…is what i look like when i’m incredibly thrilled about taking a photo of myself after i’ve not shaved for a day and had other things to do.

so in the apparent interest of making myself look as old as i can….{sigh}

only for you, Sherri. only for you….

i was able to captured #1 Daughter’s school Christmas Concert, but where we sat for her Nutcracker performance didn’t really allow for me dragging in one of my decent lenses, and the Moscow Ballet is rather stringent on the “no photography” issue, so i declined to go there. #1 Son, apparently, would not have been very happy with me if i had shot his choir concert, either, but his grandfather did. if those photos are provided to us digitally, i’ll get them up here so we can embarrass #1 Son, who really has no reason to be embarrassed at all.

obviously, i need to get a little point-and-click with a decent zoom lens, where i can shut off the back screen and any other lights so i can illegally photograph her dance performances. that, or a nicely compact extreme telephoto lens i can put on something like the D70. bah.

at any rate, these are from #1 Daughter’s Christmas Concert on December 4, 2007. she’s quite the ham, isn’t she? once i figured out where they were, i tried to capture some of the neighbor kids as well, but that really wasn’t my focus, of course.

on to the photos…

bah.

a truly anomalous event occurred here over the past couple of days. the snow was not unique, but the snow-without-wind most certainly was. usually, the wind is blowing strong enough when we get snow that i rarely have to shovel off the back porch and only parts of the driveway. but this time, we had a nice, gentle blanket of snow on everything. one might even say it was quite picturesque.

but did i manage to haul my stupid ass outside with a camera and take pictures of it before the wind started picking up early this morning?

hell, no.

did i even manage to have a camera in the car this morning, when the clear sky and the early-morning frozen fog would have been so picturesque, even with the slight wind clearing the snow off the evergreens, fences, other other surfaces.

no, i’m apparently WAY too intelligent for that. gah.

so, in potential partial recompense for my stupidity, here are a couple of things:

Thing 1: guess who has the cover of this month’s issue of Toy Trucker Magazine? The cover story is on the collection of Paul Westhoff, who is a friend and the owner of Hard Tops of Sioux Falls. I do their business cards, too. Look ‘em up and call ‘em and ask ‘em why they don’t have a website of their own! (i kid, i kid…)

Thing 2: ~from our recent trip up to Big Stone Lake for Thanksgiving. i have several plans for this photo, so this is kind of a sneak preview of an original that will probably never be released itself. in the background, you can see the point of land which is the subject of Big Stone Autumn. several of the trees back there were severely damaged by an ice storm last winter, so my plan to do a seasonal round of that point from the same vantage point were made moot. which was kind of okay, because the marks i made for the tripod didn’t last….and my father-in-law’s dock is a seasonal thing anyway. it’s not like it goes into the lake at literally/exactly the same place each year. so, i’ll be picking another place, or places, along the shore for that endeavor.

which reminds me. i need a sugar-daddy to buy me a GPS that’ll work with the cameras. i’m WAY too cheap to buy one myself, you know….

i took this photo late saturday evening on November 24th of this year, after three days of hunting with my brothers-in-law. the orange is so intense because of a) a recently-harvested corn field was being burned (it’s a method of putting nutrients straight back into the soil), and b) a cross-process filter which also deepened the blue and removed the haze from the smoke. my angle on this wasn’t exactly perfect, but i don’t think i would have brought up a lot more of the trees in the foreground if i had dropped to one knee. as well, the sun disappears rather quickly this time of the year, and i didn’t have time to go running across the field to get more of the trees in the foreground. i’m hoping that a future version can be derived that will highlight the trees and make a nice progressive triptych with other versions. i released it anyway, because….well, i like it.

you’re welcome to read the release announcement. terribly exciting stuff, i know. it was also added to my portfolios.com portfolio.

#1 Son turns 13 on December 20th. We’re sitting together at the breakfast table the other day, and I’m reading this letter to the Spouse Unit written by this guy who happened to be around at a certain car dealership the day she decided to purchase her car, and who has apparently believed himself to be God’s Gift to Carbuyers for roughly the last two years. Anyway, it’s a one-page handwritten letter (very thoughtful and personal, of course), that in four sentences contains more spelling and grammatical errors than typically exist in one semester of assignments in a second-grade classroom. So, I read it over, hand it to #1 Son, and ask, “Okay, kiddo. What’s wrong with this letter?”

He reads through it, chuckling several times, thinks for a moment, then answers, “He didn’t have someone else type it for him so he wouldn’t look so stupid.”

Deadpan.

Yep, the boy annoys me sometimes, as all kids occasionally do, but Gawd I love ‘im.

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this looks like a screwed-up photograph, but it isn’t. although i will admit it was difficult to keep the wind off the camera during the thirty seconds it took to take this photo at night. i don’t get to do as much late-night photography as i’d like (and i’ll readily admit that Nikon DSLR’s aren’t really the best tools for dark shots), but the color here is completely unretouched, taken at ISO 800, f/5.6, 30″ in the light of a nearly full moon. the camera is pointing roughly west, about 2.5 hours after sunset. even that long after sunset, there is still a noticeable gradient to the light falloff. i just kinda thought that was neat. sadly, the rest of that night shoot was pretty poopy, because i had to use longer lenses and the wind was such that it was impossible to keep them from shaking over such a long period. this one and a couple of others are all that are going to make it.

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well, i guess that’s about it today. best be shoving off to work, work, work!

the new fine-art site is officially live.

I took the base photograph to this early the morning of October 31, 2004: our first Halloween out here. While I did later edit this quite a bit, the orange glow in the background was fairly natural. There had been a heavy fog that night, which froze, and as the sun started coming up and the rime started subliming, there was a cold, heavy mist in the air. As my first time in such weather, even in my late thirties, I found it incredible. I’m sure a couple of my neighbors thought I must be crazy to be out in the cold air, photographing frozen weeds, but oh well.

I’m using this to also show you a new plugin I found. I’m also using over on synthaetica.com for the fine art galleries. There are several others out there like it, but the code for this one is phenomenally brief and loads with almost no lag. It’s called Shutter Reloaded, and the cool thing is that it should be overriding even the old image links that popped the old shadowmoon image preview utility.

{of course, now i’m experiencing something with this plugin that didn’t happen at synthaetica.com. click into this post so that it sits alone on a page, and the plugin is working just fine. unfortunately, with the post just being read from the home page, it’s not working right. bah. i suppose it’s not that big of a deal right now, though, and i have other things to work on.}