The Mote in My Eye

Off to Utah

2008-08-15T19:57:00.003-04:00

It always pays to get a second opinion, and then maybe a third or a fourth. After the startling news that the first neurosurgeon wanted to do a 4 disc laminectomy with a fusion I called a neurosurgeon that my physical therapist recommended. His evaluation couldn't have been any different, and much more thorough. Before making any recommendations he had me undergo an EMG which is shorthand for torture. Not, emphatically not, a fun experience, although I have to say that I've had one before and the doc that did this one was infinitely better. It was uncomfortable but I didn't leave thinking the man was a sadist with a MD. When I saw the neurosurgeon today he reiterated that he didn't think surgery was a good idea at all, apparently only 50% of neck surgeries result in less pain in the neck and since I don't have any pain in my legs and arm and the EMG's were normal so I don't have any nerve damage and the weakness in my left hand is much less in the past week.

So no surgery for me and I will be getting a third opinion but I have to jump through some hoops for that. And while waiting for the hoops to be put in order we will head out on what I feel is a well deserved vacation. So we are going to Salt Lake City then down to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. I might have nothing to post before then since work is kicking butt but I should have some fun stuff after.

Forays into black and white

2008-08-01T08:44:00.007-04:00

Last weekend we got up early since there was a bit of residual storm surge from the hurricane that was out in the atlantic and Mike wanted to catch the last of the surf. I tagged along with my tripod and 100-400 (and regretted not bringing my other lenses of course), the day was hazy even at 8 am and while the surf wasn't quite what we were hoping for there was still enough for Mike to ride and bright enough for me to shoot but the results were at best disappointing for the color. I got 2 pretty decent shots, one of Mike and another of a short board surfer weaving in and out of the surf, but the color was so bleh that I played a bit with black and white. Not exactly what I was looking for but not as bad as the originals.

Mike:

Unknown surfer:

and then there was the mussel. I really liked this image when I was composing it, but it lacked that oomph for me when I was working on it, so I decided to play around a bit with it in BW and just left the mussel itself, a few strands of seaweed and a rock the original color and gave a very slight sepia tint to the rest of the image. Desperation should be the title of this picture:

Road Rage?

2008-08-01T07:48:00.003-04:00

Passenger beheaded on Canada bus

And here I thought road rage was a uniquely American short-coming.

Balloon Glow

2008-07-27T21:04:00.004-04:00

Sometimes life gets in the way and the best of intentions, like putting together the second part of the balloon festival post, just didn't get done. There was always something else that was in the way, but tonight I figured I'd best make the time.

The evening shots were much more challenging, there were many more people there crowding the field and there was a pretty stiff wind and of course, it was dark. Still I managed to get two pretty good shots. The first was just after dark while most of the balloons were still inflated and giving tethered rides:

And the second was well after full dark. On both images the majority of the work was done in RAW and the only things I did in Photoshop itself was a small amount of sharpening and removing noise with the Neat Image plugin:

It Is Balloon!

2008-07-22T21:23:00.007-04:00

The South County RI Balloon Festival was this weekend and to celebrate having my car back we got up at the very inhospitable hour of 4am to get to the field by 5:30 with the hopes of seeing some balloons fly out. Alas we could have slept another hour since they didn't start inflating the ones that were staying to be tethered for rides or leaving to fly back in until almost 6:30. There weren't very many people around at that hour (why I wonder? with tongue firmly planted in cheek) so the organizers were very cool with us walking around the field itself to photograph the balloons and the people. One rule-watch the ropes (oh and of course NO SMOKING!) The guys with "Big Max" the Remax balloon were really cool and let me walk inside while it was inflating. I took three handheld exposures and combined them in Photomatix since the lighting was pretty contrasty inside:

It seems like quite the ballet when the balloon is ready to upright, and fish-eye was perfect to capture the guys out in the field holding the lines as they gave "Grandma Buzzard" some hot air to lift her vertical.

We hung around, took a ride in "Big Max" (picture to come later) and finally the other balloons came across the treeline. It was over 18 knots in the upper atmosphere so they were zooming along. Only one actually made it land in the field, the rest overshot it by varying mileage. It was very hazy so I went to Luminous Landscape where I remembered a technique to decrease the haze using unsharp mask set at Amount 20%, Radius 50, Threshold 0. What this does is to increase the local contrast and the results were much improved.

That was most of the morning. We left and went home and took some long, much needed naps that afternoon and went back to catch the "Flying Wallenda's" high wire act and the Balloon Glow and Fireworks. More on that another day.

FreezeFrame

2008-07-18T07:56:00.003-04:00

At the behest of said younger sister (never my little sister mind you, she has about 6 inches of height on me) who has informed me that since I am not a pissant pseudo-intellectual I should not use a Latin phrase. So I will leave such things to the presumptuous and more worldly and continue my daily flick through titles for this blog. (despite the fact on a good day I get 3 readers :P)

Name Changes

2008-07-17T21:39:00.004-04:00

I go through name changes about as often as some woman buy new shoes it seems. Mental Floss has been done before pretty much ad nauseum it seems and although I do own the sweatshirt (really! see!)

I thought that maybe something different would be better. Since most of what I post here is photography related I wanted something that reflected that in some way, or at least since I tend to be verbose about the circumstances of how the image came to be if not the photoshop steps, I looked for something different. My sister is probably rolling her eyes since she actually took a few years of Latin, but I tip my metaphysical hat to her since I was thinking of her at the time I was looking and decided to look at Latin phrases. Thanks Lita!

That's Amore!

2008-07-17T21:33:00.003-04:00

Stolen from a friend:

Eef eet bites and you bleed that's.... a moray,
Eef you scream and you cry that's... a moray

When an eel lunges out
And it bites off your snout,
That's a moray!

Okay enough silliness for tonight...

The Girls of Riyadh

2008-07-15T21:52:00.003-04:00

I was listening to WRNI last week, because I still have the hated Kia rental and it's about all that's worth listening to over the air, and they were interviewing the author of The Girls of Riyadh. Written by Rajaa Al Sanie, a 24 year old Saudi woman in a PG Endo (post graduate endodontic i.e. root canals) Program here in the US, it is a peek into the life of young women of the privledged class in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, something that no matter what I had read about in newspaper articles or heard from people who had visited Saudi Arabia (mostly military people so that source was always suspect since they couldn't know what goes on behind closed doors) I could not ever imagine. I graduated dental school with 3 girls from Iran who had come to the US to get their "undergraduate" dental degree and they sometimes talked about a girls life in Iran (this was 1984-88 a bit different I think than today) and much of what I read did sound familiar to how they were brought up. I found the book engrossing, well written and sad, perhaps because of the cultural differences and I applaud her conviction to "take the veil" off of the life of at least some women in Saudi. Since I mostly read sci-fi, fantasy and historical fiction this was an unusual pick for me but it's a great read.

Victory at Sea

2008-07-14T19:24:00.006-04:00

Well with the hurricane swell coming in from Bertha it was time to head down to the beach again, this time sans surfboard. Mikes friend was going to let me try his daughters boogie board and I brought my 20D with the 24-105 in it's very bulky Ewa-Marine housing. Boogie boarding was a blast, but the current was fierce and it pulled us waaaaaay down the beach by the time you could say Rip Tide! Mike got worked pretty hard even once he got out past the surf zone and he got pulled nearly into "surfers end" from the tide and had to keep walking back to paddle back out. I finally stopped having fun on the boogie board (what an absolute blast!) and took the camera out and learned a very valuable lesson, which perhaps to some would have been pretty self evident...never hold a camera to your face to look through it when the surf is crashing on your head. Lets just say I saw stars and my nose is black and blue across the top but it's not broken.

So staying more inshore I did get this fun one of our friends daughter riding her boogie board:

I got one of the guys after they got out, you can see the major downfall of using the camera in the water and then taking it out-the beaded water on the lens in the blur that covers Jas' hand and the blur to the right of Mike's hand going up the beach:

It will take a lot more use to get used to that enclosure. Notes for next time include setting it for aperture priority at something like f16 or f22 instead of shutter priority at 1/250th to maximize my depth of field. As long as it's a sunny day it shouldn't be a problem. I will also need to get used to just pointing it and shooting it with it away from my body something that isn't all that intuitive to me.

The car repair from hell

2008-07-12T21:03:00.004-04:00

It was really a small ding with some paint chipped off in my right front quarter panel. One of the receptionists at the office had pulled out and tried to exit the parking lot one way only to find she was blocked and when she backed up into her space she, well, misjudged it a bit. Poor thing I thought she was going to pass out as she waited to tell me. No worries though, we did the insurance information exchange thing and called our insurance companies etc, etc. So now the "shop" (aka the dealerships autobody shop) has had my baby for 13 days, and even though it's not their fault its been 13 days driving a Kia Optima...no offense to all you Kia owners there but this car stinks, literally. 13 days of sitting in a car that smells like someone was chain smoking in it for the last 2 weeks before I got it. 13 days of refusing to clear the junk that has been smeared all over the windows in the name of rental car company cleaning. 13 days of rushing from home to work back to home so I don't have to sit in the thing for longer than necessary. And the worst-13 days of no gym since I forgot to pull my gym bag out of the back of my car. Yeah, I know I could have/should have called the rental company up and complained but at first I thought it was just going to be 3 days, after all it's just a bit of a dent and paint, but it took 5 days for the rep from my receptionists' insco to come out and do another appraisal so hopefully I'll have my car back Monday, if not...sigh...

It's not the surfing life for me

2008-07-05T16:10:00.003-04:00

I've tried, honestly I've given it my all, bought the surfboard , the wet suit, the rash relief, Dr. Zog's sex wax and given it a good go. It's probably as much of my not going out more than once a month as it is my ineptness but I just can't surf. Oh, I've gotten up a few times, sure, rode a teeny tiny wavelet into shore twice but I got so knocked around in "moderate" surf yesterday that I think it's time to take out the boogie board, fins and my Ewa-Marine camera enclosure and do what I know won't give me whiplash because I am sore today and I have a whole new set of bruises that look like, well, like I got beaten about my legs and arms with a surfboard. So now it's time to hope for some better than moderate surf and get Mike out with his friends and actually have some fun getting wet.

Storm Front

2008-07-03T22:07:00.004-04:00

A while back in my old blog my friend Terry asked what my then new fish-eye lens would do with interesting cloud formations. And as you all can imagine then next few weeks had either blue skies with nary a cloud, skies so overcast that they were dull gray from horizon to horizon, or worse I was at work without my camera when the fabulous cloud formation came by yesterday with a thunderstorm. Tonight broke that streak and even though this storm didn't do much other than drop a few raindrops I did get a few good shots. This was as the clouds were moving in from the west right about 18:30.

Shasta Daisies

2008-07-02T21:55:00.005-04:00

We had a heck of a thunderstorm today and for a moment I was wondering if Toto ran off off to bite my 12th grade Calculus teacher again. With wind gusts over 50 mph for a short time and 4 inch hail lots of trees had downed limbs and many of the flowers were beaten to the ground. Driving home I saw a stand of Shasta Daisies that were flattened and it reminded me of some images I took a few weeks ago when I first got fish-eye. I have been watching the Olympic Swimming trials pretty avidly so with only a little bit of time I worked on this:

Another Damselfly

2008-06-30T21:57:00.003-04:00

This is the other image of the jewelwing Damselfly that I was too beat to finish working on last night. There were a lot of steps that went into making this image look good, including exposure adjustments to lighten the wings to get a hint of their translucency even though all four were folded together, a bit of work on the leaves to make them not as blown out as they showed up in the original image, but that's about it. What I really like about this image though is the delicate spider web that is under the damselfly's feet, I think the damselfly was hoping for a spider snack because he sat there for nearly two minutes and I know he wasn't posing for the camera.

The Switch and The Swamp

2008-06-29T21:25:00.013-04:00

I was planning on using wordpress and publishing the blog from my website but it was getting too complicated and I got too lazy so for now I am migrating the blog here while I ponder how much work I really want to put into making the blog my own. Any suggestions about what I should be writing about or what I'm writing too or not enough of is welcome.

So instead of working on that I spent some time working on images from the Great Swamp. For some the words Great Swamp would conjure up thoughts of Okefenokee or The Everglades, but remember-I live in RI and you can probably put one RI inside The Everglades. (Yes it's tough living in a state where they measure the size of landmarks by the number of your state you can fit in there) The Great Swamp is a RI DEM management area down in West Kingstown that borders the states largest pond-Worden Pond. It has 6 miles of looping double track mountain bike trails of which we hiked about 5 and probably got to meet most if not all of the swamps mosquito's in the process, long live Natrupel and DEET. The walk was long, hot, sweaty and for the most part not very productive photography wise, partly because we started at 10AM and the sun was already high. It started out good with a sighting (but no good image) of an Indigo Bunting, a decent image of a Chestnut Sided Warbler:

and this image of a lily in the swamp on the side of the path:

After another hour of hiking and swatting mosquito's and black flies we made it to the pond which at the shoreline was fabulous with a breeze and spectacularly bug free. There were some cool lily pads that I took pictures of with fish-eye but haven't gotten to yet and this frog which I nearly stepped on:

The walk back was just as exciting as the hike to the pond except for the damselflies:

There is one other that just needs more work than I want to give it right now.