Another gas pump in Jerome, this time camouflaged by a bunch of ivy:
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Pic of the day
Busy at work today, but I managed to get to Jerome over the weekend to have lunch with sis. Here is an old gas pump that sat along our route:
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Woohoo
I’ve a big fan of Joe McNally’s blog. He seems like a guy who knows how to have a little fun in life, and he is a premier photographer to boot. If you haven’t already checked out his site I would highly recommend it.
So anyway, Joe wrote another book on photography because he was hurting for cash, and I decided to help support the cause. It shipped today, and I can’t wait to take a peek inside.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Pic of the day
Seems like we are always speeding through life, on our way to somewhere else:
Had some fun friday night walking through the construction zone at the new overpass as night fell. This shot was 3 second exposure as I leaned over a rail, the big light in the corner is just a standard street lamp.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A wild safari
We hung out for a total of about four hours. I clicked 220 exposures, and kept a whopping 22! Chain link fencing made picture taking a bit of a chore, and I quickly found the limits of my 200mm lens, but we soldiered on. The wind blasted us with dirt and sand the whole time. I did however get to kiss a giraffe, so it wasn’t all hardships. :)
Here are my favorite pics from our weekend trip to the wildlife park.
A game of catch:
Discontent:
A little cat nap:
Nice kitty:
Accomplice (notice wind-blown hair):
See all of the photos in the Flickr Set
A rhino rescue story
DaNece and I took a trip to a wildlife park this weekend. While there, the tour guide gave us a little background of some of the animals that we passed. As we turned a corner he informed us that we would be getting to see one of the park’s prized inhabitants: Boom Boom.
Boom Boom is a rhinoceros who was saved from a purchaser that intended to use him for a canned hunt. He was saved by none other than Marc Ecko (ecko unltd.). For the full story check out this website, as they cover it way better than I could.
And for anybody in the area, I would very much recommend checking out the Out of Africa wildlife park. I’ll be posting more pictures soon.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Breaking that funk
Decided to read through old journal entries to help get out of the rut. The memories were fresh enough that I could still recall the moment of the writings, the feelings and thoughts running through my mind.
Walking in the snow:
… So instead I dance through a white curtain, I smile at the sky and try to catch pieces of this moment on my tongue. I try to savor all that is here around me in the present. I choose to ignore the future cold that might take me over, just as I choose to ignore the bites left by snow storms gone by.
A site for the movie addicts
For the movie fiends out there, check out ClerkDogs. You put in a movie title you like, it gives you recommendations based on that, like a movie store clerk. It even tells you how the recommendations compare to your favorite title.
And based on my very amateur tests, it matches my likes better than netflix. Hooray!
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Dinner gone by
A meal from a few weeks ago:
Quinoa cooked with caramelized onion, garlic, carrot, cranberries and parmesan cheese. Served with an acorn squash cooked with brown sugar and butter.
Pic of the day and a big thanks
So first off, thanks to everybody who commented on my last post. I appreciate all the kind words. :)
And the pic of the day? A Saleen modified mustang. The S281 3V with some heavy lightroom editing:
Monday, March 16, 2009
Stuck in that rut
Nothing original going on in my brain. Nothing to write about. Nothing to photograph. Nothing to cook. I look back and wonder where all the hours disappeared to. I sit and question where the creativity has gone, and when it will return.
For now I am subsisting on mediocrity.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Pic of the day
I’ve got no canz
just this marker in
my hand, but I’ll still
take every chance I get to
kill Uncle Sam!
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Pic of the day
A silly over processed image of a homeless man’s shoes sitting on a hillside in the weeds:
Camping pics
Hooray, got the camping pics up last night! Here they be:
Happy dogs after a good hike:
There were little spring flowers everywhere:
I even got an accidental shot of a butterfly while taking flower shots!:
I ran through my first trials with my infrared filter. LOTS to learn on this front. Here is the best of the bunch, a very blurry affair:
And of course, I bugged the girls to no end. Eventually DaNece decided to hide:
Sadira couldn’t find a place to hide fast enough:
As the sun set we were all a little taken with the color of the sky:
Nothing quite like sunset in the desert:
Other than that there was real fire, over which marshmallows were roasted:
And there were ants (randumb?):
So that was camping in a nutshell.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
I survived
Well I survived the camping trip to Wickenburg this weekend. We three had a great time and some unbelievable scenery. I’m still downloading pics and editing, but rest assured they will make it here within the week. Somehow Sadira got a post and pics up the very same day we got back. Talk about industrious!
The weather there was mild. Cool in the evening (it dipped just below freezing Saturday night), and warm during the days (probably low 70s), which made for great hiking.
I do have to say… it is different camping with girls. Lots of inside jokes which I was very much on the outside of. And at times it seemed like they were speaking in tongues. Very high-pitched tongues.
They brought products which boys would never be caught camping with (lotion? pajamas?). But regardless of all the femininity in the air we had a blast.
I was introduced to cottage cheese with salsa ala Sadira, which ROCKED! We cooked up some burgers with onions and mushrooms which kicked a small amount of ass. And we had some so-so chicken with (not-quite)baked potatoes. We had lunch at Anita’s in wickenburg which was some rockin’ good mexican food, then rolled ourselves home.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Goin’ Camping
Me and D are rolling out tomorrow to go camping with Sadira. Be back tuesday. Have a great weekend everybody. :)
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Silliest auction site ever
Swoopo is possibly the silliest auction site ever.
The breakdown:
- You pay ~$1 for every bid you place
- Your bid raises the purchase price by a set amount (either $.15 or $.01 depending on the type of auction)
So, to take this auction for example:
Canon Rebel XSi
MSRP: $899.99
Final Purchase Price: $23.96
Winner placed 249 bids.
This auction was a ‘penny auction’ which means that each bid increases final price by $.01. The starting price was one penny.
So let’s do some math:
- The winner placed $249 worth of bids, plus pays the final price. So the winner came out with a great deal at $272.96 for a nine hundred dollar camera.
- All the people who placed the other 2,146 bids lost out. As a group they paid more than $2k for the privilege of playing this fancy slot machine.
- $23.95 / .01 (price increase increment) means that Swoopo received $2,395 for all the bids that were placed. Swoopo makes out like a bandid, 266% of the MSRP.
Now take THIS auction for instance:
Nintendo WII
MSRP: $249.99
Final price: $213
Winner placed 18 pids
This auction started at $.15 and each bid increased the price by another $.15.
Math:
- the winner gets merely an okay deal paying $215.70 including their own bid fees for a $250 piece of merchandise.
- $212.85 / .15 = $1419 paid to swoopo in bid fees, an astounding 567% of the MSRP!!!!!
My question is: why not just go to vegas to lose all your money with the off-chance of hitting it big? At least there you get pretty girls and a mild sense of luxury.
Local celebrity?
Just read through the newest issue of PopRocket and who do I see featured?
Our very own Rich Charpentier. Maybe I’ll ask for his autograph next time I see him…
Pic of the day
A happy accident. I saved this HDR as a TIF file instead of a radiance file. Of course I didn’t notice until I had tone-mapped it. Kind of dark and fore-boding. Muted colors and exaggerated tones. Kinda cool:
Compared to my regular HDR workflow:
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
I spy with my little eye…
Something that, up until this point, I had only ever seen pictures of.
Apparently Nissan decided to take their $80K Skyline GT-R over to the united states. They dropped the Skyline from the name, but seriously… who’s even going to notice that while they drool over this sexy machine?
And the five hundred horsepower doesn’t hurt either. This thing looks like it’s speeding when it is parked:
I’m in love.
EDIT – apparently I am uninformed. The Skyline is still around, but has headed in a different direction than the Skyline GT-R of my memory, and is now more of a sporty family car. How faux paus of me.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Pic of the day
A pic of DaNece from our little photo outing on Saturday. This one was using the pop-up flash (meh) with the sun behind her highlighting her hair:
Monday, March 2, 2009
Chicken soup for the soul
Except for it’s got hamburger, and tastes kind of tex-mexy:
It was early this morning when I prepped it all, so I can’t say as I honestly remember everything that went in there.
I do remember the following:
- browned some hamburger
- cut the corn off of two cobs of corn and threw it in the pan to roast for a bit
- threw all that in the slow cooker along with 1/2 onion, 2 carrots, a bunch of green beans, two potatoes, 3 fresh cloves of garlic, a lot of cumin/paprika/cayenne, and enough beef stock to cover.
- let it cook all day
- cooked up some rice and added it to the pot
After all that it tasted good, but not great. Then DaNece had the great idea of putting green chiles in it. PERFECT!!
Add some crusty bread and you got yourself a great meal!
What have you torn apart lately?
DaNece and I went out to play with flash photography over the weekend and I found a huge limiting factor to my setup. The SC-28 chord that I purchased only lets me get a few feet away from the flash. That’s great if I am just holding the light off to the side with my hand, but when I set it up on a tripod and go to move around D it was severely limiting.
I almost dragged my flash over a number of times, which got me thinking that there must be extension cables out there. And surely, there are. For the cost of a whole ‘nother cable I could put the two together to get a 6’ cable… not exactly what I had in mind.
So I browsed the internets and found an article about hacking this $50 cable to bits. I got out the knife and cut right through the cable. I hoped this would work.
A trip to Home Depot to pick up a couple of female network jacks, and a few minutes of separating wires and punching them down into the jacks. I was done:
I plugged it all in, threw a 25’ network cable on it, and turned the camera on. The cam showed a flash connected, the flash showed connection to camera, and I fired off a test:
SUCCESS! And instead of a $50 cable for three measly feet, I spent $10 on some jacks, and about $10 for the cable!
Pic of the day
My last post garnered quite a few responses, so why not post the complimentary image?
The rear to Friday’s front, also a 3 exposure HDR, but with a little different processing:
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