2004 Photography Calendar

2004 Wall Calendar

While I’m certainly not a professional photographer by any means, I do enjoy experimenting with photography, seeing what I can come up with, and occasionally coming up with a decent shot or two. I’ve just selected twelve photographs from my collection, and added two new items to my CafePress shop: a 2004 Wall Calendar featuring those photographs, and a full year calendar featuring a shot of Post Alley, near the Pike Place Market here in Seattle.

Oh, and the full selection of “I’m just here to get laid.” shirts are, of course, still available. I thought for sure I’d have sold more than one by now — maybe it’s not as generally funny as I think it is…;)

Wacom Photography Contest

Wacom is currently having a “Go Platinum / Go Pro” photo/design contest.

Go Platinum: design a cover for a stock photography CD.

Go Pro: submit a photo for inclusion in a future stock photo CD.

The winner of each contest will get a 40Gb iPod and $1000 as payments for the rights to use their submission.

Pretty cool, I think — I’ve submitted my Post Alley photograph. Worth a shot, at least!

Canon EOS Digital Rebel

Canon EOS Digital Rebel

Now that my new computer is on the way (two weeks to go, at most…), I’ve started fixating on a new item for my techno-lust: the Canon EOS Digital Rebel.

I’ve had an interest in photography for many years now. I remember playing with my dad’s old SLR camera when I was younger — unfortunately, it didn’t work anymore, but I had fun fiddling around with it. I took one quarter of photography in high school. Not so much that I really remember much of anything, but enough to cement it as a definite interest. However, it’s been a fairly low-level interest for many years.

Just before I left Anchorage I picked up a nice little Kodak digital camera (the DX3500) which has served me well over the past few years. I’ve even managed to come up with a few shots that I really like from time to time (my favorite so far being one of Post Alley here in Seattle). The more I play with it, though, the more I wish I had a more full-featured camera, and the Canon EOS looks to be a really good value.

It’s essentially a full-featured SLR digital camera. 6.1 Megapixel resolution (roughly three times the resolution of my current camera), through-the-lens viewfinder, the ability to accept all of Canon’s EF series lenses and Speedlite flashes, and all sorts of other goodies. It even got rated ‘Highly Recommended’ by DPReview.

The downside, of course, is that I won’t be able to afford it anytime soon. While the \$999 price is extremely good for everything you get with the camera, it’s definitely out of my price range anytime in the near future (especially if I ever want to get myself out of debt). Ah, well — such is the way of life, right? At the very least, it’s a goal for the future.

Of course, if anyone out there is feeling generous at all, you’re welcome to help me out here! ;)

PayPal donations are accepted, if you go shopping at Amazon through this link I’ll get a miniscule percentage of whatever you spend, and, of course, Christmas is only a few short months away. Okay, sure, I’m shameless. But as I’m not expecting anyone to actually chip in, I can’t exactly be disappointed, now can I?

Mayday! My life, May 10th, 2003

Here we are — one day of my life, my entry into the Mayday Project.

Since most of my Saturdays generally involved hanging around my apartment, doing laundry, dinking on the web, and other such fun stuff, I actually made an attempt to get out of the house for the day (since 14 pictures of my computer monitors wouldn’t be very interesting). The times aren’t exact on-the-hour, as I don’t have a watch, so I just took a ton of photos throughout the day (140-some) and grabbed decent ones around the right time for this page.

Waking up and heading for the shower

12:00pm: Waking up, heading for the shower. One of the benefits of having shaved my head is that I don’t look too terribly goofy first thing in the morning — hard to have ‘bedhead’ when you’ve got hair 1/8 of an inch long!

Getting in line at the Apple Store

1:15pm: Saturday was the Grand Opening for Washington’s first Apple Store, in Bellevue, so I hopped a bus out to the Bellevue Square shopping mall to check it out. When I got there, it was about a 30 minute wait to get in — apparently the first person to line up showed up at 6:30 in the morning, and at one point the line stretched around the shopping center! It’s not a computer — it’s a cult. ;)

Watching children play

2:20pm: There are two spots inside the Bellevue Square mall (which is huge) set aside as playspaces for children not as much into shopping as their parents — a good spot to spend a few minutes after finishing drooling over computer toys.

Ducks in the fountain

3:10pm: I spent a while wandering around the mall, and after I couldn’t take anymore, I started heading back into Seattle. There was a fountain by the exit of the mall, that had two remarkably brave ducks swimming around in it, hoping for handouts from the shoppers passing by.

Outside a flower shop

4:05pm: Once back in town, I spent a good amount of time wandering through the Pioneer Square area before heading towards the Pike Place Market. This was taken just outside of a flowershop in Pioneer Square, which was almost invisible except for the petals strewn across the ground outside the entrance.

Dance demo in Westlake Plaza

5:08pm: Heading back toward the apartment and passing by Westlake Plaza, I stumbled across a bunch of kids doing some sort of dance demo/fundraising — one guy on a drumset laying down rhythms, with five or six other kids dancing. Some pretty impressive breakdancing, too.

Underneath a planter in Freeway Park

6:01pm: I went through the Convention Center Park on the way back up to my apartment. There’s a large planter in one section — this was taken flat on my back underneath the planter.

A coke at Fado's

7:30pm: My idea of an appropriate drink while hanging out at Fado’s, an Irish pub downtown — Coke!

Prom night transportation

8:07pm: Prom season in Seattle. Lots of the standard limos all over the place, but every so often you spot someone with actual class.

Caterpillar tents

8:50pm: The trees around my apartment were covered in this webby, filmy stuff — at first I thought they were spider webs, which creeped me out a bit, but it turns out when I took a closer look that they’re actually caterpillar nests — nifty!

Dressed and ready to go out

10:07pm: Dressed and ready to head out to the club: basic black!

At the Vogue

11:00pm: At the Vogue, my club of choice in Seattle. Goth/industrial/new-wave. Woohoo!

Rick at the Vogue

12:00am: My friend Rick, sitting in his corner at the Vogue. I’m not sure he expected me to pull out the camera…

Me dancing at the Vogue

1:15am: Elephant picture #1: Me on the dancefloor.

Still dancing!

2:00am: Elephant picture #2: Me on the dance floor again. Shake that boo-tay!

That’s it for now —

Mayday! Mayday!

The other day at work, I was toying with the idea of doing a “day in the life” series of photos. Taking my camera with me during the day, and snapping a shot every so often, then presenting them to the world. I hadn’t decided quite how to do it — a picture an hour? Every half hour? — but I’d been letting it rumble around in the back of my brain since then.

To my amusement, though, today Dyanna pointed to the Mayday Project, which is essentially exactly what I’d been turning over in my brain, only somewhat organized and loosed upon the blogosphere at large.

So, I’ve signed up, and on May 10^th^, will be documenting my day hourly.

Hrm. This means I’m going to need to actually leave the house that day, doesn’t it? Something tells me a series of fourteen pictures of my computer monitors would be pretty un-exciting…

Stay out of Photoshop

An L.A. Times photographer has just been fired after it was discovered that the photo he submitted and ended up getting placed on the front page had been digitally manipulated. The retraction in the L.A. Times is unusually good, too, including both of the original images, and the final altered image that was printed.

(via MeFi)

Nighttime beauty

Nighttime flower

Trying to find something nicer to look at than the constant barrage of news, I spent some time last night experimenting with taking nighttime shots of some of the flowers in Freeway Park by my house. Since using the ‘macro’ (closeup) mode of my camera gives it a very shallow depth of field, by shooting at night I was able to get nice deep blacks behind the flowers, while the flash brought out the colors of the petals. On some of the shots you can see the evening dew hanging off of the flowers.

I think they came out fairly decently, myself — but feel free to judge for yourself!