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Here In Oakland

Art & Life


   



May 22, 2013

Follow Through
Wednesday. To bed again at a decent hour, but up a couple of times during the night for a bathroom run, whatever side I'd been sleeping on aching. I suspect it's the aching side and not the bladder that awakens me at night, not sure how that can be cured.

Off to breakfast and back on another sunny morning, running a little later than usual having overslept by a good forty-five minutes. Fed the meter, had breakfast over the papers, left taking a photo or two of the pandorea blossoms and came home as I always come home in the early mornings. What to me and perhaps thee is, at least, an early morning.

We'll get in our walk, we'll take a picture or two, maybe cart the 80-400mm lens over to the lake to see if I can't take a better picture than I've managed so far, otherwise something will come up and we'll go with it (after an interminable internal debate).

Later. A lie down for thirty minutes on the bed because I was tired before snapping the long lens on the camera and walking over to the lake, coming upon the goslings and their minders right at the start. OK. Pictures of the goslings (counting the full eighteen: good), a walk on farther to come across a Snowy egret and then a Great egret not far beyond. Good, I finally nailed one with a small fish in its beak.

Back to the apartment to screw around with the pictures before heading out again (taking the 24-120mm lens, this time) to take a bus downtown. The day is nice, why not? Couldn't think of a thing I really wanted to do or anything I wanted to eat, but I went by the ATM and then on to Peet's for coffee and a cookie, back then to the City Center to sit at another table (eating a box of Good & Plenty, two servings of sugar in under an hour) and then to head off down Telegraph, turning at the Sears store over to Broadway and then on home.

And that was lunch? A cookie and a box of licorice candy?

Allows me now to have a proper dinner as I consciously crossed the street to avoid adding an ice cream cone to the damage at the 7-11 look-alike store. Sensible, don't you think? Yes?

Evening. Well, what to say? It's evening. Nothing on television. Spent the time working on a set of photographs from one of the old Carnaval parades that have been showing me I need to get a lot better in Photoshop. An overcast day, the day they were taken, so they have muted colors, but they shouldn't be quite so dark and muted as I managed to make them when I processed them for the web. So I've been now and again fixing one or two. And they're still not right.

Maybe it's just you're better at both taking them (focus, depth of field, position of the sun and such) and now in processing them, so you can tell the difference when you go back and look.

Maybe. But I need to develop some kind of internal standard candle I can use for comparisons. Which means I may have to go through one of these How To Use Photoshop books I'm so good at buying and then putting up on a shelf without taking them down and, you know, reading. Studying. More than checking out chapter one. The basics.

Otherwise to bed again soon at a decent hour, start again tomorrow. Carnaval is coming up this weekend and I've started taking pictures now during the week with some enthusiasm. We'll do our hup, hups! and carry on.

Or stop all the hup, hup! crap and actually follow through.

The photo up top was taken of a cormorant in a tree out on an island in the Lake Merritt bird sanctuary with a Nikon D4 mounted with an 80-400mm f 4.5-5.6 VR Nikkor lens.


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