YAY! It is the happiest time of the year again. Merlefest is going extremely well. I have pictures up from Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Sunday’s pictures are yet to come. It is also worth mentioning that my pictures that were taken using RAW mode are not up yet due to the time involved in their processing. Once the festival is over I will hopefully find the time to repost the color corrected images in albums sorted by artist.
Well it is once again February 5th and that means I am another year older. For those of you that do not know, my birthday is really more of a birth-fest that starts on Groundhog Day and ends on Feb. 6. This year my birthday was most excellent. My girlfriend came home to spend the weekend with me. We visited some of my family as well as going to a friends place to have a wonderful birthday sushi party.
Thanks to all of my friends and family for making my 26th birth-fest so very special. I received some very thoughtful gifts and had a wonderful time. If you would like to help make my birth-fest even more wonderful, please consider buying one of these books from my Amazon Wish List for me.
Today I was browsing the pennfans forum and someone mentioned a South Park character creator. Why didn’t someone tell me about this before?! I played with it for a good half-hour trying to make a character that at least remotely resembled me. Not having much luck with that I thought I would try to make one for my girlfriend Murphy. I definitely got a lot closer resemblance with her character than with mine. For anyone that knows Murphy, the likeness is uncanny. From the band-aid covering a bike related accident to the assault rifle, it all screams Murphy.
To create this image, I made a character for each of us, then I took screen shots of them. Next, I used GIMP cut out our characters and put us in front of a simple gradient.
I am a huge fan of the PennRadio show, hosted by Penn Jillette and Michael Goudeau. I have been listening to the show since it began back in January. I have always appreciated Penn Jillette’s sense of humor, but I never realized what a wonderful story teller he is. I knew I would listen to every PennRadio show I could get my hands on when I heard this episode[mp3], which was the basis for what is now known as ‘Monkey Tuesday‘. In this momentous show, Penn told some of the funniest stories I have ever heard in my life. These stories ranged in topic, but my personal favorite story was known as “The Story of the Monkey and the Dwarf“. There were also stories about people wearing various costumes, such as a giant chicken costume, a power ranger, and a gorilla suit. I laughed so hard that, had I been driving, I could have been killed!
When PennRadio first started, it was only broadcast over the radio. Despite the technology to do so, CBS was reluctant to make the show available as a podcast. To fill the demand, PennRadio listeners began recording the streaming audio many radio stations offer through their websites’, and then posting them all over the web. At the first of this year, I was looking for a reliable source of PennRadio shows, and I found PennFans.Net.
The site’s admin, Zac, dutifully records PennRadio episodes, trims them up, encodes them as mp3s, and then posts them to his website. He does a wonderful job and if you appreciate the show, you should make a donation to help him cover his hosting costs. Just last week, after being ‘dugg’, he used 120GB of bandwidth in a 24 hour period! In an effort to help Zac deal with the increasing bandwidth consumption on his site, I am now mirroring PennFans.Net files.
Bumped into an old friend(Matt) when I was in Wilkes this past week. He came up the next day and we went out on the Parkway to take some pictures and catch up. It was a Saturday so there was a lot of traffic, and a detour around Price Park and Price Lake. We ended up at Beacon Heights after a failed attempt at Yonalassee, because the trail was now a preserve.
This is now the background on my desktop. Originally, this image was just short of being a 360 panorama. I say ‘just short’ because somehow managed to take 15 pictures instead of the 16 I need for a proper 360. This image is just a crop of a much wider image. So, I can make 3 and 4 screen panaramic wallpapers, but I just don’t think there are many people running 3 and 4 monitors. This is the impression i get from my site statistics. If I am wrong, let me know.
I was at Merlefest from 10am to ~11pm everyday of the festival except sunday (2pm-6pm). When I got home, it was all I could do to charge my camera and download my pictures from my camera. So, my plan to make a post highlighting each day of the festival went right out the window. I will however be writing a review of the festival and my wonderful experience doing photography for it.
Over the course of the festival I took 1,793 pictures, ~775 of which are currently in my Merlefest 2006 Photo Gallery. After my exam today, I will begin the painful process of color correcting all of them. I will also be thinning the herd and hopefully get it down to around 600 to 700 of the best images. If you would like to use any of my images, all I ask is for an email letting me know, proper credit, and a link back to my site.
Has it been a year already? Tomorrow is the first day of the world’s greatest bluegrass festival, Merlefest. I will once again be doing photography for the festival this year and I can’t wait! I would like to thank Christie Hutchens and Sherry Dancy of WCC for this wonderful opportunity. I will be doing my best to get my pictures posted each day of the festival for those of you that won’t be able to make it out. Also, I hope to be able to write a few comments about what I did and who I saw each day of the festival.
This year’s Merlefest line-up is going to be fantastic. Personally, I am most looking forward to seeing the following artists:
I am also looking forward to being introduced to some musicians I have yet to hear. At last year’s Merlefest, I saw the The Avett Brothers brothers and The Duhks for the first time and I really enjoyed them both immensely. I can’t wait to see them again this year. For those of you who have yet to plan your day, here is a link to the Merlefest 2006 stage schedule.
Over the last 6 years or so, I have taken 10’s of thousands of pictures. I have photographed a wide variety of things; portraits, landscapes, studio, macro, panoramas, the living, and the dead. I have taken my camera from sea-level to ~6,000ft. In each image, a moment is captured and frozen in time. Some were in incredibly sharp focus, while others were abstract or over exposed. I am not a professional photographer, but I play one on the Internet. I have had zero training, and my concepts of lighting, composition, and technique are my own. I know what I like, and I do my best to capture it with each image I take.
When someone asks me, “Of all the pictures you have taken, which one is your favorite?”, I have no trouble telling them exactly which one is my favorite. Without a doubt, it is this image. I’m sure many of you are thinking, ‘What? that one? Huh?”. Granted, its technical merit is poor at best. The image isn’t properly framed, It looks like I may have moved while the shutter was open, and the depth of field is all wrong. All of that aside, It is the best photograph I have ever taken, as far as I am concerned.
The eZine, PureMusic, has a great interview with Leonard Podolak of the Duhks in this months issue. They found the pictures that I took of the Duhks durring last year’s Merlefest and asked if they might use them. Ofcourse, I was more than happy for them to use my images. It was really nice to see my images being used to illustrate an interview with Leonard.
Perhaps the Duhks themselves will check out the interview and find their way to my website. I actually got to talk to Jesse and Tania at last years Merlefest, after their last performance. They were both really sweet and unassuming. I gave them my website address incase they wanted to check out the shots I got of them. I really look forward to seeing them at this years Merlefest, and hope to get a chance to talk them again.
So it is February 5th AGAIN and I am now 25 years old. Wow, a quarter century. I gotta say, after 21, birthdays are not nearly as exciting. I think I might just stay 25 for a few years. If no one does the math next year, I should be in the clear.
I’d like to point out that I am still a student and every little bit helps. So if anyone wants to make my day, please use my donate link to send me a few birthday bucks or happy birthday wishes. That monsterous student loan I have isn’t going to payoff itself.
I am just a guy with passion for the outdoors, photography, technology, and in general, shiny things with blinking lights.
200GB Storage
2TB Bandwidth
Only $9.95
1 Comment
