Take or Make?
- At February 22, 2011
- By Chuq Von Rospach
- In Photography
4
As aspect of your craft as a photographer is the shift from taking photographs to making them. What we mean by this is that as you study and practice, you learn to predict the image and you go from pushing the shutter and hoping you get a picture to understanding the situation and manipulating it (and the camera) to make sure you get one.
And then there’s serendipity.
There were reports of short-eared owls in Coyote Valley. I decided it was a good excuse to head out for some birding and grabbed the camera, a good excuse to go out and work with the camera in low light conditions and see what happened. The sun went down, no owls. Twilight darkened, no owls. One very loud and happy meadowlark — no owls.
And just as I was about to give up, I saw this bird patrolling the meadow, so I hauled out the camera and snapped off some shots. ISO 3200, 1/6 second at F5.6. It was pretty dark, and if nothing else, I wanted some imagery to study to help decide if this was an owl or not, since it was hard to tell live in the low light conditions. I could have gone the other direction, popped on a flash and a fresnel and tried to light the night sky — but isn’t this an awesome image the way it is? I sure think so.
As soon as it popped off the card and onto the screen, I loved it. I’ve been experimenting with abstracting avian forms, looking at ways to capture and explain birds in non-photo-realistic ways. The panning was pretty much spot on here, causing the blurring and streaking of the wild mustard blooms in the meadow to pop out. Very impressionistic, and yet very clearly a bird in flight. It required very little post processing.
But is this image taken? Or made? In honestly, some of both. I knew what I needed to accomplish to get a usable image under those conditions, and I knew it was going to be more impressionistic or abstract than a classic bird in flight shot. But the details that for me make this image work are in many ways a happy accident — but a happy accident made possible by knowing how to create the conditions to make it possible. Not something you’re going to get putting things on autopilot and hitting the button. that’s a bit of what really makes me like this image, I think.
By the way, it’s a northern harrier, not an owl. the white spot on the butt makes the ID possible. The Harrier and the short-eared Owl share similar facial and body structures, similar hunting styles and are effectively both in the same ecological niche but the owl works swing shift. In this case, though, it’s the day shift working late, not the swing shift coming out to start their day. I’ll have to catch the owl some other evening, I guess.
If you’re interested, I’ve made this image available as a desktop wallpaper over in my smugmug wallpaper library.
in the “oh my god, hell just froze over” department…
Laurie and I have been talking this over for a couple of days, and I figured this might make for interesting blog fodder.
We’ve decided not to renew our season tickets with the Sharks next season. Which given we’ve had season tickets since the Sharks first season, and we’re going through the 20th season now, probably comes as a surprise (especially to folks who know us well).
Why are we doing this? Well, it’s not because we’re upset at the Sharks, or the quality of hockey, or the cost, or whatever. It’s because we both want to spend less time sitting in a hockey arena.
Think about it. If you’re full season ticket holders, you’re committing to 43 games a year. Lots of season ticket holders sell off chunks; in our case we average about 35 games a year. That’s over a month a year sitting in the arena, so from October to June (depending on how deep a team goes into the playoffs), you’re committing a big chunk of time and a lot of evenings to being at the game. This year, especially, I’ve felt at times that it’s gotten in the way of some of the other things I want to do (especially photography), where the friday night or saturday game really limits the ability to do other things on the weekend. When I birded Panoche a few weeks ago, I only covered about half the territory I’d planned on because I needed to get back for a game.
Our decision was to drop the tickets and buy on the open market (hello, Stubhub) rather than hang onto the tickets and have to deal with selling off the ones we don’t want. It’s just less hassle and gives us more flexibility (and no responsibility…)
So we’ll still be in the arena, just less — and watching more TV from home, where we can multitask or PVR the games if we need to. or (gasp) miss one. I expect we’ll try tobuy tickets down in that area, or maybe grab tickets from some of our seat neighbors who sell them off, since we like that section and the folks in it, and we like the angle (or perhaps we’re just used to it…)
amusingly enough, we both had been thinking about this independently for a while, and weren’t sure whether to mention it to each other. And amusingly enough, neither of us was at all surprised to find out the other one was also thinking that way; the joy of sharing your life with someone for a long time….
And yes, this opens up options. We’ve wanted to check out hockey in other venues, and this frees up some cash (and time!) to give us a chance to, say, try the edmonton/red deer/Calgary trifecta, or do a trip through ottawa, toronto, montreal and some of the OHL. Or just start getting back up to Vancouver again on a more regular basis and wallow in the WHL and take in a game or two at GM place.
Oh, and we’ve also decided not to buy playoff tickets this year. Partly for this reason, partly because we just don’t think this team will go deep and can’t convince outselves to spend the money for another first or second round exit. maybe they’ll prove us wrong, if so, we’ll happily cheer (from home).
Go sharks!
Only a flesh wound….
Behold the new hole in our garage.
The morning started as plumbers from about four counties all arrived at our house, in search of a slab leak. For those that don’t know, a slab leak is when your plumbing breaks, only the break is hidden under 6″ of concrete, and you get to guess where the leak is.
Fortunately, there are leak detection specialists. They have a gizmo that stuffs a sequenced electric charge onto your plumbing, and another gizmo that finds that and tells you where the pipes are, and how deep they are. They wander through your house hearing beeps (it’s the really expensive machine that goes PING!) figuring out where the plumbing is. Then they stuff your pipes with helium, and use a set of stethoscopes the size of a big can of soup (two, actually) to listen for the helium exiting through the leak. I swear it looks like the guy is dowsing….
And in about an hour, he mapped out where all the pipes are, and then he found the leak. And that made me happy.
Not because we found the leak, but because the leak turned out to be in the corner of the house, where the service enters. Right where we were seeing the water come out. And this makes me happy because the leak wasn’t in the dining room, or in the kitchen under a cabinet, or under the tile in the bathroom, or…
You get the point — if you see how this gets fixed, the place that needs fixing is best in the garage, where it doesn’t trigger major remodeling projects. So the plumbers used a saw to cut the concrete, and then a jackhammer to remove it, and after I took this picture, patched in new copper to connect the good piece to the good piece, and by about 4PM, we had water — and it wasn’t out in the front yard.
Tomorrow they’ll come back and patch the concrete, and we’ll give it a few days to harden, and then life will return to normal, at least it will once I clear out the concrete dust and the mud and all of the other debris that now inhabits the garage, and backfill the bed that used to be part of the front yard…
If you live in an eichler, this is the kind of problem you dread, and when they happen, they can become really bad really fast. If it had to happen, this problem is about as close to the best case scenario as you can ask for — so I’m happy. And it was a relatively quick fix, too.
and once they stopped jackahmmering, I even got work done…
But it’s been an interesting few days…
Happy Valentines day!
And how did you spend your Valentines day? I spent mine with the plumbers, with what we thought was a leak in the service line into the house. That’s been patched, but when we turned on the service again, the leak re-appeared. Not so good. That means we have a slab leak; this is an Eichler, it has no crawlspace, it’s on a cement pad. and in the pad is the plumbing, and somewhere it’s leaking. So soon the guys with the really expensive leak detection machine will arrive to find it, followed by the guys with the jackhammer to chew out the part of the floor over where the leak is. which is likely (I hope) either in the kitchen or dining room. if we get really lucky, it’s in the garage but somehow I doubt it..
And we have this nice hole in the front yard, slowly filling with water again…
But we have a nice new copper service line that no longer routes through the porch slab…
This is likely going to complicate my blogging schedule. and maybe vacation. And who knows what else?
oh well. nobody’s died, and that’s good.
Bit busy…
- At February 8, 2011
- By Chuq Von Rospach
- In About Chuq, Photography
- 0
going to be a bit quiet on the blog for a bit; went out on a long bird chase over the weekend — 500 miles of driving in the central valley, hitting Isenberg Crane Reserve, Woodbridge Road, Staten Island and Consumnes River Preserve on Saturday, and then overnighting in one of those places with towels that give you a free exfoliation along I5, and then visiting San Luis NWR and Merced NWR on Sunday, and visiting the Gilroy tundra swans on the way home (my best view of tundra swans the whole weekend. go figure). 800 images day one, 400 images day 2, and I’m just starting to sort through them, but definitely, some of them do not suck.
Sunset at Isenberg was slow as far as birds, but, as you can see above, I don’t think I’m complaining. I ended up with an 80 species weekend for the bird list, which was rather nice, and the only winter duck I missed (as usual) was redhead. I already know I got some nice images of at least two nemesis photo birds, the Marsh Wren and the Belted Kingfisher.
More when I have time, but HP/Palm has this little shindig going on this week, I’m in team briefings for a lot of the week, and I’m sorting through the images; my first day ding rate was about 65% which was lower than I expected, and there’s some nice stuff, but it’s all going to take some time. Which this week, I’m short of..
So just enjoy the sunset, and think to yourself — boy, I wish I was there for that. Because if you had been, you’d have been amazed at the colors.
Vacation time..
- At February 3, 2011
- By Chuq Von Rospach
- In About Chuq
- 2
So I have bitten the bullet and scheduled vacation. Given I have over 160 hours piled up, it wasn’t going to be long before someone started yelling at me to take it or start losing it. I decided to go ahead and schedule out two weeks (I considered one; I’m insane), although for various reasons, I did it as a week off, a week back at work, then another week off.
Wait. that actually makes some sense, since I’m going to be doing different things in different climates. Current plan for the first week (mid march) is to visit mom, then hit Salton Sea for some serious birding, and then two days exploring Anza-Borrego and Joshua tree, a day in Carrizo Plains, and end it up with a day in Morro, doing the southern cal bird and wildflower loop. I decided against Death Valley, which really warrants a trip of its own. I may change this depending on the state of my knees and the weather, and how the wildflower reports kick in.
The second week (last week of march into april) I’m hoping for early spring in Yosemite for a few days, with hopefully good waterfall action and some early dogwood blooms. If I time this right, I’ll extend the trip. if I don’t, I’ll shorten it and see what else might make sense, like coming home and sleeping. It’ll be way too early for Tioga to open, or Glacier Point, but there should be some nice opportunities to explore up by hetch hetchy and around Mather before the crowds arrive and the wildlife disappears. I decided a later visit for spring was more interesting than another run at the park during the winter (but Laurie just finished a few days there and was quite happy with things….).
And I’m hoping to do a lot of interesting photography and get off the grid. Unlike the last couple of years, the plan is to get completely away from work, barring an emergency and not multi-task. The knee’s about 98% and I expect it to be ready to go by then, and with any luck, the weather will cooperate and the waterfalls will kick butt..
The Salton Sea trip is to finally do the one I had scheduled in 2008 when dad got sick, and I haven’t been able to break some time free at an appropriate time since, so I’m thrilled it finally looks like it’ll happen. Carrizo should be blooming by then and full of interesting critters and far enough past the rainy season to be passable. That’s another area I was just starting to explore when dad got sick, and I’m just not getting back to it again.
And then it’s back to work….
Learning to love life….
- At February 3, 2011
- By Chuq Von Rospach
- In About Chuq
- 0
I got an email from an old friend this week, and it dealt with something I was going to talk about, so it’s a good starting point for this…
I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that I follow your blog; greatly enjoying your photos and prose since sometimes last year. I am saddened to read about your health problems.
I appreciate that sentiment — but to be honest, I’m really pretty happy with life. That hasn’t been true in the last number of years, but one thing I realized after I had the breakdown was that if I didn’t get to the root of things, none of the rest mattered and ultimately, I wouldn’t get it all fixed. The root of much of this was that along the way, I stopped liking myself, and so I went out of my way looking for reasons to be negative about myself, and that’s a big part of what drove the anger and depression that led to the collapse, and was a core cause of a lot of the weight gain — eating as punishment, eating because I didn’t give a damn. Probably, at some level, seeing eating as a really slow suicide path that wouldn’t be seen as that. At best, not caring if it happened. So if you play root cause analysis games (yes, life is nothing but a red flagged project needing some structure and a post-mortem), and you solve those root causing problems — you can fix things.
And so I ended up spending an enormous amount of time trying to understand what was making myself so unhappy, both internal and external triggers, and then understanding how to resolve those conflicts and come to terms with them. It was a process of learning to be comfortable and happy in my own skin again. There’s an entire series of blog posts on this down the road, when I can organize it and figure out how to talk about it.
In all honesty, I see myself as really lucky these days. I feel pretty good most of the time, ignoring the knees, and they continue to slowly improve; our seats at the Sharks are three rows off the glass, which is awesome, but that implies a bunch of stairs, which isn’t, but at the Phoenix game this week, for the first time in about six weeks, the stairs were merely annoying, not massively painful (down is a problem. up has never been a problem. go figure). So I’m hopeful this episode is almost over, and I’m trying to do a bit more exercise, within the caution of not overdoing it and causing a setback. I feel good enough that Laurie’s given me a hall pass, and I’m headed out this weekend for an overnight trip into the central valley to do some serious birding and photography, and see how it goes — hopefully Yolo Bypass, Staten island, Consumnes and Woodbridge on Saturday, grab a room somewhere on the I-5, and spend sunday up at San Luis NWR for the fly-out, and Merced NWR in the afternoon for sunset and the fly in. weather looks like it’ll cooperate, and I’m hopeful the birds will cooperate.
Whenever I want to feel sorry for myself, it’s easy to put it in perspective – I caught the diabetes relatively early (I’m guessing 9 months after it came on), and I had a head start of a couple of years on fixing the diet, since I knew I was a time bomb and it was likely to arrive at some point, and so while it’s something you have to watch and manage, for me, it’s more like dealing with chronic allergies or something. I’m not fragile, I don’t need insulin, I’m well controlled — and I hope to keep it that way, but for now, it’s more something to structure lifestyle mangement around than anything.
And when I look at how that (and grumpy knees) compares to what others around me are going through – honestly, my life’s not bad. I have grumpy knees and I have to watch my arthritis, and I need to lose weight. I lost an old college girlfriend to liver cancer this year, another had her 20+ year marriage breakup and she’s now being a single mom. I’ve helped a close friend through breast cancer and a full mastectomy. A photographer I know just announced her Lymphoma is back. I’ve lost friends to bone and breast cancer, my dad to heart problems. I can think of two friends currently under chemotherapy, three who underwent cancer surgery in the last year, two 20 year divorces… I could go on.
When you look at that, you wrap your grumpy knees with a heating pad and count your blessings, because I’m still happily married and working to keep it that way, my heart seems fine (I did a treadmill test a couple of years ago and they didn’t find anything to worry about), I have my photography and now that the apnea and diabetes are well controlled I now find I have my energy back, and I’m getting myself more involved in a bunch of new things which you may or may not hear about at some point. 2004-2006 was when things crashed, and things were pretty sucky for a while before that, but now?
I’m just having fun, and enjoying what I have, and trying not to overthink things or get back into the mindset of worrying and being upset over what isn’t. Because what matters is the stuff that is… And what is, is pretty cool.
So I don’t complain much these days. And that’s awesome, since there’s so little worth expending energy complaining about…
Notes from the Commish – the all star game
- At February 1, 2011
- By Chuq Von Rospach
- In Sports - Hockey
- 0
Welcome to the latest ruling in “Notes from the Commish” where I as the Commish of the NHL (in my universe) and my Vice President of Disclipine Barfy will pontificate upon the state of the game and what I think needs to be changed. The fact is, NHL hockey is in pretty damn good shape overall, not that you’d believe that reading some of the pundits out there. But the reality is, a business the size of the NHL can never be perfect, and there are always things that can be improved, and there will always be things that need to be fixed. And I’m the guy to fix it. (or replace this with something witty and snarky)
Tonight’s Note from the Commish is the All Star Game.
A few notes on this weekends all star game.
It was fun to watch the game. A little more fun than previous years. The skills competition was interesting, but the camera work on Versus kinda sucked and made it hard to follow some of the action. I’ll chalk that up to nobody quite knowing what to expect, including the cameramen and director. Tough job, did okay.
The draft was… it was a draft. Kind of amusing, and I kinda half watched it. I think it’s nice they’re looking for ways to make this more interesting and change it up a bit. This works, and it’ll probably work for a few years, and then it’ll get boring and they’ll need to do something else.
What annoys me are the people that are annoyed by the All Star game. They want to take it really seriously, and complain because it’s not. Believe it or not, not everything has to be brutally serious and life or death. Yes, this is an excuse for a city a year to come out and party, and a chance for the league to make some money off the event, and to bring their vendors and sponsors in and throw parties for them and generally schmooze the folks paying big chunks of the bills. And nothing more than that. It’s a weekend where the league does some business with the big checkbooks and has a bit of fun and takes a few days up to relax and party and just have a good time. And somehow, some folks, especially in the media, and double-especially in the canadian media, can’t handle that.
That is not the league’s problem. Ya’ll, lighten up. not that you will.
It is also the annual chance for the Canadian media to rip into the NHL and especially Bettman, because, well, the league isn’t perfect (what business the size the NHL is?) and because Bettman is, basically, not canadian enough to run their precious league. It’s all rather sad, actually. So we get the usual stuff about fighting in hockey, expansion (which the league has said for years isn’t on the agenda — so why do some pundits keep ripping the league by saying that expansion would be stupid to do?) and the lack of franchises in Winnipeg and Quebec City, even though neither currently has an arena for a team or an ownership group waiting. Surprisingly enough, speaking of ownership groups, the whining about not letting Balsillie grab a team and ignore league ownership rules was at a minimum. Maybe they noticed the trendlines on RIM’s finances… Nah. Not likely.
Look, the All Star game is a bit of fun fluff in an 80 game grinding death march. So why don’t we all relax and just enjoy it for what it is. Or be unable to enjoy it, but shut up and go do something else for a couple of days. Seems like too much to ask, and from the reactions of some, it is. So I just try to not listen, and kick back and enjoy it for what it is. Unless I’m busy doing something else. But, you know? when it came to San Jose, we grabbed our tickets and we went and had one hell of a time. For the folks in that city, on that weekend — it’s awesome. So let’s stop trying to make it more than it is, and complaining when it falls short of that. Relax and have a cold one instead…
Agree? Disagree? drop a comment with your opinion.
Got a rule or some aspect of hockey you want the Commish or — Colin — to rule on? drop us an email or a comment with the question. And we’ll be back soon with another Note from the Commish.
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