Pictures that no one else can see don't seem worth as much now that the Internet makes them so easy to be seen. Not that I expect many people will care, but they're a record for me and people I know. Like Clippings but for pictures.
| 2016.02.02 |
2015 Sky Garden |
Comment
|
After last year's success with tomato plants I expanded for 2015. TFS gave me some pepper seeds (Anaheim and Early Jalopeño), of which I used maybe 10% so I have plenty left, and a local dollar store had some seed kits for basil and cucumber. It was the first year I've started anything from seed. |
| |
| 2015.03.30 |
The Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, 2009 |
Comment
|
In 2009 I had the chance to skip out on a bit of winter for a couple days and go to Houston, TX to install some software. It was only a light day's work and I was there for 2 days so I had just a little time to see something interesting and I chose the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center because I'm a space nerd from way back and it was not so far away. And, if I remember, I couldn't think of anything more significant, and this was pre-Google and -Expedia and -Yelp and I didn't even bring a laptop or have a smartphone. Old-fashioned tourism.
I wasn't a photographin' phool back then either, and certainly didn't give any consideration to blogging, so these pics aren't anything more than documentation I was there once. They're crap photos, TBH, and had to be gamma-corrected heavily because the JSC lighting was rather subdued (dark), and my camera was a $100 cheapo digital from Radio Shack. With no anti-shake apparently. |
| |
| 2015.01.13 |
Tomato Plants 2014 |
Comment
|
Tomato plants have never been far away in summer for my whole life. My Dad always had some growing up against our south-facing white-stuccoed garage. Nothing fancy, usually Beefsteak as far as I can remember. Sunday brunch after church when I was young always featured tomatoes in season, with bacon and toast mmmmm...
Since then I have been loath to buy tomatoes from the store. Even greenhouse-grown are still just red round things that look like tomatoes.
My Italian ex-father-in-law grew the largest tomatoes I've ever seen: easily larger in diameter than a slice of sandwich bread. He grew from seed from a "stud" plant in the worst place in his yard. All fruit, hardly any juice. Amazing.
Imbued with similar urban-farmer spirit, I've grown a couple plants on my south-facing balcony over the last 3 summers. Like my Dad, nothing fancy, usually whatever is available at a local big-box store. Put them in dirt, pour in water every other day and tomatoes come out. And out, and out and, as you'll see, out...
This is a gallery of my 2014 plants, mentioned previously in a Clippings post, but with much more history now.
2015.02.03 Update: A small addition, and the completion of this Gallery. |
| |
| 2015.01.01 |
Opening |
Comment
|
I was never much of a photographer until my late 30s. Never had a camera until I won a disposable camera at a birthday dinner with my folks that for some reason had a local old-timer radio DJ walking the room giving out prizes. I didn't use it for years later though, and I don't remember for what.
Then my friend RL gave me his Mom's old Pentax Spotmatic F and I used it quite a bit for a few gardens, my Sunbeam Alpine, and mostly other cars it seems, including a trip to Montana. I have a storage tub of those pics that might get scanned onto here one day. Still, I never took the camera out just to shoot pictures - they're all for a project or an outing. I still didn't care much about taking photography beyond that.
For another birthday I got a $100 Radio Shack snapshot-style digital camera, which I didn't find necessary to use for a couple years after. There are pics stuffed away in folders that I may be inspired to add here some day, including a trip to the Johnson Space Center.
Years later as a Christmas gift (I think, or my birthday) I got a fancier digital camera, a pocket size Nikon comparable to what most of us use today. I used it for pictures out the window mostly, until it died and I exchanged it for a store credit.
And then Bristol happened. I took that store credit and got the best pocket-size digital camera I could find, a Canon PowerShot SX230 HS that I still have today and that is the source of nearly all the images on this blog to-date. Combined with a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 I'm not usually far from a camera anymore. The PowerShot itself is responsible for around 15,000 images so far, half of them on the Bristol, Beach, and Valley blogs already.
Lest you think I am a digital photography Luddite, I have experience with digital image processing going back to the mid-1980s. I worked in a University of Alberta research lab on various human visual perception and machine vision projects using a video camera connected to a PDP-11/23 with a frame-grabbing digital-to-analog board. Some cast-off PDP-11/34s with 10M RK05 (DECpack) removable hard-drives served as processing mules for days-long batch jobs creating stimuli for human vision experiments. Back then a "fast" Fast Fourier Transform happened in minutes using finely-crafted Assembler on a computer doing only that function. Nowadays the same FFT is instantaneous and underlies many of the picture enhancement and transformation operations in the camera on most people's phones and photo-editing software.
I used a 35mm film camera quite a bit in those days: to photograph images off a screen for publication. These images are from the first of two papers I co-authored ca. 1984 - What is Perceived When Two Images are Combined?.
| The (much-younger) mug of yours truly, band-pass filtered and combined with one of three other filtered images.
The panel images were cut out from contact sheets and laid into grids using my elite drafting skills. :) |
|
|
|
Somewhere in the
middle, hints of
what our children
might have
looked like. | |
|
|
|
|
So from all that an accidental collection of photographic experience, the fruits of which will trickle out into this section as I nerd-out on ways to get them and future captures on here for your eyes too. |
| | |
)
)
)
)