In today’s post, I’m going to be rather snarky toward people who don’t necessarily deserve it, but if you have a problem with that as a concept you’re reading the wrong blog.

It seems that these days there’s a focus on oversharing every thought.  People who should never be listened to (I’m thinking of Sarah Palin, although there are others out there too) now have a platform to express their every wanton thought and desire.

And this is not particularly a good thing.

I present you Exhibit A.

Exhibit A is a young woman that I refer to as my “intellectual nemesis.”  She’s a former student of the type that, whenever I tried to have a conversation with her, my brain would explode from my inability to get what I thought were very simple points across.  I believe I have on numerous times expressed amazement that she has not inadvertently killed herself in a tragic knife-and-fork accident.

So, today, there was this doozy:

It’s not that I don’t think that people watch Jersey Shore.  Clearly people do.  I mean, for Chrissake, even Michael Kors referred to Snooki on last night’s Project Runway.  However, I kind of feel like regularly watching Jersey Shore is a bit like masturbation: everyone does it, but no one needs to talk about it—ever.

This, by the way, reminded me of another status update that also caused some hard wiring to go short circuit a couple of months ago:

I don’t know where to begin here.  First off, they didn’t cancel it, Ricky Gervais decided to stop making it at the height of its popularity.  Secondly, the American version is not a spin-off, it’s a remake.  Third, The Simpsons is an American spin-off of an American show—it’s a spinoff of The Tracey Ullman Show, which was made for an American audience and only featured a British lead actress. And furthermore

*KERBLOOEY*

Sorry, my head just exploded.

Exhibit B is a former coworker (the same former coworker who once refused to take me off of her list of people she sends massive amounts of joke forwards and chain letters to because, “you can just delete them if you don’t want them”) who has taken to including copious amounts of not-entirely-appropriate personal information in her headers to said forwarded e-mails.

Like this one:

For the record, I have neither seen nor spoken to this person in over two years.

I’m just putting this out there for consideration: the next time you have a thought that you feel needs to be shared with the world at large … don’t.  See what happens.

This weekend I attended one of the weekend workshops offered by Rocky Mountain School of Photography.  I’m not planning to turn this into a commercial for RMSP, but I did enjoy it and I learned quite a bit that I hope/plan to try to use  in my photography.  A flier landed in my mailbox in early December and, since the price was right, I signed up almost right away, figuring that it might be a good way to work on those skills that I’ve been trying to hone for a while.

See, as someone who travels around and does training, I was able to appreciate not only the course itself, but how it was executed.  The two presenters had two different styles, but I appreciated both (note to self: learn to speak in bullet points). They made the opposite decisions of some that I’ve made over the years (they opted for a long morning, late lunch, and short afternoon–I usually do the opposite, usually because it’s requested, but I was reminded that doing a 60/40 split has its merits.)

I did share a sympathetic laugh when one of the presenters lost his train of thought in the middle of a talk–when you do the same content all the time, it happens.  You mentally check out while you’re talking and sometimes the autopilot fails.

The conference facility left a little bit to be desired.  One of the rooms was floor-to-ceiling windows.  The Venetian blinds didn’t cut a good portion of the light–a bad idea when the presenter is dependent on PowerPoint (or, in this case, Keynote–which looks neater than PowerPoint but has the misfortune of being a Mac-only program).

Among the other things that I learned inadvertently is that I still don’t like a good number of people out there in the universe.  It amazes me that some people can sit in a room with 200 other people and be completely unaware of their existence — or, more to the point, not actually care.

There are, for instance, the people who are so focused on the question they want to ask that they don’t notice that it’s already been asked and answered.  Those are annoying.

Then there were the people who didn’t turn off their cell phones.  And let them ring.  And ring.  And ring.  And didn’t actually seem to feel that acknowledging the disruption was necessary.  File those with people who can’t whisper.  And the lady who scraped her way along the metal blinds in one of the rooms…twice.  While the presenter was talking.

But mostly, the people I found annoying were the ones who honestly believe in the mantra about there being no such thing as a stupid question.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to give you a definitive answer: there is such a thing as a stupid question.  Let me demonstrate.

This morning, we had f8 lady.  I was attending the class on photographing sunrises, sunsets, and flowing water.  Nearly every time a different photo was shown, she would ask, “Did you shoot that at f8?”  For a while the instructor patiently indulged her, but, finally, displaying far more patience than I would have given the number of times the same question was asked, he replied, “I don’t honestly remember what I shot this at.”

“Well, what f-stop did you use?” she asked.
“I don’t really recall.”
“What was the aperture?”

Now … let me explain this in different terms so that you will understand exactly why this is a stupid question.  This is exactly the same thing as asking:

“Well, how many miles per hour were you going?”
“I don’t really recall.”
“What was your speed?”

The other reason why this was a particularly ill-advised question is that the instructor had just spent some time explaining that the technique he was describing could really be used at any aperture.  Granted, I didn’t go to the class where they discussed f-stops in detail, but it was pretty clear that he also didn’t quite get her fascination with f8.

There were also an inordinate number of people who seemed to completely miss the point of “principles that can be applied to any situation like the one I am describing.”  These tended to fall into one of two categories:

1. People who insisted on asking whether their situation–which was identical to the one being described–”counted” for the principles being described (the answer always being “yes”);
2. People who insisted on asking about a completely different situation and whether the principles being described would also apply to it.  While more understandable, what these did was slow the conversation down by causing the poor instructor to repeat, “We’ll get to that in a bit.”

Then, of course, there was the guy who had to argue with everything.

“I’m telling you to shoot in manual mode,” the instructor would say.
“But,” this guy would say, “Aperture Priority mode can do the same thing.”
“No it can’t,” the instructor would say, and explain why.
“But Aperture Priority Mode does that.”
“No, it doesn’t,” the instructor would say, and repeat.  Finally, someone else in the audience would try to explain it.  Eventually , the guy would get it.

And then ask the same damned question in the next class.

So, what I have gotten out of this weekend is as follows:

1. I learned that I shouldn’t be shooting with Auto White Balance.
2. I think I’m ready to try using manual mode on a regular basis.
3. I might be ready to try more portraiture, too.
4. And I learned that people really, really, really annoy the crap out of me.

And how was your weekend?