One Thing About Ducks Is, They Go "Quack"

As far as hoary sayings go, few beat: "A picture is worth a thousand words." It is, like most famous maxims, almost always true. Often because it has to be. When words cannot take sufficient shape, a captured image can encapsulate with near-perfection an event and/or emotion that seems beyond the grasp of mere human intelligence. If a new parent wants to get across the sublime sensation of viewing and hearing and feeling their infant in its first moments and days, they would be better served at bypassing words as the method to express to others this incredible push of emotions, be they spoken or written, and just get a picture of themselves holding the newborn. The punch drunk ecstasy evident in that snapshot will speak for itself.

For a quick fix, a snapshot is unbeatable. It achieves maximum impact with minimum demand.

That said...any of the blogs on my roll to the right--and innumerable others that I have not yet added--are worth 25 Flickr pages. Which is no disrespect to Flickr, a site I visit daily. Anyone can fancy themselves Ansel Adams for the 2-double and snap shot after shot of ducks in the midst of aqua laze, skies in various hues, and trees shedding for the season. I do it, not least because the City Park is one of the few true bright spots Hagerstown has to offer up. It's a relaxation method. If I ever wrote to relax, I'd stop writing. A gifted photog can capture what something is and show you slices of life. A skilled writer can tell you why that something is and give you slices of life.

Why do photographers who put their works on the Internet get so precious that they tattoo their pictures with ugly watermarks? Nice way to ensure no plagiarist will go unpunished, but they've also ruined their shot for the Web audience. Unless you want to spend some money and get a print!

Text plagiarism is still a problem in the blogosphere, thanks in large part to a lack of similar precautionary measure. Although...I guess if you wrote a piece you were proud of and didn't want it stolen by some lazy, ignorant sack of unemployed loser you could just put a watermark over what you perceived to be the least-impressive paragraph.


Flickr writing photography