Category: Photography

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Chihuly at Night, Take 1

Last night Ben and I attended Chihuly at Night at the Denver Botanic Gardens. I was really torn as to whether or not to take my DSLR or just my new iPhone 6 to photograph the exhibit.

I decided on the iPhone to put it through its paces and see if it really lived up to all the shooting-in-low-level-light hype.

It didn’t. I was sorely disappointed. The evening wasn’t a waste and I had a good time (it’s been far too long since Ben and I had a date night), but I really wish I’d brought my DSLR along because the iPhone camera simply wasn’t up to the challenge.

In addition, Ben also had issues with the flash on his 6 Plus washing out entire scenes.

Granted, Chihuly at Night is a difficult subject to photograph even with the best equipment. But it seemed I got much better results with my DSLR when the exhibition was in Phoenix several years ago.

Thankfully, the exhibit continues in Denver through the end of November, and we’ve already purchased tickets to return. This time I’ll bring the DSLR and a tripod…

All that being said, out of approximately 80 shots, I did manage to capture of a few decent—not good, but merely decent—pictures:

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A Little Impromptu Road Trip

I was looking at my Flickr page the other day and realized it’s been quite a while since I got out and did any photography. I think that’s partially because I’m at the point with Denver that I really don’t want any more reminders of this place. All I know is that every time I take my camera out with me I find no inspiration anywhere.

But photography is an itch I need to scratch every so often, and yesterday I really wanted to go somewhere and capture images of something. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t looking cooperative.

Ben suggested we head west and drive to the top of Mt. Evans.

I was less than enthused at the idea. Yeah, maybe if the sun was shining and dark rain clouds weren’t threatening in the west, but not with the way things were looking when he first proposed the idea.

After lunch the sun was starting to peek out in places, and he convinced me that we at least needed to get out of the apartment and go somewhere other than Starbucks. And since Sammy hadn’t yet been on a road trip with us, it might be a good chance to see how he’d react.

I agreed with the proviso that if my camera battery wasn’t charged all bets were off.

Amazingly, the battery in my camera was fully charged, so we set out on our little adventure, and I’m so glad we did.

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Scenes from an Auto Show

My grandfather had one of these. He sold it the year before I was able to drive.

A MINI convertible is not in my future.
While he’s fine as a passenger, Ben still can’t drive a MINI.

SO tempting! The new MINI is gorgeous, but I’m still enjoying not having car payments too much. And I’m way too attached to my Anderson to trade him in.

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I Had Every Intention

…this evening of going out and doing some night photography. I even got the camera and tripod out. Then I looked at the temperature and the wind chill and said, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

Oh well. Maybe this summer.

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Dreams of Home

Last night I dreamt my sister and I were back in the house where we lived during my high school and college years. I don’t remember the circumstances, only the overwhelming feeling of “home” and “safety” that it elicited. I remember standing in my bedroom, running a finger down the blinds, watching the afternoon sun stream in. It was a little slice of heaven.

Dig those bell bottoms!

That poor bedroom received more coats of paint that I can count over the years. Sadly, I don’t have photos from all its iterations. I think the blue phase was my favorite, even though it never was the exact blue I’d envisioned. I also forever regretted my choice of carpet when we first moved in because it never went with anything; a brown, white, and black shag that my father reluctantly agreed to on the condition there would be no more “girly” colors (lemon yellow, lime green—hey, it was the late 60s and early 70s!) like I’d had in my bedroom in our previous home.

My mom, being an interior decorator, indulged my nervous color twitching and I think on some level encouraged it.

My “peach” phase, and the color of the room that most often appears in my dreams

I’ve dreamt of that house more often than usual over the past few years, and I’m starting to think that while my last apartment in Phoenix may be my current conscious mental “happy place” where I go to de-stress and cocoon, that house on Solano Drive North may in fact be my real, subconscious place of refuge.

The chocolate experiment
What I wouldn’t give to still have that original Hildebrant STAR WARS poster that I picked up for $3 at Spencer’s Gifts shortly after the movie came out…not to mention the Donna Summer!
Yes, that’s a collage of mens…
Always the stereo geek. Funny how I don’t keep house plants any more; I used to surround myself with them.
The chocolate walls lasted about 6 months before they closed in and I was convinced I was seeing things moving in the shadows. It was time for them to go.
Disco, baby. Disco.
A little bit of that afternoon glow streaming in that so often appears in my dreams of this house.

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Scenes from San Francisco, 1993

I still find it amazing that for all the years I lived in San Francisco—inarguably one the most photogenic cities in the United States—I have so few photos of The City itself. Again and again I used to say, “I really need to grab my camera and just start walking the neighborhoods,” but like going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium—something else that kept getting put off “because it’ll always be there”—one day I woke up and realized I no longer had the opportunity.

But every so often I did get out…

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The AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1988

Going through more photos…

Even though I’d been in San Francisco a couple years when the quilt was unveiled at Moscone Center in December of 1988, I was still semi-insulated from the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, having lost only two friends to the disease: Kent “Red” Kelly (who’d moved from Phoenix to San Francisco in 1979 and remarked shortly before his death in 1987 that, “Six years in San Francisco are better than sixty in Arizona,” and Ben Walzer, a dear friend and “neighbor with benefits” from my time in Tucson who passed only a few days after Kent.

But like happened with so many others, the arrival of the horrible 90s changed all that.

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Bullshit

Like millions of others, I upgraded to iOS7 last week. I generally like it, but it’s taken me only a few days to discover a HUGE fail on the part of Apple and the bloom is definitely off the rose because of it.

The built in photo app now allows you to apply filters to your photos, either when you take them or after the fact. Pretty cool, right?

The problem is that when you transfer them off the phone using Apple’s own Image Transfer application on the Mac (or through iPhoto), all the filter information is stripped and you’re left with only the original photo.

WTF?

And moving the pictures back onto the phone does not restore that lost data.

So all of the original beautifully filtered photos that I took on our trip to Santa Fe are gone (except for the ones I uploaded to Instagram), and the only way I was able to get them back is to re-import them to the phone, reapply the filters, and then email the filtered photos back to me. Yes folks, email.

I would expect this kind of crap from Microsoft, but not Apple.

And did I mention that when you do this you don’t get the full resolution photos, even though they’re being selected to be sent as full size? Nope, they’re only 62% of the original resolution.

This is bullshit.

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And Apple Wins Again

Just amazing.

I tried catching this scene earlier today using my old “prosumer” (not my digital SLR) Sony digital camera. It failed miserably—by not only refusing to stop the moth’s wings in flight, but also in failing to capture the deep purple color of the flowers. As I was about to give up and walk off, I returned with my iPhone.

MIND. BLOWN.

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