In the days that followed I joined a small but vocal group of people from Aiken calling for protection of the rights of women’s and others. It’s taken me a few weeks to get these pictures off my camera and posted, but I did want to get them up for anyone who is interested. There are people in South Carolina who dissent.

Life for Faith wasn’t always easy. She spent a little time on the race track before they closed, and was among the last dogs to ever race in Florida. Her first adoptive home didn’t treat her well, and she bounced back to the rescue group underweight, with a cracked tooth, and uncontrolled multi-drug resistant worms. But those problems are gone (at least we hope, the worm treatment takes several months and we just got our first clean test last month – need three in a row). But Faith found a life she loves in our home.

She loves to cuddle with her brother.

She loves paper towels.

She loves a good inverted nap.

She even loves hiking with us in the mountains of North Carolina (trust me on this one, she doesn’t hold still again until she’s napping when we are done).

Like many people I aspire to be more like my dog. She has handled life’s ups and down with grace (mostly) and forgiveness (graciously – even after I trim her nails). I hope to learn to be as openly loving as forgiving as her.

Each year opens with a parade to celebrate the diverse set of communities that have settled in and around Augusta.

The whole event is built around artists selling their work. They manage to pull in people from a fairly large area, but also make space for young local artists to try to get started selling their work.

For us, and for many others, the variety of ethic foods available for purchase is a large part of the draw.

It’s also a great event for just plain people watching. Between watching the various performances, enjoying the vendors, and the many activities, there are lots of chances to watch people having a good time with their friends and family.

Mixed in with the vendors, food, family activities, stages, and other goes on are always a mix of street performers.

There are several stages setup throughout the event, spanning several city blocks. The performances range from local signers to dance troops, street performers

Until next year…

In my post on being an activist back in March I mentioned attending the Hague Appeal and the peace walk that followed. I was part of a delegation from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting; a group mostly made up of college students and a few older high school students, along with a few adults who handled the logistics and kept us on track more or less.

I have ten boxes of slides, and a few years ago I scanned them as best I could but frankly the scans aren’t great. The slides, which were more than ten years old at the time, had already started to fade and color shift as a result of their age. I did some color correction as I prepped them for this, but I also like the feel of some being somewhat faded and shifted with time. There are shared here full frame, and some are roughly cropped, but none carefully realigned. Since they are now pushing twenty I decided that I wanted to leave them all at or near full size and try to capture a bit of the way I saw the world then, and less of how I would edit it now. I like the rough visual feel they have as part of reflected on partially faded memories.

That trip was an important few weeks in my life, and I’ve been having a great time going back through the pictures. If you were with me on that trip and wonder if I have other pictures of you kicking around I might so send me a note and I’ll try to see what’s around and sent some your way.

These panoramic pictures were created with a combination of my iPhone in pano mode and some that are stitched together with Hugin.

Update: we did manage to get back on Sunday for another meal and to see a few more performances.

So I charged the camera battery, cleared the memory cards, and made sure I’d have pictures to share. Aiken is a small city in a state that’s hostile to gun control, so even a small crowd is an impressive turn out. The turn out was good, the people were energized, and the kids were clear in their ask: they want to be safe at school and they don’t think that should mean they have to be surrounded by armed guards (police or teachers).

As we walked around the harbor I took pictures of the opera house from several different angles. And that got me thinking about the advice I’ve been given both about photography and about my work: make sure you try things from different angles.

Too often all kinds of experts get into a rut and lose track of the perspective non-experts, and other experts with whom they disagree. Cable news channels like to package those ruts as two talking heads yelling at each other by calling it “debate”.

It’s an easy trap to fall into even without watching the people paid to yell at each other. Sometimes when we look at a problem twice it looks different because we changed something small, and we think we’ve seen all the valid angles. But we’ve just reinforced our sense of superiority not actually explored anything interesting yet.

And sometimes you look from a new angle and something easily recognizable becomes new and different, but that’s not always an improvement. There are reasons for best practices, and sometimes we just reinvent the wheel when we try to break our own path.

And sometimes it is important to think about the extra details that you can capture by changing perspectives and taking the time to figure out the best approach.

But when you take the time to look at things from different angles, perspectives, and positions sometimes you get to discover something you didn’t know to ask about.

For me the best moments are those gems you find when you take the time to explore ideas and view points and discover something totally new. Nothing beats travel to help you remember to change your perspective now and again.