I haven’t been able to work on any photos recently on account of Hurricane Sandy hitting New York. Luckily, everyone I know has gotten out of it with just a pile of inconvenience, but there are people out here who have been completely devastated. The hurricane aside however, I wanted to talk about the blackout.

My town in particular was left without power for 12 days now, and while electricity has been restored to some parts of town (my house was restored today, the 12th day), others are still without light or heat. Now as terrible as this is, I have to say, deep down I’m happy we lost power. The hurricane aside, and despite my personal inconveniences, I found myself looking around my town and thinking about how happy I was to see us all in the middle of this mess. I wish we could’ve had this blackout without the hurricane. I wish all of us would have been left in the dark for a week or so wondering how to get gas, and how to get physical cash out of our bank accounts.

Society needed a blackout. More than anything, society needed a slap in the face to remind us of what’s important in life. For all the pampered people who attach value to the most insignificant things. For the people who could no longer find a purpose or find the ability to function when stripped from their luxuries. They disgust me. That blackout was the most essential event of their lives. If I could somehow extend it for the people who lamented and bitched over being separated from their first world luxuries when in reality they were only mildly inconvenienced, I would have. I would have kept this blackout indefinitely until they all came to terms with it, realized how nonsensical their values were, and how sadly dependent they are on factors outside of their control.

I’ll admit, there are people who needed power to work, and people in poor health who needed it to physically keep themselves alive. Hell most of my work is done online. I’ve been running around this past week and a half trying to find a power source and tethering internet from my phone whenever I got an email from work. But among all of those people, there are still others who just wanted an excuse to escape reality. That was more apparent than ever when the blackout hit and they found themselves taking sleeping pills to push through the day or sitting around too unmotivated to finish their work. They indulge themselves in these luxuries and lose sight of what was important to them to begin with.

Life carried on during the blackout. And it honestly saddens me that some people were so detached from everything once they were separated from their cell phones and computers that they couldn’t see something so magnificent.

Another look at the scarecrow and fishtank photo from last month.

I found myself stuck in a DIY kind of mood after I finished making my bed, and so I decided to do something about the god awful cabinet in my house. The project’s not done, but hopefully it won’t keep me occupied much longer because I honestly haven’t been doing much other than this. I plan to do a portfolio update in the very near future and I still haven’t touched the motorcycle I was restoring before I left for Asia. School’s starting in a week, let’s see how much work I can actually get done.

So after sleeping on a couch for the past two years, I finally decided to grow up and get myself a bed. After getting back to the states, I spent the next week indoors getting over a case of pneumonia and then immediately dived into a DIY bed project that took about a week and a half to finish. Well, the pneumonia’s gone, and I now have a place to sleep. I can finally go back to my regular routine.

Instagram user? You can follow me at smileitsfranny, where you’ll find random mobile shots as well as my most recent blog posts.

Reuters’ published a slideshow of their best photos from 2011. There’s some amazing stuff in here. Click the picture below to check it out.

For the photographers out there, Reuters also included detailed camera settings for each shot.