28 years ago today I made the smartest decision I've ever made in my life. I asked my girlfriend to marry me, and amazingly, with all she knew about me, she said yes.
For whatever reason, I am amazingly blessed to have a wife who puts up with all my foibles. She said to me this morning that she wondered why I put up with her, but I actually think it's the other way around. I know myself all too well, and I don't think I'd like to live with me for very long, yet she's done it now for 27+ years. That's pretty remarkable.
During that time, we've lived in an apartment, and purchased three different houses, always upsizing to go along with our expanding family. Interestingly, our first house was a brand new house and the other two houses we've owned since then have been increasingly older.
Our three children have gone to school here in town, graduated. Two of them have graduated from college and have full time jobs in Northern California. Our youngest is still in college taking some very interesting classes, some of which I would have avoided when I was in college, but would love to take today.
Early last year, I took a series of photos entitled "Grow Old with Me." All of the photos feature my wife's left hand, for obvious reasons. This particular shot was taken on Valentine's Day last year. Grow Old with Me my Love.
This month's challenge by P.J. was to post 5 photographs in black and white. Originally, I was going to post something to the effect that I didn't have five B&W shots, but then I started looking through some of the shots I took this past weekend and was pleasantly surprised that I have enough to cover this month's challenge with ease. And so, without further ado, I submit my shots for the B&W photo challenge.
1. Grow Old with Me
I've done several of these shots in the past, but this one was actually a re-do of one of the originals I posted for this series earlier in the year. In each shot, I wanted to emphasize my wife's wedding ring and I didn't do that very well in the first shot, so when she sat down at the piano a couple of nights ago, I had my opportunity to get the shot right. It's still not quite perfect as I would have liked to have seen the ring straight up on her finger, but I'll take this for now.
2. Man's Best Friend
This is Jack, our dog. He's been featured on this blog before and will probably be featured again from time to time. I started to Instagram earlier this year, but it's really so much easier to do with an iPhone as opposed to an iPad. Watching football, with your dog at your side or in your lap is a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I just love the contented look on his face as I scratched him under his neck. I'm sure your dog is probably similar in that if you stop, you'll immediately know that you're not supposed to stop yet, because the paw will come out and scratch the closest body part to you and you know the dog is thinking, "Oh c'mon now. That wasn't enough scratches. Keep going there food guy."
3. The Windmill
For those of you who are long term readers, you'll know that I enjoy going out geocaching. The best way I've been able to describe geocaching is it's an Easter Egg hunt for adults. People will go out and hide something, get the geographic coordinates for what they hid using their GPS unit and then return and posted them on the geocaching website. Once they coordinates and cache get posted, then anyone with a GPS unit or smartphone can go out and look for the cache. Trust me, it's way more difficult using a smartphone.
This windmill is located in San Dimas, one city to the west of where I live. It's located behind a small little residential park and there's some fruit trees tucked back in there with a couple of trails. I noticed on a sign there was going to be a pumpkin patch back there starting next month as well.
This photo represents why I got into geocaching in the first place. I like to hike, but I've never been very familiar with the hiking trails in the local foothills. When I first stumbled upon geocaching, the nearest geocache was approximately 7 miles away from our house and a half mile hike from the parking lot. It was located in the Claremont Wilderness Park. I had no idea that park even existed. Now, many of my hides are in the Claremont Wilderness Park.
For me, at least, geocaching has allowed me to discover my own back yard. I've found so many trails that I never would have known were there, were it not for geocaching. The hobby has kept me reasonably fit, but I still need work in that area. The last couple of times I've really been up in the foothills was on the mountain bike, so I'm starting to incorporate biking into my geocaching outings as well. If you haven't already tried it, I would suggest checking it out. It's a lot better than sitting on your butt all weekend watching sports. Well, sometimes it is.
4. The bicyclist
I live in a college town. The Claremont Colleges (five separate universities, plus a graduate school) are located about a half mile away from where I live and provide ample opportunities for photography, whether it be architecture, statuary, people shots, or combinations of them.
This particular day, I was shooting a variety of things, walking around the campuses. I started out at the Harvey Mudd campus at a spot that I've photographed many times before. There is an old fountain tucked away down in a small plaza. It has some rather large koi swimming around in it and the area always provides some great color shots.
It's rather obvious that I was looking for some kind of angle to get an interesting view of the architecture of these two buildings. I love the building to the right totally surrounded by a reflecting pool that is only inches deep. I'd taken several shots and I could hear a bicyclist coming up so I waited until he came into the frame. I think that little added piece of the guy in the shot made all the difference with this one.
5. Three college guys
After getting the shot of the bicyclist, I ended up almost in the middle of a conversation involving these three guys. They were talking to a fourth one about a paper that was due at the end of the week. When the one guy left, the other three started walking to the east, presumably back to their dorm rooms to either work on their papers, or to watch some football on TV. My bet is actually on the latter, based upon the laughter I heard from them as they trailed away from me.
I only had a couple of seconds to compose the shot before they'd be too far away. As it was, this one had to be cropped because I didn't have my telephoto lens on my camera and was relying on my 50mm fixed lens when I took the shot. I still think it's an interesting shot. Were I to do it over again, I think I would have approached them to see if I could have gotten a 100 Strangers shot. I haven't taken one of those since early January of this year.
Well, there you have it. My installment of P.J.'s monthly photo challenge. Stop by and see some other blogger's interpretations of the same B&W theme.
This should have been posted yesterday, but things got in the way, so here's my take on the theme New, as posted in P.J.'s blog. At first, I thought this was going to be an easy theme, but there aren't as many new things as you might think, so I'm taking a leap here in my interpretation of the word New.
1. New Lens - This was my Christmas present from my wife this year, but it wasn't purchased until after the new year and so I didn't take this photo until after the new year, so the photo was taken during the month. This year, I've decided to try a 365 project again after taking about 7 months off just to recharge my brain with regard to photography.
In 2011 I started a 365 project and did two full years of pure 365. I got my camera out each and every day and took photos and posted at least one to the 365 webpage. The work wasn't always quality, because there was a drive to make sure I used the camera every day. This year, my project already has some fillers in it, but I'm trying to post real quality work. I'm also using my Prime 50mm lens exclusively at the moment, mainly because I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the lens. So far, I'm really enjoying the lens and have been taking lots of photos with it.
The learning curve hasn't taken as long as I thought it might and I feel very comfortable with the lens. I've been shooting mostly in aperture mode mainly because I can. The one selfie I took so far was really interesting to see that lens open wide with a 1.4 aperture. I can't remember the last time I've seen a lens open that wide.
2. Grow Old with Me
This sounds like a contradiction in terms as far as the theme goes, but with this new lens, I decided to create a new series of shots, based upon a central theme. The theme ended up being my wife's hands and the words, Grow Old with Me, My Love. All of the shots were in B&W or sepia tone, and all of the shots thus far have depicted her hands doing regular things that she does on a fairly regular basis.
Some of the shots, like this one, had to be staged, as it's not too practical to give someone a hug and also take a photo at the same time. So far, I've posted 6 shots on my Flicker page for this series. I have one more shot that I'd like to take before I end this particular series. I'm not sure if I'll end up taking more after that or not, but it can be open ended, so I probably will if I see something that I know will work with the series.
3. How's the weather outside?
In December, I became aware of a group on Flicker called Project Weather. To be honest, I can't remember if I became aware of it, because one of my shots was invited to the group, or I just stumbled upon it, but I would suspect the latter happened. Either way, I joined the group and downloaded this new app (well, new for me anyway) - Yahoo Weather.
It's a standard weather app, but it takes photos matched geographically and weatherwise as the cover shots for any location. In other words, if you're searching for the weather in San Francisco, when you pull up the San Francisco page, you should get a photo of somewhere in San Francisco which also depicts the weather for San Francisco at the time.
I started submitting some of my weather shots figuring I might get a couple in there. I've been very surprised because I now have 19 shots in the queue for various locations around the United States. Of those 19 shots, I've actually seen 6 of them show up for the weather places that I follow. Yeah, I'm a geek, I love weather and I have all the places where I've had photos taken come up in rotation in the Yahoo Weather app. I did a screen capture of this shot in the weather app in mid January on my iPad. I took that shot a couple of years ago on my way to work one morning. Here's a link to all of my shots that are in the Project Weather database for inclusion in the Yahoo Weather app. No payment for any of them, but my name and a link to my Flicker page appears on the photo when it shows up in the app.
4. New Trail
Like many of the bloggers who do this photo challenge, I also geocache. Last weekend, I went with a friend of mine down into Riverside County to hike in Harford Springs Wildlife Sanctuary. This was a new trail for me, one that I had never been on before.
The park is crisscrossed with many hiking trails and there are about 15 to 20 geocaches scattered throughout the park. Up until this past weekend, I was totally unaware this park even existed. We took several of the trails and looped around the park getting about half of the cache available to us before we started losing the light. All that means is I'll have to go back another time to find the rest of the caches hidden there and explore the other areas of the park.
That's the real reason I got involved with geocaching in the first place. I know about the Congress Trail in Sequoia National Park and I know about the John Muir Trail and the Mist Trail in Yosemite National Park. I've hiked on the Pacific Crest Trail and have read accounts about hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Those are major trails that most everyone knows about. Geocaching will take you there as well, but geocaching also gets you out on the trails in your own backyard. I now hike regularly in Claremont Wilderness Park. Before geocaching, I didn't even know that park existed. Were Harford Springs Park closer, I probably would hike in it on a regular basis. I took this shot at the trail head just as we were starting our hike. The first geocache we found was just up the hill beyond the fence post on the right hand side of the shot.
5. A new appreciation for the art of PhotoShop
A couple of days ago, I happened to step outside for some reason and realized we were getting a spectacular show outside, one that had to be recorded.
This shot was taken looking over my neighbor's fence from my back yard. The problem with this shot is there are several telephone wires that criss cross down to our neighbor's house. When I first pulled the shots up on my computer I loved what I saw, but I didn't like the telephone wires. So I decided that I was going to PhotoShop them out of the shot.
I have gained an entire new appreciation for people who do this all the time. The patience and skill required to go through and pixel by pixel remove something that you don't want and then blend in what you've cloned to remove it in the first place takes a lot of time. I think this photo represents more hours of work than any other I've taken.
For an idea of what the scene looked like originally, here's a shot I took in January 2011 from about the same vantage point. With the first shot, I had a wider lens, not the prime I'm using now, so the telephone pole to the right was already cropped out of the scene, but you can still see the wires and the antenna I removed from this shot.
I realize that some people will now look down their nose at anything I post because it's probably not a true image. If that's the case, so be it, but my goal is to produce great shots, not mediocre shots. I think this shot is much better than the shot I took in 2011. If PhotoShop helped, then I'm all for it.
Well, that's my interpretation of the theme New for this month's blogging challenge. Please stop by P.J.'s page to see how other people interpreted the same word.
Please feel free to comment about anything you read here. I really won't bite.
This post will probably ramble, so if you want to stop reading now, that's OK with me. Sometimes, I can't even read other people's rambles. The title of this blog is A Photo a day. The actual URL reads a photoortwoaday because aphotoaday was already taken on Blogger. Not like that really matters because I had high hopes when I first started and then life got in the way.
For example, it's been 16 days since my one and only post for this year. I could make excuses and say I've been busy playing with my new lens and that would be partially true. But I'm not sure it's that honest. True, I have been doing a lot of different things but one of them has been playing computer games. Yeah, I've set up our old computer in the back bedroom and all three of us (the boys of the family) have been using the computer to play various games.
So I've gotten lazy if we want to be perfectly honest and I need to get away from that. I've actually been timing myself on the "gaming" computer and trying to limit myself to an hour at a time. That doesn't always work, but it's a start in the right direction. Some might say a better start would be to not play games at all. Yeah, well there's that, but I find computer games entertaining and relaxing.
But to get back to my photo a day project. Three years ago, I started a photo project called 365. The purpose was to get people to go out and try and take a photo every single day for an entire year. Well, I succeeded in that endeavor and continued on for a second straight year. 730 days later, I posted my first "filler" shot, a shot not taken on that particular date.
I started a third year on January 1st, 2013, but it eventually ran out of steam sometime in May of that year. I couldn't keep up a pace of a photo a day, nor did I want to at that point, so I quit. I had personal reasons for starting the project in 2011 and those reasons didn't exist anymore, so it was time to let go of the 365 Project. But, in case you haven't been paying close attention, I've decided to start up the 365 project again.
It's a little bit more loose fitting in that I won't be adhering to the photo taken on that date. I want my shots to be quality shots. I say that as I posted a photo of my spaghetti sauce cooking on the stove for today's shot, taken with an iPad and not my regular camera. Don't ask, it's just a long story. However, most of the shots I've taken and posted so far this year, I feel are quality shots, which is what I'm aiming for this year.
Every year I put together a calendar for my parents and my father-in-law. My parent's calendar is easier from a photographic standpoint because my two sisters get two thirds of the calendar and I get the other third, so finding enough family photos for four months is pretty easy. Finding family photos for an entire year is a little more difficult, especially when one person isn't highly represented.
Because my wife works longer hours than I do, she's harder to get into photos, so I've made a concentrated effort to get her into more photos. I've even started a series of photos entitled "Grow Old with Me." Each of these so far have just featured her hands. I'll probably include other shots in this series that feature more than just her hands, but for now, please enjoy these three from the series.
My favorite singer, John Denver, wrote a song to his wife Annie. I can't write music, but I can take photos. This series is Marsha's Song.
