Humanity Never Fails to Disappoint

One of the nice things about turning back to God is that virtually all of the trolls who used to frequent my blog disappeared soon thereafter. I think part of the reason is that they had no interest in reading, over and over, about a religious zealot’s purported experiences with the Holy Spirit. I used to be a lot meaner and funnier, and I wrote more like a secular-minded politics buff than a Spirit-led Christian. People liked that stuff.

Amazingly, I got trolled and stalked recently in another online “space,” as pretentious people might say. It had nothing to do with politics or religion or me intentionally provoking fools.

I didn’t see that coming.

I started getting interested in photography (again) in 2023, and since then, I have sought advice and looked for kindred souls with whom to share my feelings and questions. As part of this process, I posted a number of photos. As a result, I sometimes had to ask myself whether it was safe to put shots of my wife and son on the web. Eventually, I told myself it was okay to do it occasionally, since nobody who was interested in photography would stalk a woman or child based on photography-related content.

Of course, I turned out to be wrong. As I often have, I underestimated the depravity, cowardice, and hatred of Internet kooks.

I disagreed politely, for solid, well-articulated reasons, with a person who gave me unsolicited, off-topic criticism based on the composition of a photo. I had been asking about trends involving exposure and brightness. I was not looking for advice on taking photos. I just wanted to know whether I was right to think many photographers were pushing others to do things a certain way, to the detriment of the results.

Unbeknownst to me, this sent him into an unforeseeable, baseless, incomprehensible mouth-foaming rage, and apparently, he has no attendant to strap him down until these things pass.

Next thing I knew, he or zey or whatever was claiming he (best guess) had found my blog, and he said he had reposted my written work in the space where we were discussing photography. He made some unhinged comments about me, seemingly suggesting I was insane, malignant (like himself), and otherwise flawed. Other people deleted whatever he posted, so I have never seen it. I have no idea whether he found my blog or not. For all I know, he thinks Instapundit or Maddox is me.

I never provided an email address related to my blog, and I didn’t mention my site at all. It seems to me that the only way this unbalanced specimen could have found my blog, if he did, was by reverse-Googling my images, presumably including some of my baby son.

He was so unjustifiably incensed, he sat at his computer and worked on this.

Oddly, the people in charge of the space didn’t bother banning him. Seems to me that would have been an obvious and standard response to blatant Internet stalking involving a baby, but maybe they didn’t think it through and see the possible connection. I didn’t try to get him in trouble.

All of the alleged republication and deletion took place in a short time. When I went back, thinking I would resume discussing photography with mature adults and not whack jobs in need of increased medication, I saw his deranged comments, wrote a polite response obliterating his weird claims, and left.

Afterward, I decided the best thing was to remove all my photos from the space, without warning, and delete the photo-hosting account I had created for my hobby. I had created it, reluctantly, because there was no other way to share my photos with the crowd the crank belonged to.

That’s how things stand now. If this marvelous cretin really has found my blog, it won’t keep him from returning, but it will make it less likely that other potential mental patients will follow in his footsteps.

He claims he lives in another country. I hope that is true. I wouldn’t want a weirdo like this to somehow find me and accost me in person, creating the potential for police involvement and/or legal fees for a defense attorney.

I haven’t been back. The interaction I had there wasn’t very important to me, and I was no longer having a rewarding experience, so there was no compelling reason to continue.

For that matter, this blog isn’t very important to me, even though I have written thousands of posts here. Sometimes I think about deleting it for my own sake and the sake of my family. The only reason I don’t do it is that I have learned a great deal from God over the last decade and a half, and a lot of it is vital information nobody else seems to be passing on to the public. I believe the rapture is almost here, and after it comes, there will be people who are still stuck on Earth, Googling to find out what just happened and what they can do to get the best possible outcome given the circumstances. What I’ve written can be very helpful to them. Of course, I could just delete it all and post a few thousand words to summarize the important parts.

That is something to consider.

There have been times when I have thought about the possibility that my blog’s security isn’t tight enough to keep it from being deleted by someone else, and my conclusion has always been that I don’t care enough to find out and do something about it. If I woke up one day and found out it was gone, I wouldn’t scurry around pulling my hair out, thinking my life’s work was gone. I would be relieved and eager to do something new, to tell you the truth.

As people like to say, this is why we can’t have nice things. Sadists and loonies go through life ruining other people’s enjoyment for reasons known only to themselves, their therapists, their demons, and their sycophantic imaginary friends.

He hates my photos, and it is true that some are very bad. This is particularly true of shots I put online because I knew they had problems and wanted advice to improve my work. On the other hand, some of the things he said were just plain silly.

Calling composition “bad” is fine when you’re talking about someone who took a standard wedding photo and cut off the subjects’ heads, but it’s stupid when you’re talking to a photographer who got exactly the composition he wanted and made it work, not just for him, but for at least some others who understand photography.

Composition is subjective, like choosing between color or black and white. A number of the qualities photos have are like that. A lot of famous photographers have been ripped very badly early on, by unimaginative critics who were never able to take great photos, simply because the critics lacked the capability to understand the choices the artists made. You can spend an amusing half-hour Googling highly-respected critics who made fools of themselves by confidently lambasting photographers who went on to become legends.

The thing about real creativity is that if you’re not creative, and you follow everyone else’s rules splendidly, you can’t recognize creativity in others when you see it. It just makes you mad, if you’re the kind of person who feels threatened in such situations. It looks like incompetence to you.

Usually, I crop photos, because often, I find it hard to compose them the way I want them. This is usually because I’m shooting moving subjects. The difficulty is obvious. The photo the stalker criticized was not cropped. The composition was exactly what I wanted, right out of the memory card. I had a list of reasons for leaving it the way it was.

Other people whose qualifications may well have been as good or better than the stalker’s liked the photo with the “bad” composition. I guess he stalked them, too, after I left. Who is to say who is right? Why should I listen to the stalker and not the other photographers who disagreed?

I have no idea how the keyboard detective composes photos. I wasn’t able to find any he had posted. I tried to dig them up to see if I could understand his mindset, apart from the rabidity. I thought he might know something useful. You don’t have to like someone in order to learn from him. Also, I thought his work might show he was on a completely different page. I was not looking for ammunition to belittle him or discredit his ranting.

Someone defended him in hopes of getting me to believe what he said, saying he was a great wedding photographer. That could explain a lot. I’m not sure “great wedding photographer” is a phrase that makes sense. Do such people exist?

I don’t know how believing him was supposed to help me. Basically, he said my photos were terrible and that I should buy Understanding Exposure, a book I have had since about 2006. Never mind that I have been working on learning exposure ever since I took up photography again.

I watch videos by excellent (and not-excellent) photography teachers. I read. This is 2026. Relying on books is often the slowest, most limited, worst way to learn.

To get back to his supposed credentials, I have seen magnificent, artistically-rich photos in the areas of wildlife, landscapes, candids, architecture, and journalism, among others. Great wedding photos, not so much.

Do people with huge talent wake up one day and decide to spend their lives shooting nervous couples and drunken guests, doing the same things all other nervous couples and drunken guests have done since the dawn of time? Probably not that often.

Google “wedding photos” and see what comes up. Sharp, well-exposed formula shots of people looking completely unlike themselves, which is what most of them want.

Running on a beach barefoot, in a tuxedo with the pants rolled up.

Walking hand-in-hand on the sand, with numerous footprints underneath them that show they had to do it 10 times. To get that spontaneous look.

Dancing in a rented mansion they couldn’t pay for in 20 lifetimes with their means.

The groom embracing the bride from behind while she throws her jaw open like a snake swallowing an egg, mimicking a practiced smile she saw a Sports Illustrated model flash in St. Bart’s.

Everyone but the happy couple wearing (carefully) clothes they have to return by Wednesday.

Really, Google and see. The first page of wedding photos that came up for me were commonplace and stagey. Now Google landscape photos. Complete difference. Street photos? Even better. Excellent work. One gem after another.

But maybe he is the Vivian Maier of wedding photos. The exception. Maybe he’s a genius whose wedding photos hang at MOMA twice a year. I have no way of knowing.

Criticizing people who succeeded at doing what they wanted to do, in an area where subjectivity plays a huge role, doesn’t always make sense. Imagine Titian giving Van Gogh a righteous chewing out because his brush strokes were too big. More aptly, imagine an art critic with no talent chewing him out, because that is more like what really happened during his life. One forgotten soul said Van Gogh “painted with a shovel.”

“If you want greatness, do what I do. Which is exactly what everyone else does. Set yourself apart by blending into the herd.”

Isn’t creativity about doing things differently? Did I misunderstand that somewhere down the line?

Lots of people have been gatekept by inept critics.

Fred Astaire said he got a famous review after a screen test: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.”

A casting director marched a young Sidney Poitier out of the room and said, “Stop wasting people’s time and go out and get a job as a dishwasher.”

A record executive told the Beatles’ manager, “Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein.”

I’m not saying I’m a good photographer, and I am certainly not photography’s answer to Fred Astaire. I’m saying the ability to recognize talent is a talent, and most people don’t have it, including many you would expect to have it. And I have a little talent.

The shot was not exposed very well, so I took someone else’s suggestion, graciously, and worked on that. In that case, I hadn’t gotten what I wanted, and I needed someone else to show me the problem. The composition, I left alone, and if I put it on my wall, it will stay as it is.

It’s not a case of a beginner refusing to take sound advice because of baseless pride and stubbornness. It’s a case of someone understanding exactly what he did, though a beginner, and sticking with it, refusing to throw out a photo that came out just as he wanted.

I have taken all sorts of advice from people who criticized my work. I welcome it. I don’t welcome stalking or obtuse suggestions from people who have warped personalities and limited perspectives, who become enraged by polite, intelligent disagreement.

If I were the kind of person this character claims I am, I would think the majority of the shots I take are brilliant. In reality, I’ll shoot a hundred or more shots of the same situation and end up developing one or two I dislike least, or I’ll throw out all of them.

Sometimes I’m extremely happy with the best shots in a batch. Other times I say, “Well, it has problems, but I can’t make my son relive this day so I can try again, and I don’t want to lose this, so I’ll be happy with a B instead of an A.”

I have realized I throw out shots I should keep. Not every precious photo is technically good.

I have lots to learn. I take tons of horrible photos. But the photos other people hate are not always the ones that are genuinely bad or even merely good.

Gatekeepers are the worst. I think one of the worst things about them is that they cause people to quit, all the while pretending they want to help. Sometimes they actually want them to quit, so they can say, “Very sad, but not everyone can stand on Olympus with me and my Hasselblads.”

None of it matters. I know enough by now to do without web mentors. There are so many sources of information I can access without being abused, there is no reason to wallow in the mire with the saints and the swine.