A couple weeks back in comments, long time reader and cyber-friend L asked me if I had an opinion on the new Olympus Pen camera.
I had little to say on the subject as I haven’t shot an Olympus for over 20 years.
But in my mailbox this morning, an email from Digital Photography School held some better information.
Here ya go, L:
Especially photographic type toys.
Yay plastic cameras!
After lusting and longing for a while, I finally broke down and spent some money on a Fuji Instax instant film camera.
It’s like a Polaroid, only a Fuji brand. You know, *coff coff* a financially solvent company?
Anyhow, this fabulous little Instax makes very small instant photographs, they are 2 x 3.25 inches in size.
I LOVE that I have an instant photo camera again!
It hearkens me back to my youth. One Christmas holiday, I got a Polaroid under the tree. Oh what a fabulous present!
I could spend my allowance on buying Polaroid film, which was fairly cheap back then, and then run around snapping photos of whatever I saw with *instant* gratification!
Ok, sure, these days digital cameras provide that instant look at the photo you just took, but there sure is nothing like the sound an instant camera makes after snapping a photo. The motor engages and it shoves out the cloudy photograph. Oh the sweet agony while you wait excitedly for it to develop.
Gah! I love it!
So as I do with every new camera I buy, I take it out of the box, ooh and ah over the features, load up the film or memory disk, and then turn it on and point it at the Feline.
She’s my test model for all new photo and video devices in the house.
Ah, the long suffering Feline….
(scanned photo, not actual size)
And yet, she always manages to strike a pose. I really do think she’s getting better at this job of supermodel.
“I won’t get out of bed for less than two scoops of kibble.”
Such a Diva.
Harumph!
And yet…she sure knows how to work the camera.
As for me, I’m still giddy with the fabulous gadgety goodness of it all!!
You know, looking at a photograph of myself is always an interesting and somewhat humbling experience.
In a photo, I never quite look the way that I imagine I look.
Where did those lines around the eyes come from? Do my hips really look like that?
Ah well.
The other day, I received an interesting photograph that surely has me pondering some things.
Here, I’ll share the photo with you, my fabulous readers, so you can see what I’m talking about.
It is a fun photo of me driving! Isn’t that neat! A perspective one doesn’t often get.
Look at me…intense expression on my face. Hands firmly at ten and two. Or maybe more like eleven and one, but no matter.
That’s a concentrated and skillful driver, no?
Yup, that photo was kindly mailed to me by the Superior Court of the county where I live.
Wasn’t that sweet?
It appears they are of the belief that I didn’t stop fully before making a right turn at a red light into a very busy intersection.
And so for the luxury of a faboo photo of me behind the wheel, I was charged $500.
I’m *ever* so pleased about that. Tickled pink. And other euphemisms I can’t think of right now to sarcastically convey that I’m not very pleased AT ALL!
Next step: onward to driving school. Yay me.
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate red light cameras? Oh I really hate them.
You’ll recall I first asked this question back in November.
The answer then was: persimmon.
Today, in my continuing quest to understand what in the sam hell is growing in my own backyard, I bring you the next installment in the series.
Ladies and Gentlemen…ask you. What exactly is *this*:
(no fair answering first, Natalie!)
I have a tree laden with these little guys. The birds fight over the fruit that bears a color and skin resemblance to an apricot.
The neighborhood squirrels will come running up the power line, put their little paws together over their head, and swan dive into the tree to sample of these fruits.
The bugs love this tree so much, a spider has moved in and built one hell of a web. This allows him to freely sample of the bug buffet. There are bug carcasses strewn all over the place. I haven’t seen a spider web like that since Hawaii!
The fruit on the tree looks a little bit like a small peach or a big apricot. But they aren’t.
Curious, I pulled one that looked ripe from the tree and split it open.
This mutant fruit has not one but TWO stones at the center!
Another I opened had not two but THREE stones!
What the hell?
I didn’t sample the fruit right away. The saliva-evaporating tannin in the under ripe persimmon I ate first and asked questions later taught me a huge lesson.
Nope, I was going to do some research before biting in this time.
With a little help of another overheard conversation between my landlord and his elderly father, I remembered them discussing the old man’s love of something called a loquat.
Hmm. Loquat. It sounds like a concatenation of a couple other words…like lemon and apricot. Or lemon and kumquat.
Is this one of those weird hybrid fruits? No. It’s not.
Loquat is actually an Americanized spelling of a Cantonese word, lou gwat, or the words mean “reed orange.”
This is another tree that is found mainly in Asian countries and was brought along to the Bay Area. It’s a very hardy tree!
Evidently the fruit has a mild sedative effect.
Evidently the seeds have a mild bit of cyanide. Yay.
Note to self: eat the fruit, not the pit.
Okay!
So today I dove in like a squirrel and picked a couple ripe samples.
It’s very tart like a citrus fruit but a consistency much like an apricot.
I like it!
Ok, mystery solved! Off to find recipes for loquats!
Oh, by the by, I also have this creepy creature in my backyard:
It’s almost a foot across and it looks like it could devour small animals.
Fortunately, I know what this bad boy is….
It’s an artichoke that my neighbor grew and forgot to pick.
If it gets any larger, I may have to move.
Just sayin’.
I spent the sunny day yesterday as part of a City College of San Francisco photography class. It was a full day photo walk class through part of the City.
I was excited about this class because when I started shooting, I was all about the nature shots…but I’m moving steadily into more urban themes and this was a great chance for me to improve my skills.
Wow, did I learn a lot. There were actually two instructors, one a professional portrait photographer who really helped us understand about light and how to make people look great.
The other a professional landscape photographer who helped us understand that to take a good landscape photo, you need to have a point of focus.
Both were amazing teachers!
Anyhow, I’d posted on Twitter yesterday that I’d been up and down some of the grander hills in San Francisco, and Twitter friend @pcon34 asked to see a few photos on the blog.
So here you go pcon! A few of my faves.
I’ve only done some very minor corrections on the photos and haven’t cropped or Photoshopped anything.
Click on any of the images to see in various sizes.
Down at Fisherman’s Wharf, you can find lots and lots of good rusty things. The relentless wind off the water sees to that. This was a quick snap at the side of a shed where we had been working on portraits. This chain just caught my eye and the photo has become one of my faves of the set.
More fabulously rusty. I was endlessly fascinated by this thing. I have no idea what it is…but it must be valuable. There is a pretty new lock on it.
This is the hill leading up to Coit Tower. The photo was taken from the roof of the Art Institute of San Francico on Russian Hill. There are a million photos of Coit Tower and I wanted something different. Here, I was trying to make it look like those photos you see of the building covered hills of Greece or Brazil. This one is The Good Man’s fave of the set. This small size doesn’t do the photo justice. The full sized version is a lot of fun.
I wasn’t totally into this photo when first downloaded, but I keep coming back to it. It has something working for me that I can’t quite put my finger on. I may play around with the colors and cropping to see what emerges. These are windows at the Art Institute of San Francisco.
The Exploratorium has many fabulous outdoor experiments located all around Fort Mason. This one, the wind arrows, helps you see how the wind moves in different directions depending on height. I caught the arrows in a rare moment, heading mostly the same way. For me, what I love about this photo is the sky! It’s CLEAR and blue. No clouds, no fog! Heady stuff!
A white-crowned sparrow singing his tune at Fort Mason. This was near the end of the day and the photo is a skosh out of focus. Ah well, what it lacks in technical skills, it makes up for in capturing the attitude of this little fella. A friend and bird expert says that Mr. White-Crowned Sparrow should have migrated by now, so she’s a bit worried that I saw him. Here’s hoping he finds his way….
Anyhow, if you’re still with me, thank you for looking at my photos! If you want to see more, there is a set on Flicker, click here