it’s something…

When I was young, like younger than 10, a friend of the family gave me an old train set. From what I can tell from searching on line, this set is “pre-war”. Most of the ones I have seen are just the cars and engine…I have everything. The “motor”, 3 cars, track, the box, and the power supply. That reminds me I need to find the box…I really hope my wife didn’t throw it out. Anyway the coolest thing about this train is the power supply. I guess in the “pre-war” era they didn’t have wall sockets like we do now. I guess electricity was mostly limited to being used for lighting. So the power supply is made to screw into a light socket. I can remember that this has always fascinated me.

So here is a picture of the “motor”. For whatever reason I thought this should be on a black background, but this actually made it pretty tricky to shoot, because there is not enough contrast to get the exposure easily dialed in. Getting the lighting just right seems to have been the trick, as it so often is.

eh…I am not a big fan of cats and I just wanted to post a picture of Nadia and couldn’t think of anything else to write..

I went to my studio today to take some pictures, and I realized it was way too fucking hot. So moved this over there and that over here and flipped a couple of switches, but no matter what I did I couldn’t figure a way to get the AC into my garage studio. So I picked up the whole fucking studio and moved it into the my bedroom. Presently it is just sitting on the floor and although this is not an ideal position for shooting, laying on the floor in my air conditioned bedroom holding the camera at an awkward angle was 1000 times better than standing in my fucking 90 something degree garage.

Well the reason I had gone out to the studio is that I finally remembered to get myself a proper black backdrop for the light box. Technically it is a $3 flat sheet from walsmart, but it is black not sort of black, really black, so it is a lot easier to get the lighting and exposure correct for the proper effect.

And one more! I have been having an issue with space. With the large volume of pictures I have been taking I have been maxing out my harddrive. I have a 40 gigger in this laptop so that is not a huge amount of space considering the number of pixels I have been pulling down lately. So doing the math I figured that a full sized external drive was my best dollar to gigabyte option. So I finally found what seemed to be a pretty good deal at about $0.37 per gig…

This morning I got up early, well kind of early for a Saturday, sometime around 9. I put some clothes on and went out in the backyard with my dog. As I was standing there I noticed how quite it was. No AC units, no cars, just the sound of the wind rustling some trees and a couple of wind chimes. I was somewhat reminded of when we had dem canes, and everyone’s power was out. It was so fucking peaceful I couldn’t help but stand there and close my eyes just listening to the quiet. The quiet that was so rudely disturbed a few minutes later when some asshole started up his lawn mower.

When I finished mowing my grass, I noticed that it just didn’t seem as quiet. Not sure exactly what had changed, maybe someone’s AC off in the distance or a car driving by, but at least I had that brief moment.

Anyway that brings us to what I believe to be a first of a kind photo for this blog. See at some point today I thought it would be cool to write about the quiet and the lawn mower, and then I thought…”hmmm I need a picture of my grass.” I guess I could have shot the mower, but I think the grass is bit more abstract…or something.

And yes…I was the asshole with the mower…

Hey I had things to do man…I couldn’t stand around all day listening to some fucking wind chimes.

I think I am in a B&W phase. The light in this pic is pretty vibrant red, but for some reason it just doesn’t look right in color. I think I am going to do that think where you leave the “background” B&W and pull out the color for the subject. If you look on my flickr you can see what I am talking about. The ones in there I did with GIMP, so I am wondering if it is easier with photoshop.

Time for bed now…

Here is a pic…I am going to bed.

I was sitting on my back porch…or is it a lanai..whatever, I was sitting on the covered patio thing behind my house watching the rain and I was trying to figure a way to capture the rain in a photo. I tried shooting water dripping into a puddle, it was kind of meh. After that I pretty much had nothing…

Then my kid comes out side and starts dancing around in the rain with an umbrella. I grabbed a few shots of her then had an idea and asked her to hold the umbrella down a bit more so I could get more of the top into the shot. Turns out this was a great way to catch the rain…catching rain with an umbrella…who’d a thunk it.

Oh yeah and I added a thing-y over there –> it shows the most recent pics in my flickr account, it is pretty neat.

I normally prefer to keep my pics “pure”. In other words I don’t like to fuck around with the content of the picture. Technically all of my pictures are Photoshoped since I use Photoshop to tweak stuff and crop the pics and stuff and of course converting them to B&W, but I don’t change the objects and stuff in the picture. Anyway, I have been doing some reading and one thing was a tutorial on replacing a boring sky wiht one that is more interesting, so I figured I would try it.

It was actually pretty easy, but I think my “artistic integrity” will prevent me from doing this on a regular basis. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with it or that there isn’t some artistry involved in changing out the sky, but I guess I just feel like it is a different kind of artistry than I am really going for or something.

Anyway here is the pic with a new sky and I used a different process for the B&W conversion.

A couple weeks ago I happened upon a cool fountain in the Thorton Park area of downtown Orlando. As I was driving round the round about I snapped a few pics of it. When I got home and looked at the pictures I was disappointed because the composition sucked donkey balls.

This weekend I was in the area again so I decided to “fix” it. So I stopped the truck and stood in the middle of the road and took my time to compose the picture better. OK…technically I parked the truck, and these is not a simple task in Thorton Park…see the parking sucks around there, and where the fuck are all those people anyway. There are like 500 cars parked on the street around there and I only saw like two people. But I did literally stand in the middle of the street to take the picture.

And now for something extry…this is in the same area.

I don’t have a lot to say…but yesterday was my kid’s 12th birthday. She wanted to see Pirates then ride the ride. Crossing the six oceans lagoon or whatever it is called I snapped this shot of the wicked looking sky.