Connor Bevans

Okay, instead of writing a post about why I love Earth Day, I’ll give a post on why I hate it. Earth Day is a superficial method of making people think that they’re making a difference, while still doing relatively little. Oh, and yes, it’s just for a day. Not a year. That’s the thing about it, we should just be doing this one day, or one week, or one hour; We should be doing this every day, every week, every hour.

And we shouldn’t have to have some sort of gain for us to do this, because the real gain is our planet being healthier. Look at what happened on Earth Hour; We saved a ton of energy in just one hour. Now imagine if we were doing that at around 20-50% the level, all the time. We’d save at least enough energy to power over 459 million homes if just Toronto did Earth hour 24/7 for a year at 20% of the effectiveness of Earth Hour. Now imagine if the whole world did that. We’d be doing a great service to our lord, Mrs. Earthsberg, and a great service to ourselves. 

So, if you’re going to Earth Day, why not make it an Earth Year? It doesn’t take that much effort.

Over the past year few months I’ve improved as a photographer immensely. Though not only in my actual image capturing, in my editing abilities as well. Aperture and Photoshop help, but many of the adjustments I make could be done in GIMP, just not as easily or as quickly. Example  of a shot I would have taken a few months ago. Example of a shot I’ve taken within the last week or so. Clearly, there’s been a lot of improvement. I’ve begun to take more time into framing, and choosing a specific ISO. I still generally use AF, just because most of the time it’s correct, but at least when it’s wrong I’m fast enough at MF that I can get it focused in a few seconds. Overall, I can gladly and truthfully say, I am a much better photographer than I used to be.

PS - I’d like to thank Michael for letting me use his D40x at podcamp, there was only a 50mm prime lens on it, which made me have to really think about how I’m going to take a shot.