WiredAtom

Brian and I spent some time brainstorming and experimenting with logos for my upcoming pro photo site. We finally almost nailed it with this symbolic seal as a logo. It’s a highly stylized character for the word “Chu”. Incidentally, the color red is also the perfect choice since the alternate meaning for “Chu” also means red.

This is going to be a perfect watermark… I don’t want to reveal the final look and feel of the site yet. But this will fit in perfectly to the design of the site as well. I am excited that all the pieces are finally coming together. Good times.

I subscribe to Dilbert and get a fresh strip delivered to my inbox daily. Today’s strip is particularly funny on so many levels…

There was a crazy earthquake that took place shortly after eight PM. Bryan was confused, the cats were freaked out, and I grabbed my laptop on one hand and Bryan on the other and ran out of the door to find Grace (who was talking to a neighbor by our front yard).

The USGS says it was a 5.6 magnitude quake.

Image captured, scaled, drawn on and uploaded using Skitch. I love this little program!! It’s just one of those programs that Windows users don’t have the luxury of enjoying. Ah, it’s a good time to be a Mac user.

Our next door neighbor finally moved out last weekend after our landlord evicted her. But just right after the earthquake hit, our crazy ex-neighbor mysteriously showed up at the front yard and started swearing at Grace and our other neighbor. After what she has put us through, she’s now crazy enough to come back and tell us that it was God who was now punishing us… Hah hah… But she got pissed when our neighbor replied that maybe God was trying to get her instead.

All this God nonsense amuses me.

Grace took out a camera to fake taking a shot of her car. She floored the pedal and fled the scene. But no matter, Grace got a hold of her license plate and called the cops on her again for another incident of harassment. Generally I hate drama like this. But this is getting to a point where it is actually funny.

What a day.

UPDATE: The cops came and spotted her car parked down the street. So now they are circling the neighborhood looking for a chubby silver haired lady hiding somewhere in the bushes. Cue the music [Cops theme song] “Bad boys, bad boys. What you gonna do. What you gonna do when they come for you… ”

UPDATE 2: It appears that the neighbors across the street helped hide the crazy ex-neighbor when the cops were around. I wonder if that qualifies as assistance in helping to hide a suspected criminal. Hmm… And just like the crazy ex-neighbor, they were shouting racial slurs. Maybe we should be moving out of this place. It’s hard to imagine that in California people still have such outspoken views in Hitler talk.

I’ve been doing some pretty intense reading and research in children’s portrait and photography in general for the past few weeks. And I came to the realization that the industry (at as far as U.S. is concerned) is almost exclusively dominated by woman (I have yet to come across a GOOD male children’s photographer portfolio site)! I guess no one should be surprised since women, generally and stereotypically speaking, are thought to have closer and more nurturing ties to children. On top of that, since most family photo decisions are made by the females in a family (and I am just assuming here), it’s natural that one would prefer to choose a photographer whom she deems would understand her and her child(ren) on a deeper level. Plus I also think children may warm up to women more quickly (well, until they find out what fun rides grown up males can be!).

I am not sure if this means I won’t get as many calls and referrals because I am a “guy”. This is the first time I feel that my being a “man” could actually hinder my survival in doing this specific type of photography and that it could be viewed as a disadvantage… (and I am saying this cynically and sarcastically with my own style of humor here).

In trying to come up with a name for a portfolio site, Grace and I brainstormed for a few days but failed to agree on a “gender neutral” name that would be catchy, memorable and be attractive to decision-making moms and, at the same time, showing the “gentler” side of me… Brian jokingly suggested “photosterone.com” to counter that, which made me giggle pretty hard.

In any case, I hope my style of photography and my creativity will be able to convince enough moms that I am actually not half bad! And maybe that’d put some of the men in families at ease when they find out the photographer is a guy! Hah!!

I had my first pro session today. Still lots to learn from today’s shoot. It’s always “after the fact” that valuable lessons are learned — trials and errors.

Lessons learned today (note to self):

1. Always move to a variety of locations.
2. Fast prime lenses (f1.8 or faster) work better than fast zooms (can’t get any faster than 2.8 on most zooms).
3. Natural light is the king.
4. Indoors is good. Outdoors is better.
5. Having extra memory cards with me is a good thing.
6. Overexposures are easier (and prettier) to fix than under exposured shots (especially on my Fuji S5).
7. Children want to show off… Let them.
8. Don’t over plan or over think on journalistic style of shooting — just show up and shoot. Everything will fall into place. Instincts will take over.
9. If a client insists his/her house is messy and requires a lot of cleaning up, suggest (and, in fact, insist) on taking the session elsewhere, such as a nice public garden or somewhere outdoors. Cropping and editing will be easier. Invariably, you will also be forced to select scenes more creatively with such open space. DO NOT SETTLE FOR messy indoor sessions. The result will make nobody happy.

It’s so much more fun capturing expressions of children…

First of all, my apologies for the graphic nature of this shot… But Grace wants the world to see how effective this thing is…

We’ve tried, for the longest time, to use a bulb syringe to help clear Bryan’s congested nasal of mucus. But he hated it because the syringe is rather intrusive in nature. But this nasal aspirator works pretty effectively and got a lot of the mucus out in a few minutes what it’d take me 10 minutes or longer to do with a bulb syringe.

I spent sometime upgrading this blog to the latest and greatest… Unfortunately I spent way too much time on this biatch than I’d like to. But at least now I am in full compliance to the latest WordPress specs in terms of how things should be done instead of me hacking around the code base. There are still some quirks to work out, but at least they aren’t invisible to visitors (well, unless you are extremely sharp-eyed).

One thing I was surprised is broken in 2.3 is some small parts of the WP Tiger Admin plugin — one of my absolute favorite. Fortunately it’s nothing serious that’d stop me from using the theme, merely some interface quirks that just look annoying. I am a little disappointed that the author hasn’t fixed them yet… But no big deal.

So that’s one less thing I have to think about from now on…

I find it amusing to see the very few among the student body who are using unmarked laptops… and some of them are even using just plain pen and paper… It must’ve been a long time since I went to college. The reversal in Mac:PC ratio in classrooms is astounding. I find it hard that anyone would best against Apple nowadays in both the stock market and the PC market.

PBS’s Curious George has been our favorite pass time both as storybooks and half-hour TV shows. Grace found the clip below on Youtube. And I think it’s possibly one of the best commercially animated clips that is fun for both the parents and young kids in terms of entertainment value and education!

That George is just so nicely drawn and animated… Stuff like that makes me miss doing animation… (but not modeling, lighting, texture mapping skeleton setups, character rigs or any of that technical stuff)

The character design was done by the moderately famed Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle. And I feel that the fine 2D lead animator Jeff Johnson also deserves credit… We are gonna have to watch the movie.

Last night I saw the storming coming and rushed to a mountain to snap a few shots. Unfortunately I got there a tad bit too late and missed that "magical" light that nature photographers talk about.

To make matters worse, at the end of the shoot, I saw a perfect juxtaposition of the moon against the oncoming storm and was about to snap a few more shots, that’s when I found out my CF card had been totally corrupted. And before I could swap it out with another CF card, the "moment" was gone… I was pissed. This image was among the few salvaged from the corrupted card where dozens were lost.