Lucky Me

This isn't the first time I have counted the months of a relationship. This isn't even the longest relationship. But one thing is very clear, and also more important. This is absolutely the best relationship I have ever been in. She is everything I ever dreamed of when I thought of my dream girl, but even better! I love her. I never truly knew love before I met her.

Happy ten months, I love you!

The Late Shift

It's 2:11 AM. I'm doing post work from a photo shoot with Joel for his graduation invitation pics. It was a lot of fun and is my very first photography job! Woo! That excites me a lot. I learned a lot.. and in processing these shots I'm learning a lot still. The photo shoot was done in RAW with a black sheet (thank you Joel!) for the background, Alicia holding a white poster board to bounce light off of my Vivitar flash head, and a stool. After the photos were put through CS2's RAW processing plug-in (v3.2), they were saved as 8-bit uncompressed TIFF's for processing through either NeatImage or directly into CS2. The reason I don't run all of them through NeatImage is a matter of how well it profiles a shot. Sometimes it won't get a full color channel and the results are blurred fine lines, dulled skin textures, or an effect only described as "plastic" . Not a real issue.

Joel made a great model, even though I could tell he was just as confused as me. I hadn't done nearly enough studying for this, and that was magnified by having such limited equipment. Alicia did a great job of watching where my flash was pointing and adjusting her poster board as necessary. I feel I did alright, though I certainly need to work on several things. This definitely boosted my confidence and has more or less convinced me that this is my calling in life. I love photography. Plain and simple.

Joel... I'll get these photos done soon. But for now, it's bed time! ;)
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Currently Listening To: Massive Attack - Daydreaming - Blue Lines - 1991

My Halloween With Alicia

Alicia owned me (and this pumpkin) with her carving skillz.

This is so late.. Sorry Alicia! There is no good reason why this is late. I get lazy from time to time, especially when occupied by awesome games like Company of Heroes, great jobs like B. Marcum's, and an amazing girlfriend like Alicia. However late this is, the truth is that I had a blast Halloween night. No trick or treating, no crazy pranks. In fact, if it weren't for Alicia, it would've been just another night at home. I was even sick with a fever, even more reason to stay home. But as I saw how bored my Alicia had become (probably wishing she was doing something for Halloween), I decided something had to happen.
Using the film simulating plug-in again.. I love it! Mmm.. film grain.

We got to talking and she found out that I had never carved a pumpkin before. Probably something to do with mom never trusting me with a real knife... Anyway, we struck a deal that, if she drove to Wal-Mart, I would buy the pumpkins and we would carve them. Afterwards we roasted the seeds.. but they were done wrong and really weren't good for much more than 600% of the daily value of fiber. Bleh!Taken in the dark with my flash in the vertical position.

The carving was a lot of fun. She did something traditional (and ultimately much better than mine) and I tried to be over artistic and do a line carving of a cat. Fun was had, fever was lowered, homework remained undone for longer, and it was totally worth it. Good times. Thanks Alicia for a great Halloween!
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Currently Listening To: 崎元仁 - 暗雲 (帝国バージョン) - FINAL FANTASY XII Original Soundtrack - 2006

By Alicia

Patrick wanted me to write a blog. I don't have anything to write about. I might be able to write something if there wasn't the pressure to write a blog post in thirty minutes.

So for those of you that don't know, Nathan got sick and made Patrick sick. I don't think he did it on purpose though. So Patrick hasn't been felling well. I'm not quite sure what it is he is sick with (he will have to give the details later) but he's been between 90-60% a lot. Hopefully he starts to feel better soon.

Also, someone told me today that I can't wear my orange and black earrings anymore because it is no longer Halloween. I told him that I wore them before Halloween and it wasn't a problem. If I want to celebrate Halloween longer than everyone else, I can. So if anyone reading this would like to keep on celebrating Halloween, go right ahead, it's perfectly fine.

(Patrick will also be posting a Halloween blog with pictures of the pumpkins we carved, so that gives us all something to look forward to.)

Everyone have a great rest of the week and a wonderful weekend!

Fresh Windows FTW

This is a quick redo of my photo "Windbrushes" using the Exposure plug-in. The setting is one of the many setting files they released after the plug-in release. "Polaroid - Grain On." I love the subdued colors, fine grain, and abnormal tinting. For those wondering when polaroid ever looked this good, it didn't. But it's fairly accurate to the high end polaroid films still floating around today.

I am enjoying a nice, clean, fresh installation of Windows XP. I never realized how bloated my previous install had become. I forgot all about the 15 second or less boot times and the joy of seeing over a hundred gigabytes of memory just waiting to be demolished by my games and music. And that is exactly what I'm doing right now. Wanna know how long it takes to move 74 GB's over a home network connection (10/100)? With me doing small things here and there and Nathan playing WoW, 183 minutes. WoW hardly effects the situation as it's not hard disk intensive (at least not on a 1 GB machine like mom's) and doesn't effect the net too much since I can play CS:S with a 50-60ms ping.
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Currently Listening To: Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds - With Teeth DVD-A 5.1 - 2005

Format!

Rebecca striking a pose because she's a camera hog.

It's format time! I mean everything. I'm using a good 74 GB of mom's HD for my music backup and my E:\ partition for the rest. This time around I'm not installing windows on a 7 GB partition (too cramped) and I'm not ever going to install Windows Vista RC1 again. I think if I partition 10 GB out of my 160 GB, that will be plenty for the Windows install. Then I can merge the C:\ and E:\ back and use that drive for storage. My music will still have to stay on my main because of size, and games for the ever so slight difference of ATA100 compared to ATA133. Judging from the disk space my pictures are taking up, I'm going to have to purchase a large hard drive pretty soon. Anyway, I'll be back online shortly.
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Currently Listening To: Five Iron Frenzy - Get Your Riot Gear - Quantity is Job One