More Than Just Photography…

For those of you that don’t know, I’ve been blogging and Tweeting for a while now. It took me a bit to get into the groove of pushing internal thought externally, but it’s almost become addictive at this point. It’s become a part of my daily workflow now, something I’ve incorporated into my normal work and personal schedule. I never thought I’d see the day… :)

For the most part my social networking has been professional: my primary blog is TheVirtualDC (very boring unless you’re really into the data center, virtualization, etc), which is also my Twitter persona, although I do tweet all day about both technology and personal stuff on that account. I also post occasional on Wes' shared blog The Dude Consortium, which until now, has served as my non-photo blog outlet. It’s too hard to maintain multiple personalities – actually one of my goals in the near future is to figure out how to consolidate the multiple accounts and blogs I have floating around the web already. Which leads me to…

…this blog. Although my original goal with the blog was to focus solely on photography, the truth is I don’t spend nearly as much time with the photography business as I would like these days (not that I’m slacking on that front; you should see my ToDo list, it’s _long_), and I have a ton of things floating around in the space between my ears, so I’m going to using this blog for my singular personal blog.

To start, a cross-post from my last Dude Consortium post below. More as it bubbles up to my brain and out my fingers…. :)

Beer, More Desert, The Wind, Conor Oberst

I just passed another birthday a few weeks ago. I'm not a birthday fan; I don't celebrate them, I don't expect gifts or phone calls, I don't eat a cake, etc. Just not my thing. But this year, by coincidence, one of the restaurants in our building converted it's monthly wine pairing meal to an Oktoberfest beer tasting and pairing, held on the anniversary of my birth. I'm also not a huge beer drinking (I like my libations in the form of wine and whiskey), but figured "What the hey, let's give it a whirl." Man that was some good beer. We had mostly Sam Smith offerings: a cider, porter, lambic, and others. Those were accompanied by beer cheddar soup, crab legs, shrimp, sausage. Getting hungry and thirsty just thinking about it.

Immediately after the evening of beer, I headed down to Palm Springs for work. I don't like Palm Springs; it just feels like an exclusive "members only" waste of land. There's no middle class, just the upper-upper and the lower. There were two cool things about Palm Springs, however:

1) Wind Turbines: I don't know why, but I love wind turbines. They're practical and they're great to stare out for hours. Wind farms are like array telescopes; there's just something about the architecture, symmetry, etc. Flying into Palm Springs you come right into the Coachella valley which is full of wind farms. And you're flying so low you're almost buzzing them. A great way to approach an otherwise shitty city. I had a great conversation with a native Hawaiian this week about the new(er) turbines on the West Maui mountains. I think it's an excellent idea, him, not so much.

2) Desert Adventures: My team of co-workers went out into the desert with Desert Adventures for team building on a very hot afternoon. Keeping each other from falling off a board, passing team members through a hole in a wall 6ft off the ground, that kind of stuff. It was great; I was concerned that the 110deg heat would be an issue but 10 minutes of acclimation (and gallons of water) were all we needed to get right into it. I do love the desert climate; not sure I could live there but it's fun to visit. Our guide was an Environment Scientist that spends half a year as a guide on McKinley and the other half living in the Joshua Forest. Really calm guy.

Susan was in Dallas all last week for work, so we met at the airport late Friday night as our respective flights were landing (when's the last time you could meet your loved one at the gate? It was a nice treat to greet her coming off the jetway). Then we jumped in the car and motored down to Portland for a quick Saturday night turn-around trip to see Conor Oberst and Jenny Lewis at Crystal Ballroom. Amazing show; two of my favorite songwriters from our era, so seeing them together was an amazing way to welcome us both back to the Great NW.

But now I'm back in the just above freezing, windy, and rainy (well, it is sunny today) climate I love. No travel plans until December and I'm looking forward to hanging out at home for a few weeks. We're planning on attending a Brigadoon Assistance Dogs open house this weekend, but that's about it for us.

Music: "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon is currently playing in Cog, but once again I'm back in the groove of listening to Portishead's Third near-daily, probably the best album of the year (which is a hard category this year against Conor and My Morning Jacket). If you haven't heard it, by all means, Deezer it ASAP. New Cure comes out today but I'm not that excited. We'll see how it grows.

Books: Just picked up two books by Chuck Palahniuk, Choke and Rant, but haven't started either of them.

-Alan

Technorati Tags: travel,california,music

Fun With Wide Angles & Macro

I was playing around with a friend's macro/wide angle lens adapter today (an Opteka HD Wide Angle Panaromic Macro mounted on an 18-200 macro zoom lens) and got a few good shots, posted on the Flickr page. Most are in the Max set but there are two macro flower pics that are "loose" in the photostream (I need to upgrade the account soon to post in more than just 3 sets).

I haven't really played with any true macro shooting before or a fisheye, but I liked both. I may have to add this toy to the camera bag, or start looking into dedicated lenses. I'm still planning on buying a good 50mm lens for portraits so might as well just add this to the wishlist. :)

-Alan

PS: Sure, it's the lens that makes Max's right eyebrow look like it's cut shorter than his left; it's not my terrible dog grooming skills at all, I promise.

Las Vegas -> Seattle Road Trip

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently took a road trip up from Las Vegas to Seattle. The primary reason was to drive up with our friend who moved to Seattle from Vegas, but it worked out to be a great excuse to hit amazing country and take some pics. And I was already in Vegas for work so everything just came together. :)

We left Vegas and went first through Death Valley, somewhere I've always wanted to go. I would definitely go back...but man it was hot, especially at Zabriskie Point. Then we drove up past Mono Lake and through Yosemite. Yosemite was actually a bit of a disappointment after living in the NW for so long. It was basically like our National Parks up here except many, many more people and cars. We actually got in a traffic jam in the middle of a National Park. Didn't seem right. So we went from planning on staying there for possibly two nights to just driving right through in a day. And that turned out to be a great move.

We left Yosemite and headed straight up to Mt. Shasta for a night. I've been through Mt. Shasta once before on our road trip a few years ago to Reno and Lake Tahoe (same trip we stopped at Burney Falls and Crater Lake). I'm not a huge fan of California, but Shasta is definitely somewhere I could spend a lot of time. We then left Mt. Shasta on a straight shot to the Oregon Coast.

We weren't traveling with GPS or anything fancy, just a good ol' fashioned map. Good thing because it was much, much more detailed than anything I could find online after I was back. We took a tiny logging road from Grants Pass, OR, across the Klamath Mountains and the Coastal Range over to Gold Beach. Then it was straight up the 101 through Bandan (another place that's on the list for a re-visit) and Tillamook (oh yeah, I came back with a bag of cheese :).

And that was it. Sus and I are already planning an Oregon trip in May, once the snow melts and before the kids flood the coastal towns. I can't wait.

- Alan

I'm Back!

Well I'm finally back to photo blogging...Well, now that I think about it, I guess I never really started. Has it really been since January? Wow. I created this site a _long_ time ago with every intent of keeping it current, but you know how that goes. Life, work, the dog, etc, kept me away. But I'm going to make a focused effort to keep this site current with what's going on with the Sealed Glass.

On that note, a few updates:

1) The site itself is pretty much just churning right along. I'm spending most of my down time going through years and years of archives looking for stuff that's worth posting, and that's going much slower than I would have thought. But it's going.

2) I'm working on business cards and an official logo and hope to have those done within a month or so. We're getting closer to being official.

3) It's still just me right now; I'm looking forward to wrangling Des back into the fold but I know she's busy with more important things, so I'll just bide my time until we can get some of her content posted (it will be worth the wait, I promise :). And I'm also really looking forward to her marketing expertise to help get this thing off the ground.

4) Finally got my Flickr account sorted out and some pics from my last road trip posted (more on that later). I'll be posting photos for the family and "rejects" that didn't make the Sealed Glass Photo site (rejects is a relative term; they're still great pics of course ;).

That's about. I should have some photo updates in the next day or so. Until then, check out the Flickr badge on the right. Enjoy!

- Alan

Goodbye Webshots, Hello Flickr

After years and years of using Webshots (which is a great site, for what it does), I've decided to move my pictures over to Flickr, which gives me a bit more flexibility for I want. So to pay homage to Webshots, I'll leave you with a slideshow from my trip to Tel Aviv in 2006.



Tel Aviv 2006