August Thoughts

Hot August Nights? Nope, just the sun setting through the pollution and smoke from Vancouver B.C. The weather has been freaky lately. This sun is actually blood red at this point, but my camera refused to see it. Also, we just had a massive thunderstorm roll through. Now when I say massive, I mean massive for Western Washington. For the rest of the country, if a thunderstorm had child, and that child farted, and that fart had a child, that would be the relative size of our thunderstorm. It was cool though. Unfortunately the clouds tonight, are preventing me from seeing the Aurora Borealis. That happens every once in a while down in WWa. When the pollution levels are really high, and we are experiencing solar flares, usually now in August, we can have a rare viewing of the extraordinary sight. I need to get up to Fairbanks at some point and really experience the lights. August is a great month. Everything about it is awesome except one thing, the heat. I hate the heat and this is the month where it flourishes. Lazy days and fun all around. My class is almost over, I'm turning in my last normal assignment tomorrow and the final is due on the 12th. I think I'm going to go to the land of Macro for the final. I need to find the cause of all of the freaking dust on my negatives. I have already cleaned the camera like 500 times, and I clean all of the negatives before using them, but most of them all have the same damn pieces of dust on them. I think the problem is in the negative holder. After the 12th, school is over until September 21st so even though I took summer classes, I still get a good month+ off. Good deal. I've been going back and forth on shooting in a RAW format on my digital camera. Shooting in RAW/NEF format has several advantages, the biggest one being the ability to change the exposure in photoshop. That will probably be extremely helpful when shooting football. The downside is that it takes forever to go through all of the photos. I need to open every file, set the exposure, then save them as JPEGs through Photoshop. That would take forever for the number of photos I take during a football game. If I was shooting a wedding or something special like that, I wouldn't mind spending an entire day working on photos, but because I have about an hour and a half to work on an entire game, I don't think I'd be able to get it all done in time. Maybe for the Saturday games I can spend the time, but it just won't fit into my schedule, especially when school starts again. That is the best thing about having school start so late, High School Football season is half done by the time I go back to school so I can have all of September to really get some good shots. I guess I'll have to make my decision soon as the first practice is on the 18th of this month. August will be over before we know it and with it, summer will start to die. Autumn comes in September in Washington and I can't wait. That means that Winter is right around the corner and this year, the government is predicting a great one. Well, a great one for me anyway. Snow, snow, and more snow. That is awesome.

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Black and White, Black and White, oh lovely lovely Black and White.

...or Monochrome for those of us in the photography world. I've been having trouble with the quality of my photos in my film class and I'm sure part of it has to do with getting back into the routine of cleaning the negatives, processing film, and keeping my hands off of the middle of my photo paper, but I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I simply no longer think in monochrome. Back when I first started taking pictures, it was with a film camera, and was in color. When I took Photo I in high school, it wasn't that hard to get my brain to think in black and white. I really hadn't been really focusing on photography before that so it wasn't that hard to get the rewiring done. When I got my P80, my first digital camera, I almost instantly switched over to color. I started to take some black and white stuff, but I was more focused on more important things like learning how to make higher quality photos and taking a crash course in sports photography for my work with Kent Valley Sports. I thought I'd successfully entered the world of photography and am now shooting to go "pro". It wasn't until I developed my first role of film at school during this second go around at Photo 101 that I started to realize that I had lost something just as much as I had gained something when I made the switch from Film to Digital. It really hit me when my photo didn't get one vote the photo of the week in my class this week. I know some of it is because I need to refine my developing and printing processes, but there were a lot of photos in the class which were simply better than mine. Without trying to toot my own horn, I know I can produce better photos than most of the other people in the class and way way better than the ones I've been producing. Because I do take so many photos, I can pretty easily go between "Sports Mode" and "Creative Mode". I'm going to need a lot of that creative stuff to re-wire my brain again to look at the monochrome side of things. So as a brilliant solution to my problem, I go back to digital. I know that doesn't make much sense, but during the summer, considered to be the "Slow" season for sports, I can really focus on the problem and Digital is way easier for me. I have changed my camera to only take monochrome photos for the duration of this experiment. If I need to shoot color for something on WPS, I can easily change it back, but this will force me to think in B&W. Because I have my DSLR with me at all times except at school, I can also test the photos on my DSLR before committing to a photo with the film. Digital film is cheap, and I've already paid for about 100 years of infinite memory. I have also switched the lenses that I will keep on the camera. I have a 50mm lens on the film camera for the class so I'll keep my 50mm lens on my DSLR so everything but the image format (Digital vs Film) will be the same from one camera to the next. I can't wait to get started. I haven't been this excited to just get out and shoot in a long time. TIME TO GET BIZZAY!!!

Too Efing Hot

It is too hot here is Washington. Summer in Washington should be cloudy and 65, and I wouldn't mind that for a month or so, but this is way too freaking hot. I can not wait for Winter to come back. I much prefer the snow to the sun. Plus cloudy skies are much more interesting than clear or overcast. Those are much too monotone, but the clouds are nice. The best part about the clouds is that they don't create weird shadows in my photos. Hopefully this will be the hottest it gets this summer and we move into Winter quickly. I can remember Autumns starting in August before. Maybe I'll get lucky. The La Nina is already starting to form which promises a good Winter. COME ON OCTOBER!!!

July Thoughts

July goes much slower than June does. Oh sure, it arrives with a bang, several of them in fact, but it always seems to fizzle out with a dull "meh". There are usually 3 things to look forward to in July. Number 1: The 4th of July. That was a lot of fun that was. I got a lot of good photos of fireworks. Number 2: Baseball. The Mid-Summer Classic is coming up, and I can't wait. The All Star Game is being held in Anihiem this year and there are a lot of good players going. Ichiro and Cliff Lee will be representing the Mariners this year and both look to put up some strong numbers. I think Felix Hernandez should have won another appearance, but you can't always win. Evan Longoria did beat out A-Rod for the third baseman spot so that's good. Evan is one of my non-Mariners interests. Even if the Mariners aren't doing as well as I had hoped, I do like what the Mariner's Minor League teams are doing. The Rainiers are 5 games up in their league. There is some promising talent in these clubs. In the Rainiers alone they have Matt Tuiasosopo, who, even though had a horrible start up in the big club, probably just needs some years behind him to be really effective in the majors, Micheal Pineda, who is a kid with a wicked slider, and Greg Halman who seems to be able to command the bat at the plate very well. Then there are the AA and single A teams who also are doing well. Good things are coming for the future of the Mariners. Number 3 on the list of things to do in July is go on vacation. This is something I won't be able to do this year unfortunately. I have summer classes and Dad has surgery on the 30th. It is an interesting experience to go to summer classes. The campus seems empty, but the class is full. Weird. The weather is heating up and I hate it. I am so much more comfortable in the cold that I have to wear an Ice Pack on my head to get to sleep at night. I'm already taking all natural sleep pills, but I still need the cool air. I have 3 fans on me at night and it still isn't enough. I can't wait for them to invent a small, portable AC unit for single rooms. However, I can't even think about purchasing anything major like that until I can get a job. I have put out so many applications and resumes, but no bites yet. It is very discouraging. I am liking my summer class in the meantime. It is fun to work with film again, and very frustrating at the same time. I much prefer my digital. July turns into August, and I certainly hope it will be a cooler one than last year. It can hover around 65 degrees all summer if it were up to me. I get the second half of August and most of September off from school so I still get a sizable break. I hope I don't melt before then. Soon Football starts up again and I can't wait to get out on the field. I am missing the King County Jags this year, but do to financial problems, they aren't playing. So I have to wait until September. These are the "hold out just a little bit longer" months. I'm hot, sticky, and watching Star Trek. Just some July Thoughts.