Narrators for the Story of My Life

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

I woke up this morning wondering who we should nominate to do the voice-overs for the story of my life. I know many of you were wondering.

Being a dynamic thinker and noble adventurer, I always have to keep one eye on posterity. That includes who will narrate the movie about my life, after I'm dead and gone.

Well, quick up on the list were some women who had been on TV before: Dee Dee Myers, Mika Brzezinski and a scientist who I think was Doctor Lisa Kaltenegger, a Harvard University astronomer.

All three of those people got my attention for thinking before they started talking. I also notice that when they don't have something to say, they are quiet. Those three avoid the key problem of blathering away on TV about nothing. Like 'em or not, they're thinking chicks, so they make the list of narrators.

Well, while I was tinkering around with trying to figure out if the person whom I'd seen on television was Dr. Kaltenegger or not, I ran across these ridiculous lists of women scientists.

I say ridiculous because most of these lists were of completely fake, totally fictitious, female scientists. Apparently, a theatrical facsimile of a thinking female is preferable to some of the women who've already thought up something! At least when it comes to putting them on TV.

So, to fix this, I decided to add some of these women astronauts to my list of people who are welcome to narrate the story of my life.

I don't care if they can't read a Space Shuttle index card cheat sheet aloud well enough to make it to the morning shows on the local UHF station.

What made the list a touch more ridiculous was that

• I had never heard of any of these people
• The list of female astronauts was particularly long
• Their accomplishments were intense in thought and broad in scope

And it took a whole 35 seconds to scroll down the list (I didn't get even halfway through the alphabet before their accolades started to wear me out) and pick some of them at random. That's right: random.

It turns out that you can't swing Katie Couric's lip gloss applicator stick without marking up one of these ladies' Ph.D's in Something Complicated.

Most of these ladies have spent more time flying through space in a week than most Hollywood starlets have spent on TV in a lifetime.

It turns out that many of them have been Chemists, have had military careers (many are Colonels and Generals), and have somehow ended up associated with labs and observatories in space (which made me wonder what the hell everyone else is doing up there).

Here they are:

Eileen Collins. Ancestral home from the County Cork in Ireland, not too far from where the O'Keefe's hail from. First female Space Shuttle Commander. She had two previous missions which involved piloting the Space Shuttle, both involved rendezvous with the space station Mir.

Collins seems to be one of those astronauts who ends up going into space because she's on The Pilot track. Eventually those people try skipping the "air" portion of aircraft and end up flying spaceships. Collins not only flies, but has been put in charge of the whole thing. Space Shuttle Commander.

Cady Coleman. Chemist. USAF. Scheduled to hit the star chart in 2010. She plays in a band, married a guy who's into art glass and she knows enough about Chem to explain this stuff to you better than I could.

Nancy J. Currie. US Army Colonel. Helicopter pilot. Four time astronaut.

Just think on that a second. Apparently her hobbies include flying complicated machines really, really fast.

Nancy Davis. Engineer. Three shuttle missions. Operated a spacelab. Degrees from Georgia, Auburn and Alabama. We're confident that football season allegiances are a problem for her, but if anybody can figure that out, she probably can. I liked it that her education was laced with land grant university credentials. You don't have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to make it to the Space Shuttle. Good going, Nancy.

Anna Lee Fisher, M.D. Chemist. First mom in space. Apparently her hobbies include emergency medicine. Like a lot of these chemists, she's studied X-rays and crystals quite a bit. Doc Fisher was one of the people who developed and tested the robotic arm on the Space Shuttle. Without that robot arm, they wouldn't have gotten much done with those satellites.

Linda Maxine Godwin. This one got my attention because she was from Cape Girardeau. Some years ago, I worked a jobsite out there. I was at the airport. It turns out Rush Limbaugh was from Cape Girardeau. They named a street after him. It's one of the access roads on the airport. The way one of the locals told the story to me: he landed in a private jet, cut the ribbon on the street named after him, and then immediately got back on his plane and left town.

Linda Godwin has walked in space twice. Four shuttle missions. A whole lotta science experiments.

Two spacewalks. Cape Girardeau, how about naming a street after her?

Major General Susan J. Helms, USAF. Eight hour spacewalk, which set a record for duration. She's flown on four different Space Shuttles and the International Space Station. You might notice she's a general officer.

General officers sure do make good expert explainers on TV shows. I wonder when we're going to see female astronaut Major General Helms on TV telling us all about space.

Guessing from her resume, with 30 different airframe types under her belt, General Helms': turn-ons include "anything supersonic" and her turn-offs are "running out of oxygen."

If you ever wondered what it'd be like to have a woman with her finger on the nuclear button, count Helms in. How about "in" as "in charge" of like, Space Command, which would be just about everything the US Air Force decides to put into, or take out of, space.

Since she's been at it for a while now, you can consider her the Chief Nuker of menstrual punch lines about putting women in charge of lots of powerful stuff.

Historically, on the serious side, being a female commander of USAF Space Command may make her one of the most important women to ever live.

Millie Elizabeth Hughes-Fulford. This one's my favorite. Chemist and first female payload specialist. US Army Major (Medical Corps). This chemist figured out why astronauts undergo certain types of health effects when they fly through space. She had to do a lot of studying about blood, bones and genetics in order to come up with a sound answer.

Somebody should give these chicks a little more time on the Tube. They apparently think more than most people on TV. Think on that next time women are on TV for makeup commercials instead of space flight or other thinking stuff.

# # #

Talkie Talk: Films and Movies Seen and Scenic Through Chattanooga

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Coming up this Sunday and Monday, the return to Cable TV Channel 165 (Sundance) of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, about the Antarctic. We saw this one about a year ago in theaters. Clearly a good one for the big screen; you might want to catch it for recording.

If you get into Herzog, or haven't heard of him, I first caught him in two independent films, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (required watching at some point in life). The movie is about a college bet that Herzog loses, requiring him to eat his shoe.

Also good is La Soufrière a documentary about a volcano about to erupt, and those who refuse to leave the area.

Herzog has been doing bigger and bigger projects; the latest with some "name" stars, but his best work seems to be when he tells a documentary story all alone.

On that note, I'm willing to give Disney's "Oceans" a chance. We'll see how it does. I'm hoping it'll be a movie that uses color well.

For those that don't need color, but which were shot in it anyway, I'd have to list the here-and-gone The Last Station, a story about the final days of Leo Tolstoy. An excellent film, which should probably get Kelly Condon (Masha) and Christopher Plummer (Tolstoy) awards for something. Required watching for those of you who've read War and Peace. If you haven't read it, put it on the list.

The White Ribbon, because it's the only movie I've seen in town which was followed by someone in a row behind me calling out about the end, "That sucks!"

The White Ribbon didn't suck. It was a good German film in black and white, and it doesn't come with the usual cowboy round 'em up to justice ending because just about everyone in the entire town is guilty of at least one of the seven deadly sins.

I love black and white films, and still remember a little bit of my German. The White Ribbon was the best morality movie about the seven deadly sins I've seen since "Se7en" with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.

In an interesting coincidence, like Se7en, The White Ribbon's end credits look like a class in how to get credits done. Se7en's credits were played using an interesting device of cycling them from top to bottom; but The White Ribbon's credits are notable for their content and organization. The same for the movie posters.

The White Ribbon's crediting looks like what we expect from how it should be done. At least I thought so, when I had a look at what they did.

Interestingly, IMDB lists the film stock types for The White Ribbon as Kodak's latest color negative types in 35mm, but the film is in black and white. If it was a digital conversion, then they fooled me. I would have called it as Kodak Movie Plus-X or Tri-X, which is what I like to use in my old 16mm.

The White Ribbon runs locally until for a little bit.

To get yourself back up to speed on black and white movies, you can't miss the classic, the original, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. It's in the public domain, and available for internet download.

One film, which I chose to see twice in the same day, was The Art of the Steal about the Barnes collection out of Pennsylvania. The film clearly has a propaganda slant vilifying the Pew Charitable Trusts, but it vilifies them so well that the movie is worth seeing. Billed as a documentary, like Michael Moore films, this one's a propaganda piece for those of us not afraid to admit we like some persuading every now and then.

We get to see the face of Van Gogh's Postman. Considering that the post man was famously Van Gogh's only friend in that one village, it's worth see the movie just for that.

"[This review] will never be moved.
It will never be sold . . . "

Charlie Roses' interviews have brought two more films and filmmakers to our attention.

I don't know when or if either of these are coming to town, but you may not want to wait for them to.

The first is any documentary film by a man named Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman does cinema verite, which is what Reality TV has failed to be. Unlike the Reality shows of our time, Wiseman's films are interesting, educating, revealing, and flat out good movies. 15 minutes of his stuff pretty much smokes all of Fox's Reality Channel nonsense, along with their Big Three Broadcaster cohorts.

Try either Basic Training (1971) or Near Death (1989). I recommend these two solely because I was able to see two very short clips from those films; they're both in black and white; and, like many of Wiseman's films, they deal with institutions and matters of society.

Wiseman's films look like they could do well for their audience's chosen at random; but, it's also clear from his camera work that the films in silver are working out better than the ones that he bothered to record in color.

Finally, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Solely because this one will be the La Femme Nikita of 2010. I'm talking about the movie, not the cable series. This one will be good.

Catch 'em all. They're better than anything on broadcast TV besides PBS.

# # #

Take It or Make It? Sean Peele Photography and Infringement Allegations

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

UPDATE: This article, originally published about a month before this printing, was taken down after some of the controversy died down. We were all sick of hearing about Mr. Peele's unscrupulous decisions.

Unfortunately, many of the exact same images which were used by Mr. Peele with the first website have returned under a new name. The article goes back up and stays up. While I can't say that this type of behavior is typical of the photographers I've met, in this particular instance, I think our readers will find that a significant amount of the content presented below is independently verifiable and observably true.

Subsequent discoveries revealed that it is likely that some of the infringement instances discussed in detail below were but a small percentage of the overall occurrences. The scope and intensity of the unethical practices involved may be wider and greater than those covered here.

* * * * *

Do you take pictures or make pictures? And if you didn't make them, is it right to take them and present them as though the work was your own?

Those are the questions surrounding the website of San Diego photographer Sean Peele. A recent Photo.net thread highlighted the possibility that Mr. Peele may have appropriated many images and misrepresented them to the public as being his own work.

We've been able to confirm at least four instances of misrepresentation on Mr. Peele's website. As many as 37 photographers' work may be affected.

The impact of this is that many of the world’s better wedding photographers, some of whom have scored among the top 100 in peer reviews and critiques on Photo.net, have had their work taken and published under someone else’s name.

The people featured in the photos may have had no idea that this was happening to their images. Many of the clients have contracts with their hired photographers, which in some way license or limit or specify how the wedding photos would be used in the future.

Customers for Mr. Peele’s business were recruited, in part, by these appropriated photographs, so that he could profit. It’s not entirely clear which, if any, of the photos were actually made by Mr. Peele. Some are observably not his work.

The advertisements on Mr. Peele's website appear to have been a blend of three kinds of photos: some of his own, stock photos related to weddings, and photos made by other photographers and used without their permission.

Peele advertised wedding and event photography on his website for prices beginning at $390. Several of the photographers whom he took photos from offer services at near ten times that amount.

One such photographer is Rachel Barker. We came across Barker's work when we identified someone in one of her photographs. That photograph appeared on Mr. Peele’s website.

The Soldier in Photo 19

The groom wore Army Blues and was kissing his bride as they held up their wedding rings. The rank on the uniform sleeve was Specialist. The groom was a lower enlisted Soldier in the US Army. His nametag was clearly visible.

Click a few tabs into Mr. Peele’s website, and one could see the photo. Enter > Engagements and Weddings. It was the 19th photo in the line.

By reading the groom’s uniform, we were able to track him down. He's James Dreussi. After the photo was made, he continued with his military service, progressed and completed his enlistment. He is now working as a professional actor and is represented by an agency in Ohio.

With a check against the IMDB and some other websites, we were able to confirm that he was probably the same then-SPC Dreussi that was in the photo.

We asked Dreussi about the use of his wedding photo on Sean Peele's website. Dreussi was able to confirm that he was pictured in the photo, and that he had no idea that Mr. Peele was using that picture in his advertisements.

Dreussi wrote that the photo had been made by Rachel.

Rachel Barker is a professional photographer and ordained minister in Charlotte, North Carolina. She has been working as a wedding photographer for years; her pictures are good. Her recent bookings are made through Millie Holloman.com. Pricing begins at $3200.

Website Down & Some Photos Still Up

By 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, the website for Sean Peele photography had shut down. Still, several other websites were up, and transmitting his web page advertisements.

On one of them, we could still see the stock photos identified by Photo.net moderator Bob Atkins as distributed from iStockphoto.com.

When photographers submit photos for sale through a stock photography agency, they often have little or no control over who buys the photo, or what they use it for.

Some of the photos on Sean Peele's website feature brides in dresses, smiling at the camera. Two of them are clearly from iStockphoto. The photographer who made those is apparently Katrina Brown.

On one website, http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4340009.htm, we can see Peele's advertisement with the stock photos there.

In a succession of photos on web pages describing Sean Peele’s services, we can see a man who looks similar. In two of the photos on the Party Pop.com page, we see a younger man. He's happy and smiling. He has short dark hair. Reclining on the grass with him is a brunette.

Two photos after this one, we see a man carrying a brunette on his back as he runs down a beach. It looks very much like the same pair of people. The bangs of her hairstyle look very much like the bride on the page a few photos later. They're young and happy and smiling.

People Looking Out For Number One

On a later page, related to a MySpace page, we see an older man labeled as Sean Peele. This man has recorded some songs. One of the songs is on the MySpace Page. It’s about Valentine’s Day. Another song is about high school. On an album cover icon, on another page about this man’s music, we can see smiling man with dark hair and touch of a receding hairline under a cowboy hat. It’s labeled as the music of Sean Peele. The song is "God Save Our Future Children If You Can."

The lyrics we can hear on the iTunes preview say:

"God, look upon our virtues

And see what we become.

There's just so many people

Looking out for number one.

Please help us give more to each other

And seek righteousness again.

God, save our future children, if you can."

The voice singing that song sounds like the voice on the recorded message at the telephone number for Sean Peele Photography.

On the website that came down, www.seanpeelephotography.com, was a photo of a man sailing. This same photo turned up on his Photo.net bio page and a Classmates.com entry linked to Sean Peele’s Google profile. It appears to be a picture of Sean Peele. Hair's a little thinner. He appears a little more stout.

Finally, on a Facebook page for a man named Sean Peele, we see one more photo that looks similar to the others. A little older still, we see a man wearing a camera and some dark clothes. He's standing on some stone stairs. There's a manicured garden in the background. Green, green grass and some water are nearby.

Below the picture, on the Facebook page, is a text box. It read, "Everything you think you know about me is wrong."

Candidacy and Being Candid

One of the facts which has come up is that on cached Google profile, Mr. Peele mentioned that he was a graduate of US Navy Officer Candidate School.

Looking over the Navy's OCS website, we see instructors yelling at candidates. There are pamphlets of procedures to read before you get there.

"PT starts immediately upon arrival," the Navy's OCS website noted. This means that the person who volunteers for a military officer candidacy will face constant scrutiny, and much of that scrutiny involves stress.

In Navy OCS the training is similar to most military schools which are candidacies. In the military, a candidacy is a time in training when the candidate is expected to show that he's already capable. It's a different kind of scrutiny. While some technical training is provided, and the training is phased, the person undertaking the training is expected to show throughout that he's the kind of person who's worth commissioning when the training is over. This pattern of scrutiny is mentally and emotionally more challenging than some other forms of military schooling.

OCS graduates aren't perfect. Yet, they have a tendency to be familiar with their own imperfections by the time they complete those courses.

The scrutiny officer candidates experience is somehow inconsistent with the behavior we've seen on Sean Peele's website.

Has Mr. Peele been pressured by something into bending some ethical guidelines? On these websites, it looks like some of them may have been bent until they were broken.

The Navy OCS website also mentions that the very large and sophisticated swimming pool that they use, all 347,000 gallons of chlorinated water held by The Combat Pool, was dedicated on July 9, 2009, to Medal of Honor recipient LT Michael P. Murphy, a US Navy Seal Officer.

LT Murphy died on a SEAL operation in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. The certificate for the Medal of Honor begins with the citation of conspicuous gallantry before the enemy. It tells us the same story we see in other posthumous Medal of Honor citations. Engaged by a much larger force, once again one man took great risks, despite wounds, led troops, continued fighting, and worked to do the right the thing.

The word "gallantry" is reserved in the military for citations like these. Medal of Honor recipients are the equivalent of knights of the realm in the United States. They’re traditionally saluted by everyone, regardless of rank, when they wear the Medal of Honor.

Lone Survivor and Two Names

The cached Google profile for Sean Peele listed key biographical details and included, under the category of "Other Names" Christopher Sean Peele. A man signed a review on Amazon.com as Christoper S. Peele "Sean Peele" from San Diego.

The Amazon review commented on the book Lone Survivor, which is about the SEAL operation on which LT Murphy lost his life. The review concluded with the words, "Thank you Marcus Luttrell, I salute you."

Marcus Luttrell was the sole survivor of the SEAL mission. At the time, he was a Hospital Corpsman Second Class. He was an enlisted sailor. We know this from the Medal of Honor documents like the Summary of Action, published by the Navy, on their websites.

Just as Marcus Luttrell was enlisted in the Navy, so also SPC Dreussi was enlisted in the Army. Mr. Peele, when he served, became an officer. His review of Lone Survivor was posted to Amazon in November of 2007.

Two of the photos on Mr. Peele’s website that I reviewed, and interviewed a photographer about, were initially uploaded to the Internet on November 14, 2007.

Nadine O’Hara made those two photos. In the technical data that accompanies those uploads to portfolios on Photo.net, the date of upload is recorded and displayed.

In an adjacent Amazon review, two years later, Peele wrote about some difficulties he had with upgrading his copy of Photoshop CS2 to CS4. This computer program is the premier image editing program; it's widely used by professional photographers to edit digital images. This upgrade apparently took place in September 2009.

In that review, we see accounts of everyday frustrations. Peele kept on hold for an hour. The paragraphs recite the trials and tribulations of upgrading Photoshop and trying to get some customer service from a large corporation. He had to cycle through those menus of automatic help and scripted service several times. It's the same set of headaches that anyone who's been on hold for a really long time might imagine.

That review was published in 2009.

Landslides Into the Ocean

The Google profile for Sean Peele listed several companies he had worked for: Pfizer, Bristol Myers-Squibb, Novartis. All three are pharmaceutical companies. He doesn’t mention in what capacity or when he worked with them. In the past few years, news stories about those corporations have included topics like layoffs, restructuring and lawsuits.

No large company could escape marketplace tribulations by 2009. By then things had gotten tougher all over.

One of the bright spots of 2009 was the success of students at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. Before it was renamed in 1991, it was Rolling Hills High School. Sean Peale went there; he graduated in 1976, according to the biography which had been up on Classmates.com.

This biography was linked to from the Google profile page for Sean Peele. That bio carried the same picture as the biography on www.seanpeelephotography.com.

Palos Verdes High School tells us a little bit about the kind of community that's grown up from Rolling Hills High School. 23 National Merit scholars graduated from there in 2009. It's ranked 89 out of 18,500 schools evaluated by US News and World Report. The school's list of accolades reads like the home room roll of really good school stuff.

They have the country's largest high school publication: their yearbook. There's probably some photography in there.

The community of Ranchos Palos Verdes also seems to have terrain that's prone to landslides into the ocean. Ranchos Palos Verdes is on the southwestern corner of Los Angeles County, which encompasses a big section of Sean Peele's described sales and service territory.

There’s been a landslide of public outcry against this specific instance of photographic piracy.

# # #

Bibliographic References:

List of photographers whose work may have been affected:

Chris Harrison

Edward Horn

Dave Gardner

Edwin Mendoza

Jerry King

Tracy Fairey

Thomas Paul

Michael Brown

Zulkefli Mohd Zain

AJ Zammit

Christine Sharp

Kevin Teachey

Vince Crisler

Arthur Yeo

Lloyd Rowson

Derick Africa

Sergey Usik

Adrian Blanco

Birte Ragland

Carlos Ramirez

Clemson Chan

Michele Rivera

Frode Fanebust

Jay Philbrick

Tim Holte

Jose Francisco Sanchez Diaz

Michael Shuaib

Elaine Vang

Regina Maldonado

Steve Skibbie

John Karamanos

Randy Douglas

Chad Lorenzana

Jerry Ting

Mike Palhegyi

Katrina Brown

Rachel Barker

US Navy websites:

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/ocs.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/ocs_program_overview.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/ocs_academics.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/combat_pool.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/pdfs/Updated.Gouge.Pack.OCS2.pdf

http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/soa.html

http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/oc.html

http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/index.html

Photo.net web pages:

http://photo.net/wedding-photography-forum/00W132

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6640660

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6640648

http://photo.net/gallery/photocritique/filter?period=5000&rank_by=sum&category=Wedding+and+Social&store_prefs_p=1&shown_tab=0&start_index=96&page=9

Web pages about or consulted about photographers and people involved:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2830379/resume

http://rannbphoto.blogspot.com/

http://www.millieholloman.com/rachel/

http://www.millieholloman.com/

http://photo.net/photodb/user?user_id=768546

http://www.lafflerphotography.com/ [Experience to Work Quality]

http://www.lafflerphotography.com/index2.php [“Who Me”, “Weddings”, “Rates”]

Web pages consulted about Sean Peele:

http://www.seanpeelephotography.com/

http://photo.net/wedding-photography-forum/00W132

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=sean+peele+photography&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4340337.htm

http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4340009.htm

http://www.google.com/profiles/seanpeelephotography?hl=en

[Cached] http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:uGrnqAg2tgYJ:www.google.com/profiles/seanpeelephotography%3Fhl%3Den+sean+peele+photography&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3PD2L5EF4ATHP/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1172015082&ref=ts

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/sean-peele/id337777282

http://www.myspace.com/seanpeele

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/forum/topic/878684

http://www.projectwedding.com/post/list/warning-sean-peele-of-seanpeelephotography-com-is-a-scam

http://www.shared-memories.com/OrangeCounty/photographers-oc.htm

http://www.shared-memories.com/RiversideCounty/photographers-rc.htm

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3PD2L5EF4ATHP/ref=cm_pdp_rev_more?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview#R3GGE8P49C9IQ7

http://photo.net/photodb/user?user_id=5347899

Web pages about Pfizer:

http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10005173/pfizer-aiming-for-30900-layoffs-through-2012/

http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2010/01/11/daily3.html

Web pages about Bristol Myers-Squibb:

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2007/September/07_civ_782.html

http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?symbol=BMY&type=djn

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/business/companies/bristol_myers_squibb_company/index.html

Web pages about Novartis:

http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=NVS

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/business/companies/novartis_ag/index.html

Web pages about Palos Verdes Peninsula High School:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palos_Verdes_Peninsula_High_School

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Palos_Verdes,_California

http://www.pvphs.com/

Writer’s notes, correspondence & communications with various sources.

# # #

Originally published under this hyperlink: http://www.agxphoto.com/2010/03/take-it-or-make-it-sean-peele.html

Scout Out Those Locations!

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

I had an awesome photo session this morning. I don't know how the pictures came out yet, but the session went great. It was like this:

I scouted out the camera position I wanted to use over a year ago. I wanted to photograph the start of the Chickamauga Chase. I woke up less than an hour before the race start.

Coffee. Camera bag. One camera with three frames left on the 120mm Ektachrome. Get set to drive out there. Car won't start. Wait that out. Hit the road.

The key aspect that I figured out a year ago was to use the roads outside of the park, off of the race course, but very near a desired location, to bring me to a spot that I chose as a vehicle dismount point. That's "parking space" for the rest of y'all.

I arrive with three minutes to the start time on the car's dashboard clock.

Pick up the stuff. Walk 25 feet from the car. Set down the tripod into position.

Boom! A large black powder canon, just out of sight, signals the beginning of the race.

Mount the camera on the tripod. Switch over to a telephoto lens I brought. Remove lens cap. Check the light.

Here come the runners! In a nice thick pack of moving people.

Click, click, click. Film winding. Roll done.

Reload with black and white, just because.

I look over to see if I can find anything interesting. There are about six people wearing T-shirts that say, "Run for God." They're walking.

Three more photos.

Pack up and leave. Here's the sweet part: these events normally take several hours. I wasn't having any of that. I walk back to the car. I get in it. I turn around and go back the way I came. Travel unimpeded by race course traffic! Back on coffee break in about 15 minutes after I left.

Ahhh. Yes! This is The Life.

Scout out camera positions and access paths in advance. Logistics can make or break photo shoot plans. In this case, it made a three hour wait-around turn into 15 minutes of what I wanted.

We'll see how the photos turn out, but it almost doesn't matter. It was smooth, fast and satisfying. I followed it up with morning coffee.

# # #

Medical Payment Reform: Guiding Our Leaders Into Reality and Beyond Their Talk

by John O'Keefe-Odom

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Commentary

It's medical payment reform. It's not health insurance reform, health care reform or any kind of health anything reform drummed up as a catchy name by any business or political group. It's medical payment reform.

No one pays for health, beyond grocery bills and the costs of operating bathrooms and kitchen appliances. We pay for medicine. That is what medical payment insurance is for.

We pay for professionals to help us because we don't understand how our own body can heal itself. We can't always set those conditions by ourselves. There are times when we need help. That help comes in the form of advice, orders, guidance, procedures and objects directed at two main goals: the control of bodily destruction and the relief of pain.

That help lets our bodies heal themselves. The help that does that is medicine.

Health is about jogging and flossing. Our health insurance doesn't pay for jogging shoes, gym fees, or anything that actually sustains a state of positive health. That's not its main function.

Our medical payment insurance, which is what it actually is, covers the payments we need to make in order to receive medicine to control bodily destruction and alleviate pain.

With destruction and pain stopped, hopefully our bodies will grow and heal into a strong state of well being.

No one needs a form of insurance to cover the fees over at "Intro to Pilates", so let's stop kidding ourselves by calling it health-anything.

We have medical payments to make, and some insurance to help us along the way as someone else profits. That would be medical payment insurance. Our recent changes in federal laws have changed how those moneys will be collected, kept and distributed.

With all the political blabbering that's been thrown around over these important laws over the payment of money in exchange for pain relief and destruction control within our own bodies, it's time we started asking some questions that will lead us to some concrete answers that don't expose us to manipulation from businesses and political groups.

Below are some of the assertions I'd like to make, some of the questions that I'd like to ask, and what and why I'd like to see them answered.

1. Avoid Penalizing Doctors, Nurses and Technicians for These Payment Changes.

These people who are going to do the work of actually trying to help us heal ourselves probably don't deserve to be slapped with another huge bill. As it is, we've already charged them astronomical amounts of money so that they can have the privilege of being the person who will see us when we are at our worst.

In exchange for this investment, the truth is, we provided them little or no help when they were going through their hardest years of investment. It's clear: they've already paid and will continue to pay, enough of a high price for being our healers.

The doctors pay out about the cost of a house per year of education. They're going to need about five of those to get started, and the same house to live in that the rest of us need.

The nurses aren't much better off. They may need to make less of an up-front payment to get started, but they're on a different payment plan. They have to pay as they go, to sustain their education and training. Since everything gets more expensive as time goes on, this means that they, too, end up paying enormous fees just to keep working.

It's a wonder the lot doesn't sue us all for these payment schemes.

The technicians? Probably the most necessary jobs of the medical care industry, the technicians are probably routinely ignored and dismissed even though they have to keep the whole thing rolling.

None of these people need to pay more of anything as a result of medical payment reform.

There are some things we can do about it, which could include:

Substantive Educational Debt Relief. Every one of these people bought into a system that was based heavily on laissez-faire capitalism. It doesn't take a genius to see that medical payment insurance companies will push off profit losses onto everyone else in the chain. Since we have not made adequate provisions for trapping those medical insurance payment companies into accepting the burden of responsibility, we should see to it that they cannot effectively profit from billing the people who will help us in our times of need. One of the ways we can end-around this problem is by making a relieving effort to accept the financial burdens those doctors, nurses and technicians assumed when they went to school.

Realistic Tax Offsets and Credits. Namely, to the doctors, nurses and technicians to, again, end-around these lawyerly financial ploys that will be used to trick us into billing the medical professionals so that medical payment insurance companies can profit and can continue to increase their profits at everyone else's expense.

Encourage Pro-Bono and Volunteer Support. As in, stop billing doctors, nurses and technicians for providing help to people who cannot pay to receive help. When these people move to help us, as volunteers, they lose. There's some kind of loss of payment or income or progress of some sort that doesn't get accounted for. Each day of this that goes by will still be a day when medical payment insurance companies will attempt to seize and exploit this absence of liabilities they must assume.

2. Understand What Medical Care Is.

If there's one thing we've learned, it's that no one has managed to get on TV and tell us anything substantive about the actual procedures for providing common forms of medical care. We have no idea, collectively, what medical care really is. What does it take to really support and carry out some procedures over time?

Like procedures to counter:

heart attacks

cancers

strokes

AIDS

motor vehicle related traumas

What about basic injuries and ailments, like:

broken arm

broken leg

lacerations requiring stitches

sick babies with nondescript flu-like symptoms?

Truth is, we haven't heard anything substantive about how those treatments go, what kind of support do they need, what that support costs over time. What kind of tests will these people order, and typically how much do those cost and why?

Can we not get a realistic estimate for a hypothetical case based on realistic experience?

We have had more than enough sick and hurt people in our society for someone to finally tell us, what does all this really cost? Not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but a real, practical estimate realistically presented over time: what does that cost?

3. Identify and Ignore Obvious Manipulations

From "death panels" to "this won't change your health care", we've seen our political and business leaders make some of the most dumbfounding and unrealistic statements as part of selling their points of view to us. How gullible would we have to be in order to swallow any of these arguments?

It's important for us to identify and ignore some of the obvious manipulating tactics at hand:

Two Half-Truths and a Horror. A straw man syllogism or something like it: we see a pattern of speakers telling us two extremely limited truths and then following those with some horrific statement. Then, we're invited to agree with their opinion to deny this horror.

Parroted Talking Points. Six people in the same day using the same phrase to sell us a bill of goods we don't understand. Have decided on our own to believe in their point, or are they drilling us into accepting what they say?

Persuasive Phrasing. The speakers are setting the terms of the arguments, and making themselves the sole definer of the words involved. Health-anything is just one example.

Is it global warming or climate change? And, which persuader was speaking when those terms were used? What were they trying to persuade us into believing by picking those words?

Is it health care or medical treatment?

Identity Denial. Every lawyer's favorite trick, it's plagued us since before Plato's Republic, this path involves denying that something matches a description. Plato went on and on about what's a table, and the Bush administration tried to sell us on the idea that Prisoners of War were actually Detainees.

Once an identity or basis for an argument is denied, then the terms can be redefined by the next speaker as they wish. Identity denial often lays the groundwork for persuasive phrasing. We're sick of this, and it's not been fooling anybody for a while.

Invitational Clothing. Some of our nation's most important speakers are making wardrobe decisions that are one step short of a clown costume. Ask yourself: does this person look like their held office? Our news readers and commentators aren't doing much better.

These speakers are deliberately wearing or modifying their clothing to encourage us to identify with them and make the jump to agreeing with what they have to say, whether we understand it or not.

Excessive Color Saturation in Theatrical Staging. Our TV programs have fallen victim to the circus-style color schemes and corporate logo text placements. They come in a few main varieties:

i. Saturated simple shapes

ii. Complex designs with saturated colors, usually alternating warm and cold colors

iii. Excessive logo backdrops: lately, we've moved from repetitive logos to discretely placed logos.

iv. Catch phrase placards on podiums

None of these presentation aspects will control bodily destruction, relieve pain, or build sound laws.

4. Identify and Understand Our Current State of Medical Need

Anyone who's ever looked at Department of Labor figures knows that it's next to impossible to determine how many people are unemployed in any given area. Why? They parse the figures down so far that any and only positive arguments could be made based on them. We have a similar problem with facts about medical care in our communities.

How many people are in need of medical care right now, of what kind, and how much will that cost? What, exactly, are they going to have to buy?

The old, the indigent, the insured, and the emergency victims: what's a community really going to need to provide?

That is, what are people going to have to pay to care for themselves? Really.

Just as we've seen people sold on credit and financing when what they needed was savings and sound spending, so also we don't see the public being told directly what an individual will pay to stay alive during those times he really needs standard, quality, help.

We have yet to have anyone lay out for us just what these bills really are. Who pays what, for what, when, how does that cost increase over time, and so on.

All of this talk about medical care, and no one's told us about the actual medical care and its cost.

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