#4 My $60 Tank

Okay, so I'm a little late. I thought I'd make a small statement about where everybody's money is going these days. Right to the gas tank.

Seven years ago, I bought my first new car (actually it's a truck). I drive to places on the weekend where I cart around a lot of stuff. Also, it's the real reason my wife married me (cause I got a nice truck)! Only problem, it's a 22 gallion tank and costs $60 to fill it.

Now, I have a Toyota Matrix with better gas mileage, but I still have the 22 gallion tank. It comes in handy and my friends come out of the woodwork when they need to move.

#3 Front Light

To go with my square composition. I'm trying a composition with the subject (the light on the wall outside my home), with the lack of a subject. I'm not certain how it'll go. It looks fine.

I also tried to bring out the stuco on the wall to give it more texture. It's pretty nice trick I learned somewhere to create a channel, find the edges, then load that channel as a selection and sharpen the hell out of it. It really brings out the tectures. I'd like more texture in the light, but you can't have everything.

Enjoy

#2 Noah (My New Adopted Kid)

I didn't get much time this week to stage a photo shoot. I've been with my family trying to figure out having an extra child in the family. Having one child is an inconvience, but two is a family. I'm not certain what will happen if we have more. I mean, at least there's a one to one relationship (one parent per child), with more, I'm sure it gets interesting.

Anyway, back to the photography part of this. I normally dislike snapshots of kids. They're usually, "Look at my cute kid!" You've seen one kid, you seen them all. This is one of those shots. Hopefully, I'm not exploiting him too much.

This was taken at our local mall in the children's play area. It was too cold to play outside (cold for southern California is in the 60's), so we joined the other families of playing kids there. (Can't you just hear, "Like, let's go to the mall," in your best valleygirl accent.) I was playing around with low light using my 50mm. It's opened all the way up baby (f1.8) at 400ISO and 1/30 speed. I dig the shallow DOF. I sharpened his eye a bit to give it more pop and there's also a bit of level adjustment.

First PAW this year

I've actually been in China adopting a child this past week. I didn't really have time to photograph. I took this shot during the few hours we had to site-see. I don't like the lack of contrast between the statue and the background. I only did minor changes which involved straighting the perspective and a little bit of curves.

This is a statue of a famous lady in Nanjing China who killed herself in the lake she had. She was so loved by the people of the town, the made a statue of her. Here's the story.

Enjoy.