Storm

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.

Storm

Chase Jarvis on How to Make It in Photography

Chase Jarvis takes great images as a commercial photographer. But he could really take a page from Steve Jobs on his presentation skills.

Nonetheless, Jarvis hit a few great points on the nature of photography business. We’d been warned a few times back in college about them, but it was refreshing to hear them again from a successful pro. One interesting fact he made in this presentation was: Out of about 2,000 images during his shoots, only about six to 10 get picked for final editing — I once told Brian that great photography, skills and techniques aside, also has a lot to do with statistics. If I gave Bryan a digital camera to snap around all day long, a few of the images are bound to be interesting or even great to look at. However, it’s the consistency and depth at which great images are made that define the greatness of a photographer.

So off we go. Happy clicking.

via [Strobist]

Incidentally, Jarvis also has the sweetest on-location photography laptop setup…
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via [chasejarvis.com]

Childly Neighbor

Ever since our neighbor turned nuts, we’ve been trying very hard to ignore her and her intentional verbal attacks, especially on Grace (and sometimes in the presence of Bryan). Today she did it again by picking a verbal fight with Grace and made a bunch of vulgar and racial slurs. Grace got fed up and called the cops on the neighbor (with the blessing from the landlord as well)*.

Being that San Jose is supposedly one of the fastest cities of its size in America, the police came swiftly to understand the situation. It appears that what the neighbor has been doing qualifies as “harassment” and has to be stopped. So they took statements from both Grace and the neighbor and made an official complaint of the incident. On a related note, one of the officers mentioned that our neighbor even made some racial comments in front of them as they were taking statements from her. That should clear any doubts whether she did any of those things had there been any disputes.

So now our neighbor’s supposed to stop talking to us or do anything that resembles any form of harassment or else the cops will have her kicked out in three days — something the landlord didn’t want to see happen but probably wouldn’t mind at this point. Our landlord dreaded on kicking a tenant out because of all the potential legal actions she could be dragged into should the tenant decide to take matters to the court. But with this latest incident, our neighbor had simply lost any and all possible legal foot to stand on.

Right now as I am writing this, our neighbor’s angrily slamming every door she can find in the apartment. In fact, she’s been doing that for the past two hours or so. We just might have to call the cops again for “disturbance”… But man, we just hate to spend tax dollars on stupid stuff like this! Our neighbor is probably in her 60s or 70s — I guess some people just never truly grew up.

* Backtracking things a little here: A couple of weeks ago, as Grace was taking Bryan to pre-school in the morning, our neighbor decided to confront Grace about why we are trying to have her kicked out… etc. She did that in a physically imposing and “threatening” way and kept following Grace to the car and even as Grace reversed the car in the drive way. We were going to call the cops then, but then we decided to call the landlord and have the landlord tell our neighbor to stop doing that.

So Full

We went out to have some In-N-Out burgers today since we hadn’t had any after I’ve gone vegetarian. I was surprised to find that they actually serve veggie burgers that taste pretty darn good!

While we were there, Bryan pretty much finished 3/4th of a berger all by himself (yes, it’s fast food, but In-N-Out is as healthy as fast food goes; and we only eat them once in a blue moon). So on the way back, just out of the blue, he blurbed out, “I am so full!”

We all just broke out laughing pretty hard.

We love it when Bryan says the most unexpected things at this least expected times. He’s one funny guy.

Web Photo Woes

I never paid much attention to how photos appear on the web until recently I’ve decided that I need to diversify my income sources by branching out into photography, which has been an old love affair of mine. Over the span of a week or so, I’ve soaked up so much information on just the idea of presentation of colors that it really sickens me how Apple’s Safari (and browsers based on its rendering engine, such as OmniWeb, Shiira among others) is the only browser that gets color renditions correctly according to the artists’ intent. Nine years after the initial dot-com boom and six years after its bust, I can’t believe only ONE technology company gets web-based photography presentation right!

Without getting into too much details, basically the chief complaint is, web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer are only capable of displaying a very narrow set of colors that are capable of being displayed by modern monitors. This was done in the old days to insure compatibility of color display between various makes of monitors and applications via which images were rendered. But the “old days” have long gone, and browsers are still stuck in the 1990’s.

Now I understood why my images appeared muddy on Flickr. But since there are way too many of them to fix and re-upload, I’ve gone to hell and back trying everything to make sure the richness of colors captured by my camera is properly displayed on the web. But I think I am only half way there in finding an acceptable work flow that works for me.

So anyway, this is just a rant on one of those tech things….

A Beautiful Flickr Find

Flickr, as with any publicly viewable photo services, is filled with surprises and wonderful images. A couple of days ago I was looking for inspirations on images of toddlers, I discovered Rachel Devine‘s collection of images of her daughter, Gemma. Grace and I just fell in love with Rachel’s beautiful and striking images. The downside is (what, there’s always a downside), they make my images look, well…, inadequate. I am glad I am not doing photography for a living (yet). But man, I REALLY wish I can. Come to think of it, I think I made a mistake changing my major from photography to computer art.

Gemma Jumps
© Rachel Devine

I hope Rachel doesn’t mind me “borrowing” one of her images to show case her creative talent. Rachel has a few links to her personal sites on her Flickr profile.

Saying Goodbye to My Patch of Goatee

God knows I tried. But it was time to let go.

After almost three weeks of growing the patch, I finally decided to call it quits. Some people just weren’t built for facial hair… This was actually one of my several attempts to try to grow a goatee. All previous attempts failed because it just never grew thick enough. Even after having talked to a few people who’s grown them, I still think I wasn’t getting the thickness needed to have a good patch… So here’s the final goodbye and an image for those who never saw it.

A Rare Self Portrait

Murdza in A Rare Appearance in the Bay Area

Murdza and I met up last week when he was in town for a business trip — incidentally he’s now a big shot with formal dress code and all that good stuff. It was weird to see him all dressed up having been tech geeks all our lives. But it was a nice change. We had a good chat (and a good walk up/down Fisherman’s Wharf looking for Starbucks, which we actually didn’t find, for a change for my parking meter).

Murdza Visiting

An Un-neighborly Summer

Our neighbor behind us has been leaving out food for stray cats ever since she moved in. We really didn’t care that all the cats in the neighborhood were getting all-you-can eat buffets until a skunk started frequenting the joint. Now more than a few kinds of critters have been spotted chowing down that free buffet, especially at night.

So we brought up the issue with the landlord and the neighbor, hoping that she can at least stop putting food out during the night so that we don’t have to run into one of those “wild” animals accidentally. And of course the buffet service continued 24×7.

Fast forward a few months to a few days ago. We heard some rumblings at our kitchen door. At first we thought they were squirrels. On went the kitchen light, and we saw a skunk strolling by the door, heading towards the 24-hour buffet. Left behind was its wonderful perfume that all animals enjoy so much. We thought a smelly car interior was bad (which thankfully is now gone), now the entire freaking house smelled like rotten eggs. Added to that was the hot, humid Californian summer, which meant we couldn’t just close the doors… Good thing that smell was all gone within a couple of days though.

This incident alone probably isn’t a big deal. But also consider that our neighbor has been lovingly utilizing the public servants by calling the San Jose Police Department for every incident that she can report on — this neighborhood has never seen police so frequently until she moved in. And adding fuel to the fire, she’s been trespassing other neighbors’ properties in order to track down other stray cats in an attempt to “rescue” them, and in the process, pissing off a lot of people in the neighborhood. What’s more, she told one of the neighbors to “get back to wherever they came from because America is only for the White people.” Once she even told Grace, “I don’t know what your people do in your country. But in America, animals have rights.” Um, hadn’t she noticed that we also have two freaking cats?

Anyway, basically the entire neighborhood is having an uprising against her, protesting to our landlord and begging her to take action. And as Californian housing law would have it, it’s extremely difficult to kick out tenants. But my hearty email did her in (using the “parenting” perspective that she knows so well… the angle was — wild animals have serious public health consequences, especially when a two-year-old is in the vicinity; by ignoring our repeated requests, she’s putting my child in danger — animals might have rights, but my son comes first and foremost).

So the entire neighborhood can rejoice once she’s kicked out in 90 days. She still threatens to come back and feed the critters if she has to. But we’ll let the cops deal with her when she trespasses (ironically, her son is also a cop).

Unfortunately now she’s one bitter bitch old lady. Every chance she gets, she’ll pounce on us by hiding behind the screen doors and try to engage us in a war of words. Though we find the act spooky and unsettling (almost to the point of stalking), mostly we just ignore her and walk on by. I also bought a bottle of animal repellent that should also help to keep animals from coming (though I think I bought the wrong type… we will see how effective this is).

So this is how our summer is going to end. Good times.

Email Bermuda

It used to be that when you send someone an email, you get a reply. But it seems like people are taking emails for granted more and more these days. I’d send someone an email and not hear from that person on the subject matter ever again — no replies, no thoughts on the subject, not even a quick one liner — as if the email has gone to the abyss of the Internet.

I haven’t decided what the proper etiquette is for replying emails (though one would think actually replying would be a good start). But now I’ve adopted the same etiquette for those who never reply — I simply read their emails and sit on them until inquired about. This may not be the best way to communicate. But I just don’t want to be the sucker who replies every time there’s a request for something while mine go unanswered. Sorry, jerks… 😉

When Another Parent Physically Disciplines Your Child

Something unthinkable happened this week…

Grace took Bryan to hang out with a couple of other mothers and their children earlier this week. Kids being kids (god, especially boys), they are bound to get rough with each other from time to time. And when they are as young as two, their lack of impulsive control simply overwhelms their feeble minds and their bodies sometimes muscle over their intentions.

So what happened? While having fun with a younger girl at the play date, Bryan bit her. When the girl screamed and started her flood of tears, Grace took her time and tried to find out what happened and attempted to pull Bryan aside to talk to him about this mischievous behavior. This was when the little girl’s mom swooped by Bryan’s side, yelled at him for being such a bully and heavily smacked Bryan by the arm — all without even finding out what happened or giving Grace a chance to take control of the situation.

Needless to say, Grace was really pissed. But she chose to hold back on the anger and came back to discuss the issue with me. And quite frankly, I was dumbfounded and shocked to hear that someone would go as far as overstepping another parent’s authority and spank someone else’s child like that.

We are very disappointed and frustrated with this individual and her lack of understanding of early childhood development (though she claims she knows a thing or two and brags about it [ahem, see my previous entry]). Does she have an EQ of a toddler or something? Brian offered the explanation that maybe she was overstressed and that was the tipping point for her. Brian argued that maybe she felt remorseful about what she’d done.

But later we found out that this woman has been announcing to everyone we know, well, basically about how Bryan, a two year-old child, is a prick and bullied her sweetest, most lovely, wonderful and adorable, sugar pie angel. Now, to be fair and to put things in perspective, with Bryan’s other regular play dates/play groups, Bryan’s considered the “calm” one — the one who gets picked on all the time. But let’s suppose Bryan was the “excitable” one, what gives the right to one parent spanking someone else’s child?

I wish her good luck with her own child with her involuntary spanking and frequent threats to spanking her (at barely one year old). And one can only hope that her daughter will never ever bite, scratch, kick or hit another child, EVER. And of course, constant threats to spanking and physical discipline always improves moral, self-confidence and repress violence. That’s why death penalties work so freaking well against crime, eh?