why "it's not the pots and pans"

      I am a fairly intelligent person.  I realize that people have potential to be someone and something else, in fact any thing that they set their minds on to be.  Things have no potential.  They exist and they were made with capability.  Potential and capability are not the same.  With potential, you have to transcend yourself, go beyond yourself and be something else. Potential implies something within you that you do no possess as yet but have to live up to or evolve into.  No amount of trying will make a skillet anything more than a skillet.  Yes, definitely, one person can use a skillet more thoroughly and fully than another.  Does that mean the skillet has changed?  No you just used up more of it's capability, the skillet does not have any capability to change it's very nature only a person does.
     So your saying what has this got to do with anything?  Simple, I have noticed and quite often too that people often equate potential with capability and in so doing equate increasing their potential with whatever material possessions they have.  Granted you acquire more and more things with added capability but does that increase your potential.  Maybe, if you grow into it but often not.
     My blog just outlines my quest to realize my potential using materials and instruments that most people have written off as being inferior.  For instance, my choice of cameras, the Sony Alpha 300 was laughed at to my face my almost everyone that I meet.  To the vast majority of people (except of course, the Minolta and Alpha boys and girls), if you want to shoot seriously with a DSLR, you have to have a Nikon or a Canon.  Well, bull crap.  I am willing to bet that Margaret Bourke-White or Yousuf Karsh with a Brownie can outshoot 98% of all the Nikon and Canon owners in the world.  Where does that come back to?  It's you the photographer what takes your pictures, that figures out the composition, the lighting, all the different parameters like shutter speed and aperture openings.  The camera is just a tool.  This is what I want people to realize

To begin with.............

I feel like I have to introduce myself.   I am your ordinary guy on the street.  You can walk pass me and chances are you'll never give me a second look.  In fact, what sets me apart is my ordinariness.  I do have a passion though, and that is computers and photography.  I like computers, building them in fact and photography specifically Infra-red and near Infra-red photography.  This blog aims to share my hobbies with my friends, both existing and new potential friends.

The title of the blog I feel says it all.  It is a statement against being infatuated with "brands".
The title owes from an observation I made when watching Gordon Ramsay in a cooking show.  I bet you can put almost anyone in a state of the art kitchen, complete with everything you can dream of and pit that person against Gordon Ramsay armed with a bunsen burner, a set of second hand pots and pans  and a few dollar store spatulas, and still Mr. Ramsay will cook circles around them.  So I came to realize that it is not the pots and pans that matter, it's the cook.

I have been anti-brand, in a way.  I built my own computer and I shoot with a second hand Alpha 300 that most people would not even consider using but guess what....... my computer works great and I have taken photographs that a lot of my friends with Nikons and Canons cannot and would not even try duplicating.  So yeah, the cook matter.

Like I said this blog is a journey through my passion and if you like what you read then welcome aboard


The Shadow Man