Kiln House and Stables

Scotland

Behind on Posting

Yes. I'm really behind. Look for more photos from my summer travels soon.  Coming up: Scotland, London, English Countryside, the Sierras...

Summer Sailing

Retouching Eyes

Okay, so I am going to take some portraits soon, so I'm practicing my Photoshop enhancing.  I used this really good eye retouching tutorial: Eye Retouching Tutorial and just pumped up the contrast and whites and blacks a little bit.

P.S.  The image came from this blog: souvenirs.  It's kind of cool.  Much prefer this stylized beauty to the nearly pornographic stuff passing as visually intriguing on fffound.com these days.

Home

Yesterday, I was filming a triathlon held on a military base to raise money for the families of service members killed or wounded in action.  It was an important day, the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  It got me thinking about what home is about. 

Home is the place you love, the place you hate.  The place you seek to find, and the place you try to escape.  The boring, prosaic, mundane, insipid place you long for after a long journey in another land.  The place you sometimes want to claim with pride, and the place that can make you feel deeply ashamed. 

Dorothy’s Kansas, Ray’s Georgia.  Perhaps it’s some clannish instinct to feel an emotional connection to a geographic community rather than a group of people that share common interests, which the Internet Age is supposedly bringing together, but I think that it encourages us to recognize, that because we live next door to one another, we naturally share interests: the well-being of ourselves and those around us. 

It is our responsibility to maintain it.  It is for us to keep the hearth fires burning and winter at bay.

Great Films You Might Have Missed on Netflix Instant: WTF Netflix

Okay, I know this is kind of late to be complaining about this because we heard about Netflix changing their prices a couple of months ago, but WTF!!  I went from thinking this was a great deal and a great company with good customer service, to wondering whether I should cancel all or part of my subscription.  When it cost around $11 or $12 for one-at-a-time blu-rays or dvds AND streaming, I was happy to subscribe to both.  I used the streaming to explore different films and make my list of cool stuff you might have missed because it was foreign, or indie, or just not marketed well.  Now it's just ridiculous.  The same services costs $18 and I'm sitting here trying to figure out if I should cancel the streaming or the dvd/blu-ray service and I can't decide.  If I cancel dvd/blu-ray, I can't watch most of the movies I actually WANT to watch.  If I cancel the streaming, I won't "waste" dvds on movies that might not be good, thus limiting my exploring and taking chances on indie flicks.  Basically, it really sucks for those indie filmmakers that depended on this tacked-on streaming service to get people to watch their stuff.  I can see people cancelling the streaming service now, simply because most people are convinced the selection was not very good.  I guess they weren't making money, but I'm looking for other options now.  Maybe Amazon or maybe some other purely on-demand service.  It will be more expensive per viewing, but it might be worth it.  I doubt I'm getting my money's worth from Netflix now.

Del Mar Evening

Experimenting with Shutter Speed in the City That Never Sleeps

Incident at Times Square

Mirah

I don't take portraits very often, but when I get together with my best friend Mirah, who has a budding photography business in New York City, we tend to go on photographic expeditions.  Last time we were together in Austin, she took my portrait, and during my recent visit to New York, I took hers.  See her blog, Mirah Curzer Photography, for her post of my portraits.

NYC- Testing my new HTC Thunderbolt Camera

Not bad for a phone camera, no more hipstamatic, but it's worth the upgrade.

Getty Museum