Injustice
I was searching my photo library for a good picture to portray injustice, but having a small stock of photos this was the best picture I could think find. This is a statue of Kouros taken on the island of Naxos in Greece. At the bottom of the photo I'm doing my best to mimic his robotic like stance and give an idea of the statue's huge size. You'll obviously note that this statue looks unfinished and indeed is still in the quarry. Three-thousand years ago when this statue was being chieseled away they found a vien in the marble and abandoned the statue.
At work they raised the tip pool from 2.5% to 3.5%. When I first started working there it was only 2%. Consider this; an average bill comes to about $35. If you tip 10% on your bill and leave me $3.50, I have to give $1.22 of that $3.50 to the kitchen and hostess. Now I believe in tipping out the kitchen and hostesses, but within reason. Of all the Boston Pizzas in Edmonton we have the highest tip percentage at 3.5%, the average being 2.2% and the second highest being West Edmonton Mall at 3%. I would think that with above average tipout we would have above average service from kitchen and hostess's but the truth is that we have unimaginable turnover rate with out hostesses and the kitchen isn't much better. They said the increase in tip pool percentage was to create more incentive for people to stay in the kitchen. But I don't understand why this needs to come from the servers. Why can't a raise come from the pockets of the owners?
I guess when I look at the picture of the statue, I think about what it must feel like to be used. How the marble showed a bit of weakness and was left for dead. Sometimes thats how I feel where I work. That I point out inequity of something and just be given the door. Why try and fix a problem when sometimes it's easier to just walk away from it.
Maybe this was a bad example. I don't think that they could fix the marble and it was just a statue not a person. But sometimes I feel like just a dollar sign and not a person and wish that I could break out of this horrible mold.
The reason I love pictures
This week, after somewhat of an extended break, I went back to school. Though I haven’t been idle over the past 2 years my first couple days back at university make me feel pretty small and a little stupid. Well not stupid so much as worried that I might have forgotten the first two years of knowledge university provided me. Though it seems a bit daunting right now I’m lucky to have a lot of motivation for success in the form of a beautiful (and by the way extremely brainy) girlfriend and a light at the end of the tunnel sort-of-speak.
Our photography company is slowly but surely coming along. SLR Photography (an Acronym for Steve Lauren Rob) is on its way to having a website. It’s still in the early stages of development, but baby steps are still steps in the right direction. This photography company is something constantly on my mind and with every class I walk into I walk in with one objective above all others: What can I take away from this class to help us create a more successful business? I know that I can take a lot away from university if I think of classes in this way. But anyways I’m getting away from what I wanted to say.
I like photography. I like the idea of light entering a box with limitless possibilities of subjects, exposures, and compositions. It’s something that has been around for a long time but something that can be approached from an original and innovative angle. This excites me a lot. But beyond the mechanic and technical details of photography I love the actual products: the pictures.
A picture can show people new and fascinating places. It can convey the whole spectrum of emotions. It can be a memory. I have never had the greatest memory but when I look at a picture I’ve taken I can remember exactly how I was feeling at the moment it was taken. It gives me a snapshot of not only the scene before me but the period of my life.
This picture was taken on the island of Santorini in Greece. Lauren and I had spent the day bumming around the beach. We were riding around on our scooter looking for a high place to shoot the sunset from and accidentally stumbled upon some narrow pathways affording great views of the setting sun, the main town and gorgeous posh little resorts. A few minutes before this picture was taken Lauren had just taken a panorama of the cliffside town. We heard some commotion and turned around to witness a wedding procession walking along the path towards a church. The procession was led by a couple men playing violins, actually it looks like one may be playing a lyre. I wish that this were a better picture. I can think of how I would have composed it differently, what lens I would have used and what exposure setting. I can see how the picture may not mean anything to anyone else but me, but I think it’s beautiful. I love how it makes me feel, and the things I remember when I see this picture. It is this feeling that makes me so passionate about this photography company. It’s a feeling I want to be able to share. I want to be able to take pictures that will instill emotion in people, fascinate people, make people realize how beautiful life is. I’m lucky to have a couple great friends who share this same dream of mine.
Anyways I suspect that things will slow down more with school and all, but I’ll keep up the posting.
