Author Archives: blurb

Car Art

Image

I’m back from San Francisco. It was a great trip and so good to see my friends and meet new people. I attended the Google Plus Photography Conference that was run by Scott Kelby. Went on an official photowalk to Treasure Island and learned a few tricks about how to light people using a two then three speedlight flash units; one as master, one or more as slave(s). It was windy and cold. Surprise! But toward the end, the light got better and I’ve got a few good images to work on and share.

Later, I went on a Drink & Click photowalk that started in North Beach and ended in Chinatown. Ended for me. Several others stayed out much later and went to a couple more spots. I didn’t want to feel like crap the next day at the conference, so I left at a semi-reasonable hour. A very nice and good person gave me a lift back to my friend’s house to crash. Big thanks to Lotus Carroll and Juan Gonzales for setting up the photowalk and hosting a really great night out. Here’s a group shot.

I think I want to try to do some Drink & Click action in Salt Lake City. People who don’t drink would be welcome and under no obligation to drink. Any Salt Lake photographers who are reading this and have an interest, let me know via my contact page and we’ll set one up. Even if no one comes, I will be doing this through the summer because the after work light will be fantastic and hey, drinks and cameras. What can go wrong? Nothing!

Tentative agenda:

  • Drinks (Dinner as well?) at a good starting point to be decided later
  • Walk around and shoot
  • End up at another drinking location
  • Shoot some more

This isn’t about getting lit. It’s about socializing and relaxing. It was really great to loosen up and visit with people I’d seen and circled on Google Plus at this informal event. Seeing all the cameras parked on tables while people visited was something else. Fortunately, we all pretty much owned the bar space of the last spot we hit, so there was not a deep concern about losing a camera. I still kept mine on. Because I’m paranoid and uptight.

The image above is from this walk and is a detail of graffiti on the side of a van parked in Chinatown. Because the walk took place on Monday night, there weren’t too many people out and we could roam and shoot with relative ease. The streetlights added some nice ambience, but I was shooting at 3200 ISO pretty much the whole night.

I did some noise reduction in Lightroom and then took the image into Photoshop for some more trickery to pull up the spray paint details.

Daily affirmation: Great things happen when I let them.

Mike Diamond on the Beastie Boys Last Recordings with Adam Yauch

Posted:

2

“He had us fooled in the most beautiful way,” Michael Diamond said of Adam Yauch, his friend and fellow Beastie Boy for more than 30 years, describing the latters “incredible optimism” during his three-year battle with cancer.

via Mike Diamond on the Beastie Boys Last Recordings with Adam Yauch | Music News | Rolling Stone.

I missed this one yesterday. Still hurting about MCA’s passing…

Outer Sunset

Posted:

11

20120523-093247.jpg

When it’s not foggy, the magic hour light in the Sunset can be delicious. But it’s usually foggy.

* * *

Last night I got to shoot my friend’s band. The last time I did that was in 2001 with my Nikon Coolpix 990. Eleven years ago. It was great to hear him play and a blast to shoot. There was another photographer there shooting film with a Contax system. Beautiful camera. I’m more anxious to see what he got because I have already seen what I shot. Film is great and I miss it. Sometimes. Seeing a frame here or there during a shoot can be instructive. But the anticipation of film can contain its own rewards.

* * *

Daily affirmation: Make here greener.

Twelve

Posted:

9

I’m in San Francisco for a few days for the Google+ Photography Conference. I’ll try to post regularly from my phone and whatnot, but no guarantees.

Yesterday, I went with my old college buddy and his family to a park in the Sunset to watch the eclipse. I got a couple of shots using Hipstamatic where the eclipse is visible via lens flare. Look at the very bottom of this one:

click image to see a larger version

A tiny crescent. Nice!

Daily affirmation: Lighten your load.

Option to Buy

Image

More New Orleans beauty. I don’t recall where this was taken, but i wish I did. I could spend a couple of hours shooting all the textural goodness of this building.

Daily affirmation: Get one longstanding thing done today.

This affirmation is something that I’ve been trying to do all week. I think I cracked it last night. It’s nerd-related and I’m proud of myself for learning all the stuff I needed to move forward toward completion. MySQL, PHP, 77 browser windows (all with at least half a dozen tabs open) and only a smidge of caffeine.

I’ve got my dev server up. I’m doing work. I’m staying up way too late on said work. It feels good.

However. When I get into the state necessary to focus on database code (and it’s largely syntax that is my stumbling block), other things fall off the radar. Like blogging. Shooting photos. Progressing on projects and the like. The sludgy feeling of poking around a large database and extracting things programmatically is very cool, but it’s kind of anti-climactic. Most one-time data operations are like that. You spend hours and hours perfecting the commands and queries. Then when you run it and it works, you see that the server spent 0.2258 seconds to execute it. While that speed is very cool, there just isn’t a big enough payoff. I’m thinking that when you run a batch of successful commands on a database, the computer needs to transform into things like:

  • Supermodels
  • Charcoal grill
  • Full drumline
  • Time portal that opens and send you to a warm (not too hot) beach
  • Perfectly fitting Iron Man® suit with a minimum two hours of power

Just saying.

Vintage Detroit Iron

Image

Saw this car parked behind a suburban professional building in Salt Lake City. Weird juxtaposition of doctors, dentists and this incapacitated Ford LTD.

* * *

I grew up with two Ford station wagons; one right after another. We used them like covered trucks for my mom’s business and they towed our Starcraft popup trailer on family camping trips. The bit of taillight shown in the image is similar to one of the wagons. Those station wagons were massive. Very boaty to drive, but had good power ratio for the weight of the car. My dad could squeal tires driving up Utah canyons with 5–6 kids and the trailer in tow. I recall a Mario Andretti comment from one of my siblings. My dad said something like, “bullshit” or maybe it was one of his invented words. My mom calmed him down and I was bummed. Squealing tires meant excitement and danger. I loved riding in the back of the first wagon. My dad found these pads that were made to fit the car and I would ride, unsecured, sprawled across the back of the car in quite luxurious fashion, reading MAD magazine and whatever comic books I had scrounged for the trip.

Good times.

I hauled a lot of food, tables, fake ferns, real ferns (it was the 1970s-80s) and other wedding decorations in those cars. I occasionally made out in one of them. The mats my dad got for the first station wagon fit the second one and as a teenager, the combination of comfort and space behind the rear bench seat meant serious snogging. I saw Conan the Barbarian (also featured making out) from the back of that car.

* * *

Main reason for posting these vintage cars is the memories I have of their durability, their non-durability, their quirks and all the miles shared with friends and family.

Daily affirmation: Stop treating the computer like a friend. It’s just a tool.

Booker T. Jones: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Posted:

1

I’m working on a post remembering Donald “Duck” Dunn, legendary Stax bassist who passed away on Sunday. Dunn played for years with Booker T & The MGs; they were the house band at Stax in Memphis. In looking for videos, I found this great one of Booker T playing at NPR. The Hammond B3 sounds glorious:

Excellent audio engineering. And he was 17 when he recorded “Green Onions”! I was just trying to make out all the time at 17. And play some music, but at that time, making out edged music out of the way.

Via: Booker T. Jones: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert — YouTube