Being in a battleground state hasn't been all it's cracked up to be...between the appallingly negative adverts and constant invasions of our home by the candidates and their surrogates, sometimes one can't help but feeling a bit under siege like the poor villagers in the opening of Mel Brooks' "Robin Hood: Men in Tights"...
Whether you like him or hate him, you've got to admit that the dude's got one heck of a nice ride! #757sWithRollersRock :)
This story starts off with Nicholas playing in the Wake County District Honour band which he had auditioned for a while ago and was successful in getting a seat with that saxophone of his. They started out with a patriotic tune and of course one's mind had to wander a bit... I'll never forget the one night that Dad was playing his guitar, Grandpa was playing his ancient mandolin, and I was playing the flute.…
After three debates and the nastiest campaign I've ever seen (and I got to see Hunt-Helms 1984 which was really ugly!), I've come to the conclusion that I need my go-to therapy for combating political despair.
Somehow I get the impression that if they were assigning seats at the UN, they'd think that putting Iran and Iraq next to each other and Israel in the same row as those first two would be a totally great idea! If you get the chance, do go visit the remarkable young people manning the Peace Booth…their caring and thoughtful engagement in the political process and commitment to justice and equality for all in spite…
The more I see of the open (un)civil war roiling the GOP, the more Donald reminds me of Emperor Cartagia and I seriously wonder if he has a council of severed heads he talks to in the basement of Trump Tower. Anyway, he would have been wise to heed this nugget of wisdom from Ambassador Mollari: "Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of…
Just saw an advert on the telly for Chia Hillary Clinton and Chia Donald Trump. Yes, you heard me correctly… I'm not sure what scares me more: finding the Chia versions preferable to the real candidates or admiring Chia's uncanny ability to match The Donald's skin tone! ;) (And yes, apparently they have Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders on offer as well…)
Yesterday, it was hard enough bearing witness to two huge corporations engaging in levels of bureaucratic officiousness that would make Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz absolutely giddy with joy (if proper permission had been secured for such joy and signed in triplicate and countersigned and approved…and if he actually remembered what joy was like in a non-bureaucratic sense if he's even capable of such an intellectual leap of faith) with the goal of SUCCESSFULLY DOING EVERYTHING IN…
At the chemist's drive through lane signing a slip of paper saying that I have received a copy of the (absolutely and hopelessly useless!) "Notice of Privacy Practices" mandated by HIPAA that you cannot actually see or read and this was playing on WFOX… :)
A truly surreal moment that I can't imagine ever happening at any other time in the family history: watching my daughter being rendered birthday honours in a bingo hall! Yes, she chose bingo to celebrate her 10th birthday and it was quite an enjoyable time. Mind you, I'm still trying to wrap my head round the thought that my baby girl is now 10! Yikes!
The good: being ready to dramatically reduce that nice long iTunes wish list and get some righteous tunes for WFOX! The bad: Apple removed the buy all button from the wish list to protect idiot users who apparently can't grasp what a buy all button does in practise. Even worse: iTunes doesn't have a shopping cart so each item in the wish list is purchased individually resulting in multiple charges to credit card. On the…
This is the last photo I have of Dad and his grandchildren in front of his house (from over three years ago). He is in a far better place now and whilst it still seems to take a bit of getting used to, I know that he knows he is loved even if he is no longer walking among us. Looking at this picture, I'm struck by the rather impertinent thought that where that neighbourhood…
I just got back home from a quick in-and-out to Florida and Orlando was its usual hot and humid self (which if you've ever lived there is about 11.5 months of the year!). I hired a car from Hertz and the agent at the desk and the chap who was at the checkpoint at the exit of the car park offered free ice cold bottles of water. What an amazingly considerate and BRILLIANT thing to…
After dropping Nick off at school downtown, my precinct is on the way back home so I figured I'd pop in and vote in the primary being held today. What I wasn't expecting was to find a cameraman from Time Warner Cable News INSIDE THE BUILDING blocking the door to the polling room and then keeping the camera pointed at me the entire time I was in there and going through the voting procedures. Can…
But we certainly didn't have any problems with shooting it! Any decent lens will do to really get the colours of the flame to pop...were I shooting on a DSLR, I'd likely have the 50mm f/1.4 lens at hand. That f/1.4 aperture is huge...so large that I can shoot that lens in total darkness without using the flash! But in this case, these all came from the back camera of an iPhone. The technology is…
The last picture shows the eight logical CPUs (four physical cores and Intel's Hyperthreading means each core appears as two CPUs) during a big export of a little over 2,000 pictures from the recent photo shoot at the Gilbert Theatre. Maleficent blasted through that export roughly five times faster than Callisto would have and that was with the virus scanner actively scanning the hard drive at the same time dramatically slowing down the machine's performance.…
Originally, my eye was caught by the contrails of an Airbus A320 passing overhead but when the hawk decided they wanted to come round and play...well, who am I to refuse? All of these were shot on the D810 with the 300mm f/4 lens. The tricky bit of these shots is keeping the bird that is randomly flying round visible in the viewfinder and getting the autofocus to lock on properly. In situations like this…
The time of great change is finally upon us with the arrival of a new laptop to replace the nearly six year-old current laptop that is finally starting to show its age. Laptops by their nature tend to be evil with all of the hardware crammed into an itty bitty space and this new one actually embraces it. The naming scheme of laptops in this house is always for evil characters and thus the name…
Here's yet another gallery featuring the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens, this time playing with a lizard that is holding onto a branch of one of the Japanese Maples in front of the house. I love how the lens really shows you the details of the scales that is breathtakingly sharp! :)
Today I did my first real wedding photo shoot at the Cape Fear Botanical Gardens...the same place I had scouted a week ago with my sister Meghann. The wedding was for her boss Robyne at the Gilbert Theatre and it was a wonderful ceremony to experience. Mind you, I was nervous as it was my first wedding shoot and I can assure you I invoking Alan Shepard's prayer more than a few times down I-40…
October's special treat comes from the world of astronomy with the planets Venus, Jupiter, and Mars in a lovely conjunction (Mars is pretty hard to see compared to the other two but the iPhone 6 Plus still did a pretty decent job of getting it). Of course, the D7000 or D810 with the 50mm f/1.4 or the 70-200mm f/2.8 probably would have done better but then I DID have a kid I had to collect…
This is the other roll of slide film I shot at Ocean Isle Beach using Provia 100. You can see that it is much less saturated with color and as a faster speed film is much better in retaining contrast details even when shooting in the evening. Provia 100 is my go-to general purpose slide film and it was what I was using when I was wandering round the mountains in the spring. In darker…
