Quarantine consequences

Our lives have changes drastically lately, albeit temporarily. For some, the change is an eye-opener, for others it’s hell on earth. I tend to be a moderate guy and often find myself halfway between two extremes. The quarantine is presented as a self-inflicted house-arrest. If you don’t stay inside, you are part of the problem.

Prop at the City Jail in Winnipeg

That is a view that goes a bit too far for me. It gets thrown on the same pile as the idea of “you should hoard toilet paper or you will be part of the problem”. For the record, I have bought one pack of TP, just like I always do. Not more, not less.

Being careful is something else. One won’t see me in a crowded supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. Some of my family here are working in those supermarkets and are on the front row for possible infections. Careful is one thing, overreacting is another. I have never swayed to the push of social opinions, though. I still want to go out in my car, the same way as I always do, yet without the friends that usually accompany me. Should I have “something”, I wouldn’t want to give it to them.

Prairie Crocus first flower of the season

Prairie Crocus first flower of the season

So that leaves me alone in my car. Alone with my camera and my ideas. Past week, Mother Nature decided to make us all stay home with a fresh layer of snow that not many cars will appreciate on smaller roads. Roads not being cleaned, as nobody is “supposed” to be driving on them anyway.

Red sided Garter Snake

Red sided Garter Snake

The result of this quarantine is that I have to resolve in presenting pictures from my library of pictures. There are enough pictures in there to choose from, but the post subjects haven’t come to me this week. So I tried another Lightroom CC experiment.

Yellow Warbler

Yellow Warbler

I took a random number of pictures and dragged them into a “Synced” collection in my Lightroom. As a result, Lightroom CC will pick those up and can make some interesting selections for me. After all CC has Artificial Intelligence built in, unlike the classic version of Lightroom. I hope that one day this post will be laughed at as being wrong about that Smile.

American Redstart

American Redstart

Lightroom CC has a filter that allows selections based on the assumption of what is in a picture. If I enter “Bird” in the search box, all birds invariably show up. When I entered “Snake” the snakes showed up. So I decided to enter something more generic as to get a wider range of pictures to choose from.

Mourning Cloak, an early butterfly in the season

Mourning Cloak, an early butterfly in the season

I entered “green” and “yellow” at the same time. The result is what is posted here. Well, part of the results. My library still contains a lot of pictures that should never see the light of day. Let’s call that a work in progress. An interesting result for these criteria was the American Redstart popping up. There’s no green or yellow in that picture, yet it showed up in the results. Oh well, it’s only artificial intelligence. Perhaps that is a plot to not scare us about how effective it can be for real Nerd smile.

Small path to nowhere

Small path to nowhere

The collection of pictures here is purely random. No predefined story can be used to present them coherently. The starting point was a selection of pictures taken in April and May of any year in my library. I was not in the mood to post wintery and snowy pictures anymore this time.

May Long Weekend

May Long Weekend weather

There was only one hiccup during the selection and syncing progress. I forgot to limit my selection the first time, giving Lightroom the go ahead to upload all my 90k pictures into the cloud. Useless to say that I have no storage in the cloud for that volume. Stopping it was a bit of work, but finally all the pictures and their duplicates were out of the cloud. No way for them to come raining down on me at awkward times.

Eating their way into life

Eating their way into life

So this time, no story with the pictures, just about how they came to be presented. I suppose a virus can do strange things to anyone’s brain. So far I have no symptoms and I don’t expect any. The only thing I can do is stay away from others so they won’t suspect me for their possible mishaps.

For me, who does not really care what others think about me, that’s as far as I will go. Next time I hope to have some fresh pictures, taken all by myself, with nobody around.

Until next time…