Barely Out of Tuesday

"Change"
HTC myTouch 4g
3.5mm, ISO 88

Yes, I know what I said on Monday. So I put the cameras aside (mostly) and stayed away from blogging (mostly). But life never stops until you're dead. And then, only for you.

I drove my wife to an outpatient facility so that they could look down her throat and check for acid reflux damage. My wife's condition has required the use of certain drugs for over 20 years, and one of the side effects has been an effect on the tissues lining the esophagus. While they didn't find anything, they implied enough to scare us both, so this trip was a necessary preventative measure.

I drove her up, waited for her, and then drove her home. On the way home we stopped at an Einstein's at Orange and Michigan, where we each picked up a bagel breakfast sandwich. Afterwards she grabbed a chocolate mud cookie, and left me change from a five on the table.

It's funny where the mind wonders sometimes. I started thinking about how we were going to feed nine billion people in 2050. The report underlines that our current food production is failing; each day, there are six million more mouths to feed; the global population is seven billion and rising; one billion go to bed hungry, another one billion are malnourished. And here I sit eating more calories and nutrition in one meal than over two billion will see in all of today. But I'm like everybody else; blog about it, link to it, show some token concern, and then forget about it. After all, I'm satisfied.

"Another time"
Olympus E-1 with Zuiko Digital 12-60mm
1/800s, f/5.6, ISO 100, 12mm

After Einstein's, and on the way home, I passed this closed Sunoco station. The gas prices on the sign are $3.69/gallon regular. We haven't seen prices that high since early 2008, which gives some idea when this station closed. Funny thing is, there was a station still open across the street selling regular for $3.47/gallon.

It's been a while since I photographed the cats. After my 'run-in' with Smokey I thought I'd spend a bit of time with them and take their photos. Two of the three were 'willing' subjects. The third was too busy napping.

I wonder, as the cost of food rises, how long we'll have the luxury of pets. How can you justify feeding pets when you can't feed people?

Technical

The first photo was taken with my HTC myTouch 4G build-in camera. I have yet to fully adjust the device to produce acceptable (to me) photographs. At five mega-pixels, it matches the resolution of my eight-year-old E-1. But the image quality of the myTouch doesn't even come close to the E-1. And that's what the rest of these photos were taken with.

The Sunoco photo was taken with the 12-60mm. It was post-processed in Lightroom 3.3, using the Color Creative - Yesteryear 2 preset. I then set yellow and blue saturation to 50.

The first cat photo was processed with B&W Creative - Antique Light, and black clipping was raised to 15. The second cat photo was imported, auto toned, and then exported. The third cat photo was processed like the first.

The camera used in the last three was the E-1. The lens was my OM 50mm 1:1.4. The first and third photos were using the 50mm at f/1.4, while the middle was stopped down to f/2.

I can't remember where I read it (I think it was Kirk Tuck's blog, but I can't find it), but why does it have to be sharp? Today was all about being not-sharp, even in those sections that were trying to be sharp. Let's not be blind slaves to technique.