We went out for the now-traditional birthday dinner at Shogun for Gina’s birthday. This year we had a big crowd attending. I realize Gina’s not in the picture, but this was a funny moment and it gave me a chance to make one of those new-fangled animated GIFs that all the kids are talking about.
Back before digital, photography frustrated the hell out of me. It’s an expensive hobby and I was poor back then, so I didn’t have very good cameras or lenses. And there was the whole buying film and paying for processing and prints. On top of the expense, it took a few years for me to finally figure out that film processing and printing at Wal-Mart or the drugstore or even a dedicated photography lab was notoriously unreliable. It all became too much for me and I pretty much gave up on pursuing photography as a hobby and turned to golf. I did shoot a lot film for the podunky newspapers I worked for in the ’90s but that was mostly recording news events. The technical and artistic quality of the photo was well down on the priority list. Plus it was impossible to get decent reproduction on a newspaper press, so I didn’t sweat the details too much. When I got a DSLR back in 2007 I learned more about photography in a year than I had learned in the previous 20 years just because of the sheer amount of photos you can shoot and the instantaneous feedback on the back of the camera. I got it in my head that I could put that knowledge to use and go back and conquer my film demons. But I wanted to shoot something larger than 35mm. Film equipment is now very cheap compared to 10-15 years ago, so I had several realistic options in medium-format equipment. The medium format frame is four times larger than a 35 mm frame. All things being equal, that translates into better quality because it doesn’t have to be enlarged as much as 35mm. It seemed pretty cool to me. I ended up going with the cheapest option, though, because it’s the coolest looking: the twin lens reflex. The version I got is the YashicaMat 124G. It had been recently overhauled and is in great working order.
I’ve been making maps for a couple of years now, but I’ve yet to share one on Post Irony. The main reason for that is I don’t have a lot of cartographically attractive maps in my portfolio. My earliest efforts are quite ugly and in the two jobs I’ve held in the GIS field I haven’t really been called on much to make full-on cartographic products. It’s been mostly analysis and tweaking other people’s maps.
It started sleeting/snowing about dark on Christmas Day. Once it got deep enough on the driveway I forced Abby to make a snow angel so I could get a photo.
My parents have a cute series of pictures taken over several years of me and my sisters sitting at the top of the stairs before hitting the living room to partake of Santa’s bounty. Since we now live in a house with stairs I thought it would be neat to do the same thing with Abby. She wanted no part of it and only allowed me to take this one picture of her scowling.
We thought the fall colors were pretty magnificent up in the Buffalo River country two weeks earlier, but by the first weekend in November, the Ouachita Mountains were putting on a crazy color show. We visited one of our favorite spots, Flatside Pinnacle, a mountain peak in the Flatside Wilderness, which is about an hour west of our house. It’s a very popular place for central Arkansas photographers. It’s a good spot for family outings because the trail to the top is pretty short and easy and the view is pretty spectacular. Abby is starting to show a fondness for rambling around these steep places. She gets that from me, I guess. It makes Gina really nervous. Thunderstorms boomed over Little Rock while we had mostly clear skies overhead. It made for a dramatic photo.
Then I turned around and caught a pretty dramatic sunset.
Abby’s current favorite book is Alice In Wonderland, so she wanted to dress as Alice for Halloween. Gina got on the eBay and ordered up costumes for all of us. I tried to get a good photo in the new ghetto studio but the neighborhood Halloween party was calling and I had to settle for this. I didn’t even have all the pieces of my costume on.
