You are now pregnant with oil

Listening to Moulin Rouge’s final scene on YouTube while editing pregnancy test photos is a great multitasking combination.  Earlier during the photo shoot, we didn’t have any urine to drop into the pregnancy test (thank goodness), so we used water which I am coloring yellow in very careful mouse moves.  I’m using Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush which is kind of accurate but it’s difficult to get the yellow color to what I imagine urine in an eye... Read More

Cycles

Life and death, war and peace, being together and living apart all cycle in the nature of the seasons.  Similarly, that pattern belies a deeper truth.  That is, that even though they repeat, things are different each time, with some progression, some regression, every time around.  In war, there may be an attack on a village which is light and militaristic so as to be directed only at the enemy.  Maybe the attacker wants to visit that town later and so does not want to... Read More

Photography Workflow

This may initially look complicated but this is the photography workflow that I currently use including the route from initial captured image, through ingestion and processing, distribution and eventually to archiving. INGESTION: Through Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, images are copied to a working internal hard drive on my PC.  During this “ingesting” stage, I set keywords, add copyright, apply any preset editing and add these images to a subfolder named, “originals”. ... Read More

My Version of Inception

Here are some faces that I drew the other day So, after typing my last post which was about the recent increase in surprises in my life, and after proofing and publishing it, SURPRISE!, only half of the post was published.  Everything I added after previewing the post was deleted forever.  That goes into the, “Bad Surprises,” category of course.  But the more I thought about it, the more I am thinking that it would be better to have the following post appear... Read More

Supplies!

I don’t squeeze my toothpaste tube up from the bottom the way everyone else does because I like there to be some surprises in my life.  Like, “Hey, there’s a whole ‘nother glob of extra toothpaste over here in this part!  Just when I thought I was running out!”  Unfortunately, the most recent surprises in my life aren’t as pleasant.  Recently I was asked to photograph a check presentation at the Chicago Auto Show.  Seemed like a boring... Read More

Children of an Idle Brain

It’s sad that in the past five years of blogging, despite my roller coaster love life, I’ve only posted once on Valentine’s Day.  In 2009, I wrote about saving your old emails and how it paid off in a pointless argument in CYA Email Bitch Slap.  Bad form on a day dedicated to Love, or lack thereof.  My sister Anne calls today, “Single’s Awareness Day,” which I think is pretty funny.  And as I am single today, I feel an obligation to write... Read More

Car Show Girl

The Chicago Auto Show is coming up again soon and that means there’s a chance I’ll see her again.  Wait, who?  The girl from the car show!  More on her later.  Silly, I know.  The statistics for attendance at the CAS are unreal with millions of people jammed into ten days of mobbing the fingerprinted steel at McCormick Place, the world’s largest convention facility.  Basically, if you don’t set up your meeting place at a specific wheel of a specific... Read More

Memento

Sometimes when I sit introspectively and review the conversations of the day in my head, I think, “Why didn’t I acknowledge when Sally told me that she was in love with Jack?  I just sat there and then changed subjects.  Why the heck did I do that?  And now I’m remembering that she looked at me funny when I didn’t acknowledge that.  WTF?”  So I think it all stems from some dormant brain problem that is slowly surfacing as I get further into... Read More

Inelastic

I’ve spent the last few nights watching The Pacific on Blu-Ray with an air-sick bag close by. Television programming is so repetitive with rehashed themery that it has become a blister on the minds of most viewers. Shows like The Pacific are the rupturing of that blister into a gore fest of hyper-violence. I found myself cringing for most of the miniseries until about half way through the disks when I adopted a sort of withdrawn third person view of the scenes, remaining... Read More

The haze of the drink

You have to lean your head against something with your eyes closed and the closest thing is the cold beer in your right hand.  So you lean into its curve, your face falling into the slope of its neck, and sleep flows like the liquid in the bottle as the music is swallowed by your ears and down into your chest.  Your left hand looks for a place to fall between the greasy shot glasses.  Your eyes open and she’s still across the room with another man curling her hips to... Read More

Smashed Android

Hey blog.  It’s like 3am.  I am obviously not going to fall asleep any time soon despite a killer-busy day today which ended at 10:30pm.  I don’t know what PM stands for but it feels like post mortem after the longer days. So I was laying in bed just now thinking, I should write to you and see how you are doing and see what’s new in your life.  My life has been like some kind of comedic play lately.  I’ll try to give you the brief version of my story: So... Read More

Adaptive Preference Formation

You can’t reach the grapes so they are probably not ripe anyway, right?  This attitude is known as Adaptive Preference Formation.  It’s what we do, as humans, to justify our failures.  The other day, I had to do a photo shoot where I KNEW that most of the photos were never going to be used.  It’s what I call a “Political Shoot” where I am asked to show up an event in order to demonstrate to the attendees that the corporation believes the event... Read More

The Mystery of the Exploding Girl

I can’t think of anything to write about tonight so I am just going to start writing and see if anything comes out of my head in opposition to my writer’s block.  Maybe I should simply describe the above photo.  I took this shot back in 2005.  It was a late winter evening, and I was finishing up an afternoon of deer stalking.  Now, I’m no hunter, but the act of stalking and photographing a deer is fun for me.  Such curious creatures, I doubt they feel my... Read More

I remember this

  You’ll know if this makes sense to you: “And it starts, sometime around midnight. Or at least that’s when you lose yourself for a minute or two. As you stand, under the bar lights. And the band plays some song about forgetting yourself for a while. And the piano’s this melancholy soundtrack to her smile. And that white dress she’s wearing you haven’t seen her for a while. “But you know, that she’s watching. She’s laughing, she’s turning. She’s... Read More

All these things that I’ve done

Tomorrow is my birthday. Thirty-six. Alla, the girl who cuts my hair, says I’m just a baby though an increasing percentage of the clipped hair falling from her scissors is silver. She’s getting married for the second time now at forty-five and I’ve never seen her happier. She insists that people who get married before they are forty are nuts.  She did it and she thinks of herself as nuts.  People just change too much during that transitional era between twenty... Read More