it’s something…

My coke has fallen and it can’t get up!

I am pretty sure that I have already mentioned that I am a member of the church of Coca-Cola. I must admit that I am a pretty faithful follower and sacrifice an average of 24-36 oz. a day. To assure that I am able to fulfill my daily obligations I try to take advantage of bulk tithing.

For example this month I acquired 32 twelve oz. units packaged in handy aluminum cans. As I went to move the cans from the car to my refrigerated alter, there was a most tragic and horrible and devastating and heartbreaking and just downright sad accident. The plastic that was used to bundle the cans was not strong enough to support the weight of the cans and when it gave way they fell to the ground. I will give you a minute to process all of the emotion that I am sure this has stirred up…

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OK, now for the gruesome details…there were an estimated 24 causalities and 2 fatalities. I must admit that we were fortunate to only lose 2 of the brave souls, but some of the injuries sustained were very serious…

You know what I see when I look at this pic?

A very nice Greek style fountain? (I think it is Greek style, but what the fuck do i know…)

No.

The water that is frozen in mid air?

No.

Power lines!

I see the mother fucking power lines!

I hate power lines in my pics. Maybe I should go out and take pictures of power lines so I can get over it or something.

I have figured out something. I have to work out a system, or a “digital workflow” as they call it. Keeping up with all the fucking pictures I have been taking gets a bit daunting. Plus I am filling up my fucking hard drive with images. So I need to work out a process for going through the photos and “processing” them. Then figure out how to best archive them. I was reading an interview with some fuck who gets paid for his pics and he said he never delete a pic cause you never know when you might have a need for that picture.

OK I figure he didn’t mean no to delete the pictures that are just totally fucked since if he is a pro he shouldn’t be taking totally fucked pics. I figure he means pics that are fine quality wise and shit, just didn’t work for what he was going for or for what the client wanted. Anyway, the key to keeping all these pics is being able to find them. So if someone said “i need a picture of an out of focus white flower”, I could easily dig through my library and pull out that pic. Right now with my “archives” on DVD this is not going to be so easy. I do only have one archive DVD right now, but see I am trying to think pro-actively or something.

Anyway here is a pic of some kind of red flower thing with ants crawling on it…isn’t that fucking cool…you can see the fucking ants and shit (click the pic if you can’t see them). If any of you botanany types know what kind of flower this is please let the rest of the class know, cause I haven’t got a clue. Thanks.

I was outside taking pictures of the gardenia flowers and my kid was sitting on the porch eating popcorn from a bowl. Since the flower pics pretty much sucked I snapped a pic of the popcorn. When I looked at the LCD screen there was a HUGE hand in the middle of the picture. OK my kid doesn’t really have a huge hand, but it looked huge in the picture and stuff. So I took another one, and it looked like there was only one kernel of corn in focus. Made an adjustment to the settings and got this one.

I am not sure why I like this but I do.

Tonight we went to see Shrek, it was pretty good. It certainly wasn’t the let down that fucking Spiderman was. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed Spiderman, but I don’t think it was worth the 30 fucking dollars I spent to see it.

But I digress…when we walked out of the theater I noticed this fountain, and decided to snap a couple pics. Yes I do try to take my camera with me everywhere. This is not always terribly practical since my camera won’t exactly fit in my pocket, but I almost always carry a shoulder bag…it is my hip urban version of a briefcase or something…no stop it…shut it…just shut IT! It is not a fucking man purse, it is a backpack, fuckers…always trying to bring me down.

Now where was I…damn it. Oh yeah…I figure snap a few pics and if they don’t come out they don’t come out. See I wasn’t sure I could get a decent pic without a tripod or something to set the camera on, but it seems there was just enough light to get a couple of decent pics.

This one is my favorite…

Oh yeah…Happy Birthday Michele!

Meh…I need to get a better black background. I like the red against the black, but it isn’t really black (like I said yesterday), so it comes out a little wonky. I had to darken the “shadows” to get the background to look black. Another issue with this pic is the reflections. I have to do more experimenting with the lighting to get rid of the herd reflections.

The good news is that except for the reflection thing and background problem, this is almost exactly the picture that I was seeing in my head when I decided to use the empty coke can for a subject.

OK, so we have seen the lightbox with a white background, but some things are going to look better with a dark background. I decided to try to play around with this a bit tonight. Overall I am happy with what I was able to get, but there are a few issues that I need to work out.

First of all my black background is not really that black, more of a faded out dark grey used to be black. I think my wife has some black fabric hiding somewhere that I think will work better than one of my old t-shirts. Secondly the exposure is not great, I had to make a bit of an adjustment in the contrast. I am pretty sure I know what the problem is. I am going to have to see if I can correct it in the camera next time.

Finally…the fucking lantern is too dirty. It has been in a box since we moved three years ago and it was really dusty. I knocked most of the dust off, but I missed some, and the glass is pretty fucking dirty. I will spend some time making this thing shine before I shoot it again.

So you go to a theme park and they have created a reproduction of some far away location, and you say “Wow that looks just like ____________”. So you snap a pic so you can post it online and say “hey look I went up to Maine this weekend”, but then you load the picture on the computer and you realize it looks fucking fake. Some stuff just doesn’t look right. Like the rocks don’t look like real rocks and shit. That’s cause they aren’t real rocks. They are made out of concrete and painted to look like rocks. Then you get frustrated cause if it wasn’t for the fucking rocks it would look great.

So anyway I tried to make it look better by fucking around with the colors and stuff…I think it is decent picture, but it still doesn’t look real.

If you stand there you are going to get wet…no seriously, don’t stand there unless you want to get wet. Not just wet, you could very well get soaked…like really fucking soaked. For you see sir (or madam) you are now standing in the “Splash Zone”.

The “Splash Zone” is brilliant. You have a ride that creates a big splash to soak the riders…but there is also a shit load of splash going somewhere else…if you make room for people to stand where the extra splash lands…they will. Bingo…you have a new “attraction” and it doesn’t really cost you anything. OK there may be some wasted water, but most of it is recovered and put right back into the “river”.

It is amazing to watch people stand there and get soaked over and over again. I can understand wanting to cool off on a hot day, but walking around a theme park in soaking wet clothes is almost worse than being hot. Of course most of the people (if not all) were kids, but it is still amazing to watch them just get soaked to the bone.

And a bonus….splashed

I guess this is another one of those cliche pics, but it doesn’t make it any less cool looking. I am not sure what else there is to say about the picture except maybe that it wasn’t edited. Well it was cropped a bit…but that isn’t so much “editing”, just a small change to the composition.

So did the candle help you get all relaxed and stuff? OK, good. I am sorry to my faithful readers for my lack of updates this week, but this was the final push to get our move completed. Monday was D-day and it royally sucked ass. By the end of the day it was too bad, but the morning was hell. Then Wednesday we brought over the multitudes of shit that everyone had left behind…while back at the new office…16 pallets of supplies get delivered as well as the forklift thingy that we need to put the pallets on the shelves. Seems like a good thing, except that nobody knows how to drive the forklift thingy cause it is one of the stand up kind.

By the end of the day the warehouse was just about full up with stuff…however it was all on the floor and not on the shelves where it needs to be. So the forklift thingy…I actually had figured out how to work it pretty soon after it was delivered, but it was a little tricky to maneuver and they told us not to use it till we had been trained…so I waited. Thursday morning the “trainer” shows up…”oh man I haven’t used one like this in years”. So I showed him how to work it so that he could train me…

Now keep in mind that I am a programmer…not the shipping manager or warehouse dude or anything like that, but it is a small company and I have been there for a long time and often function as Manager of Operation or whatever you would call the person that does the stuff that needs to be done. So for the past two days I have been putting shit away, but after two days on the forklift thingy I have pretty much made her my bitch. Oh, and late today I noticed that her name is Karen…well that is the name that is written on her.

So hopefully next week things will get back to something more like normal…