All Over

There is a local blog about "what to do this weekend", and recently they put out an email to people who had previously submitted photos. (I sent in some local images two years ago for an event, but they were not published online -- it's way back before chemo, and a little bit murky in my mind, because I ended up not being able to go to whatever the event was to see my photo on display on the projection screen behind WhateverSpeaker.)

Last week they ran a series of Summer Scenes posts, and the email was requesting photos to use for that series. I sent a few links to photos of mine from a local fair, and kayaking on Lake George, and so on. (you can see the fair shots here , and here is the kayak shot -- but you've seen that already in my blog header. )

So I got a reply "How would you like us to credit you? Is there anyplace you want us to link to?" and was very excited... and then they didn't use my photos. I was a little bit crushed because they focused on one photographer each day and I felt like I didn't make the cut. But I got over it and just decided to study the photos that DID get used; one thing I've always believed in life is there is always someone better off than you, yes, but there is also someone doing worse than you in whatever aspect of life you are dwelling on, and so stop feeling sorry for yourself already.

Today I got a wonderful note explaining that they'd changed direction with the series and asking if I would like them to use some of my photos in the future. Hell yes!! The best part of the email was her remark, "We love your work."

So, I hope to be able to link to a future post and scream "THEY USED MY PHOTO, LOOK, LOOK, LOOK!" very soon.

Kelby-nated

A week or two ago I came across news that Scott Kelby was going to be doing a seminar in Boston. If you don't know him, let me sum it up this way: he is Photoshop Guru, if Guru stands for Geek Ruler of the Universe. Here's the very official description of the classes:

Kelby Training LIVE has just announced Scott Kelby’s Photoshop for Digital Photographers one-day seminar tour. It includes five classes, covering editing images in Adobe Camera Raw, portrait retouching techniques, shooting and creating HDR images, printing techniques that will help you get what you see on screen, as well as Scott’s very own step-by-step Photoshop editing workflow from start to finish.

I have his 7 points book, which covers the Raw editing he went over in this seminar in detail, and it's great. I texted my photography buddy APB that we needed to somehow convince our spouses that we should be granted parole to cross state lines for a day trip. (Yes, I got up at five, met A. at 6, and we drove to Bean town, attended the classes, and then drove home. Lonnnnnng day.)

I was a little bit annoyed with Scott, because of one phrase in his blog that I had an issue with, when he weighed in about Kelly Clarkson's photoshopped Shape magazine cover ("her battle with weight"... my comment over there, that THAT'S THE POINT THAT EVERYONE'S UPSET ABOUT, THEY MADE HER LOOK 25 LBS THINNER, ON A MAGAZINE WITH A HEADLINE ABOUT LOVING YOURSELF, MAYBE SHE'S ACTUALLY HAPPY THE WAY SHE IS.... brought me the first troll I've had in a while... ) - but I forgive him now, because he's so effing funny. There, I bet he can finally sleep nights.

And I have to tell you, the TomTom (a GPS navigating device, for my two British readers... hi guys!!!) rules Boston. Every intersection that I needed to turn at seemed to have 6 choices for which way I could go, and we made it to the convention center only about 20 minutes past my target, which left us plenty of time to check in, check out vendors, enter raffles we wouldn't win... and see ALL of the presentations.

Here's the thing. We owe an apology to the guy we sat next to. Because we laughed quietly but hysterically through a good portion of the classes. There were SO MANY "That's What She Said" setups during those presentations, we just couldn't believe he didn't know what he was saying. (The whole "ooooh, fingers!" bit for example.... ok, maybe you had to be there but when you're in that frame of mind, it's pretty easy to spot TWSS opportunites. ) The guy is VERY funny. I'm too tired to really do an adequate review and describe how entertaining it was to watch him tweak pictures, but he was hilarious. ("Too sezzy, too sezzy....." as he was moving the edge of a shirt over to be more modest... just little stuff like that made us want to bug his office. )

I definitely recommend the seminar ($99) to anyone who can get there - he's going around to various sites in the country (Philly and Tampa) in upcoming weeks. I learned a great deal... I came home and since I was wide awake from caffeine-ated driving, I started playing around in Lightroom 3 Beta and put some of what he taught us to good use (LR is similar to the Bridge component which he was using in the class to edit RAW format photographs). I'll definitely be using some of the portrait retouching techniques. Just not on pictures of Kelly Clarkson.

Unfortunately, when you put 400 people in a room all day, what do you get? I've got it! A cold.

I've got it.

Dead

it's aaaaaalive.... master...... to me, this looks like a zombie clawing out of the earth...

anyway... this is the shot I entered into the contest associated with the photowalk... sorry for the repeat to some of you who have seen 3 different versions of this while I tried to refine it...

Take a Hike

I took a walk around a nearby state park that has two hiking trails marked... I was pretty proud of myself for successfully following the one I wanted to... and for making it up and down a steep embankment or two, to get shots I wanted, without falling into the river OR managing to get hurt... the trail looked pretty much like this...

And, well...

You know I have to do this, right??? I neeeeed to. My daughter likes the way these pictures come out. She's got some of my quirks. :-)

it's all her fault.... sorta...

Friends

My friend APB has always been a go-to guy for PC help (he talked me through installing new memory into my dust chamber, um, desktop), and photography is a common interest that we share. Along with cheesecake. Mmmm, cheesecake.

APB has been very kind to me, especially since I got job eliminated. When my last day was approaching he brought me Starbucks goodness and more or less convinced me to take a road trip with my free time this summer.

But now I am rambling... at any rate he passed me a link to the Kelby photowalk and I was all excited and replied with something mature like "DUDE, we have to do this!" Then I lost my password at the last minute and couldn't remember the time the walk started, so he gave me that info too. See? A good friend to have in your contacts list.

My friend John captured this moment at the photo walk of
me, laughing at APB because I cracked him up with a "that's what she said" joke... ruining his concentration and all.... I'm known for being something of a distraction I think...

and then this one of me letting him take the picture he was actually trying to compose... (we were shooting the very old robin's egg blue Dodge pickup)

my friends put up with so much nonsense from me! You rock, Andy.

(and wow, John, this light made my hair look fabulous! thank you! )

PS: John? could you do something about my arms?? (they do NOT look this big in the mirror...woah... I'm off to do some pushups on the wii now...)

Sunday art... a walk in the park

Yesterday at the local Scott Kelby photo walk site I took pictures, but based on what our walk leader said, I was trying hard not to do the standard "tree in a park" or "pretty flower" pictures for purposes of the contest... these were a few I liked...

Henry Johnson ...(wiki link) ... who was kinda cute if I do say so. That's inapropriate, but not as much as what I accidentally said to APB when I saw the statue. ("Huh, I never saw this before, ... I never came in this end before" - since we were doing "that's what she said" jokes all day, he doubled over laughing. Sorry A. I actually didn't INTEND to act like a 13 year old in that moment.)

part of a statue... me, fixated on tiny details. How true this rings...

While I was taking the above picture, the two poets besieged my companions, wanting to read to us and have their photo taken. I began hiding. I should have stayed hiding. One poet had a poem about a Girl, who was a godess, and he looked my way at key points in the poem and I wanted to sprout wings and fly away. :::hangs head in shame::::

this for some reason is one of my favorite shots of the old Dodge we saw. I know. Not much to it, but it really appeals to that quirk part of my brain that likes robin's egg blue, and tiny details of things (and tonal curves. Look, this post has NO WIERD PICTURES WITH FREAKY TONAL CURVES. Are you proud of me, internet? thank you. I will post a couple tomorrow from my hike today.)

this is the door handle of the car. It probably DOES need a tonal curve adjustment to punch it up. If only I knew the RIGHT way... hahaha. Look, no electronic keypad to get in. Me likee. Right after I took this picture I told APB yet another TWSS punch line, and our other friend took pictures of us cracking up. They're awesome. But I don't have a model release on APB so I won't share them with you. There are rules, you know.

technically, I suppose this is a flower and so I can not enter it in the Kelby contests because flowers are boring, yada yada.

I have a few others, that I am actually thinking of submitting; since I can only submit two I will wait until I see what I have on the memory card on J's camera. He was crazy, um, nice enough to bring a spare memory card and let me shoot for a while in RAW format on his REAL camera with multipoint focus and a 70-300 lens.... damn I want a real camera!!!

More tomorrow, my friends.

Frasier

Photo by moi... this morning, on my rainy walk... it took 20 minutes of stalking to get one good shot, but I love this...

I have an odd affection for this bird... he has been hanging around my pond for years. Sometimes I see him in the old dead tree, up in the woods behind my house. He will eventually decide to go back to the pond and fly over my head with a whooop whooop whooop.

Once (long ago) I saw him standing on one foot for no particular reason in the back of my yard, and figured my neighbor had made some sort of a bizzarre scarecrow as a practical joke. Then I opened the window for a closer look, and about had a heart attack when he spread his wings and took off.

Really, they're big.

(The largest North American heron, with a head-to-tail length of 91–140 cm (36-55 in), a wingspan of 167-201 cm (66-79 in), and a weight of 2–3.6 kg (4.4-8 lbs), it is blue-gray overall,..... thanks wiki... )

And it's not ACTUALLY a Crane. But back when I watched him fish every day, I named him Frasier. That was right after I'd had my gallbladder out, and was just starting to take walks to get my strength back and recuperate. I'd walk to the bench, sit for a while, and since it was usually around 9 am, he'd be out looking for his breakfast.

Clicks

Just a few random pictures here, with comments... this weekend was very mixed, weather-wise, but I managed to enjoy the good weather and duck the bad. At Country Drive-in I saw a 59 Corvette convertible. I immediately sent a picture of the car to Suzy with a request to have one for my very own; I have yet to hear back from her. I like how the two headlights and the area below make a face.... or am I the only one who sees that?

sigh... yes, I thought so.

Earlier in the day my son and I took in the scenery at the visitor's center at the point where the Hudson River splits off into the Erie Canal... (we were too late for the farmer's market, my bad)

This is an example of some of the clouds that were out and about in the evening, before the thunderstorms moved in. I love clouds. Don't know why. Did you hear they might officially declare a new type of cloud? really ... first Pluto isn't a planet and now they want to declare that there are FOUR types of clouds? I need to lie down. It gives me a headache.

More clouds, earlier in the day, after a trip to Michaels (!) and the market (boooo). I swear that the upper mountains in the shot below are in Vermont, at least it seems that way because I don't usually see them. And, I shoot very CROOKED these days. I need to get a tiny bubble level and put it on the back of my darn camera. But this is, I believe, one of the ones I shot out of the sunroof of my car. SO that may be why it's a little crooked. It's vistas like this that are part of why I like living here, and not in some really flat place where the wind can blow along a tumbleweed for miles. (I'm hurtling downhill here at about 70 mph. Hi Mom.)

And then there are the falls. Pretty huh? You can find these in Cohoes. It's not like they hide them or anything....

Too much to do these days.... that's all the time I have for you, internets... it's not you, it's me....

Meet up

Someone forwarded a "meet up" link to me, and it was for a kayak group, but I don't have a kayak yet. I looked around the site and found a photography group, and so I went to the Empire State Plaza to meet some of the other members to take some photos tonight... these are two of my favorites.

I definitely had the baby camera of the bunch - no lens switching for me... but I have at least 15 shots I really like (out of probably 150 +, thank god for digital)

The one above is a long exposure, self timer with a tripod, and then you know I had to show you one that I played with tonal curves because I just can't NOT DO IT sometimes.

For you who are not familiar, this is The Egg.... not the mother ship of an alien race. It's actually a small theater and was the scene of the crime for the recent field trip I chaperoned.

Huh. I had way more fun tonight ;-)

Come Fly With Me

So... someone that I've known for a long time mentioned to me last month that he has part ownership of a small plane, and if I ever wanted to go up to take some pictures, maybe we could do that.

Hello? is the Pope Catholic?

We had one day planned, and the weather didn't work out. Yesterday the weather was perfect. I spazzed a little and had trouble finding the airport, and was a few minutes late. D'oh.

Did I mention it's a really small plane?




Small. As in, a Cessna, which is latin for "propeller on a box with four seats inside", and I'm not convinced the two in the back really count.

One funny moment was when we first went into the (hangar?) and I couldn't figure out how the plane would get out, because it didn't seem like the "garage door" was wide enough. I was tilting my head and looking at it and thinking "Huh. I bet I can stand under the wings of that plane and they'd be practically resting on my head. But they're too wide to go out that section of the wall because they'll hit the door. " Then he hit a button, and the whole wall went up, including the door. Oh.

The point of that story is that I know nothing at all about small planes. Which he proved again by asking me to move (I was indeed able to stand under the wings and almost touch them with the top of my head) so that he could lower the wing flaps without whacking me on the head. (He worded it differently.... )








We had to review a few rules. Seatbelts must be worn. I played stewardess and fingerwaved out the two exits (to the pilot, who knew already, but whatever. )

Then after more checking and testing and whatnot, we were off!



Hey look - there's our wheel - it's still on the plane. Awesome, we need that later. I knew that the wheels would not pull up, because they would be... in my seat. So to speak. And there's the shadow of the plane. Cool. So I took about 60 pictures after this one; I'm not even kidding. Of course I mean of the scenery and sky, not the shadow of the plane on the ground. Just so we're clear.

Here are one or two...

Saratoga Lake...


And Lake George...

and... something... maybe Saratoga Lake again, from the other direction, or part of the Hudson? I'll have to think about this one. But I like it.

Well, that's all for today, kids, but tomorrow Carly takes Manhattan by storm... um, by tour bus. Coach bus. Whatever.

Or actually....

This was more like what I had in mind, but I could probably still improve that mess up in the ....nevermind.

Sunday Art

I have been off the grid for most of the day today... but wanted to share this photo of my niece. When you are ThreeAlmostFour and have a twirly dress for a very special party, it is a happy day.

Ignore the ghost in the upper corner... I need to go back and finish editing extraneous junk out...or crop it or... I haven't decided...

Clicked: Coach

We have a running joke about how a certain local college basketball coach looks JUST like Mr. Carly. Truly, he does. Mr. C was even mistaken for him about a year and a half ago.

Today Coach was in the restaurant where I was having lunch with APB and a friend we call The Kid. I noticed him and pointed him out to APB, while the Kid more or less tried to figure out who the heck he was.*

I wanted a picture, preferably one of me WITH him, but I don't have that paparazzi streak quite yet... APB pointed out that "it would be a shame for this to go Unclicked; your kids will be sooooo disappointed..." and I hemmed and I mumbled and was basically a big chicken.

So we waited for him to finish his lunch and then APB more or less said "You know, WE have to get back to work... so I'm right behind you, are you doing this or not?"

I walked over to Coach and said something like "ExcusemeI'msorrytobotheryou butcouldIgetaphoto of youformykids withmethey'rebig fans...>" -- only not QUITE as flustered as that, because I could pretty much sum up my basketball knowledge in one sentence: "Duck when the ball comes at you...."

His dining companion (who was about my father's age) said "Don't you want a picture with ME??" and I laughed and said "would you like to be in the picture?" - that guy was cute. Coach was really nice about it and stood right up, put his arm around me, and patiently waited for APB to snap two shots. Clicked!

Always carry your camera, kids.


*During the course of the conversation the Kid told me he had a dream about me getting a job in a creative field, and that he's kind of like Nostradamus. Then we discussed pushup techniques. You just had to be there.

Clicked: Yankee

I am beginning to be more comfortable asking people if I can photograph them.

This guy walked out of the convenience store as I was walking in yesterday, and the goggles on the dog made my brain explode. I couldn't get done with the atm quickly enough (but I had to count my money, it's the same one that gave me $20 too much last week).

He was enjoying his coffee when I went out so I chatted with him for a minute. I didn't want to be too intrusive, so I just snapped one shot. The dog's name is Yankee, for the NY Yankees, and has logged many miles in that little carrier (LOVE THE DENIM JACKET.... omg....)