A view from one of my most favorite spots on the planet

Before I lived in LA I was introduced to the Southwestern part of the country with a short stint in Las Vegas.  My folks were transferred there while I was in college and after graduation I went there to start the job searching.  

I quickly fell in love with the desert.  And the mountains.  I loved the huge expanses and the many colors of the year.  One of my favorite spots still is Red Rock Canyon west of Las Vegas in the Spring Mountain Range.  Of course now its only a few minutes drive from the edge of the city compared to back in the early 80's when it was a half hour drive across open desert.  Fortunately the Canyon is in a National Forest and protected National Monument now so it will never be built up and will remain wide open.  

December 26 I had the pleasure of doing something I have not done in years.  Drive the scenic loop around the canyon and just enjoy the vistas.  This time around I had the added treat of watching a snow squall line pass from Mount Potosi across the southern reaches of the canyon.  What drama in the sky.  I had to capture that storm and photo'd it from several areas in the canyon until I got just the shot I wanted.  I love the drama of the sky and how HDR and tone mapping could bring about the feel of an one Dutch masters painting of a sky in a photo based image.  

The scene was shot bracketed +/- 2 stops from average with the HDR file generation done with Photomatix.  The same program was used for the tone mapping.  The final image was then post processed with Virtual Photographer for that old timey Kodachrome feel.

Back from a Holiday Road Trip to LV

Check it out, I was getting ready to upload onto flickr some raw pics from a short shoot I did in Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas yesterday.  There to greet me was the flickr greeting in another language.  I got a chuckle outta this one...its lolspeak as in one of my favorite silly blogs "I can haz cheezburger".  Enjoy the greeting.  Gimme a little more time to sort through the shoot and do something with my favorites of the day.

arghhh...love the attention hate the thieves

What you see here is my flickr stats.  Love the attention and views per image are wonderful on the business side.  I'm suspect of huge increases on any given day if I didn't do anything in particular to drive traffic to my flickr sets.

On the left of this chart is the spike from the 2010 Mustang Launch and the LA Auto Show in the latter half of November.  Entirely expected as I blogged it on metblogs and linked to my flickr for the images themselves.  Added bonus is that those looking at the cars took the time to look at my flickr sets sorted to my various artistic explorations.  Its all good.

The spike on the right side of the chart is maddening.  Why?  ITs all images of the 2010 Camaro.  GM should be pleased that this car is generating some attention, lord knows they need some excitement in their showrooms.  

What is bad is all those hits also involved the theft of my images.  Yes, I found out people are swiping my copyrighted images and using for wallpapers and who knows what else without permission (or being paid for them).  With the exception of a couple images, most never were more than journalistic recording of the car so I really never intended them for sale.  What irks me is the just linking to and swiping them with out asking.  So...the Camaro set is now down to "friends and family" view as the saleable ones are among those being swiped.  Trust me on this should I see any show up in some poster showroom there will be hell to pay.

Thieves.  Eventually they will get theirs.

This just cracked me up...

I have to give credit where it is due.  Fellow blogger here in the SGV put up a link regarding Beany and Cecil on her face book page.   It jogged my memory of the show and the one thing I remembered most was the stoooooooooopid song the dragon, cecil sang "R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P".  It cracked me up then and it did again.  I can't find the exact episode, but this one is very good none the less.  You get the point.  Join me in being a kid once again.  

Beany and Cecil: Ragg Mopp

I gots me a logo, a really cool professional logo

As the resident carnut-gearhead-lover of all things with 4 wheels, rubber and chrome over at Metblogs they decided rather than dissuade me from doing more on cars make me the defacto car guy, or at least LA car-guy.  I am totally jazzed and humbled that they thought enough of my stuff to give me this privilege.  The logo frazGOES itself is kinda neat and a fun play on my screen name and what one does in a car.  

To that end Lucinda Michelle our city captain hooked me up with her significant other Seth Dowling for the log design.  The results are awesome.  Seth does all sorts of very slick graphics but he Blogs as well at Unventure.  If you want to talk to him about your own logo and graphics contact him directly at seth@unventure.com .

Back to the logos themselves.  Both are similar.  The lower has a little smoke and flame action on the "fraz" part whereas the top its all flames only at the "o" or tire.  Upper or lower which is your fave?

Of course at the end of the day what I get out of the deal is more photo ops with cars and a chance to annoy the metblogs readers one keystroke at a time.  

Been a little busy but here goes...

This pic is the subject of a post I did for metblogs.  In short LA has such a gorgeous long summer fall and winter are compressed into a few weeks starting sometime around Thanksgiving, and thankfully, done with by the end of March.  As a result our autumn blends right with Christmas and few notice the fall color and focus on the yard art etc., for the holidays.  It didn't however skip my notice.

This image was shot 3 frames bracketed with photomatix generating the HDR file, as well as the tonemapping. The final image was post processed in Virtual Photographer to replicate the over saturated colors found on the old 'chromes printed on cibachrome print material