Mark is featured this week. He tries to write to his nephew, and I 'shanghaied' his letter for you this week.

So, “hello” again from the land of never ending humidity and mosquitoes. I think I figured out why people living in the tropics are so laid-back. Its because nothing ever changes. It’s always warm, so there’s no incentive to change the environment or accomplish tasks at an accelerated rate because there is always tomorrow. Where as in the U.S. there is a limited time for warm weather and changes need to be completed relatively quickly before everything is hampered by cold weather. Therefore, all significant change throughout history has occurred in areas of temperate climate.

Think about it. Paper, the compass, and gunpowder were invented in China. The Key Stone architectural design and democracy were invented in Greece. The airplane, missiles, rockets, and the IC chip were invented in America and Europe. The automobile - America. The polio vaccine – America. All of these places are Temperate climate areas. Nothing ever came out of the tropic except deadly viruses, drugs, and pineapples.

I’ve been helping Casey with her photography class. She is in the advanced class and is currently doing night photography with black and white film. I found the perfect place to do some shots. Behind us on the side of the hill our home is built are two abandoned high-rise buildings. Three of them were built years ago, but one of them collapsed, killing a lot of people. The other two were abandoned. We went there on two separate nights to do time exposures. The place is really creepy and torn up from people taking anything that wasn’t laid in concrete. But there were some really cool shadows from the city lights streaming through the empty window frames. We climbed to the top of one of the buildings.(15 floors) and took pictures from the roof of the an adjoining building, then we starting working our way down checking out each floor just to see if there was anything worth shooting.

Casey has an eye for picking things out and I think we got some excellent shots. But we won’t know until tomorrow (Monday), because we developed the first roll of film Saturday and didn’t have time to wait for it to dry. We shot the second roll last night (Saturday) and will develop it Monday. I will scan and send some shots to you in the next letter. Let me know what you think.

Mark and Casey didn't get to the dark room on Monday, but here are some of the digital prints they took. They take a pic with her digital camera first, to see what it will look like before taking the shot with film. These are the shots digitally.

This shot is the original one.

This one Mark photo-shopped with color.