Noise

Phoebe

Hark!  What's that I hear?   Some kind of obnoxious visual static is ruining my groove and it's so loud I really can almost hear it.   When I saw the tiny version of this photo on my camera (and all the other tiny photos that showed on my tiny LCD screen that day), I thought it was lovely.  When I downloaded it and saw it full screen, I had to put my hands over my ears.  NOISE!   I checked the properties of the photo and discovered that my camera did an end run around my intentions and bumped the ISO up to 1600.   When I take an indoor photo without flash in a reasonably well-lit room with the aperture set at F/2.4, I don't expect to be confronted with the number 1600.   The shutter speed was 1/45.   All my photos that day (Christmas, actually) were lousy with noise.   What went wrong here?

Must calm down.   (Breathing deeply...breathing deeply...)  

I've allowed a fair amount of noise in my life, things that take away from the clarity of my thoughts and add static to my brain.   I'm sort of like Counselor Troi when it comes to picking up emotional static from all around me ("Captain, I'm sensing a feeling of loss, of anger...")    There are times when emotional sensitivity comes in handy, but there are lots of times when it becomes NOISE.  I'll let you know if I figure out how to resolve the noise issues in my life.  (Rats!  I should have said "I'll keep you posted.")  It might revolve around taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.  And as for the camera noise?  There's probably a setting deep in the labyrinth of the menu that I've ignored somewhere along the way, or that I set incorrectly, forgetting to leave a trail of bread crumbs on my way out so I could find it again.  

It's the last day of 2011.  I'm posting today mostly because I set a goal of doing two blog posts a month as a discipline.   Before you look at my blog post schedule for this year and see the glaring inconsistencies, let me hastily point out that I made this resolve in September.   (Ha!)   My goal at the beginning of the year was to do one a week, but let's not get caught up in the messy details of my failures.