Consider Skimilk: June 2009

Flight to California

On the flight to LAX I sat next to a lovely lady from Botswana going to LA for business. Anyway we chatted throughout the flight and at one point in the flight the light was just right in the plane so I asked her if I could take a picture of her and she said yes enthusiastically. Anyway here are two pictures I got on the flight.

Torrance, California. June 12-16

So I spent the last few days visiting Jenele in her hometown of Torrance, California. We spent the trip eating a ton of good food, going to the tidepools, beach, and the Long beach Aquarium, meeting new friends, and sighting Sasha Vujacic the day after he won the NBA finals. I had a great time and actually discovered a new calling, decorating cakes. So while at the tidepools, Jenele and I had quite the mishap. We had gotten to the tidepools an hour after low tide, and decided to shimmy through a cave to get to another set of tidepools, anyway long story short the tide rose too quickly for us and we fell in and half of my camera plunged into the crashing waves. Luckily no harm was done. Apparently, in "the village" near Jenele's house there is this guy who lives in a van that is adorned with Jesus paraphernalia and he's known by all of Torrance as the Jesus Man. Wild. As for the food...I haven't eaten as much as I did in the last 4 days...For example, one night we made a plethora of sushi one night as a hors d'oeurves then had tortilla casserole, and a copious amount of steak as the main meal...Then later that night went out for yogurt at yogurtland. At this place you serve yourself as much yogurt and topping and you pay 30 cents by the ounce! One day while making plans for the day Jenele's Dad suggested that we go to the Long Beach Aquarium, so we did. It was pretty sweet although it was kinda over-priced and way too many small children galavanting through the establishment...But other than that we saw some cool tropical and northwestern fish, touched a few batrays and sharks, and saw a tufted puffin put on a show for the audience. Anyway, I had an interesting last day in Torrance, we went to the beach when the weather was not the greatest and decided to take a dip in the ocean, after we had returned I realized that I had broken out in hives, due to an allergic reaction to something in the water...After a few frantic calls made by Jenele's mother to various hospitals and the lifeguard hut asking for advice, we gave up and went out to dinner. Later that night we went down to the village to eat some dessert crepes and long story short we saw Sasha Vujacic of the LA lakers eating at the same restaurant the night after winning the NBA title. Wild.

Torrance, California. June 12-16 (cont.)

An attempt on HDR

You know those really crazy images of landscapes that when you look at them you say "that can't be real?" Or those advertisements for cars found in magazines? Well a lot of times those places/things are real, and there's a field of photography used by a ton of advertising companies to create these types of images, and that is HDR. So HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and what you do is take three different photographs at different exposure values and then merge the three images into one. The result is some pretty bomb stuff. One day Saular showed me a web page of crazy landscape pictures and I began looking up ways to create these images and finally stumbled upon HDR, so I've recently learned about it and thought it would be interesting to dabble in the tidepools of HDR. These are first attempts but they turned out alright...