Makin' Dough (Into Bread)

First loaf of bread ever! Made with a sponge of 2:1 water:flour along with a little yeast and some honey to feed it left overnight. Then incorporate that with enough flour to get a 2:3 water:flour mixture in the final result, let rise, knead, rise, punch down, make into loaf, glaze with diluted corn syrup and corn meal, bake for 45 some-odd minutes, et voila!

Pictures of the innards to come, when it cools.

Edit: Tasted pretty good for a first try. Need to let it rise more and cook a little longer. No pictures as its been eaten. Maybe tomorrow?

No Sense Crying Over Spilt Wine

Really pleased with how this one came out. The roughest part was figuring out how to disguise the umbrella-ness of the umbrella without fudging the lines out in Photoshop (the specular highlight it makes is really obvious and unattractive). Putting some plain white shopping bags from a grocery store over it killed most of it, although you can still see it faintly.

After that it was just a matter of getting the perspective and framing correct to get to this point.

How Fortunate!

Part of a series, maybe? I just hope I don't get one like 'triceratops' or 'horse'.

Triceratops would be pretty weird for a fortune cookie word.

Food!

Been doing a lot of food/drink pictures to practice for the Strobist Contest. Probably going to be a lot of boring pictures here in the coming days, hopefully ramping up into something good. Definitely a lot different than all the people photography I've been doing up until now.

Firstly, coffee!

And what goes really well with coffee? Why, olives! Of course!

DECEPTICONS!!!

Set out today with old McClancy friends just expecting to go see the mediocre Transformers sequel (which we did, and it was worse than mediocre; it was downright crappy), but came out of it with some nice post-rain amazing sky pictures, with brand new subject VINNY!

Vincent is amazingly photogenic, despite being real shy around the camera and generally poo-pooing his looks.

Damon was there too, sporting the shirt emblazoned with the phrase that he can't help but say at least 30 times a goddamn day (don't think I don't keep a running tally Damon).

I'm gonna hijack this post a little to say just how horrible Transformers 2 was. There were no human characters in this movie worth a damn or with any kind of personality. I wouldn't mind this in an action movie usually, but it tries so damn hard to get me to feel something for these people, but it just fails. The movie is filled with so much destructive shit going on around the main characters that they constantly escape from unscathed that they almost lose any kind of mortality. HUGE Main-Character Invincibility problems.

I will say that Jetfire was goddamn awesome, and that all the scenes involving him were amazing. A crotchety old Decepticon turncoat talking about his ancestors ('My grandfather was a wheel! And do you know what he turned into?! NOTHING!') who walks with a cane and has a beard made out of metal? I'm there. More Jetfire please.

Aaaaaaanyway, enough of that. After we got out of the theatre and the torrential rain stopped, we went to Astoria Park for some crosslighting fun with the setting sun. Mike was there too, but he was off in the bear-infested forest at Astoria Park taking some more landscape shots.

I have never seen a sky like this. It was freakin' amazing and an excellent background for a nice low shot of Vinny to end the night.

Secret Squirrel Spotted!

This squirrel was poking around some trash near the fancy restaurant near Astoria Park, nibbling on a little bit of pizza crust. He was so awesome. There was also a toothy homeless guy watching me take the pictures who gave me a real creepy smile, but I didn't get a picture of him.

The squirrel skittered off shortly after I took this shot, I'm guessing to a small hole or hide-away where he keeps his things. His pizza crusts, his apple cores, his tree nuts, his acorn cup that his squirrel wife uses to collect honeydew as a restorative aperitif each morning for him.

His wife loves him, but questions if he is really out collecting food all day or if he is off cavorting with loose rodents. She has her doubts.

Kung Fu Master

Above is the Black Belt Awesome Ninja Assassin, Damon Smallwood. He's amazing, even besides being able to do an amazing looking flying kick. We were shooting around the apartments near Astoria Park, and we eventually went from pretty standard portraits to kung fu moves and going to get Darth Vader helmets and light sabers.

Mike was there too, playing around with his new 3.0 ND filter taking long exposure landscape shots of the bridge. From what I could see in his viewfinder they were coming out really awesome. I snuck a couple good shots of Mike with his camera in throughout the day.

Here is Mike looking like Russel Brand. Oi mate!

Also, heres a cat!