It's those little journeys off the beaten path where one can learn the most. Learning to follow the path of greatest curiousity is where we reap our greatest rewards.
Meet Rocky and Bullwinkle. While meandering around my garden I thought of that silly cartoon show and named these two in their honor. Of course the poem "Daffodils" that Bullwinkle would recite was running rampant through my grey matter at the time.
The poem itself is by Dorothy Wordsworth and appeared in The Grasmere Journal if the wiki is correct:
I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them,
some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake,
they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.
The image is post processed from RAW in the orton style. The final image was post processed in Virtual Photographer to remove the cyan cast since this was largely shot in the shade. Enjoy.
Since I was a little kid in the UP of Michigan nothing has screamed spring like the arrival of the daffodils, sometimes even popping up through the remnants of the winters snow. That bright yellow blossom with its trumpet wide open seemed to just scream spring and alert us to the coming warm days.
Of course in LA we get our spring way earlier than the rest of the country. Even better daffodils are completely low maintenance and naturalize to our climate. All we need to do is plant bulbs once, cut off the dead blossoms and just let them sit. I like that kind of gardening.
This shot was done in the Orton style. I did shoot bracketed in RAW. I post processed the raw file adjusting the color depth and temperature. The final image when dumbed down to jpeg was run through virtual photographer to bring about the look and feel of a Kodachrome and to remove the cyan cast since most of the image was in "open shade".
Has anyone else noticed that digital recording media seems to lend much more "blue" to the shadows than traditional silver based media?
Regardless of the question or how I got here, enjoy Daffodil and think of the warm spring days to come~
I'm in a class that has some forced journaling requirements. Not that I'm a great writer or even a poet, but I' took the easy way out on the random thought process. I came up with this ditty that my wife and daughter liked. Its funny but the idea came from the fact these old "K-Swiss" classic wear like iron, look like hell but they are still so comfortable. The all want me to get rid of them. The bit after the jump. Call it a classic meandering...
These shoes
They're old - Dec 07
The've taken me on adventures
I slipped off a cliff -
hit a cacti before going over the edge.
They took me to London,
they took me to Paris.
I walked the path of kings,
At the Louve I saw the mark of the common man.
They took me on hikes at Rushmore and Yellowstone.
2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.
That's "where is frazgo" en francais folks. I've used that tag a few times over the years first on the now defunct "textamerica", then a few more times on LA Metblogs and Flickr. Kinda like that silly kids show "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego" its about the random different things I spot as I meander about. Think of it as the ultimate ICME as it poses a question rather than tell you where it was.
"Ou est frazgo?" will be a regular feature. 99.9% of the time it will be so random the image source will be my cell phone cam or the che-ez.
Things are in turmoil here. I'll save you all the boredom of the dx, rx and tx suffice it to say that was the reason for the silence and slow come back.
Enjoy it. Identify it, just don't expect a prize ;)
Interesting week over on facebook and with my friends on metblogs and our various readers. A meme started flying. At first I ducked but eventually I got tagged by Roger Jacobs who has his blog "Carver's Dog" who was tagged by Joseph Mailander who has the "Cocktail Circuit" blog...which I think I need to get hooked on since I do like a nice cocktail every now and then. That's what we do when we're grown ups finally, right? Guess the beer bong years are over.
I have no idea who will respond. My tagee's will be at the end. The rules:
1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
7 Unknown Things
1. I eat m&m's in color order, never mixing
2. I weighed a diaper once then tallied how much poo diapers I changed over the years with the kids...nearly 2 tons. They owe me. Dearly.
3. I lived in Death Valley for an entire year at Furnace Creek.
4. I never got a ticket I did not deserve.
5. My first speeding ticket I was 3 mph shy of going to jail...in a dealers loaner car.
6. I firmly believe in consumer guerrilla warfare.
7. A martini made with a jalapeno olive doesn't taste as good the second time around.
Now if you really want an eye full you'll have to friend me on facebook and check out my 25 things note on that meme from hell.
It was a silly midlife crisis thingy. I wanted to be googleable. Its that insecure time in a guys life when you realize...oh shit I'm how old and what mark will I have left on the planet other than a granite marker on a plot of land.
For kicks and giggles I googled my real name, my email name "frazgo" from an employer at the time and virtually nothing. Random stuff, little had to do with me. I had a couple of little web pages or blogs before then and had sorta stopped fooling with them as my cube job was demanding more of my time as my responsibilities increased.
2oo2 was the year I decided I could either work myself to death in a cube knowing if I dropped dead they would just roll me off the chair into a bucket and have someone else there before the seat was cold. Or...walk out, retire with what little I had and start a new life. A new me. One that would make a difference with the fam, the kids in particular and give me a chance to do some thing that made my heart sing. I went back to doing my photo.
I started using "frazgo" at the suggestion of an old friend from college who just liked the ring of it. All of as the cube warehouse knew each other by our email addy's and even took them to our personal emails. I already was known as frazgo by many and when it came time to set myself apart from the past I grabbed the handle and ran with it. It took.
Today I took part in the google battle. Damn...the number of hits for frazgo and fraz were amazing. I know I can get a million hits on the real name, the nom-de-plums...in the mills also, but to see it in smiley faces left me gobsmacked. Of course the "fraz" are all over the board, but "frazgo" is just me and that is even funnier to know some gabacho with a keyboard is able to leave a mark out there.
Take the test yourself at googlebattle.com Let me know your results.
Word of caution watch the use of your real name as even that query will be cached and visible until the last electron flows and the last server on the planet dies as the sun finally fades away. Pretty permanent mark. I like it.
Every now and then something happens that shouldn't. Something that you could not have done if you had tried.
This image is a couple of accidents in sequence that I wish I knew how it happened. Briefly I accidently clicked on one image from a series of 3 exposures. The "wrong" image was of an entirely different subject matter. Photomatix doesn't allow out of sequence images to be opened and blended to create an HDR file. When you use something out of sequence you get an error message from the program advising you that all images not the same or different enough in exposure and you have to reload the files you want to use. It stops you dead in your tracks.
Here it had not only an out of exposure sequence image, but one not even part of the xif tagged sequence yet photomatix accepted it and blended the 3.
When the HDR image file opened imagine my surprise. I haven't had that happen since back in the day when I would sandwich slide fill and print it on cibachrome, or purposely double expose an image before advancing the film. Here I did it and can't duplicate it!
Anyway I took the file, tone mapped it and ran it through virtual photographer. Now if I knew how to duplicate this I would as I really do like the results.
I shot this while visiting the Donut Derelicts weekly cruise in Huntington Beach this morning. The ornament is from a 40's Caddy. I just love the polished chrome on that art deco hoody. Since this was an OC event I couldn't very well cover it on LA Metblogs so the city captain there worked it out and now I post on OC Metblogs (guess that makes me bi-city). You can read the full post on OC Metblogs HERE.
Its official. I did it on Saturday morning. I was hung at the Focus One Gallery in the lobby of the Focus One Credit Union here in Monrovia. Two sets representing different paths I continue to meander down in artistic exploration. The first series is an HDR exploration of diorama's and the other is impressionistic Orton style imagery.
Clockwise from upper left, "Duck and Cover, #1-4" - and exploration of the world as if caught in the first flash of a nuke. These are done using HDR technology.
Clockwise from upper left, "English Rose Bud", "Maw of the Magnolia" and "Apple Farm in Spring" all done in the Orton style.
An opening reception will take place and I"ll announce the date here. All would be welcome to attend. Until then you are free to visit the Focus One Gallery in the lobby of the Focus One Credit Union at 404 E Huntington Dr (at the corner of California Ave) here in Monrovia.
The video from YouTube is what gave me the idea for the title, a little explanation after the vid.
Note the image above, its part of the "Duck and Cover" series that I will be installing 1/3/09 at the Focus One Gallery here in Monrovia.
I wrote about this image and a few others in the series a while back. I accidentally started a series of HDR photos of dioramas that I worked into very surreal images almost refreezing the moment. Shooting it I knew that the spots and floods used were all different colors of light which I used to move it further into the unnatural. I did that by exaggerating the color shifts. They may have started as a photograph but the quickly morphed into something other than a simple recording of a scene.
There was a quality to the images that I wound up exaggerating that reminded me of the pictures of the A-bomb tests from the Cold War era. I have to admit I struggled with what to call the series.
At the risk of severely dating myself there was event in particular that struck a note in me when I was in Kindergarten. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don't remember much of the details but I remember being in South Dakota at the time visiting my great-grandmother. My Mom's cousin whom we stayed with and all the adults were glued to Walter Cronkite and the TV and worried aloud what it all meant. Thankfully history records well how it ended.
In the weeks after that I have memories of being told about "the bomb" and how to "Duck and Cover" to save ourselves in the event the bomb came. (Reality check, in the UP of MI at the time we were well outside of striking range, and if we were hit we'd be a glowing ash regardless if we did the duck and cover or not). Many years later I watched the film "Atomic Cafe". Watching that film I remembered that video from my childhood.
I did a quick little YouTube search and found the video that matches a sound track I had found a while back.
Duck and Cover the series will be 4 images. They will be framed and matted artists proofs, done as if on old fashioned deckle edged glossy photo paper, just like you would have found the pictures done up in your granny's photo album back in the day.
Once opening reception details are ironed out, I'll post here and you all will be invited.
I could not resist it. For the New Year am feeling kinda impish verging on prankster and then I stumbled across an old book mark to make this sign. Pretty cool...your own alteration of the Hollywood sign without going to jail for vandalism. Make your own HERE.
I have less than 2 days until I install for a 3 month show at the Focus One Gallery here in outer monrovia. Part of me wants to be really daring and put up a few pieces of the "Atomic Flash" series I yammered about a while back. Another part says play it safe. Maybe I can knock out the mimosa funk from this morning and make up my mind once and for all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
