The best photo I’ve ever taken

So, I’ve been doing photography as both a hobby and side profession for about five years now. I’m sometimes asked what my best photograph is. Longtime Herald Times readers will no-doubt be familiar with my photograph of the Monroe County courthouse with a lightning strike in the background. Without a doubt, it’s the most visited photo on my smugmug account and I heard a bizarre story about a friend happening upon a conference in Las Vegas where a speaker from the Pacific Northwest was using it in a powerpoint slide.

So, yeah. You might think that’s my favorite. But it isn’t.

I’m rather fond of this photograph of an American flag hanging in a window of a closed up shop in Madison,Indiana. Being in the downtown, it signified the simultaneous American dream of small business ownership, and the American collective choice to destroy that dream by ignoring Main Street and buying in the outlying “shopping donut”.

But that’s not my favorite photo either.

I constantly go back to this shot of Bok Tower in Florida. The clouds were a beautiful contrast to the deep blue hue of the sky. The tower itself is an interesting story, rising so gloriously out of the Florida flatlands, looking misplaced amongst the sprawl and neatly trimmed lawns. The angle of the photograph makes it look ever more impressive, and the duo-tone treatment I gave the photograph provides a very distinct contrast that both obscures and highlights the treeline in the lower right. The tower is purposefully cropped off the top edge to give the impression that there’s more to it.

I take pride in all three of these images. They’re all fine photographs that (to me anyway) deserve to be listed in my top ten favorite images. But none of them carries the same weight, or the same meaning as the following image.

Technically, it’s not that interesting of a photograph. The ISO is pushed way too high and the framing is off on the original shot. I added some strong vignetting in the corners to focus attention to the middle of the shot. I had to punch the colors up and correct them a bit because the tungsten lighting rendered a bit too yellow-ish. It’s sharp, but it could be better.

But, it’s clearly, the most important image in my collection. The subject: my 3-minute old daughter who opened her eyes for the first time to see me and grab my hand. I can’t think of a more pleasing image than that in all the stock photo archives, art museums, and online galleries in the world….

 

A fresh coat of paint for the dining room

As part of my effort to be productive this weekend. I decided to finally paint the dining room. We chose a very pleasing golden base coat when we built our house, so we haven’t felt a pressing need to slap more color on the walls. We’d talked about doing blue or purple in the dining room for a while. In the end, we went with purple- two shades, to be exact.

It went fairly well, though Laura really had to spend all her time keeping Olivia entertained. So, it was a one-man job. At first, I was really worried that the room was going to start needing some unicorns on the walls to complement the pastel-y purple colors. Was beginning to look a bit like a girls room. But after the paint dried, and we moved the furniture back in, it looks quite good.

One note: we have one entire blank wall that we’re reserving for a future upright piano purchase. That may be a year or two off, so we have to brainstorm temporary configurations. It definitely needs a wide painting or photo. I proposed tonight that I work up a black and white panoramic shot of downtown Bloomington. Thinking of something like this old shot I did last year, but with a more interesting sky.

Bloomington from 7th and Walnut Garage (stitched from multiple images)

 

3:47AM Veep announcement? Really?

Someone should be fired. Seriously. The Obama campaign has been gifted with all this media attention over the past week about his pick. It’s talked about everywhere. And for the first time in history, people are waiting on text messages to get the announcement. We’re hovering over our phones, waiting for that nectar of press release.

So, the natural thing to do?

Send the damn thing while most of America is sleeping! Of course: send it at 3:47AM (by my phone’s time) so people either miss it and feel left out of the glee of hearing the news, or wake up and get pissed they weren’t part of the shared experience. In my case it’s both. I woke up when it came in, and ignored the message. It’s not like my life depended on this or anything, but I’m just amazed at how stupid its timing was, given the opportunity. They don’t get to capitalize on the online posting rush. Instead, I’m sitting here typing how badly they screwed up.

I follow an NBC News Cameraman, Jim Long, on twitter. He’s been camped out at Biden’s house for three days now waiting for an announcement. It’s been amusing to see his updates about the boredom of speculatory journalism. Even he wrote this morning: “back at Biden’s. txt came in while i was asleep!”

A friend pointed out some current speculation that the Obama camp was thinking of holding off on the announcement until next week since they felt they already had a really good thing going with the McCain “Number of Houses” gaffe (which is totally, illegitimate, IMO, and should be dropped immediately). The concern was that they were going to get such good press and attention out of this VP announcement that they would be crowding too many good things together. I never, for a second, thought they would have actually moved the announcement, but it does highlight the attitude that this VP announcement is viewed as a huge opportunity for a bump in the polls. So, why waste the opportunity to send the text message at a rational time.

Ah, the silly things we didn’t have to worry about in the last election.

 

PLX Kiwi

This is pretty cool. I’ve been saying for years that all cars should come standard with a big readout that says how much gas you’ve spent (and how much money that translates to) for every trip you take. I’m a big data-nut, so I may get one of these, or a ScanGauge II some day. The only thing I could think that would make these better would be a USB port to dump the data off to my computer so I can archive and visualize it.

 

Changed the blog address

I’m horrible at picking blog names. I sit and sit and think and think about something witty. I finally impress myself enough to move ahead only to realize I was riding a “blog name” high and am not witty at all. There are people that are genetically engineered to come up with the slickest blog names. Laura has always wanted me to go with “Opinions Vary” from our favorite schlock film: Road House.

I’m going to stick with “Citizen Bloomington” from now on. Yeah, not all the content is going to be about Bloomington. But what if this sucker goes Hollywood someday? I’ll be throwing down down triple latte machiatos (whatever the hell those are) with Wilmer Valderrama and that dude from the “Transformers Movie” and “Indiana Jones versus The Aliens” at a Starbucks in Beverly Hills, all the while acknowledging my humble roots and the people who were jealous of my rise to the top. I just hope that George Lucas’ digital version of Me is less chunky and more hunky. (if audiences can handle it, that is)

So, I’ve strayed off topic. The blog name has changed, fool. Did you really need to read this to figure that out?