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Best of Richard:    Richard’s photography portfolio,    How to Break into Stock Photography,    The Cancer Myth,    How to give file names to your photos,    I am no longer an employee,    Being a Free Photographer,    The Profit Police and How They Kill Everyone,    How Not to Be a Photographer,    Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value,    How to Always Get the Perfect Shot

This is what it feels like to live in the fog all the time. Took this of some green traffic lights at night. How did I get the fog? I blew on the lens, and the condensation made the photo turn out like this, no fog required.

I added a ton of contrast, burned in the sides, and switched to black and white. The added contrast amplified the noise considerably, so this is a noisy image. It works because of the lack of color, though.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/100, F2.2, 50mm, ISO800, 2008-06-21T21:15:48-04, 20080622-011548rxt

Download a perfected high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

The road is long and winding… don’t you just want to jump over the fence and rest a minute in the grass? Or a day, or a week, or a year? That fence is there for a reason, No matter how long you stay, you know you eventually have to travel that road.

Editing on this involved burning the road and corners considerably, then adding contrast with the curves tool.

Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/320, F5.6, 52mm, ISO100, 2008-07-13T12:43:32-04, 20080713-164332rxt

Download a perfected high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

Seems like a reasonable advertisement, tasteful, with examples, etc. But look closer at one of them:

“Sherri, Let’s team up for the civics report!” Since when is teaming up allowed? It would make high school and college so much easier for me.

I think this poster represents a general lost of respect for the education system… because it’s generally less deserving of respect. My Dad taught me at home, but if I went to public school I would’ve been home-schooled too. No real learning goes on at school; the teachers just say “go home and learn this.” Also, you’re forced to spend time on a lot of garbage when you should be focusing on just three things: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Everything else will flow from that. And no, arithmetic is NOT mixing numbers and letters. It’s practical stuff.

1. Ones that stick to one subject so as not to alienate their readers. These bloggers always put their readers first, doing anything to make them happy. They keep everything short and pithy, and make five posts a day. If it’s a photography blog, three-quarters the post are about Canon and Nikon’s latest cameras and other industry news. These blogs are often have several writers, who follow rules like “use short paragraphs” and “capture the reader’s attention quickly because otherwise, it will go away.” These are clearly subject-oriented blogs. This category holds many popular and focused blogs. Check out Photolog for an example. A writer of this style would never dare to mix personal development in with photography, even if they can be bridged. If he wanted to write about growth, he’d start a separate blog and at best link it the footer from his photography blog. Because the footer link is so small, only 1% would come on over. The audience for the two blogs would be totally separate. The blogger may as well be a different person on each blog. Readers come to read about widgets, then leave.

2. The blog is not so much about the subject, but about the person or group writing it. It doesn’t even have to be personal. People come back because they like the subjects, but more importantly because they like the style they’re written in. They come back because the blog is about you, not widgets. Blogs like this are timeless and become insanely popular, but often less than 5% of their traffic is driven by search engines. A friendly email is always more attractive than an ad or a search result, because it’s unpaid, unfocused sponsorship. These are definitely persona-oriented blogs. Lifehacker definitely comes to mind. It’s all over the place, but people go there to feel a part of the life hacking scene, one of intelligence, versatility, and smart computing. There may be posts about widgets, but people don’t go there to read about one type of widget.

One of the things I found fascinating when I was part of the Animal Crossing Community (a site about a video game), is that the community that builds up around the game makes it so everyone wants to talk about all sorts of other stuff. There was one off-topic forum, but people loved to hang out there even though they had no idea what would turn up, just like people love to watch the Oprah show. You can’t keep people on one subject; they’re going to want to talk about anything and everything with their new friends. And you can’t expect them to know what they’re looking for. Often their waiting for you to surprise them, even if it’s a non-photography article on a “photography blog.”

Persona-oriented bloggers usually have only one blog for everything. No partitioning. It might be messy, it might be all over the place, the blogger might share a lot of unreleated talents. But the truth is, our lives are messy. Placing ourselves so firmly in these little boxes is unique to blogging. It isn’t natural.

My challenge for you is to mix it up a bit. If you belong to category 2, try doing some really focused writing in category 1. And if your firmly in the subject category, try doing some engaging writing in the persona category. You don’t have to go off-topic. If it’s a photography blog, instead of writing about the latest press releases, take some time off and write a riveting account of how your camera was almost stolen, or how you grew up longing to start photography but couldn’t afford the equipment. The consummate of the two is rounded blogging, where you have a blog that people come to not to obtain a factoid and leave, but to challenge their minds and digest everything. If you follow this path for a few months, you’ll have people that literally spend hours at your blog, because you’ve written so much fascinating material. They love it, because when they click their bookmark they’re returning to wholeness rather than being bogged in fragmentation. They don’t even come for a reason or subject, because they know whatever there is going to be great. You have a captive audience. Use that greatness, leverage it to brighten their days and inspire them to action.

I’ve noticed other people doing this, and I’m finding it ever more annoying. I’ve found there are two approaches to double-linking:

1. Link redundantly, because your readers will be annoyed and confused that your talking about a subject so much but not linking to it, if they missed the first link. Or do it to really get people to click your affiliate link. More commonly, readers scan your content rather than reading closely. Either they scan by default, or find your writing useless. To accommodate that group, you have to mention important stuff as many times as possible and hope it won’t be missed. Your writing for the unengaged rather than the engaged, and your putting the wrong ones first.

2. Don’t link redundantly, because you choose to cater to thorough rather than casual readers. Readers who take in every word and click every link in perfect succession. Readers who will be annoyed and confused if they find the same page twice in their tab bar after a work-out session with the scroll button. I click every link if I like what I’m reading, because I know the author will have good recommendations about the topic. And I’ve been finding it quite disconcerting when a good author is type 1.

I’ve decided to abandon double-linking because my audience should be type 2 rather than type 1. This goes along with blogging selectively and writing insightful, comprehensive articles rather than shallow, fleeting posts. Stuff like Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value rather than a Quick Post on HDR. Stuff that’s unbelievably useful rather than unbelievably useless. Gold rather than garbage.

I don’t mind redundant links outside of a single post. Even if the same links are in the categories list or header, it’s okay, because that content is generally fixed and largely ignored. A contextual link going to the same place is fine, because it adds to the content of the article, unlike saying “check the sidebar.” The problem also is that the header and sidebar are expensive places, because they show up on every page. I can’t be sure how long a link will stay there. If its value is transient it can’t stay up once the value is gone. There is no space for clutter. A services link is still worthwhile now, but in three months I may stop taking commissions entirely, and “check the header for services” would be out of date. The other problem is that it’s better to show than to tell. A direct link is always better than saying “see here” or “search Google.”

Within a single post, Type 1 linking just doesn’t bode with this style at all. It’s fine if you don’t value your readers’ time and assume they don’t read what you write. If you assume no one’s reading, it will come true, because you’ll start writing stuff that’s valuable to no one. But if you’re writing for the heart first, and profit second, it just doesn’t work. Type 2 is the only way to go.

One thing that’s hard to accept about intrinsic vs. extrinsic value is that it’s a sliding scale with different paradigms. Nothing is binary. Something that has intrinsic value in one context and have no value in another. You might think the item has extrinsic value, and from a completely objective perspective it might, but it’s entirely okay to call its value intrinsic for the sake of comparison.

A great example of the two types of value is money. At the extreme end we have currencies made of paper and backed by nothing more than military might. These are called fiat currencies, because they’re valuable by legislative fiat (an order). The United States has fiat currency. My money has no value unless other people agree that it does and will exchange goods or services for it. It cannot be turned in for anything of value (besides coins), more of it can be created at virtually no cost at any time, and if all confidence is lost in it, it doesn’t even make good toilet paper. The money’s value is entirely extrinsic. In fact, it’s declined considerably in my short life. I remember in 2002 when gasoline was 85¢ a gallon, but now it’s over $4. It’s not because of shortages—there’s plenty of higher priced gas available. In terms of fuel, my money is one-fifth as valuable as it was six years ago. Granted, the increased prices are also due to the oil companies joining to form monopolies, but if our money had value that was fully intrinsic, such massive losses would be impossible.

Now, the U.S. dollar has not always been fiat. Before Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods system in 1971, you could trade in a dollar for 1/35 an ounce of gold. So it had intrinsic value. During the world wars, convertibility was abandoned so more money could be printed, so for a time there was no intrinsic value. But even under Bretton Woods, paper dollars didn’t even have intrinsic value so much as representative intrinsic value. They’re still worth nothing on a deserted island, but as long as we were under the current system of things, their value may as well have been intrinsic, because they could be exchanged for something solid. The value was never fully intrinsic, or else Nixon wouldn’t have been able to pull the plug.

A step up from paper currencies are metal currencies, like the dimes and nickels in your ash trays. Though illegal, in times of panic they can be melted down to build real things, because they’re made of metal, not worthless paper. Gold and silver coins are even better, because people universally value those metals. However, as building materials, they are less valuable. Going back to paper, the bills in my wallet have some intrinsic value I forgot about. If it’s very cold and I need kindling to start a fire, I’ll be happy for my stack of $1’s.

The king of all currencies is gold bullion. It’s never going away, because people universally believe it has value. Its value is unchanging and largely intrinsic. When I see the worth of an ounce of gold is soaring above $1000, I don’t buy the hype that the gold has more value. What’s actually happening is that our dollar is becoming less valuable, but gold is the same as ever. Now, if you can buy more with $1000 of July 2008 money than you could with, say, $500 of July 2001 money, that’s doesn’t mean gold has gained value. It just means everyone is taking losses, by providing goods that are worth more than the money they charge. When the empire (the United States) is dying, everyone takes losses.

Even gold doesn’t have the true, objective type of intrinsic value I talked about at the start. If you’re back on your deserted island, all the gold in the world won’t do nothing to get you out of there. An airplane is something with solid intrinsic value. But you still need fuel, a pilot, and lots of other stuff. Heck, you even have to depend on the laws of physics remaining stable so that it continues working. But most of us would agree that little of its value is extrinsic, so those concerns are small. If all 6.5 billion of us agreed tomorrow that gold is as worthless as water, it would be that way in an instant, though.

Some things have intrinsic value that’s fleeting. The apples at the grocery market are valuable as food, but as soon as they turn rotten, the value is lost. The same can be said for human life: my Grandfather has no intrinsic value, because he’s dead and burned. Nor does my cousin, in spite of being dead and preserved in a coffin. The only value of his body is assigned, because many of us believe in stuffing and preserving corpses for some reason. We believe a corpse has value, but that’s extrinsic to the corpse. A person does have intrinsic value, but only while living. Value shifts from intrinsic to extrinsic upon death. Extrinsic value is not universal, either. My family values my cousin’s corpse much more than my neighbor’s. Extrinsic value can be fleeting. A lottery ticket is valuable extrinsically, but only till the numbers are called. Then it’s worth nothing. If it’s a winner (never happens), the value shoots up all at once, but it’s still extrinsic, just like the coupons in my wallet, because it’s reliant on fulfillment by others. Intrinsic value is not, or in relative cases, it’s reliant on unlikely-to-change entities like society or a humongous government, so it’s always a safer bet.

Where you can use the two types of value in your life, is in analyzing the time and money pits around you. Recognize that if your pursuing goals with extrinsic value, your goals belong not to yourself, but to other people. Sometimes, supporting the goals of others is inevitable. Florida Power & Light will cut off my family’s power if we refuse to continue to pay them in extrinsically valuable money. Could we live without power? Probably, but it isn’t practical. I couldn’t even share this writing with you without the power for my computer. Money is something most people value by mandate, despite being extrinsic. It even says on my $1 bill, “this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,” so I’m required to accept money as a valid form of payment even if I open a business. The business isn’t truly mine if I’m required to give people valuable stuff for in return for crap (fiat money). But I accept that I have no alternative with what power I have now. There’s a massive gulf between this lost freedom and the lost freedom you are probably subjecting yourself to.

One thing that definitely has no intrinsic value is a college degree. A college education has intrinsic value, but only to the person receiving it, and then only if it is applied. A modern college education is utterly worthless. College is a crock. You’re trained to be a docile slave for any master and brainwashed to tell lies as truth to support the state. Lies like global warming, the cancer myth, and politically-correct language. Instead of learning real stuff like history or how to spell, you have to read and write garbage about The Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s worth less than nothing. College saps your mind and spirit. It is a self-accepted prison and you are a self-accepting prisoner. I am currently a prisoner with you, unfortunately.

What a college education does have, is plenty of extrinsic value. Employers, in cahoots with the universities, agree to accept only mind slaves with worthless degrees for jobs. Or perhaps they’ll accept anyone, but pay you much more if you’ve gone through four to six years of obedience school (on top of thirteen years of mandatory training). College is a job where instead of being paid, you pay. Can’t you see the irony there? You learn B.S. subjects like humanities and calculus, wasting upwards of thirty hours a week “studying,” when really your just memorizing pointless trivia and useless formulas to reiterate for a test and then forget. A typical collegiate essay is a series of citations, footnotes, references, maybes, “he or she”s, “what if”s, and semicolons. Nothing is from the heart, everything is crap, and no one would read it if they weren’t being paid. There’s no growth and your not developing as a person, despite how you may protest. College is at best an expensive social experience, and even that is on shaky ground.

A college education is firmly in the category of extrinsic value. Unlike universal concepts like serving others, inspiration, and passion, and working for yourself, college is ultimately a waste of time. It’s okay to do things with extrinsic value, even if they cost huge amounts of time and money. Repeat after me: “I, Richard X. Thripp, allow myself to pursue projects that have no intrinsic value.” BUT, you cannot live in fear by deluding yourself into believing your acting on some higher purpose. There is no higher purpose to my college education. Tasks with only extrinsic value must only be pursued for utilitarian purposes, should you claim to be living courageously.

Buying things that have mere extrinsic value, unless to resell, is something I cannot live with. Diamonds are an example. Unlike gold, they have no intrinsic value because they’re as common as dirt. One company (De Beers) controls all of them, releases very few, and advertises how wonderful and valuable they are. De Beers has managed to make diamonds extrinsically valuable to an insane degree. If you can make yourself (or a product) highly valuable, you can make a lot of money, even if it’s extrinsic.

Intrinsic value is the only path that has a soul, though. In sociological terms, coordinated efficiency (i.e. teamwork) represents intrinsic value, whereas allocated efficiency (i.e. buy the best people) is to extrinsic value. Money has its place: it represents you contribution to the world (either type of value), and it can be exchanged for goods and services of either type (food vs. diamonds). But if you do something for money alone, that means it has only extrinsic value, be it to yourself, the world, or both. With my website, I hope I’m doing something of intrinsic value to others, and I know it has intrinsic value to myself. I take, post, and give away creative photos, write free and hopefully insightful articles, and develop as a person through all of it. If you’re doing something of intrinsic value, you’ll know it because you’re energized, dedicated, and excited about it. If you don’t feel the heat, you might be providing a service that’s intrinsically valuable to others, but not to yourself. If I fixed computers for a living, it would be an important service to others, but it wouldn’t do anything for me. The other thing that can happen, is that your doing something you love (intrinsic value for you), but its worthless to others. Perhaps it is painting, playing piano, or taking nature photographs. What you want to do is to find something that’s intrinsically valuable to you and others, or convert what your presently doing over. Often, this just involves publishing your art online, or releasing a music album by burning the CDs on your home computer. But when your on the path of good for yourself and the world, everything will feel right.

While it takes a lot of soul-searching to reach the goal, I can tell you some of the clues that your on the wrong path. If your not sharing it with others, it can’t have any value to others. The first step to converting something that’s valuable to you but not to others is to show it to them. If you’ve written an awesome book but can’t find a publisher, just set up a blog and give it away free in installments. Tell a few friends about it. If it’s interesting or useful, lots of people will pick up on it and visit. You’ll know this because you’ll be getting lots of comments and trackbacks, and your bandwidth meter will be maxing out quickly. If this doesn’t happen, it means you suck. It’s okay. Right now I suck. But sucking is the only way to progress.

Once you’ve built you a following and love what you’re writing, you’ve already made it. It doesn’t matter if your giving everything away and losing money. If you have a website, and a lot of visitors, it’s impossible not to make money. Then put ads across the site. Register for Amazon Associates too, then start dropping product links everywhere, like this. Soon, you’ll be making money off something that’s intrinsically valuable to everyone, which is great. A lot of people will try to tell you that you can’t do it, you have to pick between money or heart, and that you should keep your day job and just follow your passion on the side. Ignore them and forge ahead.

If your working for a corporation with no intrinsic value, it probably puts up a smokescreen of purposeful charity to substitute. Instead of changing the world directly, the company donates a couple percent to charity. This is the “throw money at the problem” mindset, and instead of integrating charitable practices into the business, it’s just tacked on as a “me too” afterthought. Corporations like Wal-Mart, Target, and Publix do this. Then, they’ll come up with some phony mission statement for their employees, like Office Depot’s “delivering winning solutions that inspire worklife.” I couldn’t help but laugh hysterically when I first heard that one. Next, require all the employees to wear shirts with the mission statement and chant it over the intercom.

Ask any candid Office Depot employee if he cares about the mission, and the answer will be an obvious no. Very few people who work there, or have any sort of job, do so for an intrinsically valuable purpose. “For the greater good of all humanity” is an excellent purpose, but most companies that bandy it about don’t believe it. It is of extrinsic value to them. It’s fake, a charade to fool dummies and investors. Your never living intrinsically if your living fakely. It’s better to work for a company with the mission, “to make the most money possible, at all costs.” Or live your life like it. But that’s a petty experience. Most companies are not that bad. They have a decent amount of respect for their customers and employees. But to call themselves charity cases is false and pretentious.

What else is only of extrinsic value? Certification. Education. Expensive clothes (unless radiation proof). Rites of passage. Careers. Tradition. Rules and procedures. Legacies. Religion. Sleeping at night. Clocks. Being an employee. Corpses. Funerals. All these have no value on their own. Only if other people agree, or demand them, do they become valuable, and then only extrinsically. Don’t be too worried about them. They’re red herrings.

What things do have intrinsic value? Love. Doing what you love. Purpose. Learning. Passion. Discipline. Wealth (for leverage). Power (the power to know better). Respect for human life. Serving others. Serving yourself (you have to to serve others). The list goes on, but you can see that aligning yourself with these principles, and paying no attention to the ones of extrinsic value will alienate a lot of would-be friends. Do it anyway.

Investment is nothing. It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been “treating” people with cancer and letting people die. It doesn’t matter that we have billions of dollars and lives invested in our phony treatments, or how many relatives and friends you’ve lost through traditional treatment. No matter how far we’ve gone, we must turn back. There is no progress to be had on this path, no matter how we are invested in it. We were invested in alchemy too.

We are told there are many different types of cancer… and many different treatments… and no easy solutions. The best recommendation is to be constantly tested for cancer, to constantly avoid “known” carcinogens, to constantly fear everything. We have to check your skin, your breasts, your cervix, your ovaries, your prostate, your colon, and a whole bunch of other stuff, every year for the rest of your life. The most prolific unveiler of known carcinogens is the state of California. Everything causes cancer there. I bought a computer mouse with a tag on it warning that the cord has lead in it and can cause cancer, says California. Obviously, there’s somewhere the money is going. The money is going to the companies who produce the goods that continually replace the goods that are supposedly cancer-causing. Our cars cause cancer. Smoking causes lung cancer. Drinking causes liver cancer. Sunshine causes skin cancer. Radiation causes cancer, yet also kills it when it’s convenient to us. Really, what’s up with that? If radiation causes cancer, how does chemotherapy work? It exposes you to radiation. So the best it can do is riddle you with cancer, following the cancer industry’s rules. Pesticides cause new and exciting types of cancer. Cell phones cause brain cancer. Everything causes cancer.

Cancer is no ordinary disease. It’s a legend. You don’t overcome cancer like any normal disease. You “fight” a long and unsuccessful “war” against cancer, then die. Cancer makes you sick, tired, emaciated, and hairless. Really, none of this is the cancer. It’s the phoney-baloney treatment of cancer. You aren’t losing the hair from the disease, you’re losing it from being irradiated in the name of destroying it. The best it can do is kill off the cancer for a while, followed by its return (because it’s a vitamin deficiency). Then, we hit you with more gamma rays, and instead of the disease killing you, our treatment does you in. You’ve weakened, but the cancer is stronger than ever. Because it isn’t something that can be solved by treatment.

Cancer is caused by a deficiency of vitamin B17, also called laetrile or amygdalin. According to the Food & Drug Administration, vitamin B17 isn’t a vitamin anymore. It has no value, it does nothing, it could even be dangerous, it can’t be in stores, and doctors can’t dare recommend it. The vitamin isn’t added to our foods. In fact, if it’s there, that food is dangerous to us, and the vitamin is removed before we buy the food. You find vitamin B17 in the seeds of fruits, seeds like apricots, peaches, watermelons, and loquats. Common knowledge tells you that eating seeds is a dangerous, deadly thing to do. They have cyanide in them. Cyanide? Won’t that kill you? It’ll kill you the same way sodium chloride (table salt) kills you. The deadliness of the ingredients means nothing, because when they’re assembled in a different order, there is no danger. This is why your breakfast was delicious and didn’t make you sick, but if you ground it all up (milk and orange juice included) in a blender, and then drank that, you wouldn’t be feeling so well. It’s the same concept with vitamin B17’s cyanide.

We don’t eat seeds anymore. You parents probably told you to throw out the seeds from those apples. “Never eat the seeds,” they say. If you buy an apple pie at the bakery, you can bet the seeds have been taken out. At the same time, many victims of cancer get better from the chemotherapy. Why? Because they were deathly afraid of the disease, and while pursuing traditional treatment, they went to the local health foods store and ate everything in sight. One of those foods had vitamin B17 in it. The patient doesn’t even know what it was, but he continues to eat it as his miracle cure. Perhaps he bought a jar of pumpkin seeds. Either way, it works. But his doctor says, “it looks like the radiation finally started working!” That’s how chemo gets its 5% cure rate for cancer (otherwise it would be 0%). Yes, nineteen of twenty die, despite radiation treatment. What kind of odds are those? What other disease do you claim to be making great progress on, you pour a third of the nation’s medical expenses into, you have more people treating than suffering, and 95% of your people still die? Old age is the only one I can think of, and that’s not a disease to start with. The only effective treatment we have is to screen you constantly and then cut pieces out of you when we find cancerations.

But the seeds, the seeds are what you need to eat to cure cancer. But even if you don’t have cancer yet, you need to eat them every day starting now, or else you’ll get cancer. Cancer doesn’t run in families. People will say, “I got cancer because my father and grandfather had it.” But the fact is that they shared the same diet, a diet excluding B17, and that’s why they all got cancer. Just like if none of you eat oranges, you’ll get scurvy. But you probably won’t even get scurvy, because vitamin C is added to all sorts of foods by government mandate. Not the same can be said for B17. If you and your family has never gotten cancer, it’s because you’re eating something that has the vitamin in it, that is preventing you from contracting the ailment. You don’t “cure” cancer so much as you prevent it, just as you prevent hunger and thirst by eating and drinking. To keep from dying from hunger requires continuous action. You must eat food regularly or you will die, no buts about it. The same is true with cancer. No ionizing machine or ray gun is going to keep you from dying of thirst, just as no mechanical, ridiculously expensive medical treatment is going to save you from death by cancer. There is only one type of cancer, for which there is one cure.

Almost no one treating cancer knows its true cause. No conspiracy works when everyone has all the answers. But the answer has been known in other countries for thousands of years. Even the Bible tells you to eat the seeds of the fruits, and to eat your “daily bread.” Bread used to have lots of seeds in it, seeds that had vitamin B17. But now the seeds are taken out. There is no cancer-preventing vitamin to be had in our food. This is why despite plowing so much money into cancer, more people than ever are suffering from it. We’re told now that one in two of our children will contract cancer at some point in their lives. What kind of disease is this? Obviously one we have no idea how to treat. Whatever we are doing, it’s completely failing.

If you contract cancer, and you dare not to be “treated,” no one will support you. Your family will be against you. Your doctors will be against you. You must do things the “right” way. If you have any chance of living, it’s only by being cut, burned, and poisoned. You have to do it. If your below 18 or there’s any shadow of doubt about your sanity, chemotherapy will be forced upon you, because everyone wants to see you die.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In Central Florida, we have all these loquat trees with fruit (a.k.a. Japanese plums), and they have big seeds in them that have lots of the vitamin. My Dad and I eat a couple of them a day. We froze them when the fruits were in-season, and thaw them out bit by bit, chewing them up and swallowing them with water. So now I know I’ll never get cancer. I’ll never get cancer, so long as I eat seeds with vitamin B17 in them on a regular basis. Just like I’ll never develop a goiter if I eat foods with iodine in them. Salt has iodine added to it. No processed foods have B17 added to them, so you need to find it yourself. Just like you don’t wait till you’re dying of scurvy to start eating oranges, you shouldn’t wait till you’re dying of cancer to start eating seeds.

I haven’t covered the proof behind vitamin B17. Instead, I’ve focused on how our “normal” treatments for cancer are such blatant failures. Anything is better than what we have now, even if it does nothing. But B17 does something. It prevents cancer. We’re not eating it, and that’s why we have cancer. There’s no danger in eating seeds either way. I’ve been doing it for months. But there’s real proof that the vitamin stops cancer, because cancer is a metabolic disease cured by B17, just like beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy, are cured by B1, B3, and C. You can’t cure a metabolic disease with technology. Only restoring the essential food your body needs can solve the problem. I recommend these online pages for further information:

1. World Without Cancer
2. VitaminB17.org
3. Laetrile / Vitamin B17 Treatment For Cancer
4. Cure and Prevent Cancer — B17
5. Laetrile and Information on Vitamin B17
6. Unapproved by the FDA — You’ll never see B17 at the pharmacy, because the FDA refuses to test natural chemicals.
7. Loquat nut any good? — An interesting forum discussion about loquat fruits. Notice how the early posters warn about how the seeds will poison you with cyanide. It’s a lie: I eat them all the time. But they’re just repeating what they’ve been told by the American Cancer Society, because it’s in their interest to keep cancer going. Then the later posters get into the truth: the seeds cure cancer, are not poisonous, and are used all over Japan to prevent the disease.

Good luck, and don’t live in darkness. All the things we say cause cancer actually have nothing to do with it. But that doesn’t mean those things are good. Sunshine still burns, smoke still irritates your lungs, and you still have emphysema to worry about. But if we can get the legendary cancer out of the way, then we’re well on our way to a healthier world.

One thing that definitely does not stop cancer, is happiness. You can’t laugh or motivate your way our of cancer. It just doesn’t work that way. There are plenty of things you can use your willpower on, like becoming smarter, more creative, more productive, more insightful, more courageous, or more disciplined. Curing cancer isn’t one of them. If attitude makes any difference, it’s 0.0001% of the equation, and the vitamin is 99.9999%. It’s so insignificant that it is completely unuseful. Apply your good spirits not to falsehood, but to truth.

These roses refuse to make a sound. You can see the rose in the middle wants to speak up, but is too afraid. These flowers were at Publix. They were on the top shelf in the floral department, so I held the camera up high and just guessed at the composition. Several guesses later, I had this.

I made the colors a lot cooler to make the image feel cold and uninviting, just like you’d feel around someone who refuses to speak. Then, I toned down the color, added contrast, and darkened the edges.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/160, F2.8, 50mm, ISO100, 2008-07-12T12:22:13-04, 20080712-162213rxt

Download a perfected high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

Torrential rain on the windshield at night, with stop lights. This is with a lot of droplets on the windshield, and traffic lights and oncoming traffic ahead. Neat patterns, the droplets made.

For editing, I darkened it all a lot, added contrast to push the whites to the limit, and desaturated a bit. Enjoy.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/400, F2, 50mm, ISO1600, 2008-07-16T22:28:56-04, 20080717-022856rxt

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

An arrangement of beautiful pink flowers and green fern leaves with perfect lighting. All synthetic, of course. But whose to say that makes them less valuable? They sure last longer, for one thing.

Editing involved adding contrast and burning the edges. It was hard to keep the colors in gamut as these are hard to print, but I solved it by toning them down and then selectively re-adding saturation where it would turn out best.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/80, F2.8, 50mm, ISO400, 2008-07-12T10:24:02-04, 20080712-142402rxt

Download a perfected high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

I came across these delectable flowers on an evening walk. Just had to have them. I positioned the camera to have some palm frond leaves on the sides as a frame, and then snapped away. In Photoshop, I darkened everything but the flowers, desaturated all the color channels except red, and burned the corners especially. An eye-catching effect. Selective coloring is often tacky, but I hope I’ve done a good job of it here.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/50, F2.8, 50mm, ISO100, 2008-07-10T19:43:55-04, 20080710-234355rxt

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

A brilliant sunset with deep blue sunrays. Shot this through the windshield from my Grandma’s car. The colors were interesting, and the contrast and light patterns beautiful.

Editing involved noise reduction, heaps of added contrast and darkening, and lots of burning on the upper-right quadrant. Enjoy!

Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/2000, F3.5, 18mm, ISO100, 2008-07-11T17:25:14-04, 20080711-212514rxt

Download a perfected high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

More of the Sunrays series.

All the photos in the portfolio (about page 2 of the stock gallery at the moment) have source images now. I’ve linked to them in each post. So you can get right to the source of things, be it a JPEG (stuff with my older cameras) or .cr2 RAW (from my Canon Rebel XTi). This is great for digital artists. I can’t think of anyone who is doing what I do: putting countless hours into crafting beautiful and artistic photos (hopefully), and then releasing both the edited and original versions for free to all. Even if you just want to see what kinds of files the cameras I use produce, it’s a great resource.

Anyway, I didn’t post source images for the 53 photos I just posted… because my FTP client keeps timing out on the uploads. Maybe it’s SYN Hosting’s fault; I’m not sure. But I’ll come back to that. The source files should roll in at about 400MB, because RAW files are big. Update: I uploaded them overnight and added links to each post. Every stock photo that’s edited has a source image now!

I’ve already noticed that traffic, particularly bandwidth usage, has spiked. Check out these stats:

That’s how much bandwidth thripp.com has been using in megabytes per day over the past week. That’s a tenfold increase on the 15th compared to the 14th. Granted, this isn’t drilled down to this particular blog, but I’ve been the most visited one on the thripp.com network as of late, so it’s safe to say the stock images are being widely downloaded. Thanks everyone! I can go up to 4GB per day safely… then I’ll consider offloading them to a secondary server, because I only get 120GB a month on SYN Hosting.

This is the time to institute some changes going forward. My previous method of posting a photo and then a separate source image has worked well for a long time. It was just last month that I started giving everything away as a stock resource, so it was a fine plan to make new posts for each stock photo instead of adding it only to the old ones where no one would see them. But now that everything’s up to speed (i.e. all the photos are also released as stock), it’s time for a shift. From now on, there will only be one post for each photo, and that post will link to both the edited JPEG stock image and source JPEG or .cr2 file, plus include any 4*6 for-sale versions if applicable. The 8*10’s will stay separate for thumbnailing convenience and because I don’t have many. I won’t make JPEGs for source images with the border and title anymore; just a link to the real source image. This is inconvenient if you want to take a quick look to see my edits (my camera’s raw files can be up to 13MB), but it’s less work for me and it’s worth it because not many people used the old source image function anyway.

I don’t mind the old posts staying the way they are, because it’s historical, it’s different, and it served Brilliant Photography well for many months. I’m looking forward to doing things differently with new photos later today. Must sleep now.

Thanks everyone!

The sky is falling! First, it splits in two between the clouds and the darkness. Then, it falls and kills everyone. Or something like that.

To download, right-click the thumbnail and click “Save Link As” (Firefox) or “Save Target As” (Internet Explorer).

Download the source image (8MB, Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

Original publication.

It’s hard to see when raindrops are blocking your vision! There aren’t too many here, fortunately. It’s a foggy morning with a few sprinkles.

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Original publication.

A wide-angle view of a whole bunch of raindrops. A race to the ground, if you will.

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Original publication.

Swirly raindrops, frozen against a mottled background of trees and sky. Cool contrast and formations on this one, methinks.

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Original publication.

The raindrops are coming alive, through my hand. I got tired of normal raindrops photos. Enjoy.

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Original publication.

An evil and tactless sign. I had this as my desktop background for a while… you could even print it and put it on your wall!

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Original publication.

A broken hard drive, open and speckled with raindrops. Perfect for a technology-themed flyer or postcard. Use and enjoy.

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Original publication.

A beautiful sunset among the metropolitan sprawl. Well, there’s only some power lines, streetlights, buildings, a road, and some cars… but they still block the pretty colors. I think they add something to the shot for some reason.

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Original publication.

I think this was a Bratz doll. Barbie is more ubiquitous so I’m titling it that. Have fun with this decapitated head!

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

Original publication.

A cockroach, dying on the kitchen counter. Perfect for a bug poison label or something. Enjoy.

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Original publication.

The pool at night, when nobody’s around… A thirty-second exposure and some lights from the house make this more than bright. Nice colors and reflections. Took this the night after The Florida Lifestyle; it’s the perfect accompaniment.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

Original publication.