WiredAtom

The Missouri trip was a lot more draining and tiring than I’d expected. The nine days I was there taught me a lot about quite a few things… And overall, I think I am a better person (and photographer) because of the trip.

So what have I learned from this trip?

1. Midwest Chinese food sucks no matter how much the locals rave about it — it ain’t Chinese… It’s… Frankenstein Americanese food…

2. People who are serious about guns and treating them as sporting equipment make tremendous financial, emotional and physical investments in the sport.

3. Action pistol is an expensive sport — each round of bullet costs $0.30 (more if custom made). And on an average practice shooting session, one can go through 700 to 1,000 rounds — that’s each day times almost seven days a week.

4. Based on what I gathered, action pistol sport is 10% skills and 90% mental, just like many competitive sports. They say you can only learned so much on the skills, and the rest is all in the mind.

5. Most shooters I met are great people — not the “red neck” image I’d stereotyped them as. But that changed when I heard the speech from the president of NRA on the last night of the event. He made a few comments about NRA, guns and politics that made me shake my head a few times even among a room full of gun owners…

6. Missouri does have a NPR station. But I guess it doesn’t get enough funding to have all the good stuff that other big cities enjoy. Instead, it plays classical music most of the time for which I mistakenly wrote it off entirely as a NPR-less state.

7. Driving on gravels can feel like driving on ice sometimes — when it skids, the car may or may not stop…

8. There’s a place for big gas goessling American trucks, and that place is called the American Midwest. And I don’t mean it in a sarcastic or negative way. When my client wasn’t practicing shooting, I took some time off to drive around “the woods” in the more rural areas of Missouri. And I soon realized those were no place for luxury gas-friendly Toyotas or Lexuses… Those were some rough roads with car-unfriendly conditions. And by being big, cheap(er) and possibly more capable of standing up to abuse, American trucks would fare well there. And indeed 90% of trucks I saw there were American — and they are huge and mighty.

9. For whatever reason, gas prices in Missouri was just as expensive as California.

10. Australians have far superior gun control laws than those in the United States. Americans could learn a few things from the Australians on gun control.

I enjoyed the trip, enjoyed seeing more nature, and enjoyed the learning experience. I look forward to processing 3,500+ images I shot there in the coming days…

So I survived the early morning flight, the long drive from the airport to the hotel, and the frustration of the GPS unit running out of battery in between destinations. And i haven’t seen my first tornado yet. The images below are far from the quality I’d like to show. I’d planned on editing all the images shot in the same day at the same night. But because I’ve had to bring a lot of equipment with me, I forgot to bring my monitor calibration kit; so the colors are going to be off, images unsharpened and a few other quirks. But I really want to post some of the stuff I’ve seen here. So I’ve decided to go ahead and post them first and swap them out later on Flickr (since as a Pro member, I have that feature available to me).

Hit the link to read additional notes on this image at Flickr (mouse over the image once at Flickr to see the notes).

A few interesting observations I made in the first 3 hours of arrival:
1. Interesting signs are everywhere!
2. Local radio stations have more country music than anything else combined.
3. Local car mechanics advertise not only to fix your car, but also your tracker on the radio!
4. I couldn’t find NPR on any of the local stations. The only thing closest to it is some feminist station talking about all things Girl Power (or at least in the 2 hours that I tried listening to parts of it).

So tomorrow is going to be a full day at the practice range… Bang! Bang! Bang!*

*Good thing my client offered an old pair of her ear muffs to me…

In less than eight hours, I will be flying to Missouri for a seven-day photography assignment. Actually, nine days counting the two days of travel. It’s a bit overwhelming in many ways.

My client is known as the best woman action pistol shooter in the history of the sport. Though I am not all that fond of guns, I’ve come to appreciate the discipline and focus it takes to master the “sport” by having to study my client and the sport. This will be the first time I am going to be surrounded by constant firing of gun shots (counting out experiences in Savannah, ha!).

The assignment is especially overwhelming because of the discipline that’s going to be required of me having to follow the daily regiments of my client (whom is an early riser). This is also happening at a time when a lot is happening in my life — entertaining an active three-year-old, expecting a newborn in less than three weeks, a demanding new full-time contract gig… etc. The assignment is also mentally and physically overwhelming because of the scope, distance and the relative significance of the event my client is participating in.

For this assignment, I rented a Nikon D300 body, a Nikon 70-200mm/f2.8 VR lens and an Epson portable media backup drive as an insurance policy in case my own equipment fails. This is also a prefect opportunity for me to find out if I am capable of carrying heavy duty equipment for an extended period of time — something many wedding photographers do all the time, which is a market I’d like to get into because of all the explosive emotions in such events (and not to mention the relatively high pay out if I am really good at it).

Enough babbling… Time to get some sleep before the 5:30am wake up call from the shuttling service to the airport. Good times.

So I survived my first full day of work. Though I spent most of the time reading the Internal documentation on the projects, I still felt like I over used my brain for the entire day.

One thing about returning to a full-time job is that I am not working alone anymore. And I get asked questions from time to time, which also helps sharpening my mind a little more. Being able to bounce ideas off of other is an important learning process, especially I’ve hit a certain plateau in terms of programming techniques. I needed to be with other programmers and artists to move to the next level.

Another advantage is I am forced to walk to take public transit (which is slightly cheaper than driving to work). I have to walk 15 minutes to and from the Caltrain station, which is just like when I lived in NYC. This will definitely help reduce some of that fatherly fat around my belly.

So the week will progress on with meetings after meetings in handing off workload to me to start implementation. Good times.

After almost four years of freelancing and eating Bryan’s food scraps, I finally caved in and signed a short-term contract with a local startup as a Flash developer. Since the company is in this super stealth mode, I don’t want to reveal too much about what it is. But I sure look forward to learning some enterprise-level skills after having worked almost entirely independently.

Actionscript has come a long way with v3.0. But I was surprised how fast I picked it up with my first Flash project a while back considering how much I hated Flash. It’s going to be interesting to see how I will be using it in an almost entirely Object Oriented environment using Model, View, Controller concepts — both of these things I actually wrote on my white board earlier this year as my new year resolutions for 2008…

I will probably hop on the “full time” train once I have checked out the potential of the project. I am definitely not going to repeat the same mistakes when I was a full time employee last.

Ah, life.

I think this is a happy news. But this came at a time when I am also the most stressful — my photography seems to have taken on a life of its own.

While I am not all booked up or anything for sessions, I do have a pretty important assignment during the 3rd week of May that requires me to be away for a full week to complete. The pay is extremely well, and the assignment itself is also very interesting. Needless to say, pictures will be posted for preview when they are all fully processed.

This assignment is important enough to me (and the client) that I will be renting backup equipment from a local shop here in the area. Since they don’t carry Fujifilm S5 Pro, I will get a chance to try the brand spanking new Nikon D300 and see how I like it compare to my Fuji in terms of picture quality (I already know its speed and file size nail the Fuji hands down). Another thing I want to find out is how its dynamic range and high ISO noise compare to my Fuji.

I can’t wait!

Bryan finally got the idea of taking the initiatives to go to potty on his own. He’s a bit late among his friends, but we felt that he’d do it when he felt ready for it… And indeed he did. It was a milestone event for all 3 of us to hear him insist on going to his potty chair and actually “holding” for it.

Another milestone reached this week was his readiness to sleep alone. This couldn’t have come at a better time as Bryan’s sister is due in about a month. Last night he kicked me out of the bed because he wanted to sleep by himself, with light off and the door closed! And without a fuss or complaint, he went to sleep.

Sometimes I wished he wasn’t growing so fast so that I can rock him to sleep just for a little longer. (Now he won’t even let me hold him like a baby, let alone rocking him.) But soon enough, he’d be his own man and making choices all on his own without requiring my input at all. Life with children goes by way too fast. And some days I wish we’d stay in “today” just for a little longer…

My blog had been breached once before with the same attack. But it’s happened again even though the WordPress version being attacked the 2nd time was definitely newer than that previous attack. I hadn’t been on my own blog for weeks. And the only reason I found out was because I installed Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Grace’s machine, and the new Firefox (working with Google) has this new feature that can detect “bad ware” like that.

Basically someone “somehow” inserted a line of Javascript code into a couple of my blog entries and pretended to be “statistics” code. But in reality, it’s a script that behaves as trojans, presumably for Internet Explorers…

After some troubleshooting and searching, I removed all the codes and requested my site to be reviewed by Google in order to be considered safe again in its database…