Carmel by the Sea

A short trip to Carmel by the Sea brought us a bunch of great pictures. i've put in a couple here that i absolutely love. a third is a photo that my wife took of me.

it is the haunting ambience of the photo that i love. haunting but beautiful. i guess i'm a sucker for paradoxes and my taste for photos sort of give it away.  here, the mist rises in the horizon, but it is brighter than the photo would suggest. but squinting into the distance, against the bright sun, brings a very contrasty picture that did not overwhelm the natural mist and overcast sky. the silhouette of the crowd provides just the right accent. this is unedited and straight out of jpeg.

xc_m©2009

still in that photo shoot, i tried a bunch of tricks to highlight the fog. many times i've tried to take a picture of fog creeping in, only to get a flat photo with really low image quality, and no fog. i found a good trick (and i'm not telling) and here is the result.

xc_m©2009

unedited

my wife held her own as well; a silhouette shot that's among the prettiest in our collection. i think she's getting the hang of the camera and is establishing her own style. she seems to be doing well with portraits so we're looking to get a longer lens. hope it gives us more of this:

xc_m©2009

unedited

Getting Good Shots

Got a chance to shoot birds this weekend. always had trouble getting them sharp. this time, with the help of a friend's telephoto, i finally got a good bird shot i always wanted. but my kit 18-55 didn't disappoint either, landing me some pretty good gulls in flight. here are some of the fowl pictures from Christmas weekend:

xc_m©2009

xc_m©2009

                                          

this one is a lucky shot that shows the good side of making do. while shooting on some craggy bluff on the pch, i couldn't quite address the backlight. but gulls were hovering just below me when i saw a man picking rocks by the shore. its seemed a long shot then, but the timing proved lucky. i call it "there's a puny little man":

xc_m©2009

and here's my money shot. it may not be much to a whole bunch of you but i am a big fan of cheap thrills. to my surprise, when i zoomed max into the picture, the details were still sharp. i thought this might be what they mean by tack sharp. its the first fauna shot i got that made me completely happy. its at 250mm zoom f11. never realized i could get a nice bokeh at this f stop. shows you what i know.

xc_m©2009

the crime of banana-nut muffin

the batter's in the oven and the smell cozies the house. perfect since the night's pretty chilly. california chilly of course, so its not piss-frozen-from-the-source cold. but cold enough that the thought of fresh warm muffins feels like hanging by a fire.

i guess comfort like this must lead to delirium. because i cannot stop thinking of criminal law while i was baking. funny how they both work out the same, crime and muffins. you have to have this element and that, blah blah blah, when combined, tadaaaah! you just committed a crime. take away any one bit, there is no conviction. the flour, the sugar, the oats, eggs, butter and what not, you got muffins! take away, say, baking soda, its not muffins. its crappy ant food with no conviction. :) add nuts? its aggravated assault!
banana? qualifies a simple muffin to qualified seduction!

the timer just rang...the penalty phase should be good....

Starting Over

i'm excited! you can't tell of course.

i just finished four days of mcle. the phil law version. just to keep my license from wasting away. got to driving home pretty late, an hour long through an LA maze of concrete. really almost just weaving through my lane till i got off the exit. i won't likely drive that way again.

today's not about driving, however. nor the mcle. nor about meeting a bunch of cool former fellow UPLaw students, and Ateneo contemporaries around LA. and Canada. and thankfully getting to know the less mythic persona of a formerly fearsome UP professor who's turned out to be a really funny dude (of course, not being asked to recite is a factor. but really, i never realized he could be this funny!) nor about meeting another really warm former UP prof who's always greeted me with a smile the two times i've had to take her around the mcle's city (LA this time, Las Vegas the last). it was a great week. but its not about that.

what i got from those few days is the energy to start over. i don't know what it was about the dynamics in that one big room, or in the LOADS of food served. but it got my mojo back. to consolidate my emotional and intellectual tools. to strip myself of recent habits and fears. see if i could overcome this comfy indulgence and find for myself a life that is a little edgier. back to my old days in law school. when my mouth would run and my morals loose (well, not THAT loose.) i guess i want to get back to that less nervous state of mind when the more i jab, the smarter i get (ok, ok, ego check, i know.)

so here it is, i'm starting over. i hope it turns out well.

fighting words and resignation

i was in tears when i saw this video on this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E

after reading on the incident from the insidehighered.com site, what's a guy to do? answers would be welcome.

why!??