I Can Haz Kids?

As a work-at-home dad, the vast majority of my summer has been a little like this:
I'm cloistered in my home office, which is rather close to the living room, scratching my bald head trying to concentrate on some programming issue while my son has his face pressed up against the glass portion of my office door, Wii remote in hand,

"Daddy, can you come play with me?"    

"Sure buddy, as soon as I get off work this afternoon" / train of thought - completely derailed.

The kids started back to school, which makes the house eerily quiet aside from this similar little distraction, Penny - looking up at me as if to say, "I can Haz Kids to Play With?"  

Made in China

Over the weekend, my little girl (She's 8) turned over a cup and exclaimed, "Made in China!"  Why does everything say that?

At that moment, I wondered how to answer it.   

I thought about my years working for Wal-Mart during school, my perspectives at that time from the "Wal-mart Effect" principles of race-to-the-bottom retail pricing and my own challenges as a minimum wage - earner.

I thought about my years working in Customs - Foreign Trade Zone software and what I learned about the lopsided Tarrif structures that put American manufacturers importing parts from overseas at an uneven playfield w/ oversees manufacturers importing finished goods.

I thought about our own huge tax burden, the challenges that tax system puts on Small Business owners, stifling growth.    Then I thought about our failing national infrastructure and how those taxes are needed for infrastructure projects.

I thought about the human-rights issues in China versus the failing of our own education system to teach useful skills for the next generation workforce.

She could tell, she could read it in my stare that I was about to perch upon my soap box and go into "old guy" mode.   Finally concluding with some long-winded and preachy "When I was a kid / Get off my lawn" - themed dissertation...

So, I finally answered with:

"Yummy Chinese food.    Makes it easier to build cool stuff without feeling too full all day."

Yep, I'm going to leave it at that.

A Starry-Shadow-Selfie

The telescope is broken. (Boo!)   I was sitting out back marveling at a surprisingly clear summer sky and uses GoSkyWatch on an iPad. (You point to parts of the sky and it identifies visible and invisible objects, identifies constellations, etc)

It was around 11pm and the family was all asleep.    Noticing the visible band from the Milky Way was starting to retreat into the horizon, I decided to  grab the A7(r), tripod, headphones and wearable head lamp and set out for darker skies. 

I headed down Highway 98 towards Fairhope.  I'd never stayed at the Grand Hotel (maybe should try it!)  but I saw via Google Maps that a particularly ideal location on Point Clear that seemed would be the ideal spot to shoot southbound and limited light pollution.   

A 25 minute drive down Scenic 98 and I was at the security gate at the Grand Hotel in Point clear.    The guard didn't speak fantastic english but he did have one of those fantastic, thick, middle-african accents and a warm smile (and he didn't appear to be packing).

Niceness aside, I was shot down - "Sorry, guests only."

I thanked him for his patience with me (after showing the point on google maps that I was trying to find) and headed southbound for my plan B location, "Mullet Point Park".

All that I really knew about this area is that when I was on my sailboat, sailing north into the bay, these portions of the middle-southern portions of Mobile Bay seemed mostly abandoned and quite dark at night.   

Mullet Point Park did have a view of the Milky Way Band, though was retreating beneath the horizon and affected by plenty of light pollution.   

With the park lights behind me, the unintended star-and-shadow selfies ensued for about 30 minutes until I headed North for the respite of my bed around 2 am.

I used the Rokinon 14mm on the Sony A7, still working on getting the ideal distortion removal profile built but it is getting closer.  I think it'll be a good lens until someone comes out with a high dollar must-have alternative. :)

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Good Stuff on the Horizon

I'm always quite partial to the Fall Season.  Lots of cool things on the horizon.    :)    The kids head back to school, the beaches get less crowded, shrimp gets cheaper and the weather on the Alabama Gulf Coast gets nicer.   

Hopefully, I'll find myself with a bit more camera time for my own projects, the summer has had me a bit booked with other people's projects.  

Drifter's Corner

I was a little off-put by the amount of fast-food trash around the Daphne Beach area during a sunset walk with the family, yesterday.  It's a shame when folks don't leave things the way they find them.

Zen Moments

I very much admire Zen ideals and I do, in my life and career try to exhibit some stereotypical zen-like qualities of peace, calm, slowness-to-anger, etc.

I try, anyway and usually fail. :)

But that's the problem with being passionate about things, when you actually care about outcomes, it is hard to react like a robot.

I encountered a company recently in my programming world that has these zen-references on their marketing face. I've found the people in the company to be decidedly un-zen to deal with.

Inflexible, short-sighted, combative and defensive, yet obviously brilliant. I dunno, I'm sure it is all my fault but I was expecting Jeff Bridges and ended up finding Steve Jobs.  It was especially surprising b/c they were a marketing firm and usually sales and marketing people are more.. 'bright and shiny'.

I keep trying to remind myself that the reason they frustrate me so much is that it reminds me of my own obstinance.  :)

Floating on a Pond of Air

I was over @ my neighbor's garden and I was struck that the way the background fell-off into a bokeh, it looked a little like these were floating on a pond of air.

The Faces of my Career(s)

A friend of mine posted on Facebook recently, about me that "Some people have hobbies, you just go master several careers." and of course he was being funny and flattering and was really just referring to my tendency to research and superficially absorb many different things.   The operative term being, superficially.

I suppose that's the great thing about information dissemination in the age of Google.   In times of past, we'd have to study as an apprentice under a tradesmen for years to get the meat-and-potatoes of a particular trade. Even Da Vinci called someone Maestro, early on.  Now, enthusiastic self-published youtubers are happy to show you their skills.

That isn't to say it is reasonable to expect a person to gain a full mastery of a topic via 'googling it' but certainly it seems to be the way to overcome roadblocks.

In my programming career, I've used search engines plenty to solve errors, which are usually not errors in programming syntax or algorithms but challenges in the programming environment or frameworks.   Visual Studio Wonkiness, Apple xCode unexpected behaviors, etc. I know plenty of highly talented and skilled developers that use Google, Bing, StackExchange, GitHub and others to build nearly all of their code.   I think that pattern of find, copy-and-paste code will one day soon be replicated via a clever code-generating Neural Network.

For every case of the good-spirited, brilliant-minded problem solver helping solve others problems or taking the time to post solutions to common problems, there seem to be 4 or 5 other internet-forum-trolls who are just angry about something, contributing only snarkiness.   These were the mean kids in your kindergarden class that snickered out loud as you raised your hand to ask teacher a question.

Then, in photography there is this amazing wealth of information, much of it for free or cheap to teach you about anything you'd want to know about cameras, technique, software, publishing, printing, editing, etc.    It is the reason why there is such a flood of amazing photography.  Almost  everyone has access to the Ansel Adams equivalents of our time through social media, from which to study and learn technique.

Between the incredible pace of technology growth and understanding and the accessibility of the arts to everyday people like myself, I feel we are truly amidst another renaissance of sorts.

That is, of course assuming that the internet meanies don't squash innovation and expression with cynicism and wrong-minded comments and posts. 

Must... shoot.. in.. RAW!!

I will freely admit that ever since I started using Lightroom a few years back, I've become somewhat of a "Raw Snob".

What's that?  Our refrigerator doesn't shoot in RAW?  It's crap!

But.. honey.. it's just a refrig... nevermind.

It's like I'm channeling Admiral Ackbar "It's a TRAP!" but instead "It MUST BE RAW!"

And yes.. I think I fell into the trap laid by some over-opinionated 'professional' who wrote on some photography blog somewhere that shooting in RAW + JPEG is stupid and needless...

Yet, now I find myself cleaning up/ archiving brackets of photos from 2011 and I have to say, I really wish I had out-of-camera JPEGs for these shots, so that as I delete the 40+ meg RAW files at least I'd have a pure example of the image for historical posterity.

So, what spawned this is I had turned off Camera RAW inadvertently and went out to shoot the Zinnias in my wife's garden.     At first I cussed alot when I saw the herd of JPEGS evacuating the memory card but then it occurred to me, 

"Dang, that camera has pretty good color!"

What's a Corellian to do?  For now, I guess it’s continue exporting to JPEG and deleting those RAWs from 2011.. :)

Miles Versus The Dark Side

The Seven Dwarves' Cottage

Can't overstate enough how fun this ride was.     :)

Jim the Ragtime Piano Plater

Playing in the Magic Kingdom, since 1983!

Making the Best of the View at Hand

When I heard that the Polynesian would be under construction when we got there I was concerned that our view would be jacked up.

(not that you spend all that amount of time in the hotel room, anyway)

I actually didn't mind the view of the Bungalows under construction one bit. In true Disney fashion, when they are done they will fit in the environment as if they were always there!

Seven Dwarfs Mine Train

This was a fantastic ride! Just enough thrilling to be fun for the adults but not too much so as to be overly scary for the little ones.

It is interesting b/c you can feel the train braking to keep a smooth speed and control descents.

Some interesting queue games as well.

If you can't get a fast-pass, it is still well worth the wait. Twice the sign said 90 minutes, and it was only about 60 both times.

The Keynote Speaker @ the DragonFly Convention

The Colors of Summer

With Eyes to See

One of the things about being a photographer is I feel that it makes you more aware of the environment and more appreciative of the small things in nature / around us.    

I think it's that spacey-ness that we try to medicate out of kids and that formal education tries to exercise from people and replace with structured fact and knowledge recall.

But, I digress..

This little guy was flying around the pool between various plants and after I held still for a bit, he let me get pretty close to snap a shot.  

The only (slight) bummer was I had the camera shooting JPEG, not RAW but I was pleasantly surprised by the JPEG's quality.

Your Job for the Next Three Months..

We stood around in the newer areas of Magic Kingdom, around from the addition, an area called Gaston's Tavern that sells frozen apple juice in collector mugs my kids fight over at dinner. (Though, we have spares now!) :)

This area wasn't really crowded, I guess the rains earlier in the day had thinned out the herds, somewhat..

Anyway, an employee was orienting two new 'cast members' and directed them to stand back a ways to get the best view of the fireworks as he advised, "This will be your job for the next 3 months, how cool is that?"

While I'm sure their jobs will involve a good deal more than watching fireworks I appreciated his enthusiasm.   

I was also way happy to be able to shoot fireworks, hand-held (with autofocus!) w/ a crop-sensor lens and get some very usable results.  If the A7R is this good, the A7S is going to be incredible for this..

Lines in the Green

I'm going to write up some more detail in a day or so, however.. I have the A-Mount 24-70mm f2.8 from Sony. I love it. It's substantial, has a great feel, takes great images...

For a Disney trip I rented the EF Mount 24-70 f4 Lens. Reason being I had a credit @ borrowlenses and really wanted to try out the newer lens (plus not fool with the A-Mount to EF Mount adapter in a Disney Park)

I had kind of low expectations for the f4/ EF Mount version of this lens but I have to say that I am very surprised. It's quite a good lens for 1/3 the weight and lower price.

One More Night.. (after tonight)

..and it's back to my own glorious comfy bed... :)