June is my favorite month of the year. It lays just past the border edge of summer that May ushers in while not being as extreme as August. The world always looks its best in June.

And, like always, I utterly squander it away.

A brief review of history:

2003: Stuck in Kansas doing who knows what. I don’t remember? Do you? I didn’t think so.
2004: Freakin’ Dr. Kimzey’s Economic 201 class during Spring Semester. ‘Nuff said.
2005: Economic Development with Dr. Hanes. More students use four letter words to describe this class than any other.
2006: Just had quit my first post-college job and went camping in the Ozarks. For a week. Not a total loss, but seizing only 1 out of 4 weeks is still a failing grade.
2007: Springfield Freakin’ Missouri. A sense of limbo gives way to stagnation. Work is work, nothing particularly meaningful. Nothing really eye catching in the local scene either. Housemate drama out the wazoo.

So, like every past June that I can remember, I get into an overly introspective mood that compels me to go into overdrive to salvage what’s left of the summer.

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Add to the ever-growing list: The Hmong, China’s second largest ethnic minority.

I think you’ll agree that my justifications are understandable after reading this excerpt from NPR:

In a clearing surrounded by mountains in southern China’s Yunnan province, members of the Miao are celebrating the new year with the Flower Mountain Festival. Would-be lovers court each other through song. Legend has it that the Miao’s distinctive piercing tones carry far in order to attract distant partners outside their own kin.
…
“Han Chinese don’t sing mountain songs,” he says. “They look at a partner’s talents, their figure, their weight, their family property, etc. But we find a partner through singing. Even if someone is very ugly, the main thing is if they can sing, then they might be able to show love. People who are too good-looking just love themselves.”

The women would run from me in mass. Children would wail and cry in fear. The men would gather pitchforks and torches and pursue me into the far flung regions of the Gobi Desert until my gravely, almost-tone-deaf voice was silenced forever.

So, the current “Cultures that Christopher Wouldn’t Thrive In” list looks something like this:

• Indian Bollywood
• African American Gospel
• North American Polyamorist Pod
  
• Any American High School Theater Department
• The Polar Bear Club
• Pentecostal (Snake Handlers)
• Jediism

And the beat goes on.

Sometimes you get lucky and take good shots that capture expression and emotion when shooting on the fly. Unfortunately, you don’t get the perfect exposure all the time — like this image which isn’t properly focused and loses its sharpness as a result.

Location: Siem Reap, Cambodia
Date: March 2007
Camera: Canon EOS 30D
Lens: Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L-Series IS

This was taken on my fourth day in Cambodia after slogging through the Angkor Watt temple complexes the previous three days. I was put off by the more tourist-centric areas of the city so I took off along the river and followed the streets until the touts followed me no more.

I discovered the real Cambodians of Sieap Reap to be warm and hospitable and utterly fascinating with how happy they were despite how little they had.

This is the first shot in a series exploring everyday life for Cambodians.

More to follow.

I’ve become increasingly agitated when girls come to me and ask me to take some high-quality, professional photographs of them. The problem, the vast majority of the time, is by “high-quality” they really mean “magazine-quality.”

And unless the photos match up to the images the media bombards them with, they’ll hate it. I’ve shot some amazing photos of girls who have taken one look at my work and wanted me to delete or destroy the pictures entirely.

All self esteem issues aside, it’s always intrigued me why girls almost uniformly reject realistic images of themselves — even high quality, professional ones.

It always comes back to the great mass-media conglomerate of our culture. There’s been a lot of public outcry over the way “the media” defines beauty. Big boobs, small waists and surgery to fix whatever natural blemishes you were unfortunate enough to be cursed with. The standard is indeed high and seems to keep gaining altitude with every passing year.

Unfortunately, skinny supermodels with fake breasts (who are employed in ample numbers by “the media”) are not the root cause of the problem. I believe photographers are the real culprits.

Photography, you see, is the art of lying.

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From the Associated Press:

Senior administration officials said Thursday a consensus is building for a proposal to shut Guantanamo Bay and transfer detainees to one or more Defense Department facilities, including the maximum-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they could face trial.

The signs at the border entrances instead of saying “Welcome to Kansas” should be re-scribed to say “Abandon all hope, ye you enter here.”

Dante Alighieri himself couldn’t think of a crueler fate.