Today's walk report: 052313

Music...

iPod Nano, 2nd gen.

Today I headed out the door at 5:04 PM. I don't usually know exactly what time I'm leaving but I did today. This because I hit "shuffle play" on my iPod right as I was stepping over the threshold to the front door and... no battery. So back to the office for a different iPod... no
battery there either.

iPod Touch.

That's a 2nd gen. iPod Touch and I'd use that on a regular basis because for one it sounds distinctly better than the nano but it's clumsy. The nano, I don't have to look at, I can navigate the menu for the most part in my pant's pocket--odd as it may look at times. Anyway, that goes on charge #2.

iHome Alarm clock.

Then I stared at the 3rd iPod.... grrr... I don't even know why I keep it. It says fully charged always. It's plugged into my alarm clock. I don't use an alarm clock anymore and have almost never needed one. I'm one of those people who just wakes up when it's time to get up. As soon as you try and negotiate a song on the thing it says it has no battery. Go figure. At least I didn't pay for it. It's a 30GB "Classic" and it was an "award" from Apple. I think I sold a bazillion $$ worth of Apple stuff and I got an iPod. Actually, I got a few of them. My suspicions are the alarm clock and the constant draining and charging of the thing messed something up but I can't prove that. Well, at least not without risking another iPod.

Meanwhile, my regular, trusty faithful iPod nano, 2nd gen. (2004) sits on charge. I gave it 20 minutes and we we're gone. I had a tiny bit of battery to spare when I got home. The walk was good. I felt empowered to keep going but I was fairly certain it would be without music.

All this to say... Music is really an important aspect of my walks (and the supermarket.) I cannot begin to convey how aggravating it is to have an iPod die with even just 1 km left in the walk. The sudden shift into reality, the sound of traffic, even though I was aware of it before, becomes almost overwhelming. The endorphins which kicked in during the 1st km seem to instantly fade away. The walk becomes boring and painful. The agony!

Now... I'd like to add something from the current playlist, however, embedding videos has been broken here for awhile... let's try... Oh boy... LOOK! Strip The Soul. Porcupine Tree, live at Tilburg.

Music is the BEST!

Today's walk report: 052213

One of those days...

The first time I woke up this morning was in a sweat at 3:45 after hearing someone cry out that a first strike had occurred. I really thought I heard this shouted from outside. Israel had unleashed a nuclear bomb on Iran. Crazy huh? But in my groggy state here's how it made sense. First, yesterday morning while scanning news articles to read with morning coffee I came across this. Meanwhile, I live with Persians on 3 sides of me. It would be a perfectly normal reaction for them to cry out in such a manner with loved ones back in Iran. I can hear my neighbors next door clearly right now.

So there was that, a disturbing start for today even though I was able to get back to sleep. Aside from that I had a pretty sucky day... sucky... or is it suckie? My day sucked. I won't bore you.

Heading into walk time my house was 10º warmer than it was outside and that 10º meant uncomfortable so I decided to leave early instead of suffer inside. The walk was a bitch too though. How many of you know how far 8.78 km (5.46 miles) is when you're on foot? Raise your hands... How many even know when you're in your car? What's that far away from you right now? Anyway, I was definitely in a pattern. What I looked forward to and ended up thinking about other than the music I was listening to throughout the walk was dinner. I just had a rather healthy bowl of spaghetti, no meat. Thank you.

I'm going to relax now, watch something fun on the boob tube, make a couple of fresh Toll House cookies and pour a cold glass of milk. That should erase the day.

Peace.

Today's walk report: 052113 (sort of)

Once upon a time...

I mentioned in my "introductory" post some of the evolution of the walk report, it transitioning to this blog, etc. The walk report was just a title for something I've been doing in some form or another for years and that's reporting both interesting and not so interesting things I observed on my daily constitutional. I've carried a camera with me for the most part since at least 1999 when I bought a Polaroid not even 1 megapixel digital camera for less than $100. However, the walk as a regular thing, probably didn't get in full swing until late 2000.

Looking back...

I usually started from here, although at times would drive somewhere nearby because I had a destination, a purpose, that would make the journey far too long. This is the apartment complex I lived in for nearly 14 years in the beautiful neighborhood of Windsor Square in Los Angeles. The red dot marks the location of my apartment. It was ALMOST far enough away from the swimming pool.

However, I walked this neighborhood for close to 7 years prior to those 14 when I lived in this house nearby. It just wasn't part of a habitual exercise plan. Hey! There's my son probably rushing off to his new job... Oh wait... I just had that conversation with him on the phone, moments ago. Yeah, he's in college now and has a first "real" job coming up tomorrow. Where did the time go? The 70 rose bushes I nursed back to life when we 1st moved in, front of the house there, are all gone now too.

We had a little deli/restaurant/Italian market on this street for years. Larchmont is a throwback street to the old studio days in early Hollywood. Laurel and Hardy films along with the Keystone Cops, etc. were shot on and near Larchmont Blvd.

There's the shop now and LOOK! It's that kid again! Yes, his name is Alessio. It was cute when he was 4-5 and told people he was the owner. 7-8, not so cute anymore.  I had already gone on to do new things when the place was sold in the late 90s. I did, however, sneak there one night before the new owners fully took over and grabbed that hanging sign for my boy. A lot of people in the hood knew me from the shop. Alessio's got to be pretty popular. Toward my end there I was counting over 200 in store transactions, mostly lunch, plus catering to the studios, etc. We also would cater special events at times exceeding 1,000 people. I learned a lot on that gig.

Frequent cleb customers were, Vincent Schiavelli, James Remar, Vince Vaughn, Adam Goldberg, Alexis Arquette, Joanna Cassidy (always right at closing for a piece of fresh buffalo mozzarella), George Takei, Fran Drescher, a bunch of Star Trek: Voyager people and early on some of the Frasier cast. Plus a bunch of people I can't think of right now.

Happy Days house 1974-1984

One of the more famous houses in the hood. This was the Happy Days house. Anybody hearing Rock Around The Clock in their head right now?

A little creepier, at least for some (Happy Days was pretty creepy for me)... The house used for the films Willard and also Ben. These were films about a rats used for revenge and other disturbing stuff.

Willard (1977) & Ben (1972) house.

There were several other famous homes in the old hood too. The Dorothy Chandler home would be one. I don't know about the people named in that article but someone living in this house turned their sprinklers on me once. I had stopped on first step off the sidewalk to take a pebble out of my shoe and BAM. But here's the deal, it was a stream across the steps seen here from both directions. I later heard some story about how how they didn't like lookie-loos or some bullshit. I flipped off the camera. In fact I think I did that a few times walking by.

Houses being used for filming for both television and feature film was common. Almost too common. There were times I'd have to detour off my regular route and find as much as 1 mile to make up elsewhere at time because of filming. However that's rare because most of the time nothing is happening with hours of prep going into minutes of actual shooting. This shot was taken during an episode of the TV series, Monk in 2003. The woman standing near the foreground tree is in the backside driveway of the Los Angeles Mayor's home.

Filming the TV show Monk. Scenes like this can freak you out at 1st coming home from work.

Around 2006 I was trying to become better at drawing stuff on my computer and was also making a decision about buying Adobe Illustrator CS2 or CS3. I think I ended up buying CS3 in 2007. I also had an idea for a children's book at the time. That's part of the reason for the orange cat which bears some resemblance to my cat, Lucy. In fact I used a photo of Lucy's fur for the texture of the cat drawing. The last 2 houses were drawn with AI the first 2 were done with Adobe Imagestyler. I think I'm the only person who ever bought that.

Houses I drew.

Here's what the last house really looks like... Unfortunately I took the photo the day the lawn was prepped and fertilized in the fall. Quite some time after I drew this I printed a 4"x6" copy and put it in the owners mailbox. It had my contact information on it. I never heard back. I guess they weren't impressed.

There was also the official home of the Los Angeles Mayor which was unoccupied between 1993 and 2005, during the terms for mayors Richard Riordan and James Hahn. Hahn's successor, mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has been using the house since 2005 with some intervening marital complications. I had also started an AI drawing of the Getty House in 2008. When I was taking reference photos from the sidewalk one day the mayor, one of his daughters and a police officer were out jogging. He asked me what I was taking pictures for and was fine with my answer (again 1st amendment--please police departments get your heads around the 1st amendment.) The cop who was struggling with the jog however stopped to take my card. I never went too far with the drawing. However, one of my photos is posted for the Wikipedia entry on the house itself. Mayor Thomas Bradley lived their the longest, from 1977 to 1993. I used to see mayor Bradley on Larchmont with infrequently during his declining years. I'm not sure where he was living once he left office but I'll assume he was nearby. I had a lot of respect for Tom Bradley from the time I was in Jr. High.

The Getty House, official residence of the mayor of Los Angeles.

 Dogs... I had several dog friends over the years. Some of whom actively looked forward to my arrival everyday.

(The next two posts are supposed to be videos but apparently there's an issue loading videos on Blogger.com right now and the Google Blogger team says they're working on it... since May 8th.  Anyway, I put in images as placeholders for now.Yikes!)

These two were probably my favorites. We certainly had the longest relationship. He always would try to get me to reach in for whatever we were playing with but I never had that degree of trust. If I ever get the video up you'll see he ultimately gives back the slimy rubber bone so we can continue our game of fetch.

Later on these two showed up on the other end of the same street... Dino and Dinah, I think. Both of these houses are mansions--again, if I can ever get the videos up you'll see.

Then there was Bailey. He often liked to stop with no intention to move on. His owner who was a rather slender woman about my age, would have a very difficult time trying to deal with this. Turns out she was a highly respected ENT surgeon specializing, I believe, in pediatrics and was probably a very busy person. I helped Bailey along a few times and also corralled him once after he had slipped off his leash. He's actually on a leash in this picture but I removed it for the portrait and because I can.

I was going to show some of the old hood during Halloween decorations but the video thing kind of screwed me up. Windsor Square went ALL OUT for Halloween so maybe later once Blogger gets their act together. Yes, I did walk today and it was pretty down and dirty, no action so maybe this post was a good idea after all. I hope somebody enjoyed it. These were fond memories and I miss my old neighborhood.

Today's walk report: 052013

Another bang out the 8.78 km Monday walk and get it done. A late start and it was still about 87º when I headed out.

Today I was reflecting on this post from Saturday as I hustled along. I was on a Skype call this afternoon with my dear friend Bob and we talked about those photos and the process. That's a good thing for me to do even though I tend to see things hypercritically, passing harsh judgment on my work. It also makes me want to make excuses for my warts. For one, there's a time constraint. My walks are anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 hours, give or take. I don't typically time them but I do measure the distance. Stops in the garden or other collective photographic diversions on the days I go that direction are generally 30-40 minutes. That I know from camera data. By the time I get home I've got household stuff to do, make dinner, pay attention to my cat and do whatever's on my agenda for this time suck blog. Don't get me wrong, I like to do it, it's just a lot of work and little reward for the most part. I'm waiting for it to become the sum of its parts... or something. Saturday is not a typical example but I had 1,408 images to sort through, make selections, process and then post, plus the stuff I just mentioned--that was approximately 4 hours of stuff before I posted a partial on this blog. Basically I'm trying to do a good job while at the same time I'm banging this shit out. Aside from posting that at 12:04 A.M. silly me went for another hour+ preparing some images for the morning.

On top of that there's the level of merit. I'm not a photographer I'm a person who enjoys photography and I like to dabble in processes. Both production processes and post processes. If I've got something I think is really worth the time and the effort to be pixel perfect with I try to do that. If there's something I feel I can try to shoot again and do a better job I also make that effort. There's always room for improvement.

On my walk today I thought about my approach to all this balancing, good enough vs. perfection while trying to have fun and make things at least modestly entertaining for the average 12.58 daily viewers I've gotten so far since 041913. When I was critical of my work today it that criticism was used to ask myself how could I have done things better the next time, what types of images are lending themselves best for what I'm trying to accomplish, how can I make the process easier and less time consuming (hey, you never know when it might become a paid gig--time is money) and finally how can I better post-process if I decided the image warranted the time to do so. That last item is something I will do frequently just to sharpen my skills and validate my post process visualizing. I like to know that I can correct the flaws I see in my own work.

If you read this, I thank you.
PS, I just put the butterfly here to get your attention. The butterfly though is one of the images I took on Saturday which I asked myself how it could have been better. The solution there would have been one or two more images for the focus stack with the right antenna and the front edge of the perched upon leaf in focus... I was trying to do that but my model gave up on the gig.

Today's walk report: 051913

Okay, back to merely pointing the camera and pushing the button?
Maybe... with an exception or two.

Like this... I was sitting having a $1.75, 20 oz. vending machine ripoff bottle of Aquafina water when I took this. Sun's out, it was only 5:51 PM but I did an Auto Tone in Photoshop on the image and this is what I got. I kind of liked it so...

This guy practically flew right in my face before landing here.

I realized I almost never do normal, this is where I was snapshots. So here are a few pictures of the botanical garden I'm always visiting. The sun's coming down and hitting stuff rather sharply but it's what it is.

Right at the entrance.

The opposite side of the entrance. My shortcut to where the "action" is.

Straight ahead to the pond.

There's another side beyond this and in front of that distant building (classrooms) the section up there being the Australian natives area of the garden. Lots of eucalyptus. Did you know there are over  700 species of eucalyptus in Australia? Good thing the Koalas like them so much.

I tried two more focus stacked images since I had different lenses today. This 1st one of the yellow flower (Australian native section) is 14 images using a Canon 70-300mm, backed down to about 170mm with a Canon 500D close-up attachment. I tried this two ways. One manually adjusting the focus ring and two, leaning into the background to focus with finger on the shutter button. This was the leaning thing. The DOF is so narrow that we're only talking about moving 2 or 3" and since I was moving straight in it worked OK. By the time the background leaves come into focus the flower is grossly out of focus. Photo Blend has some trouble with that and I had some additional clean up to do once I cropped and flattened the stacked image.

This was a 6 shot stack at 300mm manually focused. I thought this came out pretty nice.

Passiflora edulis, space bar for bees.

Today's walk report: 051813

For the most part I played with trying to successfully hand hold my camera in an effort to focus stack images on my walk today. These were all shot with a Canon 60mm Macro on a breezy day. There's no image stabilization with this lens and I've only tried this a couple of times before. Much of what your see are manual "tweaks" in Photoshop re-aligning images and pretty much hoping for the best with Photoshop's automated processes to do this. While it's not very complicated, it could be. If I were to really dedicate myself to perfecting some of the inconsistencies and make up for subject and camera movement, etc., this whole exercise would have become a lot more tedious. In a way I welcome the fact that my images weren't exceptional enough to warrant the extra work and I will also welcome a time in which they are. For now I had some fun and learned some of the pitfalls and idiosyncrasies of this process. Aside from the post work aspect I ended up coming home with 1,408 images. A new walk time record.

For those of you who don't know what I mean by focus stacking here's the description Wikipedia provides. If you want to know more then Google it or click the links which are coming along for the ride on my copy/paste below.

Focus stacking (also known as focal plane merging and z-stacking^[1] or focus blending) is a digital image processing technique which combines multiple images taken at different focus distances to give a resulting image with a greater depth of field (DOF) than any of the individual source images.^[2][3] Focus stacking can be used in any situation where individual images have a very shallow depth of field; macro photography and optical microscopy are two typical examples.
Focus stacking offers flexibility: as focus stacking is a computational technique, images with several different depths of field can be generated in post-processing and compared for best artistic merit or scientific clarity. Focus stacking also allows generation of images physically impossible with normal imaging equipment; images with nonplanar focus regions can be generated. Alternative techniques for generating images with increased or flexible depth of field include wavefront coding and plenoptic cameras.

Before all that got started I saw this tiny wasp dragging what appears to be a two-armed spider carcass on the sidewalk. I don't know if the darn thing was trying to fly or what but it's frenzied little dance made getting a picture pretty difficult besides this wasp not being much larger than an ant. That's not gravel, that's concrete sidewalk.

Kangaroo paws, 7 images merged and aligned.

This was 12 blended images. I liked the way those background colors came together.
The main composition could use some work. For the most part I'm going to try
and not point shit out. So....

6 blended images.

Apache Plume (Fallugia paradoxa) it's both a plume and a flower... well you can see that can't you?
This was 8 blended images.

Some succulent, 4 image stack.

Cabbage White (Pieris rapae). I would have like a few more shots here
but overall I'm pretty happy for this butterfly's patience with me. 4 images.

Cropped, close-up, Cabbage White (Pieris rapae). This was a 4 image stack.

Aphids on Narrow-leaved milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis). 4 images blended.

Ladybug (Coccinellidae family of beetles) on yarrow. 3 images blended.

Conejo Buckwheat or Saffron Buckwheat (Eriogonum crocatum). 9 images blended.

Paper wasp on Narrow-leaved milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis). 6 images blended.

Rainbow Lantana, 5 images.

Bush Sunflower, 4 images.

Desert Willow (Chilopsis linearis), 5 images.

Today's walk report: 051713

Just pics, no babble...

Four Finches. Yes, four.

See now?

Allen's hummingbird head first into silver sage.

Bees were bobbing on Caesalpinia gilliesii stamens.

One bobbing now.

Enjoying white sage too.

Coyote mint (Monardella villosa) in full bloom.

Anemopsis californica, with the common names Yerba mansa or lizard tail.

Sage flowers.

Artsy (kinda) shot of the succulent below.

The succulent below.

Bush sunflower and another "find the ant." If you can't find it I'll give you the name of my ophthalmologist.