ascimilate

so lately i have been completely redeveloping two HUGE passions of mine. one is photography. a couple months ago i FINALLY made myself commit to go out and buy a dslr, and i have been loving it. it's so amazing to get out and start shooting again. it's a feeling i missed so much. there's something so completely freeing about being behind the lens. i somehow just forgot it over the last couple years. there's just something so incredible about capturing a moment in history, a completely unique and original point in time, in a way that only you can see it. it blows my mind. it's been fantastic. so getting out and being able to shoot again inspired me to cough up some more money and buy a darkroom setup. it's not quite complete yet, but within a couple weeks i should be back to the point of being able to develop my own film and prints. which is great. i do like certain aspects of digital photography, but it will just never take the place of a darkroom for me. tweaking your prints in a computer program, and tweaking your prints with a set of tools and a light and a lot of paper are just so completely different. darkrooms are so much more real to me. when i edit prints on a computer i just don't feel like i'm actually doing anything. it's just not as gratifying. for me anyway. but all that is to say, i am loving taking pictures again. i have been starting to figure out that i think i would love to be a photographer later on in my life. i definitely still want to play music for a few years. because i love it. but after all that is said and done i would love to go work for a non profit and just do photography and traveling for them. to me, photojournalism is the ultimate form of photography. especially warzone and third world. there's just something about that form of photography that changes people's minds, lives, and hearts. at that point it's not just taking a picture, it's a documentation of the human struggle that no pen could ever capture. i want to do that.

which leads me to the second passion of mine that's been reignited. in figuring out that i would love to do photography for a non profit organization, i have gotten back into remembering that the biggest thing in the third world that i've seen that i have a heart for is the lack of clean drinking water. every day over 30,000 people around the world die from lack of access to clean drinking water. they die. it costs $1 to provide clean drinking water for a person for an entire year, and yet people are still dying from this. one of the leading organizations that builds and restores wells around the world has come out with a figure that has said that the sum total of $10 billion would build and restore enough wells to fix the entire world's clean drinking water problem. FOREVER. that blows my mind. our country is in the process of spending almost $800 billion dollars to fix a stupid economy that will fix itself in the long run anyway (it always has), and just $10 billion would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for the entire planet forever?!? it blows my mind. it completely tears my heart apart to think that people are dying from this. i guess it just shows the true colors of the human condition. here we are, living in a country where the poverty line is more money than most people in the third world will ever even see in the entire sum of their lives, and we're spending one of the most ungodly amount of money i've ever heard of to fix our economy so we can all make more money. it sickens me.

that being said, my dad and i have been talking about this problem for the last couple of months, and we have decided that we are going to raise enough money to build a well in a third world country. we haven't decided yet which organization we are going to give the money to go do this (there are several good ones, we are in the process of selecting an organization that works in the area we want to work in), but we have decided it's something we want to do. so, if you would like to contribute any money to this project (all money donated will be tax deductible), please get a hold of me via email at marcus.baney@yahoo.com.

i think that's it for now. those have been the two big focus area's of my life lately. that's pretty much what's going on with marcus.