Voter apathy

Well, the public has spoken. I was going to give you a month to vote – like India’s rolling elections, but I guess 6 votes is all I’m gonna get. So without further ado, an updated photo of the painting*:

That was the work I did on the background, way back on Sat April 18th.
And on the 19th I worked on the jeans and jacket:

It's coming along nicely. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to work on it since that weekend. The 25th was the day Kyle and I attended a photo class at the California Automobile Museum**. Then I promptly got sick for several days. This past Saturday was the cow patty wedding. And yesterday... well, I don't really remember yesterday. But I didn't get a chance to paint. And I won't be painting next weekend either since it seems we're going coastal again. So, I'm feeling kinda twitchy about the whole thing. I hate losing my momentum. Especially when I'm faced with painting the hair. I'm dreading the hair.


* Sorry P. You were out-voted 5-1. Next time do a bit of campaigning for your cause!

** That was a lot of fun! Kyle discovered the joy of using a tripod -my tripod- and got all the good shots! I've put Lightroom on Kyle's computer and now I need to show him how to use it. Photos coming to flickr soon. Well, probably in a couple weeks. You know how it is...

100 Proof

I was going through some photos in Lightroom and I realized that I never followed up with how that Mather Golf Course Second Saturday event went... probably because not much came of it. The morning was cold and windy, there wasn't much foot traffic besides the other vendors, and I only sold one print- a framed 5x7 I pulled off my office wall to use as an example piece on the table. Speaking of my table, here's how it turned out:

and here is a shot with my fancy new canvas print rack full of all the prints I made.

Pretty slick eh? Well, I'll be ready if I ever decide to do that again. In the meantime, I've got a lot of prints for sale. Call me!

Moving on...

Did you hear that little birdie* announce that I've started painting again? It's true. 2 weekends ago I finally started a new canvas. It has been around 2 years since I've painted! And I know you are going to jump to the easy assumption that I blame the baby**, but I don't. That was all Chris's fault!** ok ok it wasn't really Chris's fault. The painting muse was on an extented vacation, but now she's back!

Day One - put a wash on the canvas and started sketching in all those damn limbs!

Day Two - blocking in the color.

Kyle thinks it's done. Silly rabbit - not even close! I missed working on it last weekend as we were in Santa Cruz for Easter and birthdays! There was Chris's b-day on the 2nd to celebrate and Erin's on the 13th. Yep, the baby is now 2! I just got the pics off my camera. I'll post those photos "soon". I've got a couple other things to finish up first. Remember, patience is a virtue!


* Twitter baby. Keep up.

** The running joke around here is that I'm just too damn happy to paint. Tortured artist and all that...

Progress. It's what's for dinner.

or Progress. The other white meat. I couldn't decide.

I hate having to push the picture of Erin-in-the-hood down the page, but life moves on. And so does this blog. Albeit at a much slower pace. But hey! Tomorrow is that thing. The Second Saturday Event at Mather Golf Course that has been ruining my life for the past month and a half. Besides adding the rest of the price tags to the prints, finding my folding chair in the garage, withdrawing cash from the bank for change (which I better well need!), and packing the rest of my stuff – I am done. I think.

I talked to Sharon yesterday afternoon. Told her that at this point in time, I no longer feel the need to cause her physical pain. Although, Chris might, when he goes to balance the checkbook and sees how much money I have spent on this affair! And then I told her that while I was not necessarily looking forward to Saturday, I wasn’t dreading it either. Yup, that’s as much as I was willing to give her. She who finagled-tricked-hoodwinked me into this gig. And she’s already talking about next month! Um, lets wait and see how tomorrow goes first eh?

Hmm. All this brings me back to thoughts of trying to sell prints on-line. I was toying with the idea at the beginning of the year and doing some research into Etsy.com. Going that route, I would post the items for sale, and do the printing and shipping myself. Another option is Imagekind. For them, I would create a gallery (up to 24 images) and they would handle the rest; printing, shipping even framing. Which seems like a no-brainer. Except it’s not. The big problem is aspect ratios. Good god how I hate the whole concept of aspect ratios. The skinny is that my camera’s sensor creates a picture that has the same aspect ratio of a 4x6 print. Now if you go and make an 8x10 print of that file, you are cropping off A LOT of the picture as I had intended it to be! Because I frame my shots in camera. So, using Imagekind puts my photos at risk of unwanted cropping whenever someone orders an innocent 8x10 print. 99% of my photographs do not work at 8x10inchs. The stuff that would be cropped off needs to be there! Ugh. Now I want to hurt someone again. Maybe a mathematician (or Chris). I knew I was correct in blaming math for all my woes.

Oh. I apologize. I spoke too soon. In going to their website to create the above link, I found out that Imagekind “will never change the aspect ratio of your image (the ratio between height and width) or arbitrarily crop your images.” Well, that changes everything. I’ll probably start there and save Etsy for a later date. Depends on how many prints I end up bringing back home tomorrow afternoon.

And I’m not going to edit the above paragraph about Imagekind and aspect ratios because that rant about aspect ratios has been a long time coming! That is why I had to cut so many damn custom mats for tomorrow’s event. When the hell are the mat-makers that supply Michael’s and Aaron Bros going to get on the 3:2 aspect ratio band-wagon?! Half the world is shooting with cameras that have this size image sensor. Make us mats that fit our pictures! Must I do all the work?!

Damn.

Lidsville - Street Punk Edition

If you encounter this baby in a dark alley - run the other way. That baby will mess you up! At the very least, she'll steal your hat.*

This hat used to be mine. I bought it in Fort Bragg several years ago. I gave it to Kyle last year to take camping. At some point Erin got her hands on it and won't give it back. That's cool. I'm not gonna try and take it away from her - have you heard her scream?! I've got another hat.

I took these photos on a Saturday morning - this is how the baby kicks it around the casa.

So, I was going to tell you about Sharon and why she should pay for my suffering. Well, somehow she managed to get me to agree to be a vendor at Mather Golf Course's Second Saturday Event on March 14th. omfg. How did that happen? I don't drink, so I wasn't drunk. Why would I agree to such a thing? Selling my photographers? Sure, it sounds so simple. Wrong. It is a major pain in my ass! And it will probably be the death of me. Or a small part of me. Hey, I'm definitely losing sleep over it! I'm not even going to tell you about the traumas I am having over printing these photos. Then there are the logistics of displaying the prints. And at some point I'm going to have to figure out pricing! I am so going to kick Sharon in the shin the next time I see her. Damn it! She was just here on Saturday and not only did I NOT kick her, we fed her abalone, and then I took photos of her (106!) so she would have a new profile pic for freakin' Facebook! Ugh. Now, I'm really mad. I made her look good, and I'm sitting here having heart palipitations while some Canon bigwig is buying another Mercedes on my dime!

Ok, maybe it is time for a little yoga break. While I go stand on my head, you can ponder the cuteness of the Bean. In this shot she looks just like Chris!

* She's also been known to sticky-finger a cell-phone out of a purse without anyone noticing. Next up: Mug shots!

I want to verse you

You heard that little birdy right - my new photo site is up and running. It took several days of downloads, databases, mySQLs, phps, uploads via FTPs, and several small sacrafices to Al Gore, but I did it. So, without further ado, I give you -

dawnblanchfield.com!

Sure, there are only a few photos there now, but I've got a whole second hard-drive full of images, so I'll try to add one a day for awhile. Of course there will always be flickr for you baby-viewing needs. In fact, after a few more 4th of July beach shots, there is quite the run of family photos to be uploaded. Including before and after shots of Paul's head.

And speaking of haircuts, I did a few more things this weekend. There was the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk on Saturday morning in Old Town Sacramento. That was alot of fun and I met some very cool people. I'll have those shots up on Flickr by next Tuesday. And when I got home I did this!

Kyle on the first day of Middle School:

Kyle after I gave him a haircut:
Yes, I cut Kyle's hair. And I think I did a pretty good job of it. Of course, Kyle thinks it's too short. But after what I went through before the haircut (I don't want to talk about it) he is lucky he has any hair left at all! Hey, I had even forgotten that he had eyebrows.

So, regarding Me vs. my To-Do list, the tally is:
Me: 3.5 tasks completed (I finished my dad's cd, but still haven't mailed it)
To-Do List: 2.3 million things left to do. The bulk of that being laundry of course. And hey, my Fall Semester starts tomorrow so yeah... I'd best get going.

I miss Communism

Laissez-faire capitalism has ruined my posture.

I am still reading Shock Doctrine and it is unsurprisingly making me crazy. I don’t even know what to do with this information. I shouldn’t read it before bed – Chris would most likely say that I shouldn’t be reading it at all. He’s probably right. My brain starts spinning round and then getting to sleep becomes impossible. I got up and tried to do some yoga, but all I could do was sit there slouching. That’s bad. So, here I am. I really need to go back to reading Chekov.

You gotta keep ‘em separated

Tomorrow morning Kyle has student orientation at his new school. I have been so busy this last week that I haven’t even had a chance to think about the fact that on Tuesday Kyle will be starting Junior High! Oh right, they call it Middle School here. Whatever Kyle. He’ll be in 6th grade and in Lincoln that means Middle School, with the 7th and 8th graders. But we have been assured, repeatedly, that they keep the 6th graders separated from the older kids. And after Kyle came back from his SoCal vacation, where he spent a week camping with a group of older cousins, that isolation is now looking mighty good. Because while ‘Don’t be a fool, wrap your tool’ is good advice, learn it – live it, it’s not something I want to be hearing from my 11 year old!

Hey, speaking of school…

My semester ended last week. I got an A. And I don’t want to sound like a complete braggart, but I got a 99.3% and I’m pretty damn proud of myself. It's getting harder by the day to deny it when Chris calls me a geek. The fall semester starts on the 25th and I’m taking Web Programming II which uses that same 5lb book. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m having a hard time not starting early on the next chapter. I really am sick and twisted. So to keep myself occupied between classes, I’ve been focusing on photography projects. I have finished the cd of photos for my dad, and have finally made a decision on web hosting and will start working on my new photo-blog this week. Finally. I am also trying to meet the deadline for this year’s Utata’s Big Project. I’ve got plenty of photos but the writing part of the Photo-journalism project is gonna be tough. As you can see, I’ve got nothing to say.

Too Cool for School

Not.

In fact I’m going to summer school!
And it’s all Chris’s fault.

He was looking at welding classes at Sierra College one afternoon so I started to peruse the class schedule myself thinking it would be great to take another photography class. I took several photography classes at Ventura College many many years ago and I loved it! Black & White Film – way back when before digital was even a pipe-dream and dinosaurs still roamed the earth. I loved working in the darkroom and experimenting with double exposures, solarizing prints etc. The only reason I stopped taking photography classes was a problem I had with one of the instructors. I won’t bother going into details but I will say that I politely declined to smoke a peace pipe with him at the end of the semester. So, I didn’t take another class with him but took a painting class instead. And now this lovely trip down memory lane has distracted me… where was I? Oh yes, discovering that the Fall Semester photography classes were only one evening a week. That sounded doable. There was even a Saturday morning class. Chris was all for it. So I hopped on-line and applied for admission to Sierra College. But the Fall Semester start until August. I started wondering what classes I could take over the summer. I found a Web Programming I (HTML & CSS) on-line course – hey why not? (Again, Chris said I should do it. He totally supports me going back to school to finish getting my degree. Which is great, but I don’t know how he is going to convince me to finally take that Speech class. Good luck with that buddy.)

So, I signed up. Class starts next Monday. And after buying the text book – which has to weigh at least 20 pounds!! – I’ve now spent 130 dollars to learn the same things I have been teaching myself for the past few months with a library book! Which had an out of pocket cost of $0. No I ask you - is that smart? Maybe I really do need to go back to school.