Grizzly Pear

It just so happened that I took the first couple weeks after the structures exam off from studying for my next test. We went camping a couple weekends and generally didn’t do too any studying. Sooo of course, once I start getting serious about studying for this next test, Building Design and Construction Systems, our office gets a big fast track project dropped on us! I really can’t complain, the slow office between march till November has meant that my overall pay has been notably lower this year. That and getting into photography along with buying a car and my finances are not nearly as healthy as it was last year! I can’t complain in the end, I’ve still got my emergency savings and all that, but still…

I really do have respect for people that can work full time and take the tests along with raising a family — I find learning all this material interesting but also incredibly draining also. I guess in the end, you do what you (feel pressured to) do, since I also can’t imagine doing the crazy hours I did in undergrad at Berkeley. At least at Rice I was much more efficient and didn’t go completely crazy, but studio at Cal was really quite another beast. Maybe a the couple years out of school gave me perspective or maybe it was just that there were other nutzos who would work much to late into the night, but yeah, its really hard to imagine how I did it in those old days. But then again, some of my best friends and fondest memories come out of those crazy times…..

Nostalgia really is quite a deceiver I think.

So me and Jing have been visiting state parks in our spare time. I’ll spare you the reviews since you can just follow them on yelp. But that said, I’ve been having fun even with the deer incident and the awefully cold nights from last weekend. It was fun coming home and setting off the carbon monoxide alarm while changing the batteries that must have died while we were at Martin Dies Jr. State Park. I’m not so sure about the recuperative powers of being in nature – in the end you’re still there wherever you’re at – but it still is a nice change of pace, especially for someone like me who is somewhat obsessed with hanging out at home and reading a book (or studying the ARE’s or surfing the internets).

So here’s yet another a photographic post for this friday (actually three if you count the 11/20 post I somehow never published until today and my retroactive thanksgiving picture that I’m just about to do right now =P )

Lost Maples State Natural Area

Martin Dies Junior State Park

Livingston Lake State Park

HEB has an upscale brand called “Central Market”. The produce here is consistently quite good and consistently quite expensive. We came here to get Eric and An a bottle of wine for hosting Thanksgiving. Of course, we completely forgot that An can’t drink at the moment! In any case, I also brought a camera and had some fun along the way. I don’t know why so many of these came out well (usually I am posting one image out of twenty, but I only took about ten of these veggie shots in all) but it really does make one think of the cornucopia of food that just sits there waiting for us to step into a supermarket.

So here are a few pictures from a procrastination session from “Building Design and Construction Systems”. The photo of Peppercorn on the run is heavily worked, I kind of took Scott Bourne’s thoughts on Subject Attention Simplify (a very good article) and applied it to this one. The two bird photos were pretty straightforward with only tweaking to saturation and contrast, etc. I guess you can call them “digital shopped” because they are the best out of MANY, MANY shots from those session — way more pictures than anyone would have taken in the old days.

As you can see in the delta between shot and posting, I really need to sit down and sort through my photos more regularly! I suspect I need to start taking fewer (but more thoughtful) pictures because going through these massive galleries are really quite daunting!

About an hour from our apartment is Brazos Bend State Park. It was a really nice day on Sunday and the weather was gorgeous (aside from the fact we forgot sunscreen so we had to pay $8 for a dinky little bottle of that stuff). Lots of places to take pictures of local wildlife…including alligators!  In any case, it was such a nice experience, we ended up getting the annual state park pass and we’re gonna go check out some fall colors five hours out.  We’ll see, it should be interesting.

Just Hanging

Hamster on a Piano

Floating the Day away

Whee!

Hehe sorry not much else for today, gonna be taking the structural test at noon. But here’s some cute pictures of Badger and some haikus from the post office =)

a toy wristwatch and plastic binoculars,
an antsy boy bangs on trash cans

whispered instructions quiet complaints -
hushed conversations moving minutes while waiting in line

staring at a silent ceiling fan,
a murmuring radio plays the soundtrack
to an afternoon in line.

so here is some fruits of procrastinating from studying…enjoy =)

I had an idea to take lots of picture ala Ed Ruscha when I was running around the USA during my Thesis travels. Nothing really came of that (or to be honest from the travels in general). However, I did end up with some random pictures of Chinese restaurants here and there.

I woke up a couple nights ago with the brilliant idea of starting a flickr group and using that as a platform to publish these photos — many of the individual shots really aren’t that good but I thought they might stand nicely together as a group.

BUT like most things on the internet, this area has been staked out already — and by people who are much more intense and dedicated to the task then I ever would be. In any case, here is the group “index”. Everything is listed alphbetically by geographic location. Its really quite something — there are some amazing chinese restuarants in places and configurations you’d never imagine — even if you just look at the Texas Coastal (houston) section.

I spent some time just working a picture of Peppercorn and I thought it would be interesting to upload all three. The first one is the original shot out of the camera. Since I shoot raw, I never mess with white balance — especially since I spend most of my time just figuring out my exposure since so few of my lenses meter on the camera.

The first attempt was to try a drastically horizontal and centered composition. I spent quite some time trying to get it balanced right, however, I think in the end, it still had a Pepper head floating against the carpet.

After taking a break, I took another stab at it and I think I am much happier with this. I realized that the colorful stuff in the background helps anchor the image in space and I think keeping it at a relatively normal aspect ratio kept it in the “photograph” realm as opposed to entering the “graphic design” realm (at which point I would need to do a lot more processing). I must add that shooting in RAW, while a bit heavy on hard disk space, gives you so much extra control over the post processing output that I unequivocally recommend it to anyone who plays with their shots after they upload it to their machine.

In general I do a lot of processing on the photos — sometimes the come straight out clean, but usually I do tweak a lot of little things here and there. For this photo, clearly more of a blurry composition, I did push the blues and I did push the highlights on Badger’s back as well as from the bottom corner. I’ve never really subscribed to the sanctity of the initial image — though I do try to avoid pushing things so far that they look like digital paintings (even if the photograph has been pushed and pulled a tremendous amount).

My friend is thinking about coming to Houston around rodeo time and she asked me about any good websites about Houston and things to do here.  Unfortunately I don’t know of any such sites, but I did find an old google map of my favorite places in the city which I had put together when Dongwoo came to town.

I spent a couple hours updating it and here it is!

I gotta say that my most interesting places are really just eateries.  But there is a reasonable helping of odd ideosyncratic places and wacky moments.  If you have anything you think I should add, ding me.  Otherwise, here is a snapshot of my mental map of Houston.

Blue is places of interest
Cyan is Eateries
Magenta is places I still need to go visit

View Houston according to Justus in a larger map

If you click on the link that takes you to google maps, you’ll see a sidebar with all the places listed.