where one person is arbitrarily saved and another isn’t. I think the nature of reality, and the problem of evil, is way, way deeper than that, and if someone is saved out of dozens, their only proper response is a great humility and gratitude, not some out-loud praising of a nut-case “god” who favors some over others for his “mysterious” and “unfathomable” reasons, as if God “reasoned” like a human, anyway. I happen to think that there is a way to live that brings more happiness and even physical safety and well-being into one’s life, but bad things *still* happen to very good people, and that’s a koan to keep in mind.
Wow, Steve. That lit a fire under your bum.
I calm myself by speculating that the divinity is just simply too “big” for us to understand except by analogy. I like the phrase “wholly other” to describe the divinity. I’m a little impatient when believers point to their scriptures and suggest that everything that can be known about their divinity is contained therein. That makes for a pretty small God. I also like the little play on words in the Wholly Other name for God.
This whole thing reminds me of the old saw about the three blind men feeling an elephant and each telling what they thought the object was.
I don’t lead a risk averse life. If I don’t have one or two near-death experiences a year, the I feel like I’m walking a little too far from the edge. That attitude really got rolling in 1990 when I was very sick for ten months, diagnosed with colon cancer (mom had it too), and went back to the USA to die. I was convinced that I was dying and I did a pretty good job of preparing myself for it. I nearly got comfortable with the idea by allowing myself to accept that my death is just a little part of some gigantic and very important thing that’s going on the details of which I’m not privy to. It turned out to be a ruptured appendix. I didn’t call it a miracle. I was glad to be alive, but I ascribed no particular spiritual significance to it. I know a lot of people had prayed for me and I did mention to my God that I wouldn’t mind sticking around for a while longer if there was anything useful that I could manage to find time to do while I’m othewise busy enjoying myself. I didn’t feel like God was “killing me”, nor did I feel, after the operation, that God “let me live”.
It just wasn’t my turn yet.
First, wow! So glad it wasn’t your turn yet! And so glad you made it and that I got a chance to “meet” you, so to speak, and become, in some non-trivial sense, a friend of sorts. Your experience sounds pretty heavy, and your conclusions seem very sane and healthy.
As for “lighting a fire under my bum,” yes, indeed, those particular issues do, still……I guess it points to old scars and some unhealed, unexamined areas, but hey, that’s me too, and I just have to pay attention to it and eventually see what those strong feelings mean — or not! I guess what really gets me is how this toxic theology is foisted on children, and how long it can take to come out from under that kind of conditioning.
I loved what you said about the Wholly Other, and the belief that scripture of any sort says it all. The idea of the divine as wholly other than anything we can think or know is of course a very strong strain in Hindu thought, especially Vedanta. It has the ring of truth to it, but in some Indian thought systems, it’s taken too far and falls into a absolute monism that misses the self-evidence of Love itself to itself. Through holding on to one concept of God, even a high and true concept, a person can miss the whole. My experience is that the “wholly other,” or “holy other” is also self-revelatory in manifest love and light and truth. Having some sense of the divine as “wholly other” is a finger pointing at the moon — it helps me to be willing to yield to the possibility that however sure I am that God is Love, I may only have the faintest hint of what that love truly is in and of itself, and of what the ultimate purposes and ends of Love are . I think this is where Zen can really help the theologian or believer — with the constant reminder to not be bound by any thought or concept, which doesn’t mean the deathless isn’t real or knowable. It’s just knowing without knowing — and now I sounding like Kwai Chang Caine! Better zip it!