it’s something…

As I mentioned before, my office is in the ghetto, but we are fortunate enough to be near a pond. It is a ghetto pond, and we used to see lots of fish and some turtles. Lately the water has been more and more murky, but there are still birds and even an otter living in the pond. You read that right a real live fucking otter. When one of my co-workers told me there was an otter in the pond, I told them that they must be smoking crack. “You sure it wasn’t a catfish?” Four or five years ago there was a catfish in the pond with a head that was a good 8 inches across…seriously, so if you didn’t know better one might mistake that monster for an otter…maybe. Anyway a few weeks ago I actually saw the otter with my own eyes. So yes there is a real live fucking otter living in the ghetto.

Anyway, almost every year there will be a few or more mallards that take up residence and every so often they have babies. A few years ago the family started out with 12 babies. After the herons, osprey and who knows that else got done, only 3 or 4 babies made it. Yesterday we noticed a new family. This one is starting with nine. Nine cute little baby ducks.

As cute as they are, I think it would be great if I could get a pic of the local osprey snatching one of them out of the water…

I know that I have beat this particular subject to death (<—-that is foreshadowing and punny), but I think it deserves to be pounded on a bit more (<—-HA! I did it again). Somethings really deserve to be hammered home (third times a charm).

OK I am sure you have all figured it out by now, but tonight we are talking hammers again, but this time we have visual aids. Well a visual aid.

It was raining and kind of shitty for taking pics outside so I am standing in my garage, my softbox (see yesterday’s post) is in the garage. Well…the garage is the only space in the house that is mine…I can setup lights and softboxes and tripods and well…garage stuff, and not have to worry about someone complaining. The fucked up thing is that sometimes someone will still complain…it is my fucking garage as long as there is room for you to get your car in you have no say…oops sorry about that…I obviously have some stuff I need to deal with…

Anyway…I am in the garage thinking “what can I take pictures of”, and there it is, just sitting there looking at me. It was as if it was saying “shoot me”. So I picked it up and placed it gently in the softbox, adjusted the lights and started shooting.

I present for your viewing pleasure, my new hammer.

I didn’t take any pictures today, so I looked through some of the pics I have taken recently to see if I could find something interesting and I think I have one. This is one of the “test” pics I have been taking.

I was reading some websites about lighting and shit and learned about something called a “softbox”. A softbox is used to soften the light on a subject. It is pretty much a portable studio for taking still life pics and stuff. Or something…fuck I am having a hard time explaining this for some reason…

OK, it is a box with no sides. You cover the box with a sheet and hook a piece of white paper to the top of the back and curve it to the front so that the “floor” and the back are pretty much a continuous plane. The effect is that there is no “horizon”. Then you shine light in from the sides and or the top and you can effectively light the subject with little or no shadows.

So I built the softbox and wanted something interesting to take a pic of and decided to use my kid’s Lego blocks. OK and to answer the questions…”Lego blocks” is the proper term because the trademark is on “Lego”, so “Legos” is not trademarked and the marketing fucks don’t like “Legos”. Secondly…these are in fact her legos (fuck the marketing fucks) because I knew my legos wouldn’t look as interesting in the pic. Once I get a cool enough robot or something built I will take a pic of my legos.

I guess you have noticed by now that I neglected to blog last night. You might think that this some means that you are going to get something extra out of me now, but you would be wrong. You are only going to get the same shit that you always get.

Really, what could I give you extra? I only have so much to give…there is nothing extra going on in my head so there is nothing extra coming out of it onto the keyboard.

I have still been taking pictures, but I am mostly feeling kind of eh about them. I guess that is mostly cause they are pictures that I took as experiments. You know like playing with light and exposure and shit. Like today I took a bunch of pictures of an orange. That’s right just a normal orange, well it is organic, so I guess that makes it not just normal, but really organic oranges don’t look any fucking different on the outside. For that matter they don’t look different on the inside either. You know they don’t even really taste different either, but at least you know that they didn’t pump it full of shit or spray it with chemicals.

Anyway a picture of an orange on a white background is pretty fucking boring so I don’t really see any reason to post it.

OK, I do have one pic from yesterday that is pretty cute. This is my pup Nadia, she just turned or is about to turn five…see we don’t know exactly when she was born, but we know that we got her when she was six weeks old or so and back dated her birth to the first week or so of April.

So here is your something extra…

I really like this pic. I don’t think it is all that original, it is the kind of pic you see all the time, but I think it came out pretty good. Like the ghetto tree this one is also about the contours. The lines are what make it interesting. The problem with this pic is that it doesn’t have enough tonal range, it is almost 2 tone. I was doing some reading this week about Ansel Adams’ technique and I am thinking that he wouldn’t like this pic so much.

The way I understand it what he did was try to capture the full range of tones from black to white. Well not the “full” range, but if you took black and white and added 10 steps in between that is AA’s “full” range. I might be able to go in and edit this pic to pull that range out of this pic, but then it might loose some of the drama. It is like a silhouette, it is about what isn’t there or something…shit I think I am too tired to try to get all deep and shit.

OK, I like the pic because it IS almost only black and white…I think…

Eh…fuck it, I like the pic, it doesn’t matter why.

So my office is in the ghetto, we are moving within a couple weeks, but for now we are in the ghetto. Anyway I drive by this house everyday. It is a pretty typical run down rental. The house used to have a huge old oak tree in the front yard. Well when them storms came through it knocked some big branches out of the tree and onto a fence, but the fence isn’t really part of this store.

The tree lost a few branches but it seemed to fine at first, but at some point things went the wrong way for the tree. I don’t even remember when, which is sad considering I drive by it everyday, anyway at some point someone cut all of the branches off of the tree…all of them. Well I guess there is one branch leftor it could be just part of the trunk, fuck I don’t know…the fucking tree is bare…no leaves…no branches…nothing. Just an ugly fucking trunk.

Yesterday I was sitting at the stop light and looked over at the ghetto house and noticed that the trunk actually had some interesting…hmm…what is the word…lines and stuff…contours and shit. So I took a picture. When I copied the pic over to the computer I realized that the ghetto backdrop didn’t compliment the tree’s contours very well. When I looked closer I noticed that the top part of the tree only had sky behind it so I cropped that bitch out and converted it to black and white, ’cause black and white shows off contours better or something.

Anyway…I present to you ghetto tree.

Almost a year and a half ago I took a picture of a shitter. Now, I am sure that you are wondering why anyone would take a picture of a bathroom. Well first off the picture is actually of the building that houses the shitters, but since that is the only thing in the building then technically the whole building is a bathroom…right? The other thing…the shitter is in Disney’s Animal Kingdom (that’s how you are supposed to say it you know…the marketing fucks get upset when you don’t say the whole name…you know now that I think about it maybe I shouldn’t say exactly where I took the pic…I really don’t want to have to deal with that…)…

So where was I, oh yeah…so the shitter is at a local theme park (yeah they really might not like me calling it a “shitter”), and like this local theme park like to do the shitter is themed to fit in with the area around it. This particular waste deposit area (think that is better?) is located in an area that is themed to be like Asia…I mean this particular waste deposit area is in Asia (wink, wink) near a ride that was being built to look like a mountain of certain notoriety.

The waste deposit area was built and sitting there even before the mountain really started taking shape, and since there was nothing around there but this waste deposit area, a big green fence and a walkway to a prehistoric area of the park (see what i did there?), the area was pretty much deserted. Since there was no one around I was able to get a great shot of the building with no fat sweaty tourists blocking my shot. Now that the mountain is in full operation there is no fucking way that this is going to happen again anytime soon.

Anyway…all of that for this…

Oh yeah, the title…when I showed this pic to a friend of mine along with a few others, she said “I like the Mexican restaurant.” I then went on to explain that it was a shitter, but for her it will always be the Mexican restaurant…she is special like that. ;)

I didn’t take any pictures today. I know you are disappointed, but I did find my hammer. I am sure some of you were thinking…”that crazy fuck will never find his hammer.” Well to that I say fuck you, I knew I would fucking find it, I just had to get some shit moved out of the way. And the just of you are saying “now that stupid fuck has two hammers.” Well…to that I also say fuck you, I have already explained that I needed a new hammer….geez.

So after cleaning up the garage I finally sat down to watch the final four episodes of Rome. They did an outstanding job of telling this story. I am sure they used quite a bit of dramatic license, but fucking aye man they did a great job with the Octavian character. Smart, ruthless, and just a bit insane, and this fuck that played him…brilliant. I think they might have fucked up the time line a bit though, some characters didn’t seem to age while others seemed to age a lot.

Oh well it was a good fucking show and it is too bad that it over, but I bet it cost them a fucking fortune to make the thing. The most amazing thing about the show…the boobs. Not that they showed so many boobs, but they managed to find so many women with natural boobs. I guess that is why just about everyone in the show was American, I seriously doubt they could find that many actresses in Hollywood with natural fucking tits.

I guess most of those chicks are now off to show their tits on The Tudors.

Sorry for the shitty post…or something.

You looking at me?

This gorilla didn’t seem to like people looking at him, in fact shortly after this shot he got up and moved, the whole time he was moving he kept his ass pointed at the crowd.

Anyway, I have been feeling photographic lately. So I hope you don’t mind indulging me a bit. Well, I guess it really doesn’t matter if you like it or not…it is my fucking blog I will write whatever the fuck I want, and if you have a problem with that…uhh…I will…uhh…

So anyway I am pretty happy with this pic. I was lucky to be snapping the pic as he looked over my way. I took 10 or 15 pictures of this ape, and the only one that I like is the one where he happened to look at me at just the right time. Hey maybe someday I will need a picture of ape ass for something…until then they will just have to sit on my hard drive.

Oops, I just checked and I don’t actually have a pic of his ass…so all of you that emailed me for ape ass pics will have to get them from someone else…weirdos.