One of my son’s closest friends lost his father today. Shocking, tragic and unexpected. The boy is 15 and his father was only in his late 40′s, maybe 50, just a couple of years older than me. A terrible loss for the whole family, yet my thoughts keep turning to the boy. I know that being thrust into manhood and enduring one of the most difficult time periods in a young man’s life without the benefit of a father’s guidance is not unusual, but it is extraordinarily unfair.

My heart goes out to this young man. I hope that his family and his friends can help him through this loss and through life.

Day after day of reviewing names, considering what you will need in the future to succeed, and taking decisions that will affect peoples lives. It is a wearying experience, full of sleepless nights and stressful days. It is also a learning experience, one which I hope I never need to apply the lessons from (but probably will). I saw what was done well, and what was done poorly. I took part in decisions based on logic and principal, and saw other decisions based on politics and personal relationships. If I am completely authentic with myself, I’m sure some of my own decisions were influenced by personal relationships and politics, or at the very least I turned away when I saw it.

So often these decisions are taken in near vacuum, self imposed by management. It is a terrible thing for those inside the vacuum, starving for air (input), and for those outside, aware “something” is happening yet unable to have their voices heard. The need to “control” the information nearly always trumps the desire to communicate and collect input to assure the best possible decisions are taken. It is a great pity.

I learned and I grew. I saw great strength and determination in the faces of many who left, frankly making it even more difficult to let go of exceptional people. It’s tragic that companies are not as adept at adjusting their revenue to match their talent as they have become at adjusting their “resources” (what you call people to depersonalize them) to match the business level they accept.

So what would be the perfect camera? For me, it’s one where the technology gets out of the way of the creative act. Lets face it, photography was invented by geeks and developed for decades to satisfy geeks. It’s all about the technology. If you don’t understand the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, film sensitivity and available light, you’re doomed. We turn our collectively superior noses up at people who just want to “point and shoot”. It has been so since the earliest days of silver plates and today, with digital, NOTHING is different. Why? The film paradigm haunts us. Photographers know how cameras are supposed to work and camera designers know how to make them work in the way photographers expect. And we love it. Explaining the nuances of focal ratios and the relationship between f-stop and depth of field makes photographers feel smart. The more fiddly bits we can adjust the happier we are. Go ahead, deny it, but in your heart you know it to be true.

Digital has the power to change this, and to let creativity be king. Why should I have to care about the sensitivity of my “film”. The perfect camera will capture all the available photons flying around and simply let me choose how light or dark I want the scene. Is there too much light to shoot “wide open” with that slow shutter speed to allow motion to blur to softness? Why should I care? Give me a dial that lets me choose how much of the scene should be in focus, and another that lets me choose how much motion I can freeze. Let me set these in ANY combination I want for the picture I “see”, and let the hardware and software be smart enough to do the rest. Give me 10 or more stops of dynamic range (another thing photo geeks like to talk about). Why not? Don’t tell me it can’t be done, I will assure you it will be not only possible but common in the future, that is if the camera designers stop thinking about converting film to digital.

This is my perfect camera. Purists will call this cheating. Photo snobs will claim that you must understand the film paradigm to have creative control. I say bunk.

H.I.M. The Shah - 1952

One of the things I got from Dad was a passion for photography. Fortunately that means that Dad took many many pictures of all the places he went as part of the US Army Air Corp and USAF. I have several thousand slides that I am working my way through scanning in order to preserve these images. If has been a wonderful journey so far as each image is a new discovery.

I’ve recently been scanning slides from Iran, where Dad was assigned from 1952-1954 as a USAF advisor and C-47 flight instructor to the IIAF. This is a very different Iran than what we think of today! Dad considered these men friends, and was privileged to have a friendly relationship with H.I.M. The Shah of Iran. To the right the Shah is pictured at an IIAF event in 1952.

Nixon in Iran - 1953

Richard Nixon visited in 1953 (he was VP at the time). I found these pictures of Nixon in Teheran greeting an Iranian general (name undocumented) and a close up (unfortunately slightly out of focus). It would turn out that this would be one of many meetings between Dad and Nixon. In private aviation Dad would fly Nixon on campaign visits in the southeast USA.

Picked up this Flickr MeMe from Thomas Hawk’s feed. This is the 6th photo on the 6th page of my photostream. Pretty nice if I do say so…

Two weeks ago I made a trip to our offices in Chennai. I stayed at the wonderful Fisherman’s Cove resort which is quite near our new offices. The office facility is outstanding, one of the finest in Chennai and the employees and staff keep it immaculate. I have a very enjoyable visit and I must say that the only think I REALLY dislike about traveling to India is the fact that it takes 24 hours to get there! Some pictures in the gallery.

The Financial Times reports on an increasing number of UK based companies that are reversing outsourcing strategies and bring production “back home”. The bigger trend remains in the other direction of course, but it is interesting to see how creative companies can get about reducing costs locally when they run into difficulties in low cost countries. If it is this difficult from the UK to poland, consider the difficulties from the US to China…

There were two “thermal” solar stories in the last two days. One from Bloomberg about a deal involving Chevron and Google and one from the LA Times about an Edison deal with ESolar. One with parabolic mirrors and one with flat mirrors, yet both seem to have a similar output per acre of land dedicated to collection structures. not enough information to compare the installed cost basis or the $ per kWH for each plant. Still, if we need 1000 acres (exposed to 340 days/year of sunlight) for every 120000 or so homes, I think this is a very limited technology in its ability to solve our energy needs.

Finally, the Grey Old Lady reports that not one, but TWO men were arrested today for climbing the NYT building. At seems that neither of them will qualify for the Darwin Awards this year as then both were safely returned to ground level (in handcuffs).