notetoself.net

defection

i’m leaving you picasaweb. flickr is my new paramour.

nube photographer musings

no, not “nude”. not today.

one of my revolving hobbies is photography. i have no formal training in photography or any visual art. the photo toys have been just for fun, and i’ve somehow been published here and there in small/local publications without any self-marketing. (i’m including our company security badge photos as a publication)

so, where am i going? what i’ve been doing….. taking generally boring with an occasional, “oh, that’s kinda cool”. i see interesting cityscapes as i ride around, shoot them “as a test” to get to know my gear, delete most shots when i get home and then file them and forget them for a few years. i’ll visit a party/group-ride/event/convention and badly shoot people and shiny things and then send a few shots to some people that were also there, and they thank me, glance through them and forget them. i’ve had some requests to do product shoots which i have chosen to do or not based purely on my personal interest in the subject.

after playing with my newly acquired nikon d300 for the past few days and renting various lenses that i hadn’t tried before, i’ve reached a point where i feel the need to choose more specifically what i plan to do with this expensive and time-intensive hobby. will i ever do photo work for money, and do i really want the extra responsibility that goes with that? should i pass paid work off to “real”, trained photographers or photo students that have given more focus to photography? san francisco photographer Thomas Hawk seems to have skill/gear/exposure without too much defined purpose, and i’m drawn to his less-serious-but-very-active position. his images are used for tech publications that i keep seeing in my feeds. i’m also becoming more interested in dramatic portraiture like Annie Leibovitz does so well.

ok, less rambling. i’ve narrowed my shooting style enough to know i want fast, semi-wide angle lenses for hand-held low-light shooting. other than that, i’ll find out as it happens.

i’ve reached a new low

… with my cooking.

my general method of “find something foody”, “break/cut it into smaller pieces”, “fry it in bacon grease”… has failed very badly today. it turned into an onion/potato/egg … um… pie? more of a salty mush. i hadn’t eaten anything of that consistency before, but as usual, i’m determined to eat it. lots of spice hides the taste.

; p

can you imagine?

i’m having bacon wrapped bratwurst with ms greene tonight.

beta mission 2008

the museum of industry was fun. i’m amazed at the volume of precision metal in there. the lighting/rain storm on the way back was fun for some of us, not others.

our short for the 48 hour film project

48hourfilm.com we were team “Hammer Pants”.

i helped with sound recording and mixing. we had a cool mix of talented people, most of whom volunteered to help last minute.

our mandatory parameters for the film (to make sure we didn’t start early): “tragedy” theme, contains a receipt, contains the line verbatim “This could get complicated”. we got the line wrong the first time on purpose. good times.

here are pics from the shooting.

stocking up on coffee this week

<rambling>

i’ve nearly completed learning and configuring freenas for my home fileserver. i’m trying to move my noisy drives away from my room but still access them from my mac, squeeze-devices, and stepmania console. it’s finicky getting the various protocols all up and talking at the same time. spent a few hours last night trying to get a *UCKING windows NIC driver to work.) ..already sounding like a mac fanboy)

trying to sound fairly respectable on the maple leaf rag to record tonight on a mutual deadline with an old piano friend.

photo shoot tomorrow night for skunk art.

wednesday night … none of your business.

friday night, joining a group to shoot for the 48 hour film project with a break sat night to ride alpha-mission with scul.

</rambling>

i did glamour shots at work today

i made bacon infused vodka

grey goose + four strips will be ready by april. need to learn how to make a decent bloody mary before then. http://www.browniepointsblog.com/2008/01/20/homemade-bacon-vodka/

purge some geek stuff

three times in the past two days i thought of some techie thing i wanted to be able to do and thought of the device that would allow me to do it and then looked around online for the device or DIY instructions to make one …… and then i realized i already had what i was looking for. the last one was a component video to vga converter. maybe i should inventory everything i have and include that list in my google searches.