This was from a few weeks ago when some good friends of ours dropped into town.  Their kid, Christopher, is getting SO BIG.

For a two year old, he’s so cautious and thoughtful.  We’re at this little water play area in the middle of the city, and he’s just sitting there, watching others – and as far as I can tell – figure out how to navigate this thing without getting wet.

Man, but he is damn cute.

I’m having a little trouble.  I can’t be happy with photos I’m taking.  I find very few pictures that I like.  And the ones that I do like, I tend to think that I’m overthinking their composition or that I’m being too artsy fartsy or cliche and I don’t know what I’m saying with the damn camera.  I’ve forgotten what the hell I’m doing.  I feel like I’m taking the same photos as everyone else in the world with a DSLR and a hope and a prayer and a billion shots worth of memory.

I need to study more.  I need to shoot more frequently or at least try to find a direction I like.  Maybe this is outside life frustration leaking into the camera.  But we’ll see.  I’m not giving up yet, I just need to figure out what the hell I’m doing.

So much for that.

Going through the pictures, a few lessons were emphasized to me.

GO EARLY

If I had spent two more minutes to line this shot up so everything was centered, it would have been far more effective.  Also see lighting and early lesson as I was taking this quickly in between children’s legs getting in the way of the three lined up doors shot.

PAY ATTENTION TO EVERYTHING IN YOUR VIEWFINDER

I was so damn focused on the freaking pagoda that I forgot to pay attention to the lines of everything else in the photograph. Yes, these can be taken out in post, but it’s so much easier to notice it up front.

DON’T CHIMP, BUT CHECK YOUR EXPOSURE

Yup.  If I had spent two seconds checking the exposure bar before snapping this off, I would have had a much less noisy picture after extensive recovery.  Great job Emily.  Way to wisely spend a long drive.

I sort of like this, but it’s nothing special to me.  But I did like the colors.  A lot of this set of photos was a very large lesson in WHAT WERE YOU THINKING.

Tonight I went to a butchering class at Catalan given by Chef Shepherd.  I watched him take apart a pig from two halves and a head.  I saw racks and pork belly and legs which will turn to hams or maybe somewhere a prosciutto.

This picture is from right before he opened up that first half of a pig.  That wound on his left arm is from a butchering job gone wrong.  A set of bones was thinner than anticipated and the knife went straight into his arm and through that pretty beefy set of vein and arteries we have right in the wrist.

Joe McNally said something in a seminar that was basically that Passion for something isn’t just being into it or being excited about it.  It’s about doing something even if it tries to kill you.  That it’s like breathing – it’s unthinkable to stop.  So you find yourself doing stupid things in the name of this thing you do because  it’s too much a part of you to even think about not doing it anymore

Obviously that’s not where photography is right now for me.  I’m sitting here updating after two months of letting this place lapse.  I don’t know what I want anymore.  Well I know what I want, I want this.

Just without the 30,000 dollar medical bill please.

Well his name is Matt, but I’ve known him as Kortez or Tez for years.  And we were lucky enough to have him join us on vacation at Port Aransas this year.

What you don’t see in this picture is that the kite nearly killed us.  Several times.

My poor old kitty.  She’s my first pet, I got her when she wandered by my door in Houston and Matt brought her in.  I thought she was the prettiest cat on earth (She still is).  Over the years we’ve gathered pets and she’s become cantankerous and very set in her ways.  She’s an outdoor cat now and she loves wandering through the grass.  But you can definitely see the years taking their toll.

Man, looking through these pictures of our hike, I realize just how sick I was.  Half of the pictures are shaky, the other half I think I was really fascinated with Not Hiking and concentrating on being asthmatic.  Because there are an awful lot of pictures of things that just aren’t interesting unless you’re trying to well, not be walking somewhere.

But it was awful pretty there in the woods.

Or a lot of words about Kirk.

This is one of the walls in the story hall of the SciFi Museum/Experience Music Project in the Seattle Center.  And you can sit down under this literal wall of text and listen to Heart talk about Barracuda and just relax and listen to all of the stories from Harlan Ellison just…being himself to Sir Mix-A-Lot talking about how Baby Got Back was originally a cautionary tale.

Visited Seattle a couple of weeks ago to see Mom and the grandparents and uncle.  My brother’s girlfriend had never been to the city before, so we ran all around downtown, seeing the usual touristy things.  Unfortunately it was unseasonably cold and windy even for Seattle – and I was a bit under the weather.

I do want to go back one day for keeps.  I feel at ease in the Northwest, so even when sick and asthmatic and miserable, I’m home.

We went camping this weekend and Bethany has this little kids flashlight that she was showing off for me.  This was shot a bit after dark, but I actually like the way the grain and the color came out.  It makes the picture feel a lot older than it is.