i’ve stopped counting

I snuck out of work a few hours early today to attend the Austin World Can’t Wait protest and to try out my new digital camera. I took around 400 photos, but narrowed the list down to 158 of them before uploading my favorites to Flickr.

The most memorable part for me relates to this photo, which corresponded with a new speaker taking the mic. He started his speech by passing out that and other photos from Iraq, telling people not to be shy to take one because ‘there are plenty more where those came from.’

When he said that, the reality hit me. We’ve lost over a dozen soldiers since Monday while Iraq has probably lost another couple hundred people. And for what? Everybody (minus George and Dick) knows that our presence in Iraq is consistently making everything worse. More dead soldiers, more dead Iraqis, more hatred of American occupation, more excuses. Even the “stay the course” people have revised their position to “stay the course, just not in Iraq, at least not near any populated areas.”

Of course the administration isn’t getting the troops out today or tomorrow. It’s election season! Well I won’t hold that against them - clearly struggling to keep their own stranglehold on power is more important that overseeing and possibly preventing the continued death of the people they so often claim to care about protecting. They’ve got contributions to farm, commercials to approve, pages to blacklist.

That reality hurt for a moment, but I managed to repress it enough to continue with the picture-taking.

Lessons learned today re: photgrapherizationing:

• Camera shape means everything when getting someone to stand still and hold up a sign. I’m convinced not getting the ultra-compact camera was a good idea.
• You can’t fix a decapitation - zoom out a little or pan up instead of ruining the shot.
• ‘Oh my camera case couldn’t possibly flip over and dump out’ is not a smart thing to believe.
• Read the manual. I really had to just hope that I was actually recording the pictures today. I got lucky, but there was a very real chance that I was just killing batteries and fooling a lot of people.