This Old Blog

The Colonel dressed as Santa I don't know why but Chitose near where I'm staying has Christmas fever. There's Christmas decorations everywhere, and Christmas music (carols and other seasonal American songs) are playing in the background. This Colonel, at a Japanese KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken to all you old timers) was dressed out in a Santa suit right near one of the entrances into the store. I would have eaten there except they were cash (Yen) only and wouldn't take plastic. I've since fixed the yen problem, finding out that the hotel will exchange dollars for yen at the rate of 97 yen to the dollar. Tomorrow I'm going to have my Japanese KFC meal. Looking down from the ninth floor I walked around the hotel a bit, exploring the nearer blocks, keeping the hotel in view to avoid getting lost. So far I'm remembering landmarks, so that I can begin to walk farther and farther on my explorations. This view from the ninth floor gives you an idea of the ...

So here I am in Chitose, Japan. This is the first time in my life I've ever traveled this far, although I've certainly had my fair share of air travel within CONUS. Even my few trips across the border to Canada and south into Mexico (back when Mexico wasn't nearly as dangerous as it is today, and well before 9/11) don't count. Oddly enough this is the first time I've used my passport, the second update to a passport I originally obtained back in the mid-1990s for travel to Japan. I worked for Mitsubishi Wireless up in Lake Mary, Florida, and I was meant to travel to Japan on a business trip. But the trip never came about, and I left the company. Now, almost 20 years later, I'm using the passport for (almost) its intended reason, but for a far different company and set of circumstances. Waiting in Houston to board a flight to Tokyo My trip from Orlando to Chitose started around 6:30am Thursday morning, and didn't end until 10pm Friday Chitose time...

We (meaning the human family) have a new cat. Her name is Loki and she lives with my oldest daughter in Gainesville. I don't know how old Loki is, but I peg her age at around a year. She's an all black cat with a touch of white on her brisket. She's an extremely shy little creature, especially around humans she has no familiarity with, such as myself. Everything taken with the Olympus E-M5 and Panasonic Leica 25mm at f/1.8. Heavy flaring due to shooting directly into the sun coming in the window (Loki felt safer in that spot, so you go where the cat is). I also set the E-M5 to the gentle sepia (#9) art filter and took everything straight out of the camera, except for resizing. If you're wondering why she's named Loki, everybody thought she was a he before the vet told them different.

Four photographs, two from the Olympus E-M5 with Panasonic Leica 25 mm and two from the Sony NEX-5N with Sigma 19 mm. Both sensors with 16 MP resolution. Does knowing the difference really matter anymore if you can't see it? Group 2 All photographs taken in Key West Florida, post processed in Lightroom 5.2 and Color Efex Pro 4.

excited It's tough being a visiting parent. You want to treat your children like small children instead of adult children, to reach out and protect them still. The hardest part is acting with restraint. You offer praise without being asked, and carefully nuanced advice when asked and only when asked. It's a different form of parenting. It goes to underscore that you never stop being a parent. Your parenting continues in small and surprising ways as long as you live and breath. This is by no means everyone. This is a small fraction. And it's extending, slowly, as my daughters build their lives. The things I have, especially my cameras, are far more important as instruments to capture moments of what is really important to me than as things to own unto themselves. wary annoyed I have begun to shift (or perhaps the word is "pivot") in my photographic technique. Here's a surprising personal revelation. I find I don't quite like the added expo...

Look! Blown highlights! New blown highlight chaser mobile. Call me Blown Highlight Bill. Some weeks ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in Orlando, I thought I would drive about a little and see the blown highlight part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a humid, stormy August in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before camera stores, and bringing up the rear of every forum post on photography I meet; and especially whenever my typos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically strangling people with their DSLR straps - then, I account it high time to get to the road as soon as I can. Taken in or near Railroad Square , Tallahassee, FL. With p...

Sometime early tomorrow morning around oh-dark-thirty, I'm going to get up, pile into my rental with my luggage and my cameras and drive back to SEA-TAC for a twelve hour flight back to Orlando, via a connecting flight in DFW. This trip has been a true business trip; a lot of time devoted to the job, with little left over for the pursuit of personal enjoyment. For me, personal enjoyment means getting out and exploring and documenting what catches my eye. Today was the first full day I wasn't on the task, as it had ended 24 hours ago. I wanted to plan a big day of driving and exploring, but I got up late and felt tired. So, instead, I ate a late breakfast, piled in the rental with my cameras, and sort of meandered up towards the harbor area and Steilacoom. When I got to the area around Steilacoom I felt more like just walking around and enjoying the mystical border between land and water than doing anything of significance. I grabbed a few snaps, but nothing to set the wo...

It's been a long three weeks here in Dupont and JBLM. Tonight, on the day of my work's conclusion, I drove north to Glazer's Camera in downtown Seattle to participate in Giulio Sciorio's presentation o n Hybrid Motion Street Photography. Among the many hats that Giulio wears, one of them is the founder and chief driver of SmallCameraBigPicture.com . His primary interest is what he refers to as the hybrid aspect of contemporary digital photography, the blending of still and motion into the final visual product. His jam-packed two-hour talk tonight was an attempt to convey some of the techniques and tools he has discovered and developed, along with many examples. The group was small and intimate, allowing Giulio to interact directly with every member of the audience. I'm not about to go over every detail of his talk,  partly because I don't understand it completely to accurately convey what he said, and partly because you should go to one of his presentat...

red wheels In an age of ever accelerating camera releases, we can't keep a camera long enough before the next iteration is released and the world at large starts calling what we currently have as old and busted, while the latest releases are the new hotness. I went out tonight for my walk around Dupont, but this time, instead of taking the merely old Olympus E-M5 I took the very old Panasonic GX1 with the hoary old Panasonic 1.7/20mm mounted on it. I took them because together they're a quite unpresupposing combination. They just blend in . They're a compact powerful photographic pair that with the right kind of light and careful attention to exposure can produce some excellent images with that je ne sais pas ce image quality. The 20mm, matched with the absolutely ancient Panasonic 16MP sensor, produces some quite detailed images that match the E-M5 in sharpness and detail. The E-M5 and the GX1 represent a kind of µ4:3rds yin-and-yang camera pair for me. Depending ...

This is my trip report for the second, and possibly last, day trip to Seattle. I would have written this earlier but I've been busy and at the end of the day I'm tired. The biggest reason I didn't write this up on Sunday evening after I got back was because I had a week's worth of dirty laundry I had to wash and dry before the start of my second (of three) weeks here in Dupont. So here I am writing about an event three days after it happened... There's a lot to like about Seattle. It's a dense, compact, multi-level city. When I say multi-level I'm not referring to its skyscrapers, I'm referring to the steps and levels that exist from the harbor up to First and the San Francisco-like steep streets that run east-to-west through the center of the city. I had a great time walking through Seattle centered around the Seattle Art Museum and the section of First that ran roughly north and south for a good 10 blocks in either direction. Seattle is a city fi...