OK, I’ll admit to being lazy when it comes to updating my blog. So sue me. Lots of things going on outside of my blog, recharging my creative batteries, and I’ll probably revisit this on a more regular basis in the near future.

On the photography front, my old Canon 300D is currently off getting converted to a dedicated IR camera. I’m looking forward to getting it back and putting it through its paces. It’s been a long time since I’ve shot much infrared, but I do still like the quality of black and white images that IR gives.

I’ve also started shooting film a little bit more than I have in the past. Our daughter is taking a photography class in high school this fall, and she needs a film SLR to use. I decided it would be a bit too sadistic to foist my Pentax Spotmatic on her, considering I only have the one lens for it, and the light meter doesn’t work. So I ordered a used Canon 1N from B&H Photo, thinking that having the ability to swap with the lenses that I currently own would make the film camera a lot more versatile. Unfortunately that camera arrived DOA, so after a couple of emails back and forth with their Customer Support, that camera is being sent back for a replacement 1N. Keeping my fingers crossed on this one, but so far my experience with B&H’s Customer Support has been exemplary.

This is considerably cropped from the original image. By cropping out stuff from the bottom and left hand side of the image, I was able to convert the image into a complete expanse of reflective blue glass, with just a small colorful element of human activity in the upper right hand corner. Much nicer creatively than the original out of the camera.

One of the main benefits I’ve found with the new camera has been that 21 megapixels gives you a lot of real estate to play with when you decide to crop the original photo for creative reasons. I can crop out 75% of the original photo and still have about the same number of pixels in the final image as I had with my last 6 megapixel dSLR. Very cool, and for me probably the most important answer to the question of “why do you need so many pixels?”.

I learn something new everyday.

A few days ago I was working in the backyard, dragging some landscaping stones from one pile to another. When I took a break and looked up, I saw this most amazing cloud formation off to the south. I’d never seen this type of rainbow formation in a cloud before. I pointed it out to Tammie, who was sitting on the patio with her back turned to it, hoping it wasn’t a heat and sweat induced hallucination. Luckily she saw it too. I ran into the house to get the camera, hoping it wouldn’t disappear before I got back out.

Thanks to a friend on Flickr, who seems to know how and where to find any obscure information on the internet, I now know this is a rare cloud phenomenon known as a circumhorizontal arc. I feel fortunate that I managed to capture this rare, fleeting sight.

Today we lost a member of our family. Granted, he was “just a dog”, as I often tend to say, but the loss still hits hard. Grizzly went to sleep for the last time about 7:30 a.m this morning with Tammie and I both kneeling next to him, bawling our eyes out over the big lug. About a week ago he had showed some signs of not being his usual rambunctious self. Normally whenever we gave him a treat we’d need to count our fingers to make sure we still had all of them. But by Friday he had clearly lost his appetite.

The initial diagnosis from our regular vet was that he had whipworms that needed to be treated. But as each day passed he lost more energy and became ever more lethargic. Last night we took him to the emergency vet clinic, where we discovered he was in kidney failure. Based on the blood and urine work the vet felt that he had probably been harboring a low level chronic kidney problem for quite a while that we were unaware of. That developed into an acute kidney failure accompanied by infection that put him down.

Leaving him in the care of the vets last night, we were hopeful that their efforts would get him back on his feet, knowing that even if it did, that he would face the rest of his life dealing with limited kidney function. As we left the vets office, they told us “no phone call from us is the same as good news”, knowing that the only time they would call outside of their normal hours would be to report bad news. At 6 am this morning they called with the bad news that his kidneys had shut down and there was nothing more they could do.

Grizzly had a good life, although it was a couple of years shorter than we had hoped. We got him and his litter mate Dakota from the animal shelter in Mooresville when they were no more than 3 months old. Compared to Dakota, I think he was probably standing at the back of the line when they were passing out genes. He always had a pronounced overbite, which we were initially worried would affect his ability to eat. He never had a problem eating. Chewing he never quite got the hang of, it took too long and got in the way of wolfing down his food. He also had bad hips, even when he was a year old I could tell that he’d have hip problems later in life, and he was getting to the age where I was expecting that his hips would limit his health. But we never anticipated that kidney failure would come out of the blue and take him away.

He was a big sweetheart, as long as you were properly introduced to him. He never bit anyone, although even when he was a year old he scared the daylights out of the electric meter reader badly enough that the utility company came out and installed a remote reader on our meter, so he wouldn’t have to come in our yard any more. Hearing his bark (especially in the dark) would be enough to scare the hell out of the most determined intruder.

My favorite moment was from several years ago when he was recovering from an infected hot spot. I had him out in the front yard on the leash to do his business. He had been on antibiotics and living in the house as he recovered, hadn’t been feeling well and hadn’t barked in several weeks. Our neighborhood is filled with dogs. Most of them are kept in their owner’s yards, a few (the most irritating and noisy) are allowed to run loose, much to my irritation. One of the local yappy dogs that a neighbor allowed to run loose through the neighborhood must have been feeling brave, forgetting that there wasn’t a fence between him and Grizzly. As he came running up into our yard yapping his head off, with the other neighborhood dogs barking their own chorus, Grizzly turned around, looked at him, and let out one of the loudest, deepest, meanest, and most earnest “get off my turf, don’t fuck with me, I’m back!” barks I’ve ever heard. Just one, that’s all that was needed. The intruder just about jumped out of his skin as he turned and flew back across the street. The rest of the dogs in the neighborhood? Silence. He was a dog of few words, but he made them count.

He left drool on you whenever you’d give him loving, scared meter readers, barked at geese flying overhead (but ignored ducks in our pond), barked at the full moon, howled whenever there was a siren in the distance, got regular belly rubs, and was loved.

He really was a big sweetheart. He’ll be missed.

Local classic car enthusiasts gather on Saturday evenings at the Dog and Suds in old town Greenwood to showcase their pride and joys.

Took the opportunity to go out last evening and wander around taking photos during the golden hour. The weather was about perfect for it, no breeze at all, not a cloud in the sky, mild temperatures, and the lighting was perfect.

My recent experience with having my photos appropriated off my Flickr stream without asking for permission has reminded me of the importance of being aware of the legal issues around protecting yourself on-line with what you post, particularly in the case of photos and videos.

If you care at all about your rights on-line, TWIPPHOTO has a good (albeit long) post on the importance of reading and understanding the Terms of Service of any site that you’re posting to that’s well worth reading.

TWIPPHOTO.COM » What Does TOS Mean Anyway? .

The shot above (© All Rights Reserved, by the way) was from a recent trip to the Indianapolis zoo. Any similarity between a post about legal issues, and a shark are purely coincidental.

The Big Picture at boston.com has a very cool series of before and after photos taken around the world.

Earth Hour 2009 – The Big Picture – Boston.com.