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I went for a chilly walk in the snow today. 

It was chilly and snowy.

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Just got home from our date.  Sushi and Avatar 3D.

I was reluctant to see this film because of all the hype, frankly I was annoyed by all the endless chatter about how great it is.  Now I'll eat my words and leap upon the bandwagon.

Avatar was the single greatest cinematic spectacle I have ever had the pleasure to behold.

Here's some crappy shots from dinner in the dark at Aoyama.
(they still count, if they're crappy, right?)


The wife sharing

mmmm...squid roll

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Today is my beautiful wife's birthday.  I would have loved to take a portrait of her today but I can't tear her away from the Olympics.  We don't have cable tv and NBC is too weak for our antenna to pick up so she will be camped out at my parent's house for the next two weeks.  I know is awful to say but save for a very few events the Olympics bore me to death.

I did manage to take a couple interesting shots over at my parents this evening.  There was a big sparkling snowflake outside the kitchen door and oddly enough there was a fly sitting in the snow next to it. 

So it was macro-time.

I tried another focus stack on the fly.  Without the precision of my Wacom Tablet and only the crappy fingerpad laptop mouse I think I did fairly well.  The image is actually 6 different frames stacked in Photoshop layers then tediously erased layer by layer.  The snowflake is just a single frame.

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Well kids, the word of the day is  BOKEH (bow-keh).

Originating from the Japanese word boke, it's a term describing the blurred element in a photograph.  Using wide apertures creates a narrow focal plane causing the background (and foreground) to be significantly blurred.  This is the quality that makes or breaks a portrait [some room for debate here, just my opinion].

Background lights make great bokeh, in this shot I hung christmas lights on the wall about 5 feet behind the focus point (our faces).  Normally the lights would be circles, which have their own sparkly charm but you can change the shape of your bokeh.  By cutting shapes out of black paper and shooting through them.  I could be mistaken but I believe this only works [well] with fast lenses (wide apertures/low f-stop values).

In this shot I made a heart shaped "iris" out of black paper and stuck it to the front of my 85mm f1/8 portrait lens and...

SHAZAM!  Valentine's Day magic!

[yeah, it's cheezy.  I know]

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Well this little virus I've been fighting finally found some muscle.  
I feel like I've been run over by a snow plow.  


Here's Pearl the pug...good night