Boy Fisherman Photo and "Bailout" Rant

While at Zegler Mill in Luling, Texas last weekend, I saw this boy crossing the mill dam with his fishing pole. I love photographs that capture a bit of Americana and images reminiscent of childhood and to me this scene has both of these components.

Title: "Boy Fisherman"

Click the image for a larger version (highly recommended)!

Technical Photography Related Stuff: Shot with my Canon 40D and Canon 17-55 f/2.8 zoom. I had my camera set on exposure bracketing because I had been taking shots of the mill that I planned on converting to HDRs. Since I had all three exposures of this shot (+2,0,-2) I went ahead and converted this shot to an HDR using Photomatix and I liked the results better than any one of the three original exposures. Since the boy was moving (creating a blurred, triple exposed, image of him in the HDR composition) I used the original middle exposure as a Layer (in Photoshop CS3) on top of the HDR and, using a black Layer Mask, I painted the boy into the HDR composition from the original exposure(using a white paint brush on the layer mask). I then used several Level and Curves adjustment layers and the Tapaz Adjust plugin to fine tune the final photo.

Rant About the Proposed Bailout of American Financial Institutions: The latest panic in America concerns the proposed governmental bailout of some of the United State's largest financial institutions. The "bailout" is supposedly required (the way I understand it - and I could be wrong in some part because it is an extremely complicated issue) because of huge losses created by the financial institutions who issued mortgages at sub-prime interest rates compounded by the decline in market value of the underlying assets as a result of declining home values. Even though the geniuses in Washington have apparently seen this coming for some time without doing anything about it, they now try to convince us that the bailout must be passed immediately in order to avoid a worldwide recession and a depression in the US. I don't believe it! The absolute best way to sell a bad product (the bailout plan in this case) is to create a sense of urgency! The worse the product, the greater the feeling of urgency created needs to be. As a result we have the President of the United States of America trying his hardest to convince us that this bailout has to be done immediately. Hogwash! If a bailout or any governmental intervention is needed to address this current situation (not unanimously agreed upon at all) then certainly a plan developed over weeks or months is superior to a plan developed over a few days. I personally couldn't possibly support a plan than doesn't require the guilty parties to face the appropriate punishment or that doesn't change the appropriate banking laws to prevent any possible recurrence of the underlying problems that created this mess in the first place. Frankly, in my opinion, some of these financial institutions, at least the ones that contributed the most to the problem, need to fail and their directors and CEOs need to pay a seriously high price.