it’s something…

It is nice in the middle of all the sprawl to see something that reminds you that you still live in FL…

We had a bit of a scare around here yesterday. Peanut had a bit of a spell. We figure he had some kind of seizure, but the vet couldn’t really be sure.

My wife let him out yesterday afternoon and went back to doing something in the house. A bit later she thought she heard yelping and went to see what it was. He was laying on the ground kind of stiff and shaking. The neighbor said she saw him just fall over, but she was afraid to come over and tell my wife because of Nadia. So she took him to the vet. I left work and met her there. By the time I got there they had him the back working on him and they said he was stable. They treated him an allergic reaction to some kind of a bite, because that is the usual cause for dogs falling out in the back yard. So they ran a bunch of test…a bunch of not so cheap tests, and didn’t find anything wrong with him, but said that it could be something brain related that they couldn’t test for.

We told the vet about some of his other issues, like how he sometimes shakes like he has the shivers and sometimes seems disoriented, and the doc said this kind of helps point to something going on in his head. So he wants us to watch him and see if he gets any worse, but I am thinking as long as he continues to seem happy and doesn’t seem to be in pain I am not going to worry to much.

Oh yeah, they left the IV thing on his arm last night in case they need to hook him back up to the IV today…he got that taken out first thing this morning.

I am not going to lie to you…I photoshopped this picture. Actually all I did was fix some defects, but I moved some pixels around so it is technically photoshopped. The defects were little spots in the sky that come from dust on the lens. The weird thing is the dust spots only seem to show up when I take shots of blue sky…and of course I can’t find the offending dust particles on the lens anywhere.

Oh yeah I also pushed the sliders around about to make the blue a little more intense.

I am not sure if this shot is “right” from a technical standpoint, but for whatever reason I still like it. By “right”, I am thinking maybe the bit of the fence coming at the camera should be in focus. When I took the picture I was really only thinking about where the wire wrapped around the fence. I think that part tells the story…whatever that is. So the story I saw is being told, but now I can’t help but wonder if it could have been just a bit better. Know what I’m saying?

Believe it or not there are still a few orange groves in Orange County…I know this isn’t easy to believe, but it is true. For the time being there is one near my house. I am not very confident that it will be there at this time next year, which is unfortunate because the smell of orange blossoms in the air had a bit to do with us moving to this neighborhood. So since this could the the last harvest I figured I would get a shot of the oranges before they get picked…

I walked right by this dead bush twice without ecen noticing it. Fortunately when I turned around it caught my eye and I snapped off a few shots. This is one of those things that I take pictures of not really knowing if it is going to work or not. I mean who takes pictures of dead bushes. Of course this shot isn’t really about the dead bush anyway, it is about whatever this is that has decided a dead bush makes for a good home. That and the blue sky. It is neat how fucking blue it is.

Sometimes you just get lucky. Like this picture, I totally fucking lucked out. Yesterday I took a mental health day, but woke up at my normal time to wake up for work. So I forced myself to sleep some more, but it wasn’t very restful. While I was failing to sleep I decided to get up and go take some pictures. Early morning is one of the best times to take landscape shots. It would have been even better if I had just got up when I first woke up, but whatever.

Now I had to figure where the hell I was going to go. I decided to drive around the corner to the neighborhood that where they cleared lots of land and built all the roads before the market dried up. I have gotten some good shots over here before in the evening. Like the old oak silhouette and the powerlines, but I hadn’t really been able to get a good shot of the lake that I knew was there. I tried a few shots from the road, but the weeds that had grown up since the initial clearing of the land blocked the good shots. So I found a spot where it looked like there was a bit of a path in the weeds and made my way through the vegetation. I am so glad I was wearing jeans cause most of the shit was walking through was waste high…can you say itchy. I was also glad that I didn’t run across and snakes…that would not have been fun.

So anyway I pop out on the other side of the thicket and notice this old beat up fucking fence trailing of into the water. I think I might have actually been a bit giddy. I took a ton of shots, but I think this one is about the best. I might post a couple more that interpret it a bit differently, but I this one really has the right punch. Now that I know it is there I might have to go back in the evening and see how this looks with the sun coming in from the other side.

Oh yeah and one last bit…I really tried hard to make this work in color, but it just wouldn’t come together in way I liked, so I tried it in B&W and it popped. Funny thing is I wasn’t sure it worked till I walked away from the computer for a bit. When I came back the pic was on the screen and I really liked it a lot. Guess it was one of those fresh eyes things.

So begins day two of our series on the winter festival of lights…

So it begins…

For the rest of the year expect to be bombarded with images that relate to the winter celebration of light. If we are lucky I will be able to get some non WCOL pics, but it is highly unlikely since you can’t fucking turn around without seeing the lights and other images that relate to the holiday.

This picture pisses me off.

OK, it is a decent pic because I was able to punch it up a bit by pushing some sliders around in Photoshop.

The reason it pisses me off is that less than 2 minutes before I took this picture, the clouds were glowing. LIke really fucking cool glowing. I have a few shots of it like that, but they are fucking blurry. So by the time I get the tripod all setup and dialed in the fucking glow was gone.

Stupid fucking sun going down too fast…