Category: Photos

When I first heard the assignment on Wednesday morning, I was like “hmm, Tuesday had the dramatic clouds and the weather forecast is hot and sunny for the rest of the week.”

But it turned out I just wasn’t looking carefully enough. The best thing that happened was that I realized how fucking beautiful the Vegas strip can be during dusk, with the skyscrapers reflecting the setting sun during my commute home on I-15. Unfortunately, 65mph is not particularly conducive safe shooting.

What was safe however is going super slow shutter speeds in the back yard. It was dusk so I had to pull out the tripod and on a couple different nights I shot some long exposures.

When the sky shots seemed a little barren, I decided to insert something into it…well myself. I didn’t take a ton of these, but I got really lucky with this one. We live near an airport, so several shots include trails of airplanes, but the luck came in how everything ended up right, the focus, my location on the photo, the fact I chose to stare into the camera for once….I guess sometimes you just need to show up for something cool to happen, because I really don’t think intentionality had much to do with this final outcome, but I’ll take it.

From episode 160, the assignment was Horizon

Visually I actually kind of prefer the black and white version because it is so visually striking, but I think the color photo both captures the “horizon” of the assignment and is much more mundane, which is was the point of the shot.

My coworker Frances calls the 30×42 drawings bedsheets, but the 24×36 set is big enough for a baby!

Seems that an autofocus lens and a bounce flash can make you some decent food porn.

Thanksgiving had a duck, cheesecake, mashed potatoes and minestrone soup.

Saturday had porkchops with apples and portobello mushrooms. The recipe came from Mark Bittman’s Basics – which is really a nicely structured book – with a couple modifications, instead of onions I used mushrooms and in lieu of wine I just used apple juice. I was surprised how all these came out. Maybe I’ll be getting into cooking or something now. I think my wife would appreciate it!

Last Sunday I ran around shooting my rabbits. Well, more like tried to get myself as flat to the ground as possible while trying to shoot rabbits while they sat around under the coffee table. Here are the ones that were good enough to post to facebook. Thanks to iphoto, its surprisingly easy to go through one’s photos and post them all around.

HEB has an upscale brand called “Central Market”. The produce here is consistently quite good and consistently quite expensive. We came here to get my cousin a bottle of wine for hosting Thanksgiving.

Of course, we completely forgot that his wife 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.