You had me at Speed Racer...

...and when you said "Wachowski Brothers" my eyes rolled back in my head for a few seconds.



So in 2008 the guys who did the coolest thing since anime are going to pay homage to an anime classic. Sweet!

Bees, Blossoms and a Bit of Apiphobia Therapy on the Sly

My four year-old daughter, Em, has developed a bit of a fear of insects (especially bumblebees) and spiders. I'm trying not to make too big of a deal out of it, but still try to give her a little bit of exposure to them in a way that's not threatening to her.

Today she watched me outside while I was taking some pictures of the rhododendron, which just started blossoming over the past few days. I asked her to tell me whenever she saw a bee, so that I could take a picture of it. She had fun running all around it and shrieking "a bee, daddy, a bee!", and I actually got a couple of half-decent shots with bees in them. I thought bumblebees moved pretty slowly, but I guess slow is relative when you're trying to do a close-up shot (I wouldn't say 'macro' because I wasn't using a macro lens) on manual focus. This wasn't one of the bumblebees, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Random Bits - StatCounter, Stop-Motion & My Estranged Wife

Statcounter: I do love da StatCounter -- especially the keyword analysis function. The post I did about zombie-proofing the house the other day seems to have fallen into one of those weird little niches -- on the first page of results for something that a couple of people Google up every day. My old blog still gets hits on the phrase "synthetic thc recipe" as regular as sunset, and about 3-4 variations of "hippie non-conformist" just about every day. I also did a 'separated at birth' comparing Monty Burns to Condi Rice, and it's apparently a big hit overseas -- I get hits from all over the EU in waves. (Incidentally, if anyone has a synthetic THC recipe, I'd be more than happy to post it.)

Stop-motion: Today was nice and sunny, but I was stuck in the $%@ing office all day. I did, though, take a few minutes at lunchtime to snap a couple of 1/4000 second exposures of the fountain in the courtyard at work. I'll put them up on Flickr later.

My Estranged Wife (irony finger): Irony finger because we get along just fine, both at work and outside the office -- but it's finally hit the rumor mill at work in the past few weeks that we've separated and my wife's now taking the brunt of the wild speculation. People suck - especially the kind that never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Wintergreen Gorge Pics

Went back to the Gorge today to shoot some more pics. I had tried to get some slow shutter speed pictures of the water the other day, but there was so much glare that most of them didn't turn out well at all. With it being overcast, I tried again today and had much better luck:


I also got a few miscellaneous shots that I was happy with:



Maybe I need to get on some Prozac or something, because seeing that egg on the ground (last pic in the bunch) put me in a funk for a good while. I had to go drown my sorrows in an omelet.

Vacation's over now. Back to work tomorrow, no more six-hour photo shoots for a while. Just COBOL, vbscript, VBA and the crazy people I work with.

-= sigh =-

Monkeying Around w/ Metering & Shutter Speed

I'm in the middle of reading Bryan Peterson's Understanding Exposure, and just got through the part about shutter speed. I was also really impressed with a photo that Ron Richardson took of the sky over the lake the other afternoon.

So with yesterday afternoon having been fairly windy and having some funky stuff going on with the clouds, I thought it'd be fun to see what I could do with faster shutter speeds and some unusual metering. I ended up with a lot of throwaways, and even some of the ones I like the best have a faint lens flare, but it was a fun exercise anyway.

Things to Do: #1 - Zombie-proof the House...

Yesterday I went to the early matinée at Tinseltown and saw 28 Weeks Later. It had a few nagging inconsistencies and a bit of discontinuity from 28 Days Later, but overall it was a really good zombie flick. (The unintentional comic relief was when a couple of little old ladies walked into our theater by mistake during a really intense scene -- their reaction was classic.) But anyway, the movie reinforced for me something that I've known in my heart for a long time -- it pays to be prepared for the zombie apocalypse and I've just been slacking.

There are a lot of practical considerations to zombie preparedness. I look around my house and there are entirely too many windows, no firearms and nothing sturdy enough to use as an impromptu blunt weapon, except maybe the fire extinguisher. I have a camping axe, but it's out in the garage and let's face it, the zombies aren't going let me call a time-out and then wait for me to go get it. I could stash it under the mattress, but that might seem just a little weird.

Duct tape, plastic sheeting, potable water and MREs are a start, sure, but there's no substitute for having lots of scrap lumber, penny nails, and a good supply of liquor and/or gasoline to make Molotov cocktails. I'm stocked up on the liquor and duct tape from my last house party, but still accumulating the rest.

Even assuming that I somehow manage to come up with some kind of half-decent safehouse, though, there's no guarantee that someone in my rag-tag band of survivors isn't going to see a zombified relative, go Section 8 and unlock the door. If Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that people under extreme duress do goofy things like open up the front door to the walking dead.

I'm thinking of putting together a quick multiple-choice quiz to hand out to fellow survivors. It will have one question:

1) During the zombie apocalypse, you're safely behind a locked steel door. Through a gap in the barricaded window, you see a loved one staggering around with his/her face half eaten. Do you:

a. Open the door and welcome him/her inside.
b. Run outside and leave the door wide open.
c. Go into hysterics and distract your fellow survivors.
d. Mourn silently and reload the freakin' shotgun.

If you answered anything other than 'd', bug off and get somebody else killed.

If you liked 28 Days Later, go see this one. It has the same tense, creepy quiet to the down scenes and it's chock full o' zombie goodness.

Bitten by the Shutterbug

Sometime last fall, I was bitten badly by the shutterbug.

I've been into creative photography to some extent for a long time. My wife P. had taken a photography course back in college during the mid-90s, and we both got into taking pictures as a casual hobby. We had an old Ricoh manual camera that we got a lot of use out of, as well as a basic Samsung 35mm. We eventually upgraded to a Nikon N50 in about 2002-2003, which gave us an incredible difference in quality.

At about the same time we got the N50, we also got a Sony HandyCam that took digital stills. Using scanned negatives from the Nikon and uploaded pics from the Sony, I started getting into photomontage a bit.

Last spring, P. bought a Kodak EasyShare 650, which was quite a step up from the digital pics from the Sony. We both used that a lot over 2006, but I found that I was starting to get a little bit frustrated with its limitations (fixed lens, no manual control over ISO sensitivity, aperture or shutter speed). I was also starting to get more and more into photography, and spending a lot of my free time on it.

When P. and I separated in March (long story with nothing juicy or melodramatic, but still probably not ever one for da blog -- I'm not the confessionalist type) she took the EasyShare and the Nikon. At that point, I splurged and bought myself a Nikon D80. All I can say is this: OMFG, this camera rocks. I'm still learning how to use some of the more advanced features, but it's easily 5 steps above any camera I've had before it.

So if you look to the left, there's now a Flickr widget here with some (well, kind of a lot) of my photos on it. I've been shooting just about every day I don't have the girls, and some days when I do. Once I get a little better, I'm going to see if I can start selling some prints as a second income. Wish me luck!