I don't think that I told you guys yet, but under their scholarship program (and with a 90% discount), I joined the YMCA. See, my back has been hurting since before I left Cleveland, and it hasn't stopped yet. Coupled with the fact that I'm also the heaviest I've ever been... I don't think that's just a coincidence. So... I've made a new best friend: the elliptical machine. Oh my God, that thing kicks my ass...

---

Saz was at the studio the other day, and I was helping him work out some issues with his camera settings. He's a Nikon shooter, but we still like him anyway. :-P Actually, his D200 was a joy to shoot with. It was ergonomic in hand, and his Tamron lens took a surprisingly sharp image.



I'm an abomination in the photography world... a Canon shooter who speaks well of Nikon. It's like being a werewolf bitten by a vampire, or publicly drinking a Pepsi in Atlanta.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

---

So I'm listening to NPR the other day, and again someone is berating the west, calling us infidels. I just want to ask... is that supposed to hurt my feelings or something?



---

Now that Dark Haired Girl is living out on the other side of her parents' farm, and there is almost no city light contamination, the night sky truly is an amazing sight. I don't know if anybody else has been blessed by the spectacle, but the last couple of nights have been not only crystal clear, but also with a full moon. For several evenings now, the moonlight has been so bright that not only does it illuminate the midnight landscape to the horizon, but I can actually read a magazine by it. Last night, armed with a wide angle lens borrowed from Bossman, I decided to see what the world looked like when leaving the camera shutter open for thirty seconds at a time.

These photos were taken around 11pm.






I would have taken more, but it was all of 12 degrees outside, and my feet were starting to ache from the cold.

Hi all!

Things are going ok. Been working with Bossman a lot. Not shooting a whole lot of photos, but rather have been mostly acting as his photo lab tech. Been hanging out a lot with Ruben (Zen Master, and all-around swell guy), and he's actually made a couple of introductions for me that may just bode well for the ol' career in the form of band and fashion/glamor model shoots. I'm excited about that.

A friend asked me to do her Christmas card photos, and these are what we produced:



Nice portfolio pieces, I think.

---

Since returning, I've been really making an effort to jump back into the band scene.







---

Ruben's "home base", so to speak, is the Waffle House. If he's not home, he's there with his requisite cup of coffee, and all his books and pens spread out on the table. Often I'll join him and we'll just be bored, hanging out and BSing with the employees. The other day my trigger finger was itchy, so I brought in the camera and was taking nondescript photos while wondering what I could do with them. I thought that while each individual photo may not amount to much, together as a montage maybe I could capture the feeling of a typical bored night out with friends, hanging out at the Awful Waffle.



Now, the arrangement wasn't completely arbitrary as I tried to make sure two similar photos weren't right next to each other, but otherwise it's pretty random. It was more of an internal exercise with myself because despite that, little patterns, recurring themes, and storyboard narratives started happening as my eyes moved from photo to photo, and I realized that was the whole I'd been searching for that was greater than the sum of its parts. Expect more of these.