The Time Sink

Okay, Brad called Shelley from camp, and it looks like he'll survive. ...and Shelley? She's over in Monterey with her dad chillin' and watching the sea otters at the aquarium.

Has it only been a day? Sheesh, how time flies when you're taking the neighborhood to summer school, working, doing driver's ed, shopping, yard working and ... oh, yes, eating pizza!!!!!

One of the side 'benefits' of driver's ed here is listening to the current crop of hard core rock music as we travel hither and yon (house rules state the driver controls the radio) and finding a gem here and there (not too different from my heyday; gems seemed rare then too <g>). Currently air play is going to a re-release of Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T's...

What I found refreshing about the piece was the realization that lyricists were still writing 'plain old love songs', simple and set to an acoustic guitar. Sample lyrics:

Hey there Delilah
What's it like in New York City?
I'm a thousand miles away
But girl tonight you look so pretty
Yes you do
Times Square can't shine as bright as you
I swear it's true

Kinda' "old fashioned", -no? ...but in the course of Googling about to get those lyrics, I found out the song was about a real Delilah. Now that is really cool! Okay, so she didn't like the guy, but hey...

No post...

Everyone is home safely. Brad's back from camp and looks like he's been up the entire week; water and rest are prescribed! Shelley and her dad are back and she'd leave in a heartbeat to go look at the sea and river otters for another eight hours (it seems to be something like those old VCR tapes that show a fireplace?). Regardless, she can get her daily fix here...

Yes, yesterday was seventeen years. ...add in the seven years we dated ... carry the one... yeah, it's been a while.

Photo notes on that shot at the restaurant linked on Friday: Low light, incandescent ceiling fixtures (dimmed, "back room" effect) and table "candles" (oil lamps). The photo was about twenty feet away, lit by a single spot (narrow focus, wide slit mask). The camera was the belt cam, 'stabilized' on the table. The resulting jpeg was noisy and grainy, but did capture the effect of the lighting well enough: the question the photographers who've seen the place have is whether the lighting in the photos hung there comes from the way they've used slit masks on the spots or if it's the original lighting of the photograph itself. I'm saying they're matched up and that's why they are all so striking.

So, a grainy, noisy jpeg rather than the usual RAW? ...but you can still pull the mood where the shot was taken: into Lightroom for some tone and color temperature work, into LightZone to relight the photo and take the wall behind it down until all that is left is a hint), then into Elements for processing with Noiseware to smooth things out. ...and a trip into DreamyFilter to blur the entire shot. Drop the size from 3000 pixels to my standard 625 width and I think I can evoke the feel of a mellow dinner for two.

Mellow day... We spent the afternoon over at the boys' godmother's place in celebration of Shelley's forty-mumble birthday last week and our seventeenth anniversary Friday. Yeah, some good friends and the afternoon talking after lunch. I think I'm about talked out though: you know that bit about males only having 7000 words (or some such) per day? I'm done.

Photo notes: the Skyway shot was taken with the small camera on the way home. The cloud density in the area closest to the sun was of such a nature as to provide a shadow to the entire length of the cloud. Interesting effect...

Click image for larger version

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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