Working on some park photos tonight.
I can’t be the only one who sees it:
Or maybe I’m still 12 deep down inside…
Archive for category photos
When I went out to shovel the driveway (no pussy-ass snowblower here) this afternoon, my son was messing around outside and didn’t want to come in so I grabbed my camera and walked around the yard just randomly snapping. I don’t know what it is, but I dig the contrast and shapes of snow and bare trees together. I think these look better bigger, but the blog size will have to do for now.
Time for a little more fatherly pride. My daughter brought an assignment home from reading class that had been graded and this was on the inside:
Turns out the teacher wants to keep it to show future classes what she expects when this specific assignment/project comes up each year. So that was pretty cool.
Even better was my daughter’s confession that she “just threw it together real quick the night before” it was due. Is it wrong that that half of the story makes me smile more than the first half?
Vampires are in this year. My daughter was going with the classic vamp/goth thing. My son’s interpretation was rock star/clown vampire thingy.
Oddly enough, we didn’t buy a pumpkin this year and no one seemed to care. So no pumpkin picture. My kids are growing up too fast. This is probably my daughter’s last year trick-or-treating. She’s in 6th grade and turns 12 next week. Little man still has three or four years left to score the goods for the rest of us.
Speaking of which, apparently the cul-de-sac gets little traffic. This is our first Halloween here and it’s now 93 minutes into the 120 minute event and I’ve had just three groups (a total of 7 kids) stop. That sucks, I dig the kids coming around.
Lots of wind here today to go with the 70+ degree temps. That means leaves are dropping like crazy. The leaf density in our yard is sick:
And yes, that’s a top-down look at a portion of the wall.
Taken this afternoon out back on the deck:
Knowing permanent cold is just around the corner, I took the last two days to finally finish the brick wall I started back in June. It didn’t take more than a few hours on Wednesday to finish planting the base row(s) and stack the rest. For the record my estimates were about as close as someone with no wall building experience could get – we did indeed end with a wall 8 bricks high (as predicited way back in June) and I ended short just 15 bricks. Pretty good for trying to estimate and count in my head.
Then on Thursday we paid a shitload of money for a shitload of quality topsoil. We needed dirt to fill in our newly leveled landscaping and, in addition to running of out other places around the yard to pilfer it from, wanted to get some decent dirt for planting next spring. So we get some dirt brought in. Two problems:
1. They couldn’t dump it inside the area that I needed it, so I spent today shoveling a pile of dirt from the yard to the landscape area
2. One shitload of dirt isn’t even close to what we need. My guess it three shitloads to fill the area – and paying three shitloads is not something I want to do right now.
So my back is sore, but a I have a sweet retaining wall finished along the from of the house with the section nearest the front door left opened-ended so that it can either function as it stands or be continued along the sidewalk and around the front of the house if we decide to go all over-the-top ambitious in the spring.
So without further ado, the wall that still needs 15 bricks and two shitloads of dirt.
A blog history of the wall project:
You know I talk about my son playing football all the time but never have pics or video or anything. Truth is I prefer to watch the games – you know pay attention to life and live in the moment instead of endlessly looking through a lens trying to capture it. Luckily, there’s countless other parents (and hack photographers that try to sell to the parents) capturing the moment and at times those moments trickle my way. This is one of those moments:
Little man is dead center in that pic – the one who looks like he’s trying to touch his toes. That’s our vicious defensive line in action.
(my apologies for the photo quality – this is what happens when the pics don’t come from me, but instead come to me)
Who knew that a Time Warner DVR would afford someone such power?
It’s happening in my front yard as I type this.
(edited to add the following)
Actually, I just looked out the window again and it’s gone. Crap! I missed him (her?) fly away with the squirrel…
Just going through some of the Florida photos. More from the hand…
I finally got some time to get back out front and work on the summer-long retaining wall landscaping project of 2009. (yes, that’s the official title)
I got the 6th row on, but now I’m out of dirt. Up to this point I’ve been using extra dirt from around the garage where we ripped out all of the old plants and stuff to fill this area (you know actually modifying the contour of the land – real landscaping), but now I’m out of free dirt. I actually have to pay to get someone to bring me dirt. Life is stupid like that. At any rate here’s where it stands until I buy dirt:
Taken last week at the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach – a place I used to hang out at when I was young and dumb and amused by things that seemed creepy (1992).
No, not the people who bought the house diagonal from us. This one:
I’ve spotted her a couple of different days now. What mkes it kind of funny is that she goes from the wooded area behind our house to the wooded area behind the houses on the other side and they’re diagonal from each other so she walks up the sidewalk all nonchalantly like no one will notice. All that’s missing is the inconspicuous whistling.
Mentioned over at Jeff’s blog today that I dig Betty White. Which, in turn, reminded me of this:
The sad part is I didn’t just do that. I had that lying around, so to speak.
Some interesting spring break photography.
So I spent the late morning and early afternoon with Jeff at Kings Island for the Diamondback media day stuff. (totally didn’t grab a media kit) (Diamondback Pictures)
Then I got home and we drove back down in the evening to process our passes.
Tomorrow morning (in a few hours, actually) we’re getting up and going back down because my tales of Diamondback goodness convinced the family they need to ride it now…not later.
I’m getting my fill this weekend.
Just saw this over at Tyler’s blog:
“No problem douche”
This was the response from Mark Meadows at MVM Data, mark@mvmdata.com, when I contacted www.shawneeshuttle.com to remove a photo of mine they used in a commercial setting and without attribution.
That’s so much bullshit. I’d drive to that dude’s house and punch him in the mouth. I hate the way the net has spawned this “everything is for the taking” mentality.
Two pieces of advice for all of you photo-taking types out there:
1. Register your photos with the US Copyright Office.
It’s easy to do electronically these days and depending on the nature of willful infringement, the payout to you as a photographer is anywhere from $750 to $150,000 plus fees per photo.
2. Put a copyright watermark on your photos.
If you find the need and/or effort to register your photos to be too much, at least put a copyright mark on them. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal for someone to remove your “copyright management information” from your photos to disguise infringement from unauthorized use.
Even if you haven’t formally and legally registered your photo with the US government, the DMCA still allows for fines starting at $2500 and runnng up to $25,000 if you can prove removal or alteration of the copyright mark/info on the photo for unauthorized use.
Don’t let people just take the things you work hard to create. Whether you expect full professional licensing fees or nothing more than a simple acknowledgement, it’s still fucked up when someone takes what isn’t theirs.
Scary that unprofessional assholes like the one Tyler had to deal with are able to make a living in this world. Maybe if that guy created anything worth stealing, he’d understand.