Tag Archives: shadow

Long time no see; what I’ve been up to for the last month.

Backlit_IrisHi everyone, it’s been a long time hasn’t it!

Upgrade

As you can see I’ve updated my website.  It’s now running wordpress on the backend, rather than drupal.  This is because drupal is rather a pain in the ass to upgrade, and wordpress is drop dead simple.  As I would rather spend more time doing fun things than upgrading drupal, I decided it was time to move.  However there are no tools to transfer all my drupal posts to wordpress, so I’ve been manually copying and pasting things over from my old drupal instance to the new wordpress one.  Finally I’ve finished!

Overextended

I’ve been feeling overextended lately.  I’m trying to do too much stuff with too little time.  And as a consequence I’ve been getting nothing done very well at all.  So I’ve decided I have to focus on things one at a time.  Or at least not 5 or 6 at a time.

  1. Taking care of my daughter.  This is my top priority.  Making sure she’s well cared for, growing well, developing well, etc etc.
  2. For now, my number 2 priority is cleaning the clutter out of my house.  I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I haven’t dedicated myself to this much.  I’ve been listing things on craigslist off and on for months, and I’ve done really well at clearing out the major amounts of clutter.  But there is still MUCH to do.  This shouldn’t take too much time per night anymore, as I’m nearing the end, but I do need to make a dedicated push to finish up.  With a newborn daughter, I’m acquiring many things just for her, and so something has to give!
  3. Save money for a european vacation in the fall.  Back to italy again probably.  I’d like to do a 3 week trip this time, so I have to be stingy on my vacation as well.  This one doesn’t require too much effort on my part, other than eating at home, and not spending wildly.
  4. Continue with learning italian.  I am meeting with a tutor for 2 hours once every 2 weeks.  But I really need to work on this at least an hour a day.  I need to do flashcards, and play with rosetta stone, and livemocha.com and such, so that I can keep progressing with my knowledge.  I would someday love to be fluent.  That will take as they all say about 10000 hours of practice.  I have a long way to go :D
  5. Get better at photography.  I really feel that I have made huge strides in this lately, and I attribute that to the project365 that I had been working on.  This is the biggest thing that has to give right now.  I’m stopping my project365 for now.  The process of seeking out and finding pictures every day and postprocessing, and uploading, writing blogs posts and all that just takes up too much time.  What I want to do now is take pictures all the time still, but condense the project into a picture a week.  I have more free time on the weekends, so i will probably be posting on weekends.  I may change it so that I write the posts on the weekend but they are published on monday when more people are around.

So, the bottom line is, for the activities I have a choice in, I’m going to focus on cleaning out my clutter first, then italian, and following closely behind, is photography.  I still want to progress, and I would still love to make a living with photography, so this order may change again in the future.  I still carry my camera with me almost everywhere, so I’m ready when inspiration strikes.

Todays photo was taken down on main street in my town, on my way home from work one day. I love the light coming through the flowerpetals.

35mm, 1/800 second, f/2.8, ISO 200

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[123/365] – Wide Open Tulip

Wide Open Tulip

We took advantage of the nice weather today to take a walk up to the nice little park behind my house.

I had no idea there were so many people who liked fishing there. I hadn’t really been there since the winter ended, so I had no idea. The place was filled with fishers, and people in general.

Sadly, this picture was just taken halfway up the hill behind my house. It was a nice shot of this super wide open tulip in someones front yard.

35mm, 1/4000 second, f/2.8, ISO 200

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[121/365] – White Morning Blossoms

White Morning BlossomsThis was actually taken a couple of days ago, on my morning walk to work. I finally got a picture of those blossoms I wanted!

35mm, 1/4000 second, f/2.8 ISO 200

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[118/365] – Bleeding Hearts

Bleeding Hearts

I’ve been trying to get a shot like this for the last couple of days. I managed to get home RIIIIGHT at the right time today. The sun was out and shining and backlit these beautiful bleeding heart flowers just right.

Glad I got this shot today, as it’s going to get worse and worse the rest of the week. Fun times.

I keep waiting for the cherry trees down the street to fully bloom. They are just buds still, and just hanging there are the bud stage. I hope they don’t bloom when it’s all rainy and I don’t get to get a good picture! Every day I take a couple of shots on the way, and think “nope, not yet” and just keep going. *crosses fingers*

35mm, 1/640 second, f/2.8, ISO 200

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[117/365] – Backlit Leaves

Backlit Leaves

Ran a few errands after work today and I saw these leaves, nicely backlit by the setting sun, on my walk home from the store. I really love the purple in the background, it helps brighten things up as well!

Busy busy busy at work today. Straight out all day long, but one bonus: My boss bought an espresso maker. Solid, good, tasty coffee at work! Man I like that. I had a couple of shots halfway through the day and they kicked my butt into gear. I love that!

I had good cappuccino yesterday, and good espresso today. What a world! Did I mention we found an italian speaking cafe near my house? Caffe Toscana, just a few minutes from my house by public transport. The owner is from Lucca, and lives here now. I was able to order in italian, maybe not perfectly, but good enough!

35mm, 1/640 second, f/2.8, ISO 200

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