E-1 Experiment #8

While the left knee is showing signs of progress, it's still no where near normal. And so my wife suggested we go out and get something to eat and take back home rather than have me out cooking over the grill. I love to cook, especially over the grill, but I didn't look forward to standing next to it on crutches. So we drove down to one of our favorites, Chipotle, and ordered our regular burrito bowls to go.

Even though it's still fairly early in the evening the local Chipotle's shares the store frontage and the parking lot with a fairly large World of Beer. I'm not too crazy about that place due to its traffic and patrons swarming over the place once WoB opens. Tonight it was oddly low key with a light crowd and there were multiple empty parking slots open right at the door, and both handicapped parking spots were empty. More often than not I'll drive past them and they'll have drinking patrons parked in both without any handicap tag or hanger showing. It's an accident that both handicap parking slots wound up in front of WoB. When that storefront was first completed it stayed empty for a long time before WoB moved in.

Technical

Out and about with the KT E-1 and the Sigma 30mm. I'd adjusted the saturation level to CS0 (Lo) when I read it was the setting for 'normal' color. I'll run with that a while. I also ran the ISO up to 200 just to see how it behaved in low light. I ran the camera again in full manual, at f/1.8 and 1/30s. Post processing was in Lightroom 3.5 and Silver Efex Pro 2.0.1.

Milestone

This marks my 365th entry for 2011. It's also my 1,059 overall post; I passed 1,000 a while back and didn't slow down. I had started posting this year with the idea of doing a post a day along with shooting a photo a day. The photo-a-day has gone to shooting when I feel like it, which is mostly every day but may have gaps of several days in between photographs.

The post-a-day has been a lot stranger. If I were actually posting just once/day my posts would like up nicely with the days/month, but they don't. Some days I would post twice or three times, depending on what was on my mind. Other times I would go for several days without posting anything. But the extra posts/day overwhelmed the gaps so that on this date I've posted a years worth of posts. Even if I were to just post once/day from here on out, there's still enough days left in 2011 that I would post at least 400 for a year.

I have discovered I like to write. Sometimes it's tough, and I'm sure there's a lot I've written this year that's sub-par. There's no improvement without practice. And I need to do something creative. I refuse to sit around just watching TV or surfing the web. I do a bit of that to be sure, but I need to be doing something active and creative, not just being a passive consumer. Unless something drastic happens I intend to keep this pace up through 2012.

2012 is a presidential election year. For 2012 I want to do more journalism, work at adding more polish to my writing, and do more traveling away from the house around central Florida and beyond. I want do more experimentation with the cameras. Yes, more photo experimenting. For inspiration I'm looking to photographs like these over on The Online Photographer as well as the list of photography blogs on the right. There is such a constant tidal wave of creativity ongoing out there.