No, not really. I did a shoot of "formals" for a friend's daughter's sweet 16 party. I detailed all the gory stuff over at my K20D blog. Definitely a lot of fun, in amidst the terror :)
Zoon is still either preggers or fat, if the former I hope she pops soon so I can get her fixed the next day this time, instead of waiting 8 weeks or whatever it was last time that let that little tart go get herself knocked up again. And mother's day is tomorrow too, happy mother's day in advance mom!
Yea, I know, long time no update.... seems that not much interesting is going on lately. However, on Saturday Dana was kind enough to invite me out to a poker night. The weather was half decent, so I left home a bit early and went out with the goal of taking some pictures of Mt. Cheam (a bit east of Chilliwack) as Dana had mentioned a few times he wanted to take pictures of the mountain. In theory the timing to get the good light would be about right, however the weather was hazy and "meh" so my shots of it didn't turn out all that well at all. However, on the way out there I saw a sign to Bridal Falls and having never been there, took the side road.
It was about a 10 minute walk from the parking lot up to the falls (well, "fall" to be precise) and it was very cool. A short and fat fall as opposed to the last waterfall I was at at Shannon Falls in Squamish. I got a bunch of shots and a few even turned out. The one above is a combination of four images to create a vertidcal panorama (not needed until I want to print out something wall sized of course). That one I converted to LAB color and did some tweaking there to test the "use lab to make the green pop more" theory. May or may not have done anything as compared to normal processing of course.
The one above is a shot taken from a way up past the "don't go beyond this fence" sign to get closer to the bottom of the fall. I took a set of three images bracketed -1.5,0,+1.5 and then combined these to create an HDR in Photoshop (to align them properly) and then Photomatix (to do the tone mapping). On my screen it looks a bit more "HDR-like" in terms of a bit more cartoony color, but not overdone. I will probably do a bit of playing with a non-HDR version to see how that looks as well. I'm not a fan of overdone HDR but I can see the attraction to the odd poppy-ness of the colors and detail.
Anyway, as the sun came down and the mosquitos came out I headed over to poker night. There were 5 guys there, plus snacks and beer. What better of a night could you have!? I made it to the end as one of the last two in the game, but in the end lost out as my chips were slowly taken away from me :( Oh well, I didn't need the $50 pot anyway!! :P
Had a great time post-poker as well, chatting with everyone, and watching random funny youtube videos. I bailed a bit early due to the drive home. Oh, one thing I did find out was I don't think I could make it in the army. Dana was telling us some stories about how the training went. I've always had this random thought that if I really wanted it bad enough I could bulk up and be an army guy (no, don't try to understand how my brain works), but after hearing about how they'd have to run everywhere and do 25 chin-ups before entering any building, my body hurt just thinking about it! I think for now my goal of dropping a few pounds will be good enough for now :)
Well, maybe not friends, but tonight Rex was sleeping in "the circle thing" (the round red cat bed) and the kitten snuck up and made her way in.... slowly on the edge, then inside, then touching and then sleeping. Granted this was on the other side, but it was very nice to see the two of them being more than "I don't see you!" to each other.
Two of them in The Circle Thing
Her (still no name) being all cool and hanging off the side.
Cool like a cucumber.
Hope that satisfies for the cuteness quota!
She's been a little hellian lately though, doing the hundred yard dash across the house, attacking hands and feet, or any white thing you might take off the floor (socks, paper towels, Kleenex, clothes.... etc). Cute and scary at the same time :) She's also not understanding that climbing up people is not a good thing to do, however, if you're standing beside something she wants to go up on... guess who turns into a ladder. Clothes or bare skin she doesn't care... and has gone flying across the room a couple of times after turning my naked back into a stepladder to get up on the kitchen counter! Good thing shes cute!
Just a few updates to keep my future self reminded of what's going on with present (past) self.
- Thanks to a bit/scratch/injury of some sort, Corny had a nasty wound on his back that ended up infected, and the vet had to remove some dead flesh (ick!). He ended up as a franken-Corny (again) (pictured right). When he went back 10 days later to get his stitches removed, turns out he still had puss still in the wound (ick again) and the wound hadn't healed enough, so he's back on antibiotics for another week. He's also leaking puss right now for some reason, it's fairly gross, but it's puss and not blood, which is a good thing. Not good that he's leaking, but it's not that his stitches are pulled or anything (as far as I can tell anyway). I'm going to keep an eye on it and maybe give the doc a call tomorrow to find out if he needs another drain or something, or we can just leave it.
- Yup, I got myself a new camera... thanks to a fair amount of extra hours work I've been doing, and the magic of credit cards. I've actually had a couple of people a) ask me to take their picture and b) offer to pay!! I've upgraded from my *ist-D, which I got in 2004 to the Pentax K20D, with double the megapixels, in body shake reduction, DNG support, plus a whole wack of other goodies. I'm very happy with this and have (in part) the This Week In Photography podcast to thank for rejuvenating me back into picture taking.
- To this end I've also started another blog, with the idea of maybe passing on some interesting and more focused information than this random collection of cat pictures and rambling about myself that no one really cares about! I was inspired by another blog and created The K20D Blog over at the free blogging service, BlogSpot. I'm fairly excited to see if there is any interest in this. I have a bunch of things I've learned about photography, and while I'm still way a learner, I like sharing. Mostly it's about creating content, instead of just linking to random things. I'm also seeing if I can monetize this a bit as well. I've got google ads on the site, and have signed up with the Amazon affiliate link thing (ie: click the link and buy a book, and a tiny bit is kicked back to me to help me keep things going here). People seem to be making money with this blogging thing, maybe this can help me get things started :) (Sorry if I sound like a whore).
- Coming down from a nasty cold. This corresponded with the part of the week I was on call and working from home, so it worked out I guess, still, nasty nasty... I'm very glad I almost have control over my nose again! I'm also riding that dark
horsenag by the name of NyQuil... with the wonderful (to steal a term from Dennis Leary) "Green Death F-n Flavor". Horrible taste, fairly good results at night.
- Cat-sitting mom and dad's cat for a couple of weeks makes me realize that 5.5 cats is too many.
- Kitten is still unnamed. I floated "Alba" last night which she was tasting bubbles in a bubble bath, from a bubble bath called "alba", and also as a tribute of course to Jessica Alba... cute, long legs, a bit ditzy, and distracted easily by shiny objects (Dear Jessica, that's a joke, I know you are a wise and intelligent lady, I hope you'll still visit next time you're in Vancouver, and I promise I'll stop stalking you). I'm not 100% convinced on the name though, it doesn't quite work though, and talking to her using the name results in no reaction (not uncommon in cats anyway).
- More kitten pics soon!
Think that's about it... other than the kitten being really cute and asking ("Baroo!") to be picked up to play with things (like coat hangers out of reach in the closet of green leaves from a plant in the living room), I think that's about all for now. I can feel the NyQuil starting to hit me now and the ol' brain starting to slow down, so I'm going to hit the hay.
Dana was kind enough to invite me out tonight to see The Bank Job, which was given four of of five stars by PeeJay, which was all I needed to hear, since he's seen approximately every movie, ever :)
I have to agree with the 4/5 review. This was an excellent movie, combining a great mix of action, humor, "caper" and some "how are they going to get out of this one". In fact, that's also about my only complaint. More on that in a sec. The good is this movie is great! I believed the gritty look, the 70's characters, the actress playing the model Martine had the perfect 60s-70s model look. The caper was fast moving, the intrigue and "how are they going to get out of this" was reminiscent of Ocean's 11, the funny bits were some laugh out loud (but mostly believable) moments.... etc etc. Definitely go see this movie.
About my only complaint about this was that the movie didn't seem to know exactly what type of movie it was. On one hand it was a gritty crime drama. On another hand it was a funny action movie with the funny sidekick (a bit like Snatch). On yet another hand it was a caper movie (like Inside Man). On another hand it was (as mentioned before) a great plot and "how are they going to get out of this" like Ocean's 11. At one point it's funny and goofy, a bit out of character, almost jarringly so (the "no names Micheal", "sorry Dave" part you see in the trailer). At yet another point it gets really dark, almost disturbingly so.
Maybe it's this combination of movie types that make the movie work, maybe not. This is the only reason why I'd take a point off the review. Even so this is a very minor niggle which I do not mean to tarnish what is a really great movie!
In lieu of the standard PITA of resizing, uploading, and doing the HTML to make the images display here, I'm just going to throw a link to my latest batch of kitten pics up on Flickr. Yay for the Lightroom flickr upload plugin that lets me export images to flickr right from Lightroom, really really easily.
Another instance of my famousness has appeared at Fake Steve Jobs site. I really must catalog all the occurances of this popping up online, as it is the legacy which I leave my family, my children, and their children. I hope they are proud!
Anyone who's seen my ass, specifically the ass you see to the right please post a comment with the URL.
Ah, cats.... gotta love how they pay us back for housing and feeding them with making us pay their vet bills. Corny had a wound on his back which went from a scab to something fairly ugly looking, and I ended up taking him to the vet. Basically it's not healing, there's dead flesh in there that needs to be cleaned out. So they're going to chop him open, carve out the dead flesh (yum!) and then stitch him back up again (putting a drain in if needed). I'm hoping there won't be need for a drain again, and no repeat of the Franken-Corny.
I'm starting to lust more and more after this camera. Great video highlighting some of the high points! They are showing up in stock in Vancouver as well, so watch out credit card!
Update: Found a place in vancouver with $100 less than normal price, working on my local guys to match it..... trouble..... danger danger wil robinson!
No, it's not nearly as perverted as it sounds. I finally dug up the manual to the flash unit (the AG360FGZ for anyone whose counting) and started going through the different settings, learning (by doing this time) about high speed sync, leading/trailing curtain, different wireless modes, etc. I've read through them before of course, but hadn't done any real work with any of them.... just set the unit to the 'green' mode and clicky-clicky. In the actual doing I found all sorts of little gotchas and how things really worked (like the "HS" icon for high speed mode not showing up in high speed sync mode until you were at 180/s or over). Lots of fun. For the most part sleeping cats facing the wrong way were my subjects, as the point was not to create good photos, but to learn what happens when I click this button.
Ironically one pic that I felt was half decent enough to share ended up from one of the first shots, this is with (if I recall) the flash angled 90 degrees to bounce off the ceiling, with the wide angle flap down and the 'cachlight' flap up (note catchlights in the subjects eyes :) Pic is right out of the camera (well, from camera raw imported to Lightroom, converted to DNG, exported to JPG and then uploaded to the webserver :) No manipulation in between of exposure or anything. Great detail in the full size original, and the lighting and shadows I really like.
I do so enjoy wide angle lenses :) Click for bigger.
Aside: Anyone from the fraser valley area (Epp, I'm talking to you) interested in a photo-walk of some sort?
