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| Camera: Ricoh GR IV Monochrome. There are a few mediation habitats I frequent. My Zaffu (meditation cushion), art galleries, old churches, sacred sites and libraries. To me, these places foster an immediate internal settling as soon as you cross into them. They are places of quietude and breath (Latin: spiritus). Presence and immediacy sit thick like warm toffee. In a culture obsessed with optimisation and presentation, where everything has to be extraordinary and flashy to have a change of…

Camera: Ricoh G IV Monochrome. Wandered around the Australian National Gallery for a while today. There is currently a new exhibition of Arthur Boyd tapestries (details HERE). Wowsers. These works are magnificent IMHO. Mr Boyd commissioned the tapestries to a group of artisans in Portugal. At 2.5 by 3.4 metres, each tapestry is a scene in the artist’s retelling of the life of one of the most venerated figures in human history, St Francis of Assisi. Woven at a scale more than 20 times larger…

This man comes with stories baked right in.

One moment he was briefing his staff...then he saw me sneaking up for a shot.

When you have a camera in your hand and a photographer’s eye, windows are no longer windows. Windows are mirrors, and kaleidoscopes, and liminal planes, and filters, and sheer dissectors and image reflectors. I took the main photo with my new camera (Ricoh GR IV Monochrome). It’s a tiny pocket-sized thing, an everyday carry. With no viewfinder, and only shooting monochrome, it is a simple, quality, point and shoot. Unlike my Fujifilm, I can travel light with it in my satchel, ready to spring…

Spring meetups and scroll-downs.

Between the quietand the quiet as tin,I heard the flowers fall...padpad.

There has been a ton of media coverage lately involving CEO’s and senior researchers from various AI companies (such as Anthropic and OpenAI) resigning or speaking out because they believe that AI is now posing an imminent existential threat to humanity. The now familiar trope that there is a 10-20% chance AI will kill all the humans is one example. Have we lost control of AI? Personally, I think it is kinda strange that these executives and senior AI techs from within many of the highly…

Once it gets dark these days I am ready to put the house to bed.

Currently listening to: End Times Fascism. By Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Rating: 4.5 out of 5. Here is my progress on storygraph. NOTE: The irony of listening to a book like this on Audiable (an app owned by Amazon) is not lost on me. If anyone has recommendations for alternate audiobook platforms I would be most grateful.

Two new additions to my back garden in anticipation of a scorching summer this year. I thought last summer was going to be killer, but I was wrong…it was warm, and sometimes hot, but remained manageable and without the environmental impacts I had (glass-half-emptily) expected. This year is forecast to be different. The developing (super) El Niño is making meteorologists uneasy, with predictions of severe storms and extremely unsettled weather patterns. In some sort of micro-prepping response,…

In a culture obsessed with optimisation and presentation, where everything has to be extraordinary and flashy to have a change of being noticed, the mundane image serves as quiet resistance. It suggests that unoptimised life, imperfect spaces, and unguarded moments have value worth documenting.—- Photoni.st

“Being good at one quiet thing at the end of a loud day is its own kind of medicine” SO I PAY ATTENTION. When I get home, I do not pour a drink. I do not take the edge off with a gummy. I do not, as my doctor once gently floated, pop a beta-blocker to ease the way my pulse climbs the stairs ahead of me at the end of a long day lawyering. Satisfied with the work but always trying to find a way to let the thoughts of tomorrow’s calendar rest, I go to the side yard instead. The summer sun comes in…

A couple of years ago I had a vigourous argument with a friend over which near-future event held the biggest existential threat to humanity. I felt it was either an accidental or intentional nuclear war, closely followed by some form of (human or naturally evolving) pandemic. She believed it was the collapse of humanity resulting from AI activity. Turns out…I was wrong and she was on point1. We are rushing towards the cliff edge with increasing momentum because a bunch of ultra-wealthy elites…

Some roadside shots taken on a late afternoon drive.

Personal websites (maybe) worth checking….IMHO. Chris Glass: There’s a slew of topics that’ll perk up my ears: design, music, travel, computers, books, ideas, and how awful and wonderful cellphone cameras are. JT: Hello my name is Jasper. I have a wife, a daughter, a cat, and a beard. I like cameras, music, video games, bicycles, baseball, German compound nouns, the Oxford Comma, and going to bed too late. It’s Craney: I’m Davey and although originally from Oldham in the North of England I now…

Spring afternoon at Tulip Tops just outside of Canberra.

I am of the growing opinion that AI will very quickly devolve the entire internet into an unusable overgrowth of digitally generated, popover infested slop and AI agent simul-babble. Amidst this tangled wasteland there will, however, remain some beacons of hope for the online creativity and connectedness of mankind. That hope is The IndieWeb. The IndieWeb is a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of owning your domain and using it as your primary online…

When human beings withdraw into the silence of the wilderness—away from the noise of urban life and the incessant demands of social obligation—an alternative mode of reality begins to disclose itself. Nature, in its untamed and resistant form, no longer functions merely as a passive setting for human activity. It emerges instead as an active presence, one that addresses the individual directly. Those who spend prolonged periods living with little more than the earth beneath them, the sky above,…

Every day is a good day. Yunmen gave a teaching, saying, “I’m not asking you about before the fifteenth day of the month. Why not say a word about after the fifteenth day of the month?” He answered himself, “Every day is a good day.”1— Koan #6 from the Blue Cliff Record. I have not taken any fresh photos for a few days now….because life. So today I am packing my camera and a picnic lunch and taking my girl and my dog for a spring drive out to visit a tulip farm (Location:…

Big Brother is watching and listening. I have noticed an increasing number of small black cameras (with an attached solar panel) perched high on light poles through out my home city (Canberra, Australia). Once you start noticing public cameras you see them everywhere…from traffic monitoring cameras at many intersections, to safety CCTV cameras in public spaces, to peoples public facing home personal security systems (sending their data to the system providers).These things are everywhere! The…

Camera: iPhone 17 pro max. Thirty-seven and something tenths of a cent per litre of super. Wow. I just paid 260 cents per litre. Well played Big Oil. Well played.

Just a simple photo of a couple walking beside the lake.

Camera: iPhone 17 ProMax. Analogue: 5 am. Woke up naturally (no alarm) 5:15 am. Pour-over coffee1. 6:00 am. Gentle stretching2. 6:30 am. 40 min Zazen (meditation) 7.30 am. Put on LP record. 7.31.am. Wrote in journal (pen and paper)3. 8.00 am. Put a new role of film in my camera4. 8.15.am Shower. Breakfast and another coffee5. THEN. Digital: 9.am. Turned on laptop to write this post to flaunt my analogue superiority, got assailed by 7 pop-up notifications, checked into them, got distracted by an…

Here is a fascinating interview with the philosopher Alex O’Connor. If you are interested in the topic of exploring consciousness this is well worth watching. If course if you are really interested in this topic, you can develop a practice of meditation. Which is less thinking about being and more being about being.

OK. Here is a sheet of my recent keepers. No particular order and selected for a myriad of reasons. Project: Out of all my keepers, I am going to select some keepers of the keepers…and I am looking into ways to self-publish them into a physical ‘zine’. Probably self printed on cheap paper and assembled with reckless abandon. These will be made available for free (well, cost of postage) to anyone who wants one. Stay tuned.

Spring has arrived. Sure, the trees are in bloom and all, but the real pink flags of spring are in other places: Half-empty foil blister packs of antihistamine tablets on the kitchen countertop. Fresh hanging laundry be-speckled with white Kleenex clumps because I forgot to check the pockets for used tissues. Again. Magpies watching from their high perches with the beady-eyed intensity of a Flock camera. I have not yet been swooped this season, but I can see them planning trajectories and…